20 Days in 2 Timothy

Remind them of these things, and charge them before God not to quarrel about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers. Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. But avoid irreverent babble, for it will lead people into more and more ungodliness, and their talk will spread like gangrene. Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already happened. They are upsetting the faith of some. But God's firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: “The Lord knows those who are his,” and, “Let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity.”

2 Timothy 2:14-19

Here, Paul turns a corner from encouraging to instructing, and we begin to understand the challenges Timothy is facing in his day. It seems that there are people who consider themselves experts and teachers on the way of Jesus who are not just mistaken, but are teaching things directly contrary to the word of God.

Imagine living in a day and age when people would espouse information and teachings that were just plain wrong, with an air of authority and the gravity of a firm conviction. As with most of 2 Timothy, we do not have to try very hard to picture the difficulty he was up against.

For the Christian, there are fundamental truths that we believe: that Jesus is the Son of God, that His death, burial, and ressurection accomplished what we could not, and that people need to know Him and anchor their lives in Him. This doesn’t mean that we disregard or dismiss anyone who is struggling with those ideas. In fact, we come around those people with grace, patience, and love, but while doing so, we don’t waver from our beliefs or subject them to debate.

Why is this so important to us in our own day and age? Perhaps it's because now more than ever, we are tempted to engage in conversations online and in person daily in what Paul would refer to as “word wars.” Most of the time, the goal of these kinds of interactions isn’t love or even truth—it is some manufactured sense of victory over another person, usually at the expense of treating them with dignity and respect. Our culture is obsessed with promoting our own truths, but it simply cannot be so for the Jesus follower. We who have ascribed to the one truth must cling to it and act according to its teaching because to give in to gangrene of godless chatter will “destroy the faith of some.”

Take Hymenaeus and Philetus, for example. They were spreading the teaching that believers had no spiritual future ahead of them, that the resurrection had already taken place, and that what was left for us was just a deeper understanding tantamount to a spiritual higher mentality. Surely, such a massive departure from proper theology must have elicited a violent reaction from Paul. It would only make sense that his charge to young Timothy would be to confront these teachers head-on in a public forum to “call them out.”

No, in wisdom, Paul instructs Timothy to avoid such godless chatter because it would only lead to more godlessness. The foundation of our faith stands firm no matter who or what comes against it, and it does not need us to defend it. We can be comforted in that encouragement today—after all, if Paul is giving Timothy such advice when it comes to a disagreement over a central tenet of our faith, then why would we need to take up a quarrel over far lesser topics? No, instead we can continue on the path that God has us, to study the Word of God and depart from iniquity. We can be a people of peace, far more focused on what we are for than what we are against, and in so doing, become a refuge for all those who grow weary of the endless arguing that surrounds us all.