1 Timothy 1:9-10

Vers. 9, 10. The specific application is here given of the general principle just announced not, of course, the only application which it admitted of, but the one which was of importance for the present time: knowing this (holding it as a settled point regarding the proper design of the law), that the law is not made for a righteous person. Although νόμος is here without the article, there seems no reason why it should not be understood of the law of God as revealed in Old Testament Scripture, rather than, with some, of law generally. For parallel passages, see Romans 2:25; Romans 3:30; Romans 7:1; Galatians 2:19; Galatians 6:13, etc. (See Winer, Gr. § 19.1. He brings the usage under the general rule, that appellatives often want the article, when they are such that only one of the kind exists, or are so used that there can be no reasonable doubt as to what object is inten ded. Besides νο ́ μος, such words as δικαιοσυ ́ νη, ἀγα ́ πη, and others, are similarly used.) Middleton would take an intermediate view; he would understand law in the general sense, but take it as inclusive of the law of Moses. It is, however, of this law, specially and peculiarly, that the apostle is evidently speaking: for the persons against whom he is directing his remarks assumed to be teachers of law only in this specific sense; and we have no reason for supposing that the subject of law was in any other respect before the mind of the apostle. But law so considered, unless the context plainly determines otherwise, always bears pointed reference to the decalogue; for this was the law in the more emphatic sense the heart and essence of the whole economy of law; hence alone deposited in the ark of the covenant. And that this here also is more especially in the eye of the apostle, is evident from the different sorts of character presently after mentioned as intended to be checked and restrained by the law: they admit of being all ranged under the precepts of the two tables. Now this law is not made (οὐ κεῖται, the appropriate expression for the introduction or enactment of a law; whence οἱ νόμοι οἱ κείμενοι is equivalent to our phrase, “the established laws”) for the righteous (δικαίῳ). By the latter expression is to be understood, not one who in a worldly sense is just or upright (for the apostle is not here speaking of such), but who in the stricter sense is such, one who, whether by nature or by grace, has the position and character of a righteous man. Why is the law not made for such? It can only be because he is of himself inclined to act in conformity with its requirements. If Adam had continued in such a state of righteousness, he would not have needed any objective revelation of law; the spirit of the law in his bosom would spontaneously have prompted him to all that is pure and good. And of justified believers now the apostle elsewhere says: “They are not under law, but under grace;” yet so under grace that sin cannot have dominion over them, and their walk is not after the flesh, but after the Spirit (Romans 6:14; Romans 8:4). It is thus they have found whatever goodness belongs to them, and thus also that they are to go on to perfection not by serving themselves of the law, or using it as the ladder for reaching to higher attainments in goodness, but by laying hold of, or apprehending, that for which they are apprehended of Christ; drinking more deeply into the spirit of His gospel, and receiving into their souls fuller impressions of the great realities and hopes it presents to their acceptance. But this bespeaks nothing as to imperfection in the law itself, or the possibility of attaining to a height of excellence beyond its requirements. What is said has respect, not to the kind or measure of goodness men are called to aspire after, but to the way and means necessary to reach it; and when the law is represented as the antithesis of moral evil, in its various forms of irreligious and wicked behaviour, it is manifestly implied that the spirit and aim of the law itself is the perfection of moral excellence.

In regard to those for whom, he says, the law is made, those, that is, who need the check and restraint of its discipline, the apostle gives first a general description: they are the lawless and unruly, or disobedient, the self-willed, fiery and arrogant spirits that would fain spurn from them all surveillance and control. Then he branches out into particulars, the earlier portion of which have respect to offences against God, the later to offences against one's fellow-men: for the ungodly and sinful (ἀνοσίοις καὶ βεβήλοις, both words occurring in 1 Peter 4:18), the unholy and profane (ἀσεβέσι καὶ ἁμαρτωλοῖς), differing from the preceding pair only in pointing more distinctly to certain manifestations of the ungodly spirit, in irreverent and contemptuous behaviour toward the things more peculiarly associated with the name of God. What follows has respect to human relations: for smiters of fathers and smiters of mothers πατρολῴαις καὶ μητρολῴαις such is the proper import of the terms, rather than murderers of fathers and mothers; for the verb (ἀλόαω or ἀλοίαω) which forms the root of the second part of the compound expressions signifies merely to thresh, smite, or beat down; and so the smiting of father and mother, in itself a most unnatural and shameful violation of the honour due to them, whether or not it might issue in fatal consequences, was in the Old Testament legislation reckoned so heinous a transgression of the fifth command, that the penalty of death was attached to it (Exodus 21:15). Then come the violators of the sixth command, murderers; those of the seventh, fornicators, abusers of themselves with mankind (ἀρσενοκοίταις, a term for which fortunately our language has no proper equivalent); those of the eighth, the most repulsive and inhuman class of them, men-stealers, kidnapping and making merchandise of their fellow-creatures; finally, those of the ninth commandment, liars, perjured persons. But as in this enumeration the apostle had mentioned only the more flagrant forms of transgression, and had no intention of furnishing a complete list of lawless characters, he winds up the description with a comprehensive form of expression, which includes whatever besides that can be reckoned evil: and if there be anything else that is contrary to the sound instruction (τῇ ὑγιαινούσῃ διδασκαλίᾳ), that sort of instruction, namely, which was exemplified in the teaching of our Lord and His apostles. Why such teaching should be characterized as sound or healthful why, at least, it should be so characterized here, and often besides in the Pastoral epistles (as at 1 Timothy 6:3; 2 Timothy 1:13; 2 Timothy 4:3; Titus 1:9; Titus 2:1), but not in Paul's other writings, we may be but imperfectly competent to say. But neither can others be entitled to deny that the circumstances of the time were of a kind to render such an expression natural to Paul natural for him now, as contradistinguished from a preceding time. And the simple fact of its absence from the earlier epistles of Paul was almost certain to have deterred a forger of Paul's name to have used it, at least with such marked frequency. The apostle himself, however, might well enough do it, if the erring tendencies against which he warned and wrote in the closing period of his ministry differed materially from those which had manifested themselves previously, and, in a moral respect, were of a sickly and distempered nature. Such appears to have been actually the case. It was no longer the avowed adversaries of the gospel that the apostle had to meet, nor its mistaken and bigoted corrupters of the pharisaical type, but a class of sophistical, dreamy, self-sufficient theosophists, who, without directly opposing or disparaging the gospel, sought to introduce a fine-spun but sickly sentimentalism, teaching abstinence from things in themselves proper and lawful, as if incompatible with the higher attainments of the divine life, and refining upon the law so as to derive from it an instruction it could not yield in its direct and natural import. This was essentially a morbid, an unhealthful sort of teaching, to which the apostle fitly opposed the sound and robust character of his own teaching and that of the other apostles. It was therefore the altered circumstances of the times which gave rise to this change in the language of the apostle; and it is absurd to urge the phraseology employed as an argument against the apostolic origin of the epistles, unless one could disprove the previous alteration in the circumstances which has certainly not yet been done.