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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadOffice and Duties of the Christian Pastor by Patrick Fairbairn: 31. 1 Timothy 1:6-11.
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1Ti_1:6-11.
‘In respect to which things [viz., love out of a pure heart and a good conscience, and faith unfeigned], some having gone astray, turned aside to vain talk; 7. Wishing to be teachers of the law, without understanding either the things they say, or concerning what things they make asseveration. 8. Now we know that the law is good, if one use it lawfully; 9. Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for lawless and unruly persons, for impious and sinful, for unholy and profane, for smiters of fathers and smiters of mothers; 10. For fornicators, abusers of themselves with mankind, slave-dealers, liars, perjurers, and if there is any thing else that is contrary to the sound teaching; 11. According to the Gospel of the glory of the blessed God, with which I was put in trust.’
This passage contains the last recorded statement of St Paul regarding the law; and it is of importance, for a correct understanding of its import, and bearing on the Christian life, to have a distinct perception of the point of view from which the apostle is here contemplating it. This was determined by the class of errorists against whom he was now seeking to warn Timothy—a class differing materially from those whom he found it necessary to contend against in his other epistles (to the Galatians, the Romans, and the Colossians) on the subject of the law. The latter were sincere, but mistaken and superficial, adherents of the law in the letter of its requirements, and the full compass of its ceremonial observances—legalists of the Pharisaical type. But those here in the eye of the apostle were obviously of a quite different stamp. So far from being sincere and earnest in their convictions, they are represented as morally in a very degenerate and perverted condition; entirely lapsed, or erring from (ἀστοχήσαντες), what must ever distinguish the genuine believer, whether altogether enlightened or not in his apprehensions of the truth the love which springs from a pure heart, a good conscience, and faith unfeigned. They not only wanted this essential characteristic of a sound moral condition, but had, in a spirit of error and declension, gone into another direction, and for the exercise of a pure and elevating love had fallen into a kind of empty talk. Then as to the manner in which this empty talk exhibited itself, he tells us, that while it turned somehow upon the law, of which they wished to be more especially the teachers, yet so little were they qualified for the task, that they neither understood what they spake about it, nor had any proper acquaintance with the things on which they made asseveration, or delivered themselves with an assured confidence (διαβεβαιοῦνται). How could they, indeed, since they wanted the love which is the very essence of the law, and the purity of heart and conscience, which a real conformity to its demands must ever pre suppose and require? In such a case, if they continued to make any account of the law, they necessarily turned aside to some arbitrary or fanciful applications of it, which were fitted rather to gratify an idle curiosity or a vain conceit, than to promote its spiritual ends. What precisely, then, was the character of their perverted ingenuity? Baur has endeavoured to prove that it took the form of antinomianism; that the assumed teachers of the law were in reality opponents of the law; that they were in fact heretics of the Marcionite school, who repudiated the Divine authority of the law, and were anti-legalists of the most advanced type. But to call such parties ‘teachers of the law’ would be an abuse of terms, besides involving, as a matter of course, the spurious character of the epistle, since the school of Marcion belongs to a period considerably subsequent to the apostolic age. The view, therefore, has met with few supporters even in Germany; and, indeed, carries improbability on the face of it; for, not only are the parties in question represented as in some sort teachers of the law, but contemplating them as such, and conceding somewhat to them in that respect, the apostle begins his counter-statement by saying, ‘Now we know that the law is good’—as much as to say, on that common principle we are agreed; we have no quarrel with them as to the excellence of the law. The parties, therefore, were legalists, yet not after the fashion of the Jewish-Christians of Galatia and Colossae, for the manner of meeting them here is entirely different from that adopted in the epistles to those churches; they are charged, not with pressing the continued observance of what about it was temporary, or with exalting it as a whole out of its proper place, but with ignorance of its real nature, and making confident assertion of things respecting it which had no just foundation.
Now, one can readily understand how well such a description would apply to persons of a dreamy and speculative mood—disposed formally to abide by the revealed law of God; but, instead of taking its prescriptions in their plain and natural sense, seeking to refine upon them, and use them chiefly as an occasion or handle for certain mystical allegorizings and theosophic culture. And this is precisely the form of evil which (as is now generally believed—for example, by De Wette, Luther, Ellicott, Alford) prevailed among a class of Jewish believers about Ephesus—a class combining in itself certain heterogeneous elements derived from an incipient Gnosticism on the one side, and a corrupt Judaism on the other. The parties in question would keep by the law, they would even make more of it than the apostle did; but then it was the law understood after their own fashion, lifted out of its proper sphere, and linked to airy speculations or fanciful conceits. In the works of Philo—probably the soberest, certainly the best surviving specimens of this tendency—we find the law to a large extent evacuated of its moral import, and much that should have been applied to the heart and conscience turned into the channel of a crude and ill-digested physics. But in the case of inferior men, morally as well as intellectually inferior, men of a perverted and sophistical cast of mind, both the fancifulness of the expositions given of the law, and its application to other than the moral and religious purposes for which it was revealed, would naturally be of a more marked description. There would now be wild extravagance, and, under lofty pretensions to superior wisdom, a mode of interpretation adopted which aimed at establishing a licentious freedom. And so, indeed, the corresponding passage in Titus distinctly informs us, (Tit_1:10.) where the apostle, evidently referring to the same sort of pretensions and corrupt legalists, says, ‘There are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision, whose mouths must be stopt, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not for filthy lucre’s sake.’ He further characterizes them as persons who give heed to Jewish fables and commandments of men, which turn from the truth, in their actings abominable, and in their very mind and conscience defiled. So that their fanciful and perverted use of the law must have led them quite away from its practical aim, into purely speculative or allegorical applications. And in such writings of the apostle John, as were more immediately addressed to the churches in the same Asiatic region, but at a period somewhat later, we find indications of a perfectly similar state of mind, only in a more advanced stage of development. They make mention of the ‘blasphemy of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are of the synagogue of Satan,’ of persons who taught the doctrine of Balaam, who practised the seductions of Jezebel, who were familiar with the depths of Satan, etc.: (Rev_2:9; Rev_2:14; Rev_2:20; Rev_2:24.)—statements which could only be made of such as had given way to foolish imaginations, and lost the right moral perception of things. To teach the law, therefore, as those persons did, must have been virtually to defeat its end, because keeping it apart from the practical designs and purposes which it aimed at securing.
Vers. 8, 9. In opposition to this misuse of the law, the apostle proceeds to indicate its proper use—which he makes to consist in a plain, direct, and peremptory repression of the corruption and vicious practices which are at variance with its precepts. Now we know that the law is good; so far we are perfectly agreed; in itself, the law is unimpeachable, and can work only good, if one use it lawfully; in other words, apply it to the great moral ends for which it was given. Then, as regards this legitimate use, the apostle indicates just one condition, a single guiding principle, but this perfectly sufficient to check the pernicious errors now more immediately in view: knowing this, that the lair is not made for a righteous man. Though the article is not used before νόμος, it must plainly be taken (as the great majority of expositors, Chrysostom, Theophylact, and latterly De Witte, Huther, Weisinger, Alford, Ellicott) in the specific sense of God’s law—the law by way of eminence—the Decalogue. While, grammatically, Middleton’s explanation, ‘No law is enacted,’ might be adopted—understanding law in the general sense, but inclusive of the law of Moses—the connection and obvious bearing of the passage does not properly admit of such a comprehensive reference; it is the law, emphatically so called, in the view of God’s professing people, as is clear alone from the respect had in the enumeration of crimes (vers. 9, 10) to the successive precepts of the Decalogue. By the just or righteous person (δίκαιος), for whom the law is not made (κεῖται), that is, constitutionally enacted or ordained, must be under stood not such merely, as in the estimation of the world, are morally correct, but those who, in the higher Christian sense, are right before God—very much the same with the class of persons described in ver. 5, as having attained to the end of the commandment, by the possession of love, out of a pure heart, and a good conscience, and faith unfeigned. This certainly includes their justification through faith in the blood of Christ, but it includes sanctification as well; it is indeed their complex condition that is indicated, as persons in whose experience the great principles of righteousness had come to the ascendant and bore rule. As such, they already have what the law aims at producing; they are moving in the way which it prescribes; and so, for them it may justly be said not to have been enacted. Then, on the other side, the apostle goes on to describe the different sorts of persons for whom it is enacted—those whom it is given to check and restrain, and bring to a better state; beginning with designations of a more general kind, and after wards employing the more specific. There is no need for dwelling on them: they are, the lawless and unruly, persons of a self-willed, way ward, and rebellious spirit; the ungodly and sinful, the same characters again, only contemplated from a more distinctly religious point of view, as devoid of respect to the authority and will of God; the unholy and profane, differing from the immediately preceding epithets, only as pointing to the more positive aspect of the ungodly disposition, its tendency to run into what is openly wicked and irreligious—all, though general in their nature, having respect to men’s relation to God, and their contrariety to the things enjoined in the earlier precepts of the Decalogue. Then follow a series of terms which, in regular succession, denote the characters in question, with reference to the later precepts of the Decalogue: smiters of fathers and smiters of mothers—breakers of the fifth command of the law, yet not perhaps strictly parricides and matricides, as the verb ἀλοάω, or ἀλοιάω, which enters into the composition of πατρολῴαις and μητρολῴαις, signifies merely to thresh, smite, and such like, so that the compound terms do not necessarily import more than the dishonouring in an offensive manner, the contemptuous and harsh treatment of parents; men-slayers, the violators of the sixth command; fornicators, abusers of themselves with mankind (Sodomites, ἀρσενοκοίταις), the violators of the seventh; men-stealers, kidnappers and slave-dealers, the most obnoxious class of transgressors in respect to the eighth; finally, liars and perjurers, the open and flagrant breakers of the ninth. But the apostle had no intention of making a full enumeration; he points only to the more manifest and palpable forms of transgression under the several kinds; and, therefore, he winds up the description by a comprehensive delineation, and if there is any thing else that is contrary to the sound teaching—that, namely, which proceeds from the true servants and ambassadors of Christ, and which is characterised as sound, healthful (ὑγιαινούσῃ), in opposition to the sickly and unwholesome kind of nutriment ministered by the corrupt teachers of whom he had been speaking. This term, though used only in the two epistles to Timothy, is aptly descriptive of the persons referred to—a class of theosophists, who thought themselves above the ordinary teaching of the Gospel, and the plain precepts of the law, who, in their aspirations after what they deemed the higher kind of life, restrained themselves from things in themselves lawful and good; while, on the other hand, they were dealing falsely with their consciences as to the fundamental distinctions between right and wrong in their behaviour, and, under the cloak of godliness, were prosecuting their own selfish ends.
In ver. 11 a word is added to indicate the conformity of the apostle’s view of the matter with the Divine commission he had received: according to the Gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I was put in trust. The connection with what precedes is general rather than particular; and the utterance is not to be limited merely to the sound teaching going before (as if it had been διδασκαλίᾳ τῇ, or τῇ ὀύσῃ, κατὰ τὸ εὐαγγέλιον), but must be taken as embracing the whole of the preceding statement. His view of the law, and of the classes of character against whom it was more especially directed, its use rather in repressing evil and convicting of sin than carrying the spiritual and good to the higher degrees of perfection, so far from being a doctrine of his own devising, was in accordance with that Gospel which is emphatically the revelation of God’s glory. It was not therefore to be thought of or characterized as a low doctrine, but was in accordance with the essential nature of Godhead, and the high aims of redeeming love.