"This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief." 1 Timothy 1:15

1 Timothy 1

Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the commandment of God our Saviour, and Lord Jesus Christ, which is our hope; Unto Timothy, my own son in the faith: Grace, mercy, and peace, from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord.

As I besought thee to abide still at Ephesus, when I went into Macedonia, that thou mightest charge some that they teach no other doctrine, Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do. Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned: From which some having swerved have turned aside unto vain jangling; Desiring to be teachers of the law; understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm.

But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully; Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine; According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust.

And I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who hath enabled me, for that he counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry; Who was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: but I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief. And the grace of our Lord was exceeding abundant with faith and love which is in Christ Jesus. This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief. Howbeit for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might shew forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him to life everlasting.

Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen.

This charge I commit unto thee, son Timothy, according to the prophecies which went before on thee, that thou by them mightest war a good warfare; Holding faith, and a good conscience; which some having put away concerning faith have made shipwreck: Of whom is Hymenaeus and Alexander; whom I have delivered unto Satan, that they may learn not to blaspheme.

_______ 

"The "endless genealogies" were a vain effort to solve without Christ what is otherwise insoluble, and thus be lost in wandering mazes of the mind, apart from conscience the one inlet by grace into all truth. For conscience alone gives God His place and us our own effectually before Him. Without conscience the heart may be attracted, but can never be trusted till it find its rest in God's love and truth, the very reverse of a vain confidence in self. Then with the heart man believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. And the known grace which forgives every sin takes away all guile from the spirit: for there is no more to conceal, all being judged and gone. One can then pray and praise: one desires teaching and guidance, and can call on others for and in fellowship of joy in the Lord. How dismal the descent to human speculations with its shadowy myths, and endless genealogies! These are occupation for the restless mind which knows not the truth and which alas! now turns from it to these husks for swine.

The apostle does not finish his sentence. Timothy would understand without question; so ought we. But he lets us know his judgment of speculation as being productive of barren questionings for the mind. God's dispensation is, on the contrary, in faith. It is faith that He uses both to dispense and to receive.

The notion that in verse 5 "commandment" has anything to do with the law has wrought widely and disastrously, not merely so as to lose the true scope of what the apostle urges on Timothy, but alas! to insinuate the direct reverse of the truth. If the word had meant "command" or "injunction" as in verse 1, there would not have been one whit more of real ground for dragging in the law: only those carried away by sound would have thought of it. For "command" there even is in relation with God, not as Judge according to law, but as our Saviour in mercy. It is accordingly well to adhere to the strict expression in verse 5, as it stands related to verses 3 and 18, which it would be absurd to connect with the law. It is rather in contrast, as an evangelical charge on which the apostle insists with his wonted force, and incisive keenness, and antithetical-manner, which go for nothing where the ordinary confusion prevails. For thereby the blessing here and truly bound up with the gospel is attributed to the law. The apostle is really explaining, in connection with his charge to Timothy, how God's dispensation that is in faith acts.

"Now the end of the charge is love out of a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned; which things some, having missed, turned aside unto vain talk, desiring to be law-teachers, not understanding either what they say, or whereof they affirm" (vers. 5-7). 

The apostle is setting the face of Timothy against those who would put the Christian under law. He does not allow their motives to be good in guarding souls from evil ways, nor does he fear their outcries against his teaching as antinomian. He maintains that the end of the charge he is giving is love out of a pure heart and a good conscience and unfeigned faith. These are the effects of the gospel brought home to the believers; of which things the law is essentially incapable. It may convict of the enmity and impurity of the heart; it may prove that the conscience is evil; and it is not of faith in any way, as we are told expressly in Galatians 3:12. The law works out wrath, not grace, and thus becomes death, not life; not because it is not good and holy, but because man is evil, ungodly, and powerless. It is by faith that the heart is purified (Acts 15:9) in virtue of obeying the truth unto unfeigned brotherly kindness that we may love one another out of a pure heart fervently (1 Peter 1:22); and so it is through the word of God; but it is the word that is evangelized, not the law but the gospel contrasted with it.

Those whom the apostle characterizes were Judaizing adversaries; and he tells them plainly that they had missed their aim. Could they really pretend to a pure heart, or a good conscience, or unfeigned faith? They were manifesting not love but vain talk. Through Christ the feeblest Christian walks in truth and love. Being loved perfectly we love: the heart is purged according to the efficacy of Christ's sacrifice, as the conscience is made good by it; and faith, knowing that all the evil and ruin are fully met in Christ's death and resurrection, now rests at ease without feigning anything, because all good is truly given of God and secured in His Son.

But, cries a would-be law-teacher, does not Romans 13:10 ("love is the fulfilling of the law"), identify the "charge" here with the "law" after all? The very reverse is proved by it: for the Christian, in the new nature which characterizes him now, does love, not as requirement under law, but as the outflow of his life in Christ. Love worketh no ill to one's neighbour; love therefore is the fulfilment or full complement of law, but this result is by being under grace, and not law. The interpretation of too many, ancients and moderns, is the very principle here denounced. Their ignorance, according to the apostle, is complete. They understand neither what they say nor the question on which they thus dogmatize. At the same time grace, while it detects and rejects the misuse of law to puff man as he is and obscure the intervention of divine mercy in Christ, vindicates its true place as a matter of spiritual knowledge of which all Christians are conscious.

"Now we know that the law [is] good if one use it lawfully, knowing this that law is not laid down for a righteous person, but for lawless and insubordinate, for ungodly and sinful, for unholy and profane, for smiters of fathers and smiters of mothers, for murderers, fornicators, sodomites, men-stealers, liars, perjurers, and if there be any other thing contrary to the sound doctrine (teaching), according to the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I was entrusted" (vers. 8-11).

The fables of human imagination were evil and incapable of any profitable use. Truth is the answer to the wants of a troubled heart and the questionings of an exercised conscience; but endless genealogies were trash and could only give rise to questions.

But there was another and more subtle danger - man's misuse of God's law, which has misled more widely and permanently, and alas! godly souls, too often. But this is not God's dispensation which is in faith, any more than it is the end of the charge to Timothy. Yet the law is good, if one uses it lawfully. Have the misusers the inward consciousness that law is not made for a righteous man but for lawless and unruly, and for other evil-doers? Far different was their thought. Herein, then as now, men betray their inability to discern God's revealed mind. Law does not contemplate the good but the bad. Law is enacted to detect, convict, and punish. Law never made a "just man," still less "the good" man, if one may cite the distinction in Romans 5:7. It is a sharp weapon to wound and kill transgressors; it never was designed to form motives of integrity or a walk of true righteousness. Its excellence lies in its unsparingness of evil; and man is evil, and this by nature. Grace, not law, saves sinners. Not law but grace teaches us, that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present age, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ (Titus 2:11-13).

Here theology revolts from the truth, and even good men ignore the source of all that made them what they are through the redemption that is in Christ and the faith that casts them thus on God. It matters not that the apostle elsewhere declares that by law is knowledge of sin, that it works wrath, that it is the power of sin, that it is a ministration of death and condemnation, that as many as are of its works are under the curse, that it was added for the sake of transgressions. They will have it that the law was made for the righteous as a rule of life, though it is the plain unavoidable inference from the words before us that this is precisely what the apostle explicitly denies of all law. It is Christ Who above all acts by faith on the believer's soul. Hence he needs the word of God as a whole throughout his life, and the Spirit helps him to apply it in practical detail. Such is the Christian's secret of true morality; which in divine wisdom binds the heart up with the Saviour habitually, and makes the written word to be matter for constant pondering, for comfort and conscientious application in the Spirit, but all in the sense of the true grace of God in which we stand and are exhorted to stand. For such exceeding privileges are meant to deepen our dependence on God and our confidence in His love day by day.

Entirely is it not only admitted but insisted on in scripture that the Christian is bound to do the will of God at all cost, and is never free to gratify the flesh. He is sanctified unto the obedience of Jesus Christ no less than to the sprinkling of His blood (1 Peter 1:2). Self-pleasing is Satan's service. But the law is not the measure of God's will for the Christian. It was for Israel; but we, even if by nature Israelites, were made dead to it through the body of Christ, that we should belong to Another - to Him that was raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit to God (Romans 7:4). This is now the method of divinely-wrought freedom from the law, only to obey God with a nearness, fulness, and absolute devotedness unknown to a Jew.

Can anything be less satisfactory, yea more nugatory, than the ordinary assertion of the divines that Paul still leaves it open, so far as the scripture speaks, for the law to be the directory of Christians, and that he simply means to exclude it from justifying the soul? Now it is undeniable that in Rom. vi. and vii. he is treating of Christian walk, not of believing in order to justification; and he there lays down that we are not under law but under grace, and this as a principle of dealing on God's part, the expression of which is therefore put anarthrously, so as to go beyond "the" law, though fully including it. It is just the same here; so that Dean Alford errs in thinking that verse 9 does not go farther than verse 8 where the article appears. It is not "the" nor "a," but "law" as such; and the οὐ negatives any such thing as law being enacted for a righteous person. Against the fruit of the Spirit, as the same blessed apostle writes in Galatians 5:23, there is no law. The general form is intended in all cases with or without prepositions, where the article is not. Winer has misled people by his list of words (Pt. iii. § 19), which really fall under rule. Bishop Middleton was nearer the truth, though he mistakenly made prepositions exceptional.

It is a mere assumption, not only groundless but anti-scriptural, that law is made for a righteous man as well as a sinful, so that "the apostles meaning doubtless (!) is that it was given, not for the purpose of justifying the most righteous man that ever lived, but for restraining the wicked by its threatenings and punishments" (Macknight's Apostolical Epp. 512. Tegg, 1835). This is to subvert, not to expound, scripture. Nor is Whitby in the least better, who takes it as "to condemn the righteous." Justification and condemnation are out of the question here, where the apostle speaks of the object contemplated in the enactment of law, and declares it to be, not for righteous, but for sinners.

And is it not painfully instructive to see how an error once let in works to ungodliness? For those who so strenuously contend against the uniform doctrine of the New Testament, and place the Christian under law as his rule of life, contend that, if he offend as we all do too often, he is not under its curse! Is this to establish the law, or to annul it? If Christ died and bore its curse, and we too died with Him and now are no longer under law but under grace, the truth is kept intact, the authority of law is maintained, and yet we who believe have full deliverance. If we were really under law for walk, we ought to be cursed, or you destroy its authority; if we are not under it, the true provision for one's sin is Christ's advocacy with the Father, which brings us to repentance by the washing of water with the word.

Law then is established for lawless and unruly, ungodly and sinners, unholy and profane, beaters of fathers and beaters of mothers. Such are the pairs in this dark list of human depravity: first, the inner spring of self-will and its more open insubjection; next, irreverence God-ward, end evil man-ward; thirdly, impiety end positive profanity; fourthly, insolent violence towards parents, without going so far as killing. Compare Exodus 21:15. For this last extreme introduces the general group, wherein one follows after another - murderers, fornicators, sodomites, men-stealers (or kidnappers), liars, perjurers, and if anything else is opposed to the sound doctrine.

Truly the law is a ministry of condemnation: what then can minister life, righteousness, and the Spirit? The gospel of salvation based on Christ and His work, which faith only receives; "and the law is not of faith" as we repeat from scripture. Blessing is inseparable from Christ; and it is of faith that it might be according to grace. They then that are of faith, whose principle is faith, are sons of Abraham and blessed with the faithful Abraham. Those that speak of law may speak out of the abundance of their heart, as they certainly do out of want of faith, and never show the good works for which they call, but prove the wretchedness of slighting Christ. For the Spirit is sent to glorify Christ, and will never decorate nor deceive self by vain hopes of amelioration.

But the apostle is careful to add the concluding clause, "according to the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I was entrusted" (ver. 11). The glad tidings may not assert man's condemnation, which is assumed in the strongest way. It is occupied with good for the worst of sinners, for it is the message of grace from the God Who was glorified in the Son of man and Who has now glorified Him in Himself, before the kingdom comes wherein He will display His power and glory to every eye. The gospel only went out to all the creation under heaven after the proved guilt and irremediable ruin of all mankind; so that, as God's righteousness is therein revealed from faith unto faith, therewith is revealed, not such temporal judgment as we see under law, but God's wrath from heaven upon all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men that hold the truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18).

For it is the gospel of God's glory, not "the glorious gospel," as the Geneva Version led the way unhappily for the Authorized, but, as Wiclif, Tyndale, and all others, "the gospel of the glory". Such is the hope in which we rejoice, and such the standard by which He would have us measure and reject all evil; a standard therefore which suffers no compromise in view of man's hardness of heart, as the law did, but is absolutely intolerant of all that is antagonistic to God's nature and presence on high. And God is now revealed as "the blessed God," because He speaks to us, not in Sinai's fire and darkness and tempest and words yet more awful, but in the fulness of grace and truth of Christ Who declared Him on earth and is now set down in the heavenly places, where we who believe are blessed with every spiritual blessing in Him. The atonement once accomplished and the Saviour gone up into glory, God was "happy" in acting freely in love to the lost; for grace could then reign through righteousness unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (Romans 5:21)." . . .

"Faithful is the word and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners"; but he adds, "of whom I am chief."

In vain do men seek to limit either "sinners" on the one hand, or "chief" on the other. The apostle knew the truth incomparably better than they, be they Fathers of old, or modern Germans, Catholics, or Protestants. His very aim is to sweep away all comparison, to overturn all self-righteousness, and to meet all despair, laying man in the dust and exalting only the Saviour Who abased Himself and saves to the last degree those that disobey not "the heavenly vision."

Nor was it only a question of mercy in saving the foremost of sinners, there was also a purpose of grace toward others. "But for this cause mercy was shown me that in me, as chief, Jesus Christ might display the whole long-suffering for an outline-sketch of those that should believe on Him unto life eternal." It is impossible to exceed the energy of the expression. Nor need we wonder, if his case was to be a standing pattern or delineation of divine love rising above the most active hostility, of divine long-suffering exhausting the most varied and persistent antagonism, whether in Jews or in Gentiles at large; for who had in either exceeded Saul of Tarsus? How will not the Lord use the history of his conversion to win the hardened Jew by-and-by! How does He not turn it to the account of any wretched sinner now! Profoundly does the apostle delight in that grace which can thus make the pride and wrath of man praise Him, both at present and in the future day, through the faith of our Lord Jesus, without Whom all must have been only ruin and wretchedness, closed by everlasting judgment. "Now to the King of the ages, incorruptible, invisible, only God, [be] honour and glory unto the ages of ages. Amen."

William Kelly

From 1 Timothy 1

Photo from Pixabay via Pexels