1 Timothy 1:7

Ver. 7. The parties warned against are further characterized as desiring (θέλοντες, wishing) to be teachers of the law; implying that it was but a wish, a bootless aiming at what, in its proper reality, lay far from them, as is afterwards more distinctly brought out. The interpretation of Baur, which was demanded by his hypothesis, would find in this description not law teachers, but law opposers, Antinomians of the Marcionite school; but the view is so arbitrary, and so much at variance with the natural import of the words, that it has met with almost universal rejection. The apostle is evidently speaking of men who by no means disparaged the law as vile, or at least as too low and carnal for persons aspiring to perfection, but rather had high notions of the law, and set themselves up as its more advanced and enlightened advocates, though utterly disqualified qualified for the office they assumed. It is also evident, from the concession made in regard to their pretensions in 1 Timothy 1:8, “We know, indeed, that the law is good; “so far there is no dispute between us. It was an admission to the parties against whom he was contending, in favour of that which they so zealously lauded, in case the apostle's own position regarding it might be perverted or misunderstood. The false teachers, then, were in some sense legalists; the question is, in what sense? In what form, or with what intent, did they press the claims of law? Not, we have good reason to believe, after the manner of the Jewish Christians, who first disturbed the church zealous for the maintenance of the ancient customs; for the way in which the apostle meets them (as noticed by all the recent better commentators) is quite different from what we find in the Epistles to the Romans, Galatians, and Colossians. Here he charges the parties in question, not with bringing in legal observances out of their proper place, but with utter ignorance and misapprehension as to the real nature and design of the law: μὴ νοοῦντες μήτε ἃ λέγουσιν μήτε περὶ τίνων διαβεβαιοῦνται not understanding neither, or, as suits our idiom better, without understanding either what things they speak, or concerning what things they affirm. They spoke, it would seem, dogmatically enough; for the verb (διαβεβαιοῦσθαι) means to make asseveration, or give forth one's view in a firm, dogmatic tone. But in doing so, the apostle declares they went beyond their depth; they merely displayed their own ignorance, and that in two respects both as regards the things they said, and the topics concerning which they uttered their sentiments. The language is such as might very readily be applied to persons of a dreamy and speculative mood, disposed to take things otherwise than in their plain natural sense; attempting, as men of a higher order of thought, to refine and soar, and lose themselves in mystic reveries or fanciful allegorizings. And this, as already stated, is precisely the form of evil which we are led to understand then began to develope itself. It was a compound of Gnostic and Judaic elements. The persons who advocated it would keep the law they would even make more of it than the apostle did; but then, the law not according to the letter the law sublimated by the speculative reason, and explained in accordance with the theosophy of the East. A dangerous spirit this in which to meddle with the law! Even as applied by the thoughtful, discreet, Platonic mind of Philo, it served in good measure to evacuate the moral element in the old revelation, and sought to explain by the help of a mistaken physics many things that should have been viewed with a direct reference to the heart and conscience. But in the hands of inferior men especially men of a sophistical cast of mind, who wished to employ religion to their own sinister purposes both the fancifulness of the explanations given of the law, and its misapplication to other than its legitimate and proper ends, may justly be supposed to have been of a much more marked and conspicuous kind. There would now, probably, be frivolous distinctions, wild extravagance, possibly licentious freedom cloaked under high-sounding professions, a hunting after everything but that which should have been most especially regarded. And so, indeed, the corresponding passage in Titus distinctly tells us, 1 Timothy 1:10 sq., “There are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision, whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre's sake.” Then he refers to the Jewish fables and commandments of men that turn from the truth, and speaks of those who set them forth as unbelieving, and in their very conscience defiled. Their dreamy refinements and speculations on the law not only led them into practical neglect of its profoundly ethical spirit, but left them in a manner incapable of perceiving it deadened their whole moral nature. And in the writings of St. John, so far as they bore respect to the state of things existing at a later period, and existing in that very region in which Timothy now laboured, we perceive indications of the same spirit, only in a more advanced stage of development. They make mention of “the blasphemy of those which say they are Jews and are not, but are of the synagogue of Satan” (Revelation 2:9); of persons “teaching the doctrine of Balaam,” practising the seductions of Jezebel, and knowing the depths of Satan (Revelation 2:14; Revelation 2:20; Revelation 2:24); in short, of men who had so sophisticated their own minds, and tried so to sophisticate the minds of others, that the apostle had to warn the disciples to remember that “he who doeth righteousness is righteous, and that he who committeth sin is of the devil;” that “no lie is of the truth;” that for one to say he has fellowship with God, while he walks in darkness, is practically to lie (1 John 3:7; 1 John 2:21; 1 John 1:6). The state of things had come to be such, that it was found necessary to recall them to first principles, and teach them, as it were, the A B C of Christian truth and morality.

[Mark here the progression of error in false teaching. What in its first movements may be but a deflection in a single line, may in course of time lead to a general depravation; for example, ritualism in the early church. Mark, too, what is the result of that knowledge and teaching which would soar above the simplicity of the gospel: it ends in licence and corruption becomes dazzled in the clearer light it affects to live in, and stumbles as in gross darkness.]