2 Timothy 3:1-17

TIMES OF TERROR (2 Timothy 3:1)

3:1 You must realize this--that in the last days difficult times will set in.

The early Church lived in an age when the time was waxing late; they expected the Second Coming at any moment. Christianity was cradled in Judaism and very naturally thought largely in Jewish terms and pictures. Jewish thought had one basic conception. The Jews divided all time into this present age and the age to come. This present age was altogether evil; and the age to come would be the golden age of God. In between there was The Day of the Lord, a day when God would personally intervene and shatter the world in order to remake it. That Day of the Lord was to be preceded by a time of terror, when evil would gather itself for its final assault and the world would be shaken to its moral and physical foundations. It is in terms of these last days that Paul is thinking in this passage.

He says that in them difficult times would set in. Difficult is the Greek word chalepos (G5467). It is the normal Greek word for difficult, but it has certain usage's which explain its meaning here. It is used in Matthew 8:28 to describe the two Gergesene demoniacs who met Jesus among the tombs. They were violent and dangerous. It is used in Plutarch to describe what we would call an ugly wound. It is used by ancient writers on astrology to describe what we would call a threatening conjunction of the heavenly bodies. There is the idea of menace and of danger in this word. In the last days there would come times which would menace the very existence of the Christian Church and of goodness itself, a kind of last tremendous assault of evil before its final defeat.

In the Jewish pictures of these last terrible times we get exactly the same kind of picture as we get here. There would come a kind of terrible flowering of evil, when the moral foundations seemed to be shaken. In the Testament of Issachar, one of the books written between the Old and the New Testaments, we get a picture like this:

"Know ye, therefore, my children, that in the last times

Your sons will forsake singleness

And will cleave unto insatiable desire;

And leaving guilelessness, will draw near to malice;

And forsaking the commandments of the Lord,

They will cleave unto Beliar.

And leaving husbandry,

They will follow after their own wicked devices,

And they shall be dispersed among the Gentiles,

And shall serve their enemies."

(Testament of Issachar, 6: 1-2).

In 2Baruch we get an even more vivid picture of the moral chaos of these last times:

"And honour shall be turned into shame,

And strength humiliated into contempt,

And probity destroyed,

And beauty shall become ugliness...

And envy shall rise in those who had not thought ought of

themselves,

And passion shall seize him that is peaceful,

And many shall be stirred up in anger to injure many;

And they shall rouse up armies in order to shed blood,

And in the end they shall perish together with them." (2Baruch 27).

In this picture which Paul draws he is thinking in terms familiar to the Jews. There was to be a final show-down with the forces of evil.

Nowadays we have to restate these old pictures in modern terms. They were never meant to be anything else but visions; we do violence to Jewish and to early Christian thought if we take them with a crude literalness. But they do enshrine the permanent truth that some time there must come the consummation when evil meets God in head-on collision and there comes the final triumph of God.

THE QUALITIES OF GODLESSNESS (2 Timothy 3:2-5)