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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadEzekiel, Jonah, and Pastoral Epistles by Patrick Fairbairn - 1 Timothy 1:18 - 1:20
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Vers. 18-20. In these verses the apostle again returns to his proper theme—that, namely, of giving specific counsels and directions to Timothy. This charge I commit to thee, child Timothy. What charge? Referring back to 1Ti_1:3, we find the apostle charging Timothy ( ἵíá ðáñáããåßëῃò ) respecting those who were acting as teachers at Ephesus, that they should be urged to avoid teaching after a certain manner; and at 1Ti_1:5 he had spoken generally of what he held to be the end of the gospel charge ( ðáñáããåëé ́ á ), for all who might assume the office of Christian instructors. Several commentators have consequently brought the charge mentioned here into direct connection with those earlier passages, as Theodoret, Mack, and some others. It is a serious objection, however, to such a view, that the preceding references to a charge lie so remote from the one before us; and the subject, also, as here introduced, has the appearance of being in itself both special and complete. Most recent commentators, therefore, justly conceive that nothing more than perhaps an indirect allusion can be supposed to exist here to the charges or commands mentioned previously, and that the more direct and immediate object of the present charge is expressed in the ἵíá óôñáôåýῃ which follows. The apostle, in short, has passed from his own peculiar calling, and the trust therewith connected, to the inferior yet still very important office and trust now committed to Timothy, and lays on him the command to do in regard to it the part of a good soldier of Christ, that he might visage successfully the conflict with evil. The more remarkable part of the passage is the reference it contains to certain prophecies which had been uttered concerning Timothy, and which the apostle introduces as a kind of justification of the command he is going to lay on his disciple: according to the prophecies that went before on thee, or that were at an early period pronounced over thee. When precisely these prophecies were uttered, we are nowhere informed; but the probability is that they belong to the period of Timothy’s special designation to Christian work under the authority and guidance of the apostle, given then for the purpose of encouraging the church to make the designation, and disposing Timothy to accede to it. His extreme youth, and possibly also slender frame, might render such intimations of the Divine mind respecting the future course of Timothy in a sense necessary at the commencement of his official connection with St. Paul. And it may be inferred, from the allusion to them here, that they contained indications both of the arduous nature of the work which he was called to do, and of the divine aid that should be given him to discharge it. On this account the apostle speaks of them, not simply as having been given at a definite period in the past, but as being still in a manner operative: in order that in them thou mayest war the good warfare; in them ( ἐí áὐôïé ͂ ò ), not simply, according to them (Huther), but as being, so to speak, encompassed by them, and finding in them whatever thou needest to stimulate and encourage thee amid the perils and difficulties which thou hast to encounter. The apostle thus had, in the prophecies in question, a specific occasion for the charge he was going to deliver; and the object of both was, that the early promise made to Timothy of a successful career in the cause of the gospel might be realized. The image employed to describe Timothy’s course of Christian activity—that of a warfare—was quite familiar to the apostle. In other passages he uses it of believers generally, Eph_6:12; of himself as an apostle, 2Co_10:3-4; and of Timothy again in the second epistle, 2Ti_2:3.