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It is a precept or caution of the same nature with those, 1Ti_1:4 4:7; and 2Ti_2:16. The repetition of this precept of the apostle four times in these two short Epistles, lets us know how important a thing he judged it, that ministers of the gospel should not spend their time in their discourses to their congregations, in things that tend nothing to the building up of their hearers in faith or holiness, being either old wives’ fables, like the stories in the popish legends, or the apocryphal stories of Bel and the Dragon, Tobit and his dog, and the swallows dunging in his eye, &c.; or sifting out genealogies, or vain and impertinent discourses, or idle, fruitless questions, which tend not to edifying, but to satisfy curiosity, and increase strife and ungodliness; which kind of preaching the apostle also had defamed, 1Ti_6:4, as the issue of pride, and ignorance, and dotage, and here he calls such questions
unlearned in the same sense, because impertinent to the end of preaching. The vanity of human nature, and their non-subjection to the will of God, appeareth much in this, that notwithstanding the unreasonableness of such preaching, and the direct opposition of it to the so often repeated precepts of the apostle, and to Titus, Tit_3:9, and Paul’s proposing of his own example to the contrary, 1Co_2:1-4; yet for many years in the times of popery the people were fed with little besides these husks; and too many yet, either out of pride, to show their parts and reading, or ignorance of the mysteries of godliness, and the true end of preaching, or dotage about unprofitable speculations and niceties, can find little better food than these husks for poor people’s souls.