God wants us to stand firm on His foundation. To do that, this devotion looks at avoiding speculation and ungodliness, false teachers, and iniquity.
Nuggets
- Speculation leads us to ungodliness instead of to God.
- Living out God’s Word helps ground us when others try to lead us astray.
- A godly foundation helps us resist temptation to sin.
Devotions in Living Out God’s Word series
Unfortunately, there are those who do not want us to make good disciples. False teachers would rather turn us away from God.
Paul gave Timothy some advice on some things to avoid. Let’s take a look.
Let's Put It into Context
Here is a running list of nuggets for the series.
Avoid Speculation and Ungodliness
“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” (II Tim. 2: 16-17 ESV)
Speculation leads us to ungodliness instead of to God.
Avoid really doesn’t have a tough-guy connotation to it. It is more like oh-I-don’t-think-I-want-to-be-saying-this-right-now-so-I-am-just-going-to-keep-my-mouth-shut.
That isn’t what Paul was telling Timothy. He was saying it was a keep-away-from-saying-it-at-all-cost situation. This is more than just a cross-on-the-other-side-of-the-road deal. It is go-across-town avoid.
I think to figure that out for sure, we have to look at what Paul means by irreverent babble.
To get some idea of what is being discussed, we need to look at First Timothy 1: 4. “Don’t let them waste their time in endless discussion of myths and spiritual pedigrees. These things only lead to meaningless speculations, which don’t help people live a life of faith in God” (I Tim. 1: 4 NLT).
What I get out of this is that — instead of talking about truth — discussion was focusing on speculation. It could be stories, fictionalizations, or even wishful thinking about something.
Whatever, it was took the focus off God and His power and might and put it on us. It could bring up fruitless controversy.
What are some fruitless controversies we face? When will the church be raptured — pre-or post-tribulation? How was creation created?
We don’t know the answer to those questions beyond we will be and God spoke. Knowing the answer doesn’t matter.
Knowing the One Who will and did does.
Remember, Paul had just told Timothy to “remind them of these things, and charge them before God not to quarrel about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers” (II Tim. 2: 14 ESV).
Paul expanded on how the quarrels ruin the hearers. They are led to ungodliness. Godliness, equated with the Old Testament term fear of the Lord, is reverence in thought, feeling, and conduct that is promoted by walking in His Spirit and obeying God’s laws and commandments that produces a moral likeness of God.
Plummer said the real reason to be careful with the speculation was they, many times, are just flat out wrong doctrine. He wrote, “They are not only empty but untrue, and are a hindrance to the truth, they occupy the ground which ought to be filled with the dispensation of God which is in faith.”
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Unless God tells us, we don’t know what the truth is. No, science doesn’t always tell us correctly. God is higher than science.
We don’t need to know some things. We need to accept on faith that God is in control.
The speculations just jack us up and take the reverence off God.
The sin spreads like gangrene. Plummer said gangrene quickly becomes fatal as it spreads through the body.
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Ooo, baby. Haven’t some things spread like a disease in our churches? It taints everything in which it comes into contact.
It is easy for things to spread through the church. Think about how interconnected everything is.
When we were talking about the attributes of God, we talked about how minutely different some of the attributes were. One didn’t seem to come out of another, but they were difficult sometimes to differentiate.
To read a devotion in the Finding Our Center series, click on the button below.
Magee put that this way. He wrote, “The truths of religion are not a set of independent and unconnected notions bound up together in a creed, as men bind loose sticks into a bundle; they are closely connected parts of a great whole, arising one out of the other, so that you cannot deny one without denying or perverting a great many others; for once you admit a truth, you admit all its consequences; once you deny a truth, you must be prepared to deny, in like manner, all its consequences.
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The false doctrine that Paul was warning Timothy about was a disease. Anything sin related is a disease.
Who were Hymenaeus and Philetus? Spurgeon noted that they were two of the teachers who had grown cold and were teaching false doctrine.
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So, what does this have to do with living out God’s Word? In order to identify false doctrine, we have to know what the true doctrine is.
That means we need to read God’s Word to discern truth from lies. Only then can we live as God calls us to do.
Avoiding False Teachers
“who have swerved from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already happened. They are upsetting the faith of some” (II Tim. 2: 18 ESV)
Living out God’s Word helps ground us when others try to lead us astray.
The sad part is Hymenaeus and Philetus had already swerved from the truth. They were already on the wrong path.
Part of the message of the false teachers was that the resurrection had already happened. It hadn’t.
Yes, Jesus had already been resurrected. That wasn’t the resurrection meant.
Not everyone believed in resurrection. “Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question” (Mk. 12: 18 NIV).
What Paul was saying here was that speculation had already been resolved. “He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee” (Lk. 24: 6 ESV).
What I think they are talking about is many thought Jesus would come back quickly. They may have been saying He had already returned.
Spurgeon took it another way. He thought that Hymenaeus and Philetus were spiritualizing everything.
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Unfortunately, they were disrupting others’ faith as well as their own. Others saw what they believed — and didn’t know what to believe.
It is easy to say that our faith is our own. We can all believe what we want to believe.
But just as the doctrines are all intertwined, we are all intertwined. Tom sees Sally, and she influences Tom.
All disciples make up the church. We are the community — the family of God.
Having the support of like-minded believers can help us when the false teachers try to lead us away from God. They can encourage and support us when we need it the most.
Avoiding Iniquity
“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’” (II Tim. 2: 19 ESV)
A godly foundation helps us resist temptation to sin.
So, we have to rely on God’s firm foundation. If we don’t, we have chaos.
Jesus told a parable about this. “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it” (Mt. 7: 24-27 ESV).
It is extremely sad when we consider that each house is a soul. Jesus doesn’t want anyone to go crash upon the sand.
But when people choose not to follow God and make Him our foundation, down we go.
Candlish made an interesting observation. He wrote, “The faith of some, of many diversely minded and diversely influenced, is overthrown.”
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Think about it. What is the worldview telling us these days? God is too confining. His focus is too narrow for the reality of the world today.
Instead, the worldview people say God needs to understand the diverse makeup of the world today. He needs to allow each of us our own little foibles.
No, God doesn’t. He is Sovereign God — our Creator.
If we put our foundation on the worldview, we have built our houses on the sand. Down we will come at the end of the age.
Each disciple has God’s seal on us. He knows beyond a shadow of a doubt which ones are His children.
Glossary
God knows we are His because we need Him — we acknowledge we need Him. We don’t try to rely on ourselves to figure out every situation.
We know we can do that because we love and trust God.
God knows our love by how we serve Him. It isn’t that we just do the works — the random acts of kindness. We serve in Jesus’ name.
It is easy to tell God’s children because they are suffering for Him. We aren’t guaranteed a smooth, easy life. Oh, contraire.
God promises us trials.
God knows we are waiting for Jesus’ return. He has told us to watch, so we should be.
A big part of turning to God is turning away from sin. But we have to get the order right.
- We turn to God.
- We turn away from sin.
We can’t eliminate sin on our own. We can’t continue to live sinful lives if we say we are trying to imitate God.
We’ve talked about God sealing us before. He has His mark on us to show that we are His children.
Glossary
We know this seal is unchangeable and immutable because God is unchangeable and immutable.
To read a related devotion, click the button below.
Making the Connections
I like what Moxom reminded us. He wrote, “Christianity was before the Church. Christianity was before the New Testament. It produced the Gospels and Epistles, as in the olden time the prophetic spirit and experience antedated and produced the prophetic history and literature. Men forget this. They forget that God and the soul, and God revealing Himself to the soul, precede the institutions and records of religion.”
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We like to think that religion was made for mankind. It wasn’t.
Mankind was made to worship Sovereign God. That could have changed after the original sin – and for some it has.
But God designed a way that we could have that purpose once again – and for eternity. He designed the Plan of Salvation so that we could be reunited with Him.
How Do We Apply This?
- Turn away from sin after we turn to God.
- Obey God to turn away from sin.
- Believe all of God’s Word, not just that which follows our own agenda.
- Imitate Jesus.
- Be holy.
- Live according to the profession of our faith.
- Don’t live hypocritically by not following God’s laws and commandments.
- Express gratitude to our Savior Who has delivered us from evil.
- Set our minds on Christ so that He can grant us peace.
Resource
Father God. We do not want to follow false teachers away from You. We want to firmly keep our focus fixed on You. Help us to turn away from our sins, so that we may be pure and holy as You are. Amen.
What do you think?
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