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My first present duty this morning is, on behalf of you all, to thank the organizers of this conference for their long weeks and months of preparation, rigorous thinking and attention to detail, and for all their kindness and care for us, we thank them in the name of the Lord. My second pleasant duty is to thank those same conveners for their grace in inviting me to lead these talks on, uh, scripture, and thus to have the pleasure of addressing you all.
And my third pleasant duty is to thank them for giving me such a delightful book of scripture to examine with you as the first letter that Paul wrote to Timothy. Let's begin by reading some verses from that epistle, first in chapter one. First Timothy chapter one and beginning in verse twelve. I thank him that enabled me, even Christ Jesus our Lord, for that he counted me faithful, appointing me to his service.
Though I was before a blasphemer and a persecutor and injurious. How be it, I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbelief. And the grace of our Lord abounded exceedingly with faith and love which is in Christ Jesus. Faithful is the saying and worthy of all acceptation that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.
How be it, for this cause I obtain mercy, that in me as chief might Jesus Christ show forth all his long suffering, for the example of them which should hereafter believe on him unto eternal life. Now unto the King eternal, incorruptible, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for the ages of the ages. Amen.
And then some verses from the last chapter of this letter, chapter six, Beginning there in the verse thirteen. I charge thee in the sight of God, who quickens all things, and of Christ Jesus, who before Pontius Pilate witnessed the good confession, that thou keep the commandment without spot, without reproach, until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which in its own times he shall show who is the blessed and only potentate, the king of kings and lord of lords, who only hath immortality, dwelling in light unapproachable, who no man hath seen nor can see,
to whom be honor and power eternal. Amen. Over many long years now, I have found it a very helpful principle in beginning to study a book of Holy Scripture, or in returning to a book to study it more deeply, to look first to see what this particular book might tell us about the divine persons. What does it tell us about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
For when all is said and done, Holy Scripture is not merely a collection of rules, like our income tax schedules that must be obeyed. Nor are its histories merely records of antiquarian interest. For all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and in inspiring the prophets and the writers of Holy Scripture, God was revealing himself. We look to see, therefore, primarily what any particular book may have to tell us, as God who breathed the message first to the writers of scripture, stands waiting for us to read, that he himself might speak again into our hearts the words he originally inspired, and so reveal himself to us in our day and generation.
And if we follow that approach in this epistle, we shall notice from the verses we read in the first chapter, what a tremendous statement there is about God the Father. As Paul bows his knees in worship, even as his hand holds the pen to write the words. Unto the King, eternal, incorruptible, invisible, the only God, the honor and glory forever and ever. Here God will make himself known to us as king and describe to us the glorious character of our king, his incomparable dignity and power.
And as the king draws near to us in our studies these days, he will talk to us about himself as king and about his kingly rule in our lives. And if that is how the epistle begins, so it ends, as we noticed in our preliminary reading. Once more, out from the invisible shadows, the voice of God comes, who is the blessed and only potentate, the only one ultimately to wield supreme power in our universe, the king of those who act as kings, the lord of those who attempt to lord it.
It dwells in light unapproachable. And all the wonder of it. As we sit here at these tables, we may expect him, him who is dwelling in light unapproachable, to come and reveal himself to us. And we mark again his character who comes to speak. It is the blessed and only potentate. He will talk to us about his power and his government, not only of this Arhat, but of the whole world and universe.
The Lord of history. He was its beginning, the Alpha. He is the goal to which it p- goes. He is the Omega. And then if we have looked to see what the book has to say about the Father. Shall we not spare a moment to look to see what it has to say about the Son? Oh, that lovely word in chapter one, born out of Paul's personal experience of salvation.
Listen as he recommends it. This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. How well Paul knew it by experience. I am the very first and worst of them. So does Paul speak in chapter one about the purpose for which our Lord came into our world. He came to save sinners. But as Paul comes to the end of the epistle in chapter six, he talks about our blessed Lord Jesus as the one who before Pontius Pilate witnessed the good confession.
And you will remember from your reading of the Gospel of John, what our Lord's witness before Pilate consisted of. You are a king, said Pilate. For our Lord said to him, my kingdom is not of this world. If it had been, my disciples would have been fighting so that they, I should not be delivered to the Jew. But in the garden, I allowed the Roman detachment to arrest me without striking a blow. You will see, Pilate, said he, my kingdom is not of this world.
My servants do not fight. They shouldn't. I hope they're all listening. My servants do not fight with force of arms to promote my kingdom or to establish it. For for this purpose was I born, and for this cause I came into the world. So now we have a second reason for our Lord's coming. Chapter one said it's a faithful saying that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.
Chapter six uh urges this deeper purpose. For this cause was I, uh, born, and for this reason I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth. What is truth, said Pilate? And before this conference ends, we shall have to inquire about that, isn't it? Well, if that's our Lord's purpose for coming into the world, for which, as he stood before Pilate, he gave his very life. We who are his followers and are charged to keep his charge will need to stand with him in the great battle of the universe, to witness to the truth.
Not only the truth about us as individuals, but the truth behind this whole universe, where it comes from, and what is its purpose. Oh, there are many more things in this epistle about the divine persons. We must not stop now, we must consider them later. But of course, another thing to do if you are beginning to study a book of scripture is to look at its repeated themes. And if in your early reading you get the impression that a particular word is repeating itself.
Then a good concordance is a useful tool to have at your elbow, to look up at the concordance. Make sure you've got the right kind of concordance. Uh, a- a- and uh, see whether in this particular book that you are studying, this word is indeed a leading theme that keeps repeating itself. And if it is, that's a word to get hold of and grasp. And if you do that for First Timothy, as also for Second Timothy and Titus, you will find a word that is uncommon elsewhere in the New Testament, only a few usages of it before you come to these three epistles.
But in them it is plentiful, and we shall meet it time and again in First Timothy, and the word translated into English is godliness. Godliness. And because it is one of the leading themes in the epistle, it's good to start by asking ourselves, and pray, what is godliness, if ever one came across it? What is godliness? Well, it's not so much a kind of curious feeling that creeps up and down the spine or hits one in the i- i- in the innards somewhere.
Godliness, or at least the Greek word that is thus translated here in these books, means to reverence well. And its noun means good reverence. It is assumed in most places that the one who is reverenced is God, of course. Godliness, in the first and major instance, is respect and reverence for God. Oh God, save us from frivolity and disrespect for the living God.
God fill our hearts with that sense of awe that you see pervades Paul's own writing here, for the wonder, the holiness, the infinite love, the grace and long suffering for the person and character of God, godliness. The word is also used, at least the verb is, because the verb means simply to reverence well. It can be used of our Christian attitude to our homes, our families, and our loved ones.
Where one of the prime beginnings of true godliness is reverence for our homes, our parents, and relations. Reverence for God then. It is not surprising, therefore, that when we read through the chapters of first uh Timothy, that all through it we are introduced to the most beautiful array of descriptions, names, and titles of God. For if we're going to reverence him as he deserves to be reverenced, then we must know him.
So let me remind you of some of the names used of God in this letter. Look at the very first verse, if you will, where God is named as God our Savior. God our Savior. We shall need to keep it in mind as we traverse these chapters. These chapters and their rules and regulations come from a God who is our Savior, and are designed, all of them, to promote that great salvation. But not only our Savior, look at verse two. Grace to us, you see, from God the Father.
And not only is he Savior and Father, but look down at verse eleven where Paul turns to describe the gospel, and he describes it as the gospel of the glory of the blessed God. And at this point, I have a difficult, uh, task to do. How do you translate this particular word translated by blessed in our English versions. The Greek word mikarios. You could translate it happy. And if you will divest the word happy of all its frivolous connotations, what a lovely title it is of God.
He's a happy God. Don't draw, well, you shouldn't draw him at all. I, I, I won't say anymore. You shouldn't draw him, but if ever you were tempted, don't draw him with a long face, whatever you do. But it's more than just happy, because the English word happy is so much dependent on circumstances and the ebb and flow of fortune. That doesn't affect him. Perhaps a better word would be blissful. The God who enjoys supreme bliss. Oh, what a magnificent God. And he calls us in his gospel to share his bless, uh, his glorious bliss.
When his son was here on earth, according to Matthew, he used this same word many times to describe those who behave as they should in the kingdom of God's dear Son, the Beatitudes, blessed are. For in keeping his commandments and living as he would have us live, we come to share as sons with the Father something of the character of God and therefore of his blessedness. Oh, if this epistle were to teach me a little bit about the very blessedness of God, and how I could share it, to know here on this troubled earth even a foretaste of the bliss of God.
And then, of course, as we've already read at the end of chapter one, we come to know God as king. Coming into chapter two, we read of God, in verse five as the one God, an absolute foundation stone of God's self-revelation in the Old Testament scriptures. Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one. Protest against all idolatrous interpretations of the universe.
There is one God. And of course, we must stand for that truth and reflect it. He is, of course, this one God, is God our Savior. Let us not forget that either. We pass to chapter three, And at the end of that chapter, now we en- encounter another term. We read about behavior in the house of God, which is the church of the living God. If you had gone into the house of stone that Solomon built for God in the Old Testament, you would have found that inside on its cedar covered walls were artistic representations of life, life in all its forms, palms, rosettes, cherubim, with their wonderful mysterious life, such as of man and of ox and of bird and
of lion. Life. This is the living God. He gives us his rules and regulations, which we are honor bound to obey. But himself is not a list of rules and regulations. He's a living God, ready to interpose whenever he pleases. The living God. In chapter four, Paul repeats the title, but here he describes God as creator. And all the creatures, the things that God has created, and bids us have a healthy respect and evaluation of the creation that God has made.
When he made it, he pronounced it good. Though we now enjoy redemption, it doesn't mean that God has ceased to be creator. He is creator. And one of the lessons that Israel has to be taught in the second half of the book of Isaiah is to come to realize that the one they have habitually called God Jehovah is none other than the creator of the vast universe. I personally have to confess how easily I forget it. Talking about Jesus, what a lovely name it is, and half the time forgetting is the one by whom the universe was made.
I was a backyard astronomer, which didn't get very far, but sometimes my spiritually minded friends have inquired why was I spending so much time looking at stars? What use was that? I think they'd forgotten who made them. And the exhortation through the prophet to lift our eyes up from time to time and look at the stars and ask, who brought these forth? It calls them all by name, and it's a pledge to support little me in my few brief hours of living on this planet, and when I think that the Jesus who died for me at Calvary was the agent in this vast creation, how can I believe it that the creator of the billions of galaxies of billion stars each would die for me on
a wooden cross at Calvary. Help me to take it in. And this God is therefore said to be the Savior, that is the preserver in life of all, especially of those who, because they know him and have trusted his son, share in salvation at the highest and deepest level possible. And then when we come to, uh, chapter five, we read there about God and Christ and the elect angels, and our eyes are lifted to the heavenly court, where the judgments of God are issued.
And we're reminded that that heavenly court is interested in the church, and is being taught the variegated wisdom of God through observing the behavior and a comportment of members of the church. Then, as we come to the end, we have already seen it, chapter six, All that wonderful description of God, the blessed and only potentate. And you see, if we're going to be godly, and if godliness means reverence for God, always and again consulting God as to what God is like, and how I must may best respect his will and wishes and represent his person in this world, then by his grace I must come to know him, must I not?
Like a little child of two years old knows that fine specimen of humanity, and carries it piggyback across the lounge floor and calls this specimen of humanity dada. Begun to learn something. It'll have to grow up before it will realize that Dada is judge in the Supreme Court, and what that means. And when it is appropriate to call him Dada, and when it would be more appropriate to call him your worship.
Oh, let us not be afraid of the lovely name Jesus. But let's be careful, shall we? Lest in using it we forget who this Jesus is, and lose thereby some of the dignity and glory of salvation, and some of the dignity goes out of our behavior. We shall find, therefore, a pattern developing in this epistle, as Paul turns to give instructions to Timothy about the regulation of life in the assembly at Ephesus, that Paul will put before us what the situation is in each particular part.
And very often it's a question of problems and difficulties, things gone a bit askew. And then instead of just, uh, marching forward immediately and dealing with the problem, Paul will call Timothy's attention first to God, and portray before Timothy some special character of God that is particularly relevant to this situation. Because that is always the best way to consider things, isn't it?
Even our problems. Not to philosophize over them ourselves to start with, but to turn to consider what the character of God is that is pertinent to the particular situation. And having reminded Timothy of what God's character is relevant to that situation, Paul then proceeds to point out how our blessed Lord Jesus Christ has interpreted that character and attitude of God. For perfect and marvelous and breathtakingly wonderful are the interpretations that Christ gave of God's character in daily life.
And having considered those things, Paul will then come to point out what our part is, what duties we may have in true godliness, bringing the character of God and the example of Christ to bear upon the way that we deal with our practical situations and our problems. So when we come to chapter one of this epistle, there is a word that we should notice, another word that Paul uses.
It comes in verse four, where in the middle of the verse he talks about, to say, uh, a dispensation of God. I don't know what your translations have made of that word. It's the Greek word ekonomia, which in English transliterates as economy, but it doesn't necessarily mean what the English, uh, word means by economy, to say. Uh-huh. So no extra charge now for teaching you a little Greek. Quite simple, really. The word means how you run a household.
At least that's originally what it meant. The oikos or the oikia being the house and the household. The question was, how would you arrange it, organize it, run it, administer it? How would you run things? Yeah. And then when they were big houses in the ancient world, the king or whoever, the noblemen, they didn't, uh, just run it themselves, they appointed officers to run the place. And the chief officer, he was called a steward. You'll say, and the Greek uses a word, uh, made of these, uh, uh, basic words.
He is the steward, the man who runs the place for the master. And Paul is here concerned, therefore, with God's way of running things. God has all ideas on how to run things, you know. The Epistle to the Ephesians talks to us about the way God is going to run this universe one of these days. God has a plan for what the English translations used to call the dispensation of the fullness of times. Meaning the way God is going to run things when his plans have reached their fulfillment.
Oh, I can't wait to see, can you? This disordered world of ours, this universe, is it getting larger? Is it getting smaller? Where's it going to, this universe? What's going to happen when the whole thing burns up? What next? God has his plans for it, magnificent plans for running the universe. His economy. And the scheme basically is this, he's going to sum up in charge of it all, his dear son, our blessed Lord. Of course, there's more than a rumor in the New Testament going around that if you behave yourself, my dear sister, and if I behave myself properly, we shall be given a practical share in the running of the whole universe for God.
Marvelous that, isn't it? Why do you think Christ is spending so much time and patience on getting his body formed by baptism in the Holy Spirit and then trained in its lowly tasks that we have to do here on. Why spend so much time on it? Because the body of Christ is not simply a little organizational detail just for earth. It's Christ and his body that God, as his purposes, places above all principalities, mights, power, and dominions. Body, and he shall rule r- use to run the whole universe for God in those ages of unlimited bliss.
All that I could be persuaded to take my spiritual education and practice a bit more seriously now. I see you have the same queen as we do. In my ignorance, that sort of astonished me. I thought you had brought the constitution back to Canada or something. But I can, I can tell you a thing or two about, uh, gracious majesty Queen Elizabeth II. She has a lot of houses, more than I have by a long way. I contribute to their upkeep, but that's a small point.
She has to run these houses. Well, she's, she's the boss in charge, of course. She doesn't do all the practical things. She doesn't coo up in Tesco to get the week's groceries for Windsor Palace, for instance. She has her flunkies to do that. Very important, some of them are too. The amazing thing is, I repeat it, God's way of running things for the coming eternity to sum up everything in Christ, but Christ and his people. And we here in our assemblies are being given real practical training, learning to be in God's hand as his responsible service, to run things for him as he wants them run.
And there are right ways and wrong ways of doing things. The reason, in fact, Paul tells us why he's writing to Timothy at all, the first pressing reason is this, that there were teachers and preachers in the church at Ephesus that had completely missed the mark and gone off at all sorts of funny tangents. Some of them, according, you see, to verse four, had gone off into fables and endless genealogies, which ministered speculations, questions, instead of ministering to people's faith.
Oh, hear a word in the ears of all preachers and teachers and things like that. If you'll allow me, I'm not qualified very much to say it, but do be careful to notice. What the prime object of ministry is, whatever we do, is to build people. Yes, we have to impart information. But God help us in imparting the information, to see to it that by God's grace and his spirit, even the information produces faith.
Life is a big battle, and the thing that our enemy will oppose and try to upset is primarily our faith. When troubles come, be they physical or intellectual, problems of every kind, while his satanic majesty is at, is trying to break our faith. To break our faith in God's word, to break our faith in God's character. Does the Lord really love me? What when he's allowed this to happen?
Oh, let those of us who try to preach or teach see that we get our purpose dead clear in our, our scopes. It's a dispensation that starts with our faith in God and moves to produce faith and draw out the faith of God's people, that they may live and work with faith undimmed and undented. Instead of which the supposed teachers in Corinth, in- in Ephesus were relating all kinds of fables and nonsense. A lot of it was speculative- speculative reasoning that left people not with faith, but with questions.
Take, for instance, some of the learned rabbis discussing the tabernacle. They had marvelous rules of interpretation, according to which they came to the conclusion that the ark wasn't only in the most holy place. That's what scripture says. But they had got marvelous reasons for thinking that the ark floated midair in that cube that was the most holy place, equidistant from floor and ceiling and walls, if you ever heard such a thing. And you try to prove it, well, you couldn't. It's just sheer speculation. And some people treat scripture like that, to play crossword puzzles with it, so to speak, and all sorts of theories which you couldn't possibly prove.
And a curious phenomenon is that sometimes it's those very things that you couldn't prove that come to be criterion of the truth. They wanted to be teachers of the law. What things they got up to, read our Lord's commentary on it. There was the law of Sabbath, for instance, and they had interpreted the law of Sabbath as that you shouldn't walk too far outside your house on a Sabbath day, only go a Sabbath day's journey. But the question arose, how far is a Sabbath day's journey? Would you measure it in kilometers or British miles? And the Irish mile is not quite the same as the British mile, so problems, you see.
And how would you settle it? Huh. So one rabbi had a bright idea. If you got a bit of wire and you joined it to the roof of your house and put it on the roof of the next house, you could count it as one house, couldn't you? And if you joined all the houses down the street with a bit of wire, that would all be one house. That would let you go a few yards further, wouldn't it, on the Sabbath? Bright idea, you say that was, wasn't it? And in their rabbinic schools, you generally had a chief teacher. He was the authority. But of course, the students were allowed to ask questions, and the game was if you could think up a big question and put it to the leader that he couldn't answer, and you had the answer, then you became the chief rabbi.
And it ministered. Produced what? Well, not faith. Competition. And pride. Speculation. And uncertainty. Oh, what a loss this was. I- I- in Ephesus. Have teachers beginning to teach that kind of nonsense. They desire to be teachers of law. The law sometimes. Didn't understand its primary purpose.
Says Paul, the law, we Christians know the law is an excellent thing. The law is good. Greek kalos. Not just, uh, intrinsically good, it's positively excellent. God's law is excellent. Let's never speak disparagingly of God's law. It is against all that is unholy and all that is untrue. Thank God for God's law. It's the guarantee that heaven will never be spoiled by sin or any defilement.
The law is against anything that itself would be against the gospel of the glory of the blessed God. Mm-hmm. I can't resist the temptation, even preachers when they're preaching get tempted, and I can't resist the temptation to say, uh, when Paul uses a phrase like the gospel of the glory of the blessing God, is to stop him in his tracks and say, Paul, my man, um, what do you mean by the gospel of the glory of the blessing God? And if we ask Paul the answer and search his writing, he will tell us, well, the glory of God is that accord- uh, uh, that of which we have miserably fallen short.
For all have sinned in the past and do still come short of the glory of God. That will be true of me even by the time I'm ninety nine and a half, if I ever get there, you'll see. Still come short of his glory. Oh, I trust I'm a bit more like him than I was. Ah, we need to be saved. How can we be saved? We who have fallen short of the glory. Well, not by the law, Paul points out. The law can protest against any infringement of the glory. It can never save those that have broken the law.
For that we need the gospel of God, and what a glorious gospel it is. We be justified through faith, apart from works. And when we're justified by faith, says Romans chapter five, we can boast, we can glory in the fact that we shall achieve, attain to, and be a- and enjoy the glory of God. Oh, what a gospel. And every believer will be there when creation is delivered from a bondage to corruption and liberated to share in the glory of the sons of God.
The Lord is against anything that would diminish that glory. But the law can't save those who have broken the law. How would you turn a rebel into a child of God? It can't be by the law, can it? The law granted you is not just advice. It doesn't come alongside us and say, now look here, this is a good way of living. Try it, really have a go at it. You should love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. That's very good advice. We need its guidance.
But you see, the law isn't just advice, is it? It is command plus penalty. You better start loving the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. Or if you fail, the Lord will, the law will curse you. The law doesn't sa- say, I wouldn't do that if I were you, that's not nice. It says, don't do that, or if you do, I shall curse you. How will ever you live a godly life? My dear brother and sister, face up to it now.
How would you live a godly life? If you were living under those terms at the moment you made some desperate g- gaffe and revoked the commandment, the law cursed you. It isn't the threat of the curses of the law that drives you now, is it? That you love the Lord and want to please him. What has changed it? Take Paul as the example. We heard his conversion eloquently expounded last night. No good coming along to Saul and saying, try, Saul, to keep the law a bit better and you'll get saved.
Dear me, no. He thought he'd kept the law to its last limit. But Saul of Tarsus, thinking he had kept God's holy law, had been putting his fist in the name of God incarnate. Trying to torture believers until they blaspheme the name of the Lord Jesus. Help to blot out the name of Jesus from the earth. It wasn't law that converted him.
Oh, listen, listen to his worship again. Now unto the king. What a king. Would have had mercy on s- on Saul of Tarsus. Would you have done? Oh. If an impertinent mosquito were to alight on my noble forehead and start to bite me, I wouldn't hesitate. I would smash it into oblivion. And so would you.
Tell me, how did the king of all ages, king of kings and lord of lords, how did he find it in his heart to put up with us all of Tarsus? As he agreed with those that took a crown of thorns and rammed it on the head of God incarnate. How did God break him? Oh, broke him he did, he broke his enmity. What a marvelous story it is.
And gave the task, did God to his beloved son. Watch how marvelously Christ did the job of representing God to Saul of Tarsus. And that was amazing because Christ was the very one that Saul was attacking and blaspheming. And God gave to him, his dear son, whom Paul was, uh, uh, uh, attacking and blaspheming, trying to eliminate, gave him the task of subduing that, subduing that rebel and putting him into his service. Oh, I thank Jesus Christ, he says, who enabled me, putting me into his service because he counted me faithful.
Uh, excuse the term, what courage our blessed Lord Jesus had. If I'd have thought in my mind to pardon Saul, I said, all right, Saul, pardon, but you'll just get inside heaven and sit on one of the most drafty seats in the whole show. No, he didn't. There and then on the road to Damascus, or subsequently in the house of Anna, uh, in the house. In that moment, Christ counted him faithful and trusted him and put him into his service. He did it because I was at first ignorant and in unbelief.
That's how I opposed him. Now I've got to know him. But he changed my heart, you see. He didn't just give me forgiveness. All the grace of our Lord was exceedingly abundant, overflowed me with grace and love that have their source in Christ, and Christ, uh, gave to me to serve his people in his church. And if that was what God and Christ did for Saul, says Paul, he did it so that I should be a beacon light, an example of the way God treats all who dare to repent and trust his dear son.
So may we too, as we already have surely discovered something of the grace of God ministered by Jesus Christ, and it has turned us around. Or may God continue in these days of conference to reveal himself to us, that his revelation may leave its mark upon us that shall last from now to eternity.
