Difficult Times Ahead

So we're diving into chapter three of 2 Timothy this morning.

Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with sacred mission, we tend to work through books of the Bible verse by verse.

We believe that the whole council of God matures the believer into what God has called them to be, right?

And so we want to preach the whole council, and we do that by going through Scripture verse by verse.

And today is a difficult passage.

I just want to kind of set the tone this morning.

I tried to preach this a different way.

I felt convicted we'll get to that.

I felt like it would be unfaithful to do that.

And so I tried to submit myself to the text.

It's a challenging one.

And I'll say we don't have enough time to work through all of this.

And so you'll notice if you read the text, there's this little section of it around verse 7 that talks about they creep into houses of weak women.

And so here's what he's talking about.

He's not talking about dudes who creep in through a window at night and kidnap women.

That's not what he's talking about.

He's talking about what we would relate to or understand as like Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses.

What do they do?

They capture bored housewives.

Knock on the door, come in.

What does he say?

These women who are always seeking new understanding, but they never come to a knowledge of the truth.

They're swept away by false teachings, swept away by false doctrines.

This is what Paul's speaking about.

In our modern context, what is it?

It's the bored housewife who goes on every trend that comes across her TikTok and Instagram feed and never resolves in the truth of Christ and his gospel.

I'm done.

I'm going to move on, right?

I feel like you guys aren't receiving what I'm saying, but it's what the Bible says.

So, anyway, here's what we're going to do this morning, though.

We're going to walk through this passage together.

Last week, we talked about the portrait of a faithful servant of the Lord.

And this is what they looked like.

They're called to be kind to everyone.

They're able to teach the word of truth.

They patiently endure evil.

They correct others in all gentleness.

This is the portrait of a servant of the Lord.

And we're called to reflect that in our own life.

And like them, we are called to be people who turn away from immaturity, so that we might keep ourselves from being drawn into the nature and conduct of a fool.

And Paul says the purpose in conducting our lives this way is that in our labor and work we might create a space where the Lord may choose to work in the hearts of those who we are ministering to and grant them repentance and understanding of the truth.

Paul actually uses the language that the Lord would sober them up from the inebriating lies of Satan and free them from the trap of sin and foolishness that they are ensnared in.

But Paul's aware of something.

That he may be also under the influence of some type of deception.

Here in the passage this morning, Paul's working to sober Timothy about the difficult times that lie ahead of him.

He begins the passage with this charge to understand.

He tells Timothy that he needs to put in the work to be able to discern and examine both the cultural moment that he finds himself in and the times that are before him.

As I said, it's as though as Paul's working to sober Timothy up in case he's been self-deceived, that all he needs to really do is just simply weigh out the current opposition of the gospel and its messengers, and all of the present trials and suffering will simply just pass by.

He seems concerned that Timothy might be overly optimistic, hoping that if he just lies low for a while, the storm will pass.

But Paul won't allow this young preacher to have such a false hope.

We talked last week about how Paul's working like a gospel coach for Timothy.

And this morning in chapter three, he's coaching Timothy to realize that an opposition to the gospel is not a passing situation, it's a permanent, growing attribute of the culture.

And what is it that Timothy needs to work to understand?

That in the last days there will come times of difficulty.

Now, the first part of this statement, it's an issue of timing, right?

In the last days.

And so we need to do the work of understanding what is Paul talking about, or more importantly, when is Paul talking about?

Some things that we need to consider in interpreting this is first that this call had to mean something for Timothy in his life in ministry.

Remember, Paul is working as this gospel coach for Timothy, and he's coaching him for a very present reality.

This isn't something in the distant future, right?

This isn't something way out ahead of him.

This is a truth that Timothy has to face right now.

And the second part of our interpreting this is the apostles, and I mean that collectively, right?

The apostles' understanding of the last days.

They worked from an understanding that the coming of Jesus the Messiah was also the coming of the last days.

There was an inseparable reality for them.

That Jesus' coming was an ushering in of the last days in redemptive history.

And so the last days in biblical understanding is the time frame between Jesus' first coming and his second coming.

And so Timothy was in the last days.

We are in the last days.

If the Lord should tarry and generations after us are doing gospel work, they will be in the last days until Christ returns to consummate the covenant that he has purchased with his blood between him and the church.

And so he's speaking to something now, a very present but a very enduring time.

So it's in these last days that Paul says there will come times of difficulty.

Now, that is a very light interpretation, right?

Some of you probably had difficult circumstances this week in your life to different, varying degrees.

Paul's not something about talking about something that was just simply difficult in the way that we would understand that in our own modern language.

He's choosing, I believe, very purposely, to use a pretty heavy word to describe the situation.

You see, it's a word that was used in ancient Greek literature to describe wild beasts or raging seas.

We don't see it throughout scripture except only one other time.

It's used in Matthew chapter 8 in the story of Jesus' interaction with two demon-possessed men who dwelled among the tombs in Gadera.

Matthew 8 · chapter mention

Matthew 8 28 brings us into this interaction.

And when he, being Jesus, came to the other side, to the country of the Gadderens, two demon-possessed men met him, coming out of the tombs, so fierce.

That's the same word.

When Paul says difficult, fierce right there, that no one could pass that way.

These men weren't merely difficult.

These were two demon-possessed men with supernatural strength that ran naked through tombs and cut themselves, and anyone who tried to pass by the way, they'd come out and try to fight.

Right?

I don't want to enter into that situation.

Do you?

No, I'm not fighting any demon-possessed.

If he's got clothes on or not, I'm not fighting him.

And this is what Paul's saying.

These are gonna be difficult times.

The people are gonna act more like fierce beasts, and they're gonna prevent you from being able to navigate the way forward.

This is the difficult times of which Paul's cautioning Timothy about.

Dangerous, seemingly unable to pass through.

He then goes on to describe in more detail what these times will look like.

Verse 2.

If you're following along with us in scripture, for people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.

So our work this morning is not to labor over each attribute of this list of depraved and corrupt characteristics, but it's to help us see an overarching theme communicated through them.

Because this is what I don't believe Paul was trying to do.

I don't think he was trying to create an exhaustive list of all of these sinful attributes of these types of people.

I think he's trying to paint a picture for us so we can understand this rightly.

What we need to pay attention to is the overall structure of the list.

What's the first attribute right there at verse 2 that Paul starts with?

They're lovers of self.

That's where he starts off with, right?

Verse 2.

They're lovers of self.

And if we look at the end of the list, at the end of verse 5, we see that that statement is in contrast to how their affections should be ordered.

Rather than lovers of God.

Lovers of self, all these characteristics, boom, end.

Rather than lovers of God.

The fundamental issue at hand is that their affections are flipped.

They ought to be a people who love God first and themselves last.

But they have their loves out of order, and what we see as a result of a disordered love is the destructive pursuit of selfishness at the devastating expense of others.

You see, all of the other seventeen attributes of these people are the expression of unhinged self-love.

Loving yourself first, causing harm, distrust, division, opposition, separation, suffering, injustice go on and on.

This is the principle that we need to observe.

Others in our life, the people around us, they flourish when our loves are properly ordered.

But when our affections are disordered, they suffer.

You see, when we love God first and we love ourselves last, we're actually positioned to love our neighbors the way that the Lord has called us to as his people.

But when we love ourselves first and we love the Lord last, our neighbors suffer due to our sinful selfishness.

This is what Paul's laying before us as his caution to Timothy.

Just quickly examine this list.

They're lovers of money.

Love of money, the root of all evil.

It just harms everyone around you.

They're proud, they're arrogant, they're abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy.

That word unholy literally means they have an absence of familial respect.

They don't respect their elders, they don't respect the people around them.

They do whatever they want.

He uses the word heartless, literally meaning inhuman.

Remember that difficult times, people are gonna act more like wild beasts than image bearers.

They're heartless people, unappeasable, literally, they're irreconcilable in relationship.

They're slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure, all of them bring harm to our neighbor rather than the good that we are called to work toward.

This is the difficulty that Paul's trying to sober Timothy up about.

And I think it's fascinating that Paul uses the attribute of inhuman, as we just spoke to, that in this list he uses such a word, since the word for difficulty is also used to describe fierce beasts.

I would submit that difficult may be a considerably understatement in our modern language.

Because their relationships with others will be more like wild animals than image bearers, and the cultural time will be as difficult to navigate as a raging sea.

Does that sound familiar?

If you look across culture, if you look at what's happening within society, wouldn't a cat uh a characteristic or descriptive word be inhuman?

The way that we're treating other people, the way that we're having relationship with other people, we look more like fierce wild animals than we do image bearers.

And it is extremely difficult to navigate the cultural time we find ourselves in.

I think Paul's speaking to even us today.

Because like Timothy, we're in the last days.

This is a present reality even for us.

And then Paul goes on in this passage and he leads us into really the anchor verse here.

And what he does is he presents to Timothy the right response to both the times and the people that he's facing.

And in essence, Paul commands Timothy to avoid fruitless fools.

Avoid fruitless fools.

Now I get it.

In our church culture today, this is going to potentially seem harsh, offensive, or even objectionable at first, but can I present a possibility that we have unrightly made the church a place for the lost to come find Jesus rather than being a place where we equip the church to go and find the lost?

And because of that, we've weakened the pulpit to speak the language of a culture that doesn't know God rather than preach the divine counsel of his will.

Submit that for just a moment.

Because what are we supposed to do?

We're supposed to mature into what God has called us to by our hearts being counseled by the revelation of his word.

Trust me, I wanted to try and take the sermon in a different direction.

And my duty, though, is to exegete the text.

It's to mine out of it what is truly there and present before us so that our hearts may be counseled by his revelation.

And this here is the thrust of the passage.

It's the anchor of Paul's coaching for Timothy as a gospel worker in the world.

This is how people are going to act within the church in the end times.

And Timothy, as a gospel worker, you're supposed to avoid them.

Now, why use the language of a fool?

I think it's important to use biblical language.

The Bible is riddled with the language of fool.

Look at Proverbs.

It just talks about this contrast between a wise man and a fool.

That's what all of this is about.

And then Proverbs 31, right?

The woman at the end of Proverbs 31.

What is that?

That is the treasure, that is the prize of a young man who sought wisdom rather than foolishness.

Proverbs 31, that's what that is.

It's not something women should just have on their little doilies in their kitchen, right?

This is speaking, that's what the book of Proverbs is about.

Speaking to a young man.

If you're a fool, you're going to go after the harlot.

If you're wise and you seek the counsel of God, that's your prize.

So I want to use biblical language.

And in a biblical context, a fool is someone who lacks wisdom, disregards God's word, acts unwisely, and is often characterized by a rejection of God and a pursuit of self-pleasure rather than any spiritual growth.

That's a fool.

That's who Paul's describing.

So let's work together to understand this main idea by unpacking verse five together.

Verse five.

I think it's important for us to identify the principal problem before we work to understand the principal solution.

And Paul in verse five allows us to have both of these things.

The principal problem is that the type of people Paul is describing, they possess an outward facade of reverent devotion, but they refuse the power of God that transforms their hearts to love him and their neighbor rightly.

You possess an appearance of godliness, but you refuse, deny its power.

What I think it's important to understand is Paul is not referring to a shameless sinner who unabashedly proclaims their absence of affection for God and their wholehearted pursuit of self-love.

That's not who Paul's talking about.

Paul's talking about somebody who plays church, who proudly declares that they are a Christian, who attends church diligently, who carries around a study Bible with them that they need a backpack to transport it in.

And they wear some faith over fear t-shirt every time they go to Costco.

You've seen them?

Annoy the mess out of me.

COVID's over.

But here, they have no evidence of a transformed heart.

They've got all the accoutrements of what it may look like to be someone who has a reverent devotion to Jesus, but they show no evidence of a transformed heart.

They have the appearance of godliness.

They parade an outward zeal, but they deny his power to make them truly like Jesus.

They're fruitless fools.

And Paul gives us the principal solution for dealing with such people.

Avoid them.

And we gotta work as a community of grace to understand the way that we navigate relationship with others.

But this community of grace exists for those who yet do not know Jesus.

But for those who have this parade about them.

But they show no evidence of any true transformation.

Paul gives us a very strong command, avoid them.

We're gonna get to why here in just a second.

You see, the problem with fruitless fools is this they bring a reproach to the gospel by their lives.

If we look at a critique of culture about the church, is it not that our message seems powerless because they see the hypocrisy?

See within the church.

Well, you proclaim this, but you you live like this.

And I would argue that it's not that they are appalled by Jesus' grace, by his sacrifice, by his offer of salvation and redemption.

I think they're necessarily appalled by that.

I think they balk at the stench of a life that shows no evidence of true power.

You see, they bring a reproach to the gospel because their lives communicate a destructive severance between grace and obedience, between forgiveness and righteousness, between the old man and the one made new through the very power of the gospel we confess to believe.

Charles Ellicott, who was the Bishop of Gloucester, England from 1863 to 1905, had this to say about such people.

He said, These, by claiming the title of Christians, wearing before men the uniform of Christ, but by their lives dishonoring his name, did the gravest injury to the holy Christian cause.

Why should we avoid such people?

Because they injure the gospel that we're called to carry into the culture around us.

You see, if Timothy was going to labor in good gospel work, then he must avoid and have nothing to do with those whose flipped and disordered lives injure the work.

And so should we.

But many of us we fail to avoid the fool.

I think we have a severe problem within the church.

I think we've adopted an unbiblical contentment with a false dichotomy between grace and obedience.

We receive the grace of God of no merit on our own, and we are adopted into his family through Christ, but we receive this grace that we might obey in response to it in all joy and love and thankfulness, right?

For the glory of his name.

It's not grace for grace's sake, it's grace for the purpose of righteous obedience.

This is why he has saved us.

That we might walk in the good works of which he has called us to before the foundations of the earth.

You receive grace that you might joyfully obey.

We've embraced a wrong understanding of these biblical virtues of love, grace, acceptance, righteousness, community, shame, guilt, judgment, accountability.

The list goes on and on and on.

And we have made the church a place for the fruitless fool among us to be more celebrated than challenged.

Challenged to actually live out the faith that they confess.

In many ways, this has weakened the gospel and the impact that it's supposed to have on the culture we live in.

Because we have worked harder to display to the watching world that it's actually lacking any true power.

As they simply observe us refuse its power that transforms us to be more like Jesus.

For many of us, we are empathetic to a fool's folly.

We are empathetic to a fool's folly.

In our embrace of wrong understandings of biblical principles and virtues, like love, like acceptance, like judgment.

What's happened is we've also found ourselves being swept into a more worldly understanding of how we're supposed to relate to others.

In effect, I believe we've developed an unbiblical empathy.

What I want us to hear is that empathy isn't inherently unbiblical, but neither is it inherently virtuous.

Empathy is a means to understand and share the feelings of others that, when rightly operated in, leads us to the biblical virtue of compassion for others.

But what we've done is we've nurtured an unbiblical empathy that prioritizes the individual's feelings over their actual good.

If we look at it from this case of the parable of the Good Samaritan, an unbiblical empathy that the world wants us to adopt would look like this.

That instead of picking up the injured man who was robbed and beaten and laying there almost dead in the middle of the road and placing him on the mule and taking him to the inn and paying for his services to be healed and get better, right?

We would have laid down with him and died.

That's the world's understanding of empathy.

It is to understand a person in their suffering, it's to understand them in their experience, it's to understand them in their feeling, and you just lie down with them and allow yourself to die next to them.

Empathy has no real power.

Empathy ought to drive us when it's operated incorrectly toward the biblical virtue of compassion.

Who picks the man up, who puts him on the back of his mule, who takes him to the end to see that he's cared for rightly.

Because empathy is just about shared experience.

Compassion is about raising someone up for their ultimate good.

That's a biblical virtue.

See, we've made how someone feels and their personal experience, the supreme authority of their life, and our relation to it.

It's fascinating that you'll hear within side of our culture today, you don't have the right to speak to X situation or experience because you aren't them.

You can't understand them and their point of view and their feelings and their suffering and their experience.

Isn't it potentially a scheme of the devil to take word from us when it is the very proclamation of truth that helps people?

To silence us when the Lord has told us to open our mouth and speak.

And I'm not sharing my opinions and thoughts, I'm sharing God's revealed will through his word for his people.

But see, we've made how they feel, their offenses, their objections, their personal experience the supreme authority.

And in that, we have become either unable or unwilling to tell them their wrong, to call them to repentance, to righteously judge their life, to rebuke their falsehood, and in place of true biblical community, we have turned the church into a space for the folly of fools to flourish.

And we call it grace.

Let me say that one more time in case you didn't hear it.

The church isn't for perfect people, but it is for those who by the grace of God, through faith in his gospel, and by the power of his spirit are striving toward the perfection of the God who has redeemed them.

Matthew 5.48, hear the words of Jesus, your Messiah.

You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.

That's the aim.

And in glory, we will have obtained it because when we see him, we will be like him.

Biblical compassion, which is actually rooted in Scripture, balances the good of empathy, emotional connection to the sufferer, with a relentless commitment to the individual's ultimate good.

And that is what we're called to.

Because my good is not discovered in the affirmation of my folly.

For you just to feel for me, or to tell me it's okay to not be okay and just lay there wallowing with me in all my destructiveness.

That's not for my ultimate good.

You're just gonna end up dying there with me.

My ultimate good is you being anchored to the truth of God's word, being willing to stoop down as low as I am and reach out your hand to lift me out of the destruction of which I find myself in, that I might know him rightly, that I might cherish him as my prized possession, that I might find my satisfaction and joy and peace and contentment in him.

But no, what do we do?

We affirm the folly of fools and we say, look, you're chasing after that.

It's not gonna be good, it's not gonna lead you to life, it's gonna be destructive, but I'm gonna go with you.

And we find ourselves in these places we never imagined ourselves to be.

Rather than rebuking them and correcting them, calling them to repentance and the righteousness of which Christ has given to us.

And say, what you're finding out there, it's destructive, it's only gonna lead to death.

Here, I'm gonna be anchored here.

Come back this way.

See Christ as the possession of all things beautiful that your heart longs for.

You see, empathy creates a tyranny.

Where the most sensitive and fragile among us hold all of the power.

And it undermines their true good.

And it ultimately undermines the good of the community.

This is what Paul's warning Timothy about.

But compassion stoops down to meet them where they are and labors to lift them out of the foolishness that they're entrapped in.

Others of us, we we are the fruitless fool.

We are the fruitless fool.

Some of us, even in this room, possess the outward appearance of reverent devotion, but we refuse the power of heart transformation.

Let me say this with all clarity.

There are men and women in this room who lack wisdom, who disregard God's word, who act unwisely, you reject the righteousness of God, and instead you pursue self-pleasure rather than any sense of spiritual growth.

And I lovingly caution you in judgment this morning, it will not end well for you.

You cannot fool God.

God who sees past the facade of your exterior and gazes into the very depth of your heart, nothing is hidden from him.

Nothing is hidden from him, even though you work tirelessly to remain hidden from others.

You see, the axe is laid to the root.

Jesus holds the winnowing fork.

He knows without any sense of doubt who are his and who are not.

And Paul here in the text gives an Old Testament example about the way in which people work to fool others about their spirituality and godliness.

He names these two men, Janus and Jambes.

You won't find them in Scripture because they're not there.

According to Hebrew tradition, Janus and Jambes were the two magicians who stood in Pharaoh's court to oppose Moses.

Now I think it's fascinating that Paul here chooses these two men, two magicians to prove his point.

You see, the foundation of magic is the art of deception and distraction.

It's as if he's saying that the fool's work is more busy in deceiving and distracting others over the good and faithful work of simply being genuine to what they confess to believe.

To actually experience the transformative power of the gospel.

No, they weary themselves in the tireless work of trying to keep the deception alive.

But like a magician's trick, the fool's folly is unable to be concealed forever.

At some point in time, we always figure out how they do it.

At some point in time, it's exposed and it's revealed for the deception that it always was.

This is what Paul says in verse 9.

But these men, they will not get very far, for their folly will be plain to all, as was that of those two men.

You see, the fool's folly will be exposed.

No matter how hard we try to cover it for them in unbiblical empathy, or how hard they work to cover themselves by deception and distraction.

The truth of the gospel church is this Jesus will expose all folly.

Jesus holds the winnowing fork and is he who will separate the wheat from the chaff.

Now, this exposure may not happen in this life, but God is not pressed by our timeline.

Rest assured, at his second coming and his glorious return, at the close of the last days, all folly will be exposed before the judgment seat of his throne.

I think the scriptures can say this much better than even I might be able to this morning.

Revelation 20, 11 through 15.

It's a lengthy passage, but then I saw a great white throne and him being Christ who was seated on it.

Take notice of this.

From his presence, earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them.

Do you want to understand the cosmic nature of you being exposed before Christ?

The same one who spoke creation to existence.

The mountains were formed by his word, the seas were filled in their depths by what he declared.

You'll have no cave to dwell in, no tree to try and cower under.

All of creation will move out of the way, so that you will be exposed before him.

That's powerful right there.

Verse 12.

And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened.

Then another book was opened, which is the book of life, and the dead were judged by what was written in the books according to what they had done.

And the sea even gave up the dead who were in it.

Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them according to what they had done.

Then death in Hades was thrown into the lake of fire.

This is the second death, the lake of fire.

And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

You see, it was prophesied that the Messiah would have an eternal kingdom, that the scepter would not depart from his hand.

If we want to see the portrait of the glory of the Christ, it is him seated on his throne with the scepter of dominion and power, authority grasped within his clutch, and he is judging righteously all of creation.

That's the glory of the Christ.

Jesus' role as the ultimate judge is to faithfully discern between genuine faith and the folly of fools.

At the end of time, there is no way for man to remain covered.

We cannot cover them in our false empathy.

They cannot cover themselves in their deception or distraction.

But there is something true and eternal and beautiful that can cover us.

And it's the blood of Christ.

He covers us.

He covers this fool.

And I stand before his throne in his full righteousness.

Redeemed.

You see, church, I pray that we would be a fruitful people, that our life would match the gospel we proclaim, that we would show the world there is power in this gospel to transform us into the one who redeems us.

At SMC, one of our core values is transformation, obedience, and righteousness.

It's because the grace that we receive from God is the power for us to obey Him rightly and which we as His people ought to.

And there's joy in that.

And there's peace in that.

We want to work with the Holy Spirit to restore God's image in us.

If the world looks at us, let them not see someone who is just working tirelessly to deceive and to distract from who we truly are.

But let them see the fruit of the Spirit blossoming in our person.

And they see this unity of confession and life that proclaims the glory of the gospel.