Officers, God's House, & The Mystery of Godliness - 1st Timothy: 3

Alright, please open your Bibles to 1 Timothy 3, starting at verse 1.

This is a faithful saying. If a man desires the position of a bishop, he desires a good work.

A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, temperate, sober -minded, of good behavior, hospitable, able to teach, not given to wine, not violent, not greedy for money, but gentle, not quarrelsome, not covetous, one who rules his own house well, having his children in submission with all reverence.

For if a man does not know how to rule his own house, how will he take care of the church of God?

Not a novice, lest being puffed up with pride, he fall into the same condemnation as the devil.

Moreover, he must have a good testimony among those who are outside, lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.

Likewise, deacons must be reverent, not double -tongued, not violent, not given to much wine, not greedy for money, holding the mystery of the faith of the pure conscience.

But let these also first be tested, then let them serve as deacons, being found blameless.

Likewise, their wives must be reverent, not slanderers, temperate, faithful in all things.

Let deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well.

For those who have served well as deacons obtain for themselves a good standing and great boldness in the faith which is in Christ Jesus.

These things I write to you, though I hope to come to you shortly. But if I am delayed,

I write so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the house of God, which is the church of the living

God, the pillar and ground of the truth. And without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness.

God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen by angels, preached among the

Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up in glory.

You may be seated. Alright, so the major chunks in this text as we continue through, we have officers, the house of God, and the idea that this book focuses on how those who lead are supposed to behave and how they are supposed to help to see the blueprint of the building of the house of God to be carried out.

And there's the mystery of godliness, which is a confessional statement for heads of doctrine.

So let's... You are familiar with this text, especially as we think about the beginning, about the qualifications of officers.

And there's a great danger when you go through texts that you are familiar with. The danger of going through texts that you are familiar with is that you think you know what it says.

You might. But also, we sometimes, when we have texts that we're familiar with, we sometimes think we know what it says and we don't pay attention to the details.

And so, this text, which is important and a commonplace, is something

I ask you to pay attention to again as you go through it, as well as dealing with the later part of the chapter, which is dense and something you are likely less familiar with.

And so both are worthy of our attention. So chapter 3, verse 1, this is a faithful saying.

Remember, the faithful sayings are things that are meant to be said repeatedly.

The faithful sayings are things that are meant to be thought upon, meditate upon, considered, to be mulled over, and to be used commonly in the church.

And so what's the faithful saying? If a man desires the position of a bishop, he desires a good work.

More literally in the Greek, it's if a man desires a bishopric. If a man desires to be an episkopos, an overseer.

And so if the man desires to be an overseer, he desires a good work. In other words, desiring a position of authority is the desire for power so that you can use that power to do good work.

If you desire just the power and not the good work, you don't really desire the office. You don't desire the lawful position.

What you desire is just power. If you desire the office, if you desire the lawful authorization to use power, then what you're desiring is the power, according to law, to do good work.

And so the desire for the position is good. The desire is to have it for the lawful purpose and the lawful office itself with its lawful powers.

So if a man desires a bishopric, he desires a good work.

And so we get into, and if that's the case, if there's somebody who desires this office and he desires to do good work, then we need to remember if you think you can govern others, that means you believe you can govern yourself.

The closer in, there's an order of governance. You can govern yourself, you can govern your house, and then you're fit to govern publicly.

So the public offices of church and state are positions that first require a display of self -government and the government of the house.

If a man desires a bishopric, an overseership, a pastorate, he desires a good work.

A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, temperate, sober -minded, of good behavior, hospitable, and it carries on.

Remember that the office of bishop is the same thing as the office of elder, teacher, and pastor.

We have all of these words used at the same office. And we have, in terms of qualifications, we don't have a distinction between the office of elder that teaches and the office of elder that rules.

There are not teaching elders and ruling elders, there's elders. You can divide up work, but the office of elder has a qualification of ability to teach.

So the ability to teach is a requirement for all elders. The desire to separate the two is sometimes supported by going to Exodus 18, verse 21, and saying, look, there's an office of elder that exists here in the

Old Testament, and that office of elder has a different set of requirements in terms of what that person has to have.

And so these are the two categories of elder. The problem is when you read Exodus 18, verse 21, if you read the earlier parts of the chapter, there are already elders there, and those elders meet

Moses and Aaron and Jethro and participate in sacrifices together and a covenant religious meal together.

And so there are already elders, already religious elders, synagogue elders, elders of the church in existence, prior to the elders that are made in Exodus 18, verse 21.

The elders that are made in Exodus 18, verse 21 are civil magistrates, and they participate with Moses in judging the people because Moses, as leading the people out, was a sort of monarch, and that was not a continuing office, but what we have is the formation of the type of government that was given to Israel in Exodus 18 with the system of graded courts, which also applies in the church, as can be demonstrated in other passages.

The point is that the office of ruling elder is an office that is not found in scripture.

What you have is the office of elder, and all elders are required to be able to teach.

So this office, the office of elder, the office of bishop, the office of pastor, the office of teacher, they are the same thing.

And those labels emphasize different things. The title elder emphasizes maturity.

The title teacher emphasizes the work of teaching doctrine. The title pastor emphasizes the duty to care for the sheep, to care for individuals, to seek to care for the flock, and so there's this pastoral care.

Think about priestly type of work. The teacher is focused on the idea of the prophetic types of work, and the overseership is involved in this idea of rule or kingly types of behavior.

Think about the courts, you think about the administration of the church, those functions.

So a bishop, if he's somebody who desires authority in order to do good work, he must be blameless.

Now blamelessness has to do with not being sinless, but hopefully this is familiar to you.

Blamelessness is the idea of not having a charge that's able to be stood against you that you're either going through conflict resolution or you've resolved outstanding conflicts.

And so this idea of blamelessness has to do with a willingness to deal with conflict, and also has to do with not having had a recent charge that lands the person's found guilty of that makes it so they're disqualified.

Okay, so there are two types of behavior that would make it so the person's not blameless. An unwillingness to go through conflict resolution, or behaviors that violate the other qualification sets in such a way that it is a plain, clear, grievous sin that disqualifies in terms of removing the stated qualifications that follow.

So we have the immediately following set of list that gives to us the things, the categories for blamelessness.

So blamelessness, again, can deal with any sin, an unwillingness to deal with conflict on it, or it can deal with especially violations of these types of behaviors.

So we have the husband of one wife, a one woman man. We think about the wife herself, and she has qualifications, those are listed in the deacon section, the qualifications of the deacon's wife.

They're not repeated here. But we have this idea of the one woman man, the husband of one wife.

He's in a valid marriage, or he is called to singleness.

And in either case, he's living chastely. And that has been the case for at least the minimum period of time to be able to say that a person has these qualifications, which we talk about as being a year because of the fact that Deuteronomy 24, verse 5, uses a standard to keep people from public business in marriage, entering into a new marriage.

So this idea of new covenant relationships requiring a year to be able to be dealt with is built on Deuteronomy 24, verse 5.

When a man has taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war or be charged with any business.

He shall be free at home one year and bring happiness to his wife whom he has taken.

So the ability to focus on serving the wife and to get things established well there, and providing enough time for display of competency, of government there, those are things that would help to demonstrate.

So the husband of one wife, a chaste living with the absolute minimum of display of a one -year period of time.

The next word, translated temperate, is nephalion. And I have tried to emphasize that word and emphasize to you that this really comes down to a serious -mindedness.

Nephalion is serious -mindedness. In other words, a focus on the goal. And so men, this list of qualifications, this is the set of virtues that men ought to focus on obtaining for themselves.

You don't have the power to generate your virtue. God has that power, but you use the means that God has given.

You read the Scriptures. You seek to have holy conversation. You seek to be encouraged by godly companions.

You pray for the blessing of God to bear this fruit. These are the things to be sought. And this ought to be on your mind as a consistent pattern.

Men, we want our wives to emphasize Proverbs 31. We want our wives to think about what it is to be a godly woman.

We want them to think about the qualifications of an officer's wife. We want our wives to avoid being contentious.

We want them to submit to us. We should seek to be the kinds of men that would help to lead a wife in that way.

If you are desirous for marriage, then you should seek to be this kind of man that you might have the kind of wife you hope for.

If you are called to singleness, then you should seek to be this way so as to keep yourself from living in a useless singleness, but instead a singleness where you are able to carry out risks and do work that would not be able to be done if you were married.

This pattern laid out for us here begins with a serious mindedness in terms of the kinds of attributes that we see with the man that aren't just in relationship to other people.

We have blamelessness in terms of your conflict with other people. We have husband of one wife and how you treat women.

And then we get to this idea of temperance or Nafalian. And this is about being serious minded.

This is about viewing the world as a battlefield and not a playground. And so this idea of working to deal with the troubles and difficulties that surround you, the mindset that there is much to do, the mindset that what you do today will have an impact in terms of future generations, but will also have an impact in terms of future you.

That you, when you deal with things in terms of a serious minded attitude, display a delayed pursuit of satisfaction, a delayed gratification.

A serious mindedness makes it so that you pursue the goal. You're focused on the glory of God.

There's a doxological focus. You think about how can I glorify God and you seek to do actions that will help to encourage that.

Now, that being applied over time should manifest itself in a well -ordered thinking and a well -ordered speaking and acting.

The next attribute of an elder is listed here as sober -minded.

The word is Sophronon in the Greek. And Sophronon is prudent or wise.

In other words, I'd like you to emphasize that I've put in bold there prudent. Prudence is giving evidence of knowing.

This is how prudence is displayed. You give evidence of knowing the good and applying the means to the good in more advanced ways.

Early on in immaturity, you can show that, yeah, you have the knowledge of the good in a least immature form and you start to try to apply the law.

But as you display a prudence, a Sophronon, you're going to be able to work through more and more advanced or difficult things.

And that's going to manifest itself in terms of not only the government of yourself but the government of others. And that goes into Cosmion, which is translated here as good behavior, of good behavior.

Remember, Cosmion is the root for cosmos. You have the root cosmos. You have this idea of cosmetics, that which is created, that which is ordered, that which is beautiful.

So how is this here? Cosmion is a beautiful ordering. The idea of beauty has to do with things being fitting.

In Cosmion, the man governs himself and governs that which is under him in such a way that the parts are dealt with in a fitting way.

They're well ordered. And so competence, ability, capability are on display.

And that ability to order things well is manifested when it's skillful.

There's this decisiveness and ability to lead others and organize the external world. So we have those first three of focus on the goal, serious -mindedness, prudence, knowing the good and the means to the good, thinking about that in more advanced ways.

And we have a well -orderedness to your life and to your household. And that includes the proper ordering of loves, which is listed out as being hospitable.

To be hospitable is to literally love the stranger. You can say,

I've got a duty to love my wife, I've got a duty to love my kids, I've got a duty to love my servants, I've got to deal with people in my church, but people

I don't know? No. That provincialism, that could be something where you hate people who you don't know, you treat them with utter suspicion and unwillingness to care for them at all.

It can also be a hatred for those who are in churches that are further away.

It could be a hatred for people on the basis of race. This hatred of people outside of those whom you're familiar with is something that has to be checked.

And so the care for people from closer to farther out is the order of loves, but we must not deny the duty to love our neighbor and love our brother in broad ways.

And so when we find that there are people who walk in the door here, for example, and we don't know them, a willingness to open your home, a willingness to engage with them, to spend time with them.

As a matter of pragmatic investment, you might say, until somebody walks through the door and proves themselves to be useful,

I'm not going to spend any time caring for them. But the idea that you love people before you know them and that you seek to grant them access to some of the blessings that you have is the sort of spirit that is a spirit that leads to evangelism.

The desire to be hospitable is something that needs to occur in terms of caring about serving people in your own home that live there, caring about serving people who are a part of your church and broader family.

And those are where the gifts of hospitality and the care of hospitality are dealt with and practiced.

And then there are times when you have opportunity to literally extend love to those who are strangers to you.

And if you have not practiced it with those whom you know, those whom you have covenant relationships with, those whom you've interacted with on a regular basis, if you haven't practiced the skills of care and love in those situations, you're not going to be able to deal with those who are strangers.

And so hospitality, sometimes people will emphasize, well, it's literally the love of strangers, or they'll emphasize the general gifting and care.

And I want to suggest to you that all of it is captured under this category. And there's an order of loves in terms of the closer in to further out.

And that order of loves does not deny the duty to love the stranger. Now, go to page two.

We have this idea that if you are a man who desires to be a bishop and who doesn't want to have the ability to do more good works, who doesn't have the desire to do more good works?

Well, I suppose some people. If that's you, if you're the one that goes, no,

I have enough good works. Thank you very much. I don't want to do any more. I don't want to get any more treasures in heaven.

I would not like to obtain for myself everlasting rewards. I would prefer to focus on the things that rust and are eaten by moths and that are temporary.

I would rather not have more good works to do. Thank you very much. And if I could focus on the lower priority works as opposed to the higher priority works, that would be just fine.

If that's where your mind is at, repent. You should have a desire to do the most and to be able to do the best.

And so this desire to seek to be fit for highest and best use, maybe you don't reach a place where you're able to fill public office, but you should strive to be fit for it.

You will not regret having any of these virtues, men, if you're to be serious -minded, to be prudent, to be well -ordered in your behavior and government of yourself and your house, and to be hospitable.

You think about the order of that. Being serious -minded makes it so you can focus on growing in wisdom and applying that wisdom, which allows your government of self and of that under your authority to become more and more beautiful.

And that allows you to be able to welcome the stranger into that beauty and to shock them at the beauty of holiness.

That they, when they come into your domain, might say, blessed are those who are under your authority.

And when there, you want to be able to teach them, to give them the

Gospel, to give them broader sets of doctrine. And so being able to teach.

These things fit together well in terms of the things that are necessary in order for you to grow in usefulness.

A serious -mindedness, prudence, causing a well -orderedness in what you govern, so you can give to others generously with hospitality and teach them in the context of having shown them love and care.

Do you see how powerful you would be for good works for the kingdom that characterized you?

If it does characterize you, then you must have many good works and much fruit that you can rejoice over from the exercise of those things.

So being able to teach. When we think about teaching, the most important element of teaching is that the teaching is true.

So truthfulness. If you think you're able to teach, how much do you know the truth and how able are you to show it?

Can you communicate clearly so that you help to avoid misunderstandings and you help to leave the proper impression?

Can you tell the truth and can you do it clearly? Can you do it in an organized way which helps people to have handles?

The Bible gives us buckets or handles things to be able to hang stuff on. You think about the

Lord's Prayer being used to organize prayer. You think about the Ten Commandments being used to organize the law of God.

And when you think about confessional statements like the mystery of godliness at the end of this chapter to help to organize doctrine.

So can you do it in an organized way? And then, also, can you do it with conciseness?

Because you can try to tell the truth and be super clear and you can exhaust people with your speaking too much in a way that makes it so that you don't emphasize the helpful things.

So the issue is we need to find ways to speak the truth, to do it with clarity, to do it in an organized way and to do it concisely.

And this allows you to be able when you get into chaotic situations like chaotic arguments to be able to discuss those things with more order and to create order.

Some discussions are very disorderly. And somebody with deep understanding of the subject being discussed can help to order that conversation and make it so that the complexity and the combat and the disorderedness becomes more ordered.

So the more understanding you have in a subject, the easier it's going to be for you to do that.

And as you're practicing communicating and being able to engage and discuss over time, it helps to make it so that the truth can be spoken clearly in an organized way with conciseness.

Now this requirement to be able to teach changes based upon the level of maturity of the church in history.

The more the church has matured, the more we're going to require out of teachers.

The more clear and knowledgeable they have to be. Whereas in the ancient church, you will find often that people just talk about justification by faith.

After the Reformation, you tend to find orthodox pastors saying justification by faith alone.

Why? Because there was a rather large incident spanning over about 150 years called the

Protestant Reformation where men died about this doctrine of justification being through the instrumentality of faith and nothing else.

And so the alone word gets emphasized to avoid some sort of perversion of the gospel.

Does that mean that every single time you ever talk about justification by faith, you have to say alone?

No. But if you're aware of the pattern and the issue in the history there, it is a useful thing to generally use.

Especially once the discussion turns it all to any confusion, or even the slightest hint of disagreement about that comes up, it's good to pull that out as a shibboleth.

So the capturing of the maturing of the church occurs, we're given the example for us of councils.

The Jerusalem council is given to us in the book of Acts to help to show that. And there are decrees of that council that are written out with the four laws that are canon laws for the church about things.

And the idea is not that the council has the right to invent law, but rather that the council argued about what the scriptures taught, and as a result were able to prove those four canons as things to be taught.

Because they could be proved in the scriptures. And so it becomes less and less excusable to reject doctrine after it has been properly worked through in the history of the church.

Now to be able to teach, there are different types of teaching. And so for those of you who desire to learn to teach, one of the first places to emphasize in terms of the ability to teach is to train in catechesis.

What is catechesis? Catechesis is teaching the elementary principles of the faith.

And generally a catechism is going to lay out the elementary principles of the faith by a form of question and answer.

The question emphasizes what's this answer in relationship to? Like, what's the problem being addressed?

What's the thing? So the Westminster Shorter Catechism has questions and the questions help us to see stuff worth thinking about.

What is the chief end of man? And if that's not worth thinking about, nothing is.

If you wonder, like, what's the purpose of life? And you go, well, that doesn't really matter. Then nothing matters!

So a catechism in the structure of question and answer format helps you to think about stuff worth thinking about, questions worth asking, as well as giving answers.

You know, it's very popular in our time to say, you know, it's not the answers that really matter, it's the questions. It's like, well, both matter.

And a question is useful because it helps you to think. You're looking for answers. And the purpose of questions is to get answers.

You know that because once you have an answer to a question, you start to move on to ask other questions.

Right? If you just get an answer and keep asking the same thing, you don't make any progress. We are commended to move on, to get answers, to figure it out, to be established, and to move on to figure out more things.

Hebrews talks about not trying to lay the foundation over and over again in terms of the individual's understanding.

You need to have the basic and elementary things of the faith established in you.

You need to understand them and believe them, and then seek to build on that understanding.

And so to practice at teaching, the best thing you can do to help to emphasize your own understanding and to firm it up is to communicate the things you understand and believe to others.

And so helping others to get the basics in place is catechesis. Now from there, we should, and these things should be occurring at the same time.

This is not like you only do one and then you move on. People talk about the order of learning. Sometimes we talk about classical education.

You talk about the grammar stage and the logic stage and the rhetoric stage. So the grammar stage, you're focused on learning the parts, the constituent parts of some system.

You get the definitions. That logic or dialectic stage, you're thinking about the system.

How do the things relate to each other? How does it fit? Is there an order to it? And then the rhetoric stage is the practice of it, the use of it, the dealing with it in terms of figuring out how to master it and its use.

You're always kind of looping through those. You might, as you're more advanced, focus on the rhetoric.

So you're in a rhetoric stage and you're focusing on the rhetoric but you're going to always be thinking about that grammar piece, the little definitions.

You're going to always be thinking about the system and as you're just learning the parts initially, you're going to start thinking about how they connect together.

That's unavoidable because we're rational creatures. So you're going to be doing all of it but there's an emphasis at different stages.

So my point is one of the most helpful things that can occur for you early on is for more mature saints to walk through with you the basic pieces, the definitions, to be catechized and to also be learning the skills of how to read the

Bible. Because you're trying to check yourself. Okay, so I need these basic parts but I also need to test if my understanding is biblical.

And so you have two things occurring. You're hearing what's being taught. You're being catechized.

And then you're searching the Scriptures to see if these things are so. So those two things.

You can't just try to ignore the value of other people engaging but you also can't just take what other people say as though they were lords of your conscience.

So you hear what's taught and you search the Scriptures to see if these things are so.

And so the exegesis of the Word, the drawing out of the meaning of the Word is something that has to be taught early and be emphasized throughout the whole

Christian life. And so when teaching through a text it is the job of a pastor to help to show how that's done.

And so the goal in dealing with the text is to find the literal meaning, have it fit with the grammar so you're not just ignoring the words, have it fit in the context the whole

Bible, that particular book, the paragraph, the sentence and then to see that it's a logically coherent understanding with the rest of Scripture.

So when we think about this idea of the text and understanding it, what's going to happen as we look at text is we're also going to be connecting texts and drawing out doctrine, seeing the systematic view of the

Scriptures and we want to show that. And then you apply that doctrine to particular areas of thought or how you value things or the choices that you make.

So, exegesis, drawing the meaning out of the text, so that concern of showing how to do that involves those steps and it's so easy it's so easy to sort of try to gloss over the text and make it say what you want.

It's also very easy to get hung up in a woodenness of interpretation where you don't try to make logical connections and you try to make it so that there's just like I'm only going to look for the meaning of this text according to its grammar and its local context and I'm not going to see that different interpretations could contradict other parts of the

Bible. So we have to use all of these tools. Scripture as a whole is a system.

Nothing in the book of Galatians is going to contradict the book of Romans, is going to contradict the book of James, is going to contradict the book of John, is going to contradict the book of Genesis, is going to contradict the book of Revelation.

Wherever you are, the Bible does not contradict itself. And so it must be read as a whole, as a system.

So we look for literal meaning, trying to understand what's being communicated and that involves converting poetry into prose.

The Lord is strong as a bull. Is it literally the case? I mean like does a bull have like 2 .1

horsepower or something like that? Was the Lord precisely 2 .1 horsepower? That's a lot weaker than my car.

So what's the point of that? Well he's very strong. Oh. That's the meaning.

The poetic language converts into that literal prose. So you're working through all that and a teacher needs to be able to do this.

And to put it on display as they teach. The next thing is as you begin to become more mature in the faith, every believer ought to start exhorting every other believer.

The word exhortation is you're telling people you ought to believe this, you ought to do this.

You're telling people duties and you're trying to push them to do it. You're trying to persuade them to do their duties.

And so exhortation we could call preaching. Some people try to make preaching into this mystical thing as different from teaching.

Preaching or exhortation is just teaching and pushing people to do their duty.

It's exhortation. You're saying do your job man!

That's exhortation. You're trying to goad people along in a way that's more than just the presentation of the facts.

You are presenting the information in teaching and exhortation involves that goading, that urging on to do your duty.

It's the pressing home of applications. Now systematics is showing the systematic wholeness and well -orderedness of the truth revealed in the scripture alone.

And that systematic work can be captured in terms of confessional documents. You can write a systematic theology.

You could just preach on, teach on a particular set of doctrines. The problem is systematics is the hardest to do well because your goal in systematics is to lay things out so there's a well -balanced, well -ordered display of the wholeness of the truth.

And it's so easy to miss parts and it's so easy to be imbalanced in how you present this stuff.

And so topical sermons are only easy if you really just care about what you think about it.

Topical sermons done properly are the hardest because you have to be looking for the whole of scripture on the topic to avoid an imbalanced and wrong view being presented.

So that's why because the church must be accustomed to reading the

Bible and applying the Bible, going through texts of the Bible with exegesis of the text.

What does the text mean? What are the doctrines that can be drawn out? How does this apply to me and what

I believe and value and choose? Those are the things that have to be emphasized and the preaching is to be focused upon the words.

So being able to teach is being able to do this stuff. And it sounds very daunting but the reality is that this is what the

Christian life is about. You need to get the doctrine and you need to be able to do this for yourself. And so once you've figured it out and you've started to figure out how to argue with yourself and preach to yourself so that you stop sinning and start doing what you're supposed to do and all that stuff, then okay you're going to withhold that from your wife, you're going to withhold that from your children, you're going to withhold that from guests.

If you're giving it to them, then could you do it publicly? Could you evangelize and disciple people?

Why are you withholding that? Gifting from other people then? So this is what's good for you.

Notice the aligning of the fit for public office with pursuing your own good.

Go to page 3. Not given to wine, not violent, not greedy for money, but gentle, not quarrelsome, not covetous.

These things, we have these two sets of threes and I'm suggesting to you that they are a mirror of each other.

Not being enslaved to wine is about not being enslaved to pleasure. Remember the kings were told to not multiply wives?

This is the same sort of thing applied to church officers. On the positive side, we're told to be gentle which you kind of might think, oh, is that about violence?

Well, the word gentle there is epikeia which teaches the idea of self -controlledness or moderation of yourself.

These two, don't be enslaved to wine, instead be moderate. Be self -controlled.

Use the pleasures in moderation as opposed to asceticism. In the history of the church, we live in a time where nobody thinks about asceticism.

Everybody's just like, well, I mean, you should make sure to maximally pursue whatever you're most passionate about.

That's the spirit of the age. The Bible teaches us don't throw off all pleasures and don't give yourself over to pleasures as their slave.

Instead, use pleasures in their proper place as God has commanded so you can enjoy them with gratitude.

On the other side, we have the idea of being violent.

We're not to be violent. We're not to be quarrelsome.

Not being violent and not being quarrelsome, this is about power.

Not a brawler, not quarrelsome, not violent.

The idea here is that power is used in its proper place. Is there a place for violence?

Yes. Is there a place for fighting? Yes. Are you supposed to be characterized by the use of violence?

Is violence supposed to be early in the tool set? Do you go like, okay, we talked about this once. We don't agree.

Time to punch you in the face. No, it's at least two more conversations. No, more than that.

This idea that you are using violence to deal with three things.

Violence has three things to be used for it. You're supposed to use violence for self -defense.

You're supposed to use violence for the public administration of justice to punish crimes and just warfare, literal physical violence.

Those are the proper uses. The idea that the kingdom of God is taken by storm by men of violence, you have this idea of, are you zealous?

We should be zealous, but zeal needs to be controlled. Violence can manifest itself in terms of using symbols of violence like yelling or dominating presence.

Domineering behavior can be used as a threatening mechanism. When you're arguing with people, when you're talking to people, do you use the physical control mechanisms with people just to get them to deal with you?

There are appropriate places to use those. Those things are to stop things that are dangerous.

You're standing down. You're giving symbols of power to face against power. You're trying to stop wickedness.

When there's extreme rebellion or when there's violence that's being threatened, the idea of domineering behavior is appropriate for those places.

We don't let men exercise domineering types of behavior towards wickedness when it's appropriate.

This idea of the use of self -control over the emotions, if we are breaking down into tears, yelling at each other, throwing fits, doing these kinds of things, those are all things that are a failure to control the self and manifestations of this outward display of a lack of self -control.

We are supposed to retain our power to use properly. The proper use of pleasure, the proper use of power, and then money, the proper use of money.

We're not to be greedy for base gain. We're supposed to be non -covetous. In other words, we are to be content with what

God provides and to seek to grow our dominion by use of lawful means, but we are not looking to steal, not looking to extract what is not justly ours.

So those things laid side by side have to do with the three common false gods.

Pleasure, power, and money. And when you improperly value pleasure, power, or money, you choose those over the knowledge of God, and the elder needs to be somebody who is not dominated by pleasure, power, or money, the love of those things.

Because otherwise, he's going to pervert the church and abuse the position of authority.

So, verse 4. One who rules his own house well, having his children in submission with all reverence, or piety.

For if a man does not know how to rule his own house, how will he take care of the church of God? Not a novice, lest being puffed up with pride, he fall into the same condemnation as the devil.

Moreover, he must have a good testimony among those who are outside, lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.

Ruling the house well is ruling the household well. We need to remember the house is not just a physical location, just like the church is not a physical location.

The household, the house, is the covenant institution of the house.

The church is not the assembly hall, the church is the covenant institution of the church.

So, as a covenant institution, one must be a master who rules the house well, putting everyone in the house to good work.

The mistress is the wife. She is to help to govern there. The children and heirs are sons and daughters, and they need to be treated differently.

Sons are to be raised as men, and daughters are to be raised as women. And there's a difference.

There's a difference. And so, the types of training and education you give to sons should be different from the types of training and education you give to daughters.

Sons should be trained to pursue the virtues and functions that men are commanded to pursue, and daughters should be trained to pursue the virtues and functions that women are commanded to pursue.

They have different roles to be trained for. If there are employees or servants, we all pay people to do stuff.

There's times when we pay people to do stuff. Do you manage that well? That includes, by the way, not being someone who refuses to ever pay somebody to do something, when it would obviously save you way more time.

If your time, economically, would be inefficient to spend on a task, and it would be better to pay somebody, that's a type of mismanagement.

And somebody who never is willing to delegate is not going to do a great job at leading a house, and is also not going to do a great job at leading in a church.

The management of property is a part of managing the house well as well, and that includes putting the

Word of God on display in how the property is dealt with. The law of God needs to govern the people and the property.

That's what ruling the house well looks like, and it needs to be fruitful, making stuff happen, accomplishing goals.

The children being in submission with reverence, they are obedient to commands, they respect the officer, and they respect the office, they fear the office.

Those are the things that are on display in submission with reverence. Not a novice, not one year in the church is an absolute minimum, again using the

Deuteronomy 24 verse 5 principle. The dangers of being raised to teach and be in the office of elder when you are a novice are pride and the devil bringing about condemnation in the person sorry, not in a person, forgive me, pride and the condemnation that the devil went through of falling from a position of authority and power and having this sense that if I'm raised up early, then how great am

I? How long have you guys been doing this thing? Why aren't you elders? I've been able to come in here real fast to do it.

It must be because I'm so much better than you. So this despising of the church is the type of sin that the devil went through in his pride and his hatred of those who were in the church is the reason for his rebellion against God.

He didn't want men to be over him. He didn't want to be governed. He thought, I belong in a place that is above them and in fact because I disagree with God's plan

I actually deserve to be, I should be in God's position. Disagreement with the order of authority that God gives and the plan of God is a disagreement with God and therefore is a desire to take the place of God.

And so if we are raised to positions of authority too fast in the church, especially the teaching authority of the church, then we are likely to, in our pride, fall into the same condemnation as the devil in terms of viewing ourselves as wiser than God.

So for love of people who are highly gifted, we must restrain them from entering into public teaching too fast.

Verse 7, the good testimony amongst those that are outside of your own house. Remember, people say this is people who are outside of the church.

We don't need pagans to give good testimony of the person for them to be an officer. Some people will say it's outside of the local church, but that's not in the context.

Systematically it would be fine, but it's not in the context. The thing that's being talked about is the household.

So the good testimony is of those who are outside of the house. And that good testimony amongst those who are outside of the house is to avoid something happening where there's a disregard for the officer, a disrespect for the officer, which would make it so that there's a snare set to disrespect officers and therefore disrespect to the institution of the church.

One thing, raising a guy too fast tempts him to pride and fall. The other thing is if you put a guy that you don't respect into office, he's respected in his house, but he's generally not respected and spoken well of by others in the church, if you just kind of do it to go along, like this guy got nominated and we're going to do it, okay, that's fine.

If you do that anyways, then you're not going to respect the guy and it's going to result in a disrespect to the institution of the church and the officers of the church.

It causes a snare for the rejection of the authority structure. It's a snare of the devil.

So with the deacons, you have a like set of qualifications, but they are a lower bar.

The term reverent there is simnes, which means pious, this idea of a dutifulness, not being double -tongued, just being honest, straightforward, candid.

Not being given to wine, again, is not being enslaved to pleasure, and not greedy for money is not having, again, an enslavement to money, not viewing money as the good.

But notice here that there's not a listing out of violence or bullying. The domineering behavior is not listed here for the deacons.

Why is that? Well, first of all, deacons aren't generally supposed to sit as judges. We have our deacons sitting as judges right now because of the fact that we're in a disordered state, an unsettled state, where we have lower offices fulfilling the functions of higher offices as we seek to go through the process of becoming more settled.

But ordinarily, deacons would not sit as judges, for example, and so the use of power is going to be more restrained, and what's going to happen is you're typically going to have deacons or people who are working hard, they might have ambition and zeal, but they haven't learned how to restrain that properly yet, and so there's going to be a tendency towards sort of messing up and going in a little too hard, being, you know, a bull in a china shop.

That kind of stuff is likely to happen with deacons. And as a result, it's something that's going to be learned.

They're going to learn to deal with things in a way where they are more restrained as they deal with the difficulties of that public office.

Now there obviously would be types of behaviors that are Sixth Commandment violations that would disqualify from the diaconate, but the point is that there's not as high of a requirement in terms of the self -control on behaviors that are how you communicate and carry yourself.

The display of a sort of domineering thing would be rebuked by elders as the deacons are developing their capacity to function well.

Their doctrinal requirement in verse 9 is to hold to the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience.

Holding the mystery of the faith with a pure conscience. But that is not the same thing as being able to teach.

Being able to teach involves being able to prove the doctrine, and holding to the doctrine with a pure conscience involves seeing it, understanding it, thinking it's true, and you might be incompetent to argue it still.

The testing that occurs in verse 10 is testing for office.

You might have nomination and training, and they're being tested as they serve alongside deacons, and they're found blameless.

So even if they blow up at people during some of the conflicts, do they repent? Do they go, you guys do this, why aren't you putting off this thing?

You're not taking this help and using it properly. Why are you being lazy with this? What's happening here? The frustration might come out in a way where the person isn't holding themselves together as well as you'd want them to, but when they have something like that, there's a repentance that occurs.

They're showing themselves to be blameless having been going through these types of things. The testing does not require that a deaconal candidate get through everything, handle everything perfectly, but they need to be blameless in that when they're shown to be wrong, they repent.

Because going through conflict resolution is a part of the process of getting rid of the rough edges on deacons.

The wife of deacon has the same qualifications as a wife of an elder, and here's the set there.

The wife must be pious, seamless, so in other words, dutiful. She needs to not be a malicious gossip or slanderer, because she's going to have access to extra information and could be one who destroys the relational structure of the church.

She needs to be nefarious, in other words, serious minded, a sober minded person. She needs to be focused on the goal, and she needs to believe the doctrine.

She needs to believe all things. She needs to believe the same mystery with a pure conscience, the mystery of the faith.

So now, the deacon is to be a one woman man. He must be single and chaste, called to singleness, or married and chaste.

He has to rule his children in his house well, so there's a level of government that's quality there, but that government doesn't have to be as excellent as what you see in an elder.

But there's a general good management. And furthermore, that there is a blessing for the work of deacons.

They gain good reputation and they get boldness in the faith. And those things prepare them for the office of elder.

So hopefully those things are familiar to you. And as we close out, the thing that we have not emphasized historically is the last portion of this chapter.

Even though they are of great value, they're very important for understanding how the whole book fits together.

Verses 14 through 15 read as follows. These things I write to you, though I hope to come to you shortly.

But if I am delayed, I write so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the house of God, which is the church of the living

God, the pillar and ground of the truth. So the church of the living God is the house of God.

And that idea of the house of God, the household of God, preachers are given a job as stewards in the household of God.

Bishops are given a job as stewards in the household of God. And their duty is not to run the house the way they would run their own house.

Their duty is to run the house knowing that they're stewards who have been given authority to manage the house according to the will of the patriarch,

God the Father. And that is given and maintained properly for us by God the

Son as King of the church. He makes sure that all things are according to the will of the Father and what he has commanded.

And so we have the house of God is the church of the living

God. And the house of God, the church of the living God, is the pillar and ground of the truth.

Rome loves this verse but only as they've imagined it to be.

Not as it really is. Because they read this and they go, see? The church is the pillar and ground of the truth.

In other words, it's the foundation upon which we know what truth is. As though there were something more basic than the truth that determines the truth.

So you'd have God and then you'd have the church and then you'd have the truth coming from the church in that view.

And the church would have a magisterial authority to set doctrine. However, though the church is the pillar and ground of the truth and has a special and particular place, this does not mean that the church is the basis for knowing truth.

Instead, the church is that which upholds or holds up the truth to the world and puts it on display.

That which supports the truth and causes it to be on public display. The oracles and ordinances of God are given to the church to be put on display and used as a public institution.

Now, it was common in the Roman world to have pillars that would have writing on them.

So you have public information on pillars in public buildings. But also the idea that you use a pillar to hold something up.

And so you can also see this idea of holding something up to be on display.

The point is that the church's job is to hold the truth up for the world to see.

Not that the church is the determiner of truth.

And since the church's job is to hold up the truth, that helps us to understand how our service is to work.

This shows us how the church's job is fulfilled. It's in seeking to accomplish that goal.

Which means we need to submit ourselves to what has been revealed. So verse 16 is the mystery of godliness.

And so this would be the mystery of the faith that needs to be held to. And without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness.

Now, that language for how that's translated I think is less clear than I would hope for.

The translation there is without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness.

Literally the Greek is and confessedly, great is the of godliness mystery.

So this idea that this is a confession, it's a homo leguminous.

That idea that it's one word, it's the same word. This idea of a confession.

This is a faithful saying. This is a confession of faith. So confessedly, great is the mystery of godliness.

And so here's that confession. God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen by angels, preached among the

Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up in glory. Each of these represent for us a particular doctrine.

God was manifested in the flesh is an assertion of a particular mystery.

Now remember, when you see the word mystery in the bible, the word mystery never means something un -understandable.

The word mystery is always here's something that used to be hidden and now it's been revealed.

And so this thing that was hidden and is now revealed. What's the great stuff that was hidden that's now revealed?

These are things that are prominent doctrines for the new covenant era that need to be emphasized to stack on what has been revealed in the old covenant.

First we have the doctrine of the incarnation. That God took on a human nature.

So this right here is one of those proof texts. People will tell you sometimes that Paul never taught that Jesus was

God. Those people are idiots. And liars. It's possible they're or.

It could be idiots or liars. But I think they're idiots and liars at least 99 % of the time.

Paul so obviously teaches that Jesus is God in so many places. And this is one of them.

God was manifested in the flesh. Who do they think he was talking about?

God was manifested in the flesh. This is the doctrine of the incarnation.

This is laid out for us in a way that is explained very well in the

Westminster larger catechism. You have question 36 who is the mediator of the covenant of grace?

And question 37 how did Christ being the son of God become man? In 36 who is the mediator of the covenant of grace?

The only mediator of the covenant of grace is the Lord Jesus Christ who being the eternal son of God of one substance and equal with the

Father in the fullness of time became man. And so was and continues to be

God and man in two entire distinct natures and one person forever.

Question 37 how did Christ being the son of God become man? Christ the son of God became man by taking to himself a true body and a reasonable soul being conceived by the power of the

Holy Ghost in the womb of the Virgin Mary of her substance and born of her yet without sin.

So it goes on and talks about additional things related to that doctrine. But when you see this list this list is not a set of words that merely have to be confessed.

The goal is for a person to understand these and to believe them and to confess them out of faith.

So when we see God was manifested in the flesh, this is a head of doctrine and that's the doctrine of the incarnation.

And so you can study that doctrine and think about what does that mean? We get to justified in the spirit and justified in the spirit is another head of doctrine.

Seen by angels is another head of doctrine. Preached among the Gentiles is another head of doctrine.

Believed on in the world is another head of doctrine and received up in glory is another head of doctrine. If you interpret any of these to be unimportant statements you are doing it wrong.

These are heads of doctrine that organize significant information. So when we say justified in the spirit there are two ways that people will read this.

I think both are true. One is to say that the

Lord Jesus Christ was vindicated when he was resurrected by the

Holy Spirit that he was justified in the spirit and that he died and was shown to be righteous and that his sacrifice was accepted by his resurrection by the

Holy Spirit. This is the doctrine of the resurrection. The other way is to say that he was declared righteous by the prophetic word and then you still have this idea of him being justified in the prophetic word, counted righteous in the prophetic word and his resurrection is used as a part of the argument for that.

I understand his resurrection to be the emphasis here and that that shows that Christ's death was accepted as a sacrifice for sin and he is shown to be righteous as the son of God as an acceptable sacrifice as the spotless lamb of God.

So that's the point there. The doctrine of the resurrection as that which declares. So it's not just a vindication when he's resurrected.

It's also a declaration to everyone else that he's righteous. Now that's an important thing because a lot of controversies about the doctrine of justification people run around and they'll pull up all of these words that have the root of dikaiosune as a word of righteous or justified there.

So that term gets argued about a lot but I want you to know that no matter what this is talking about the resurrection and how that's used to show and declare that Jesus Christ is righteous and that his sacrifice was accepted.

The third one seen by angels is often turned into something that seems to not matter at all.

If you just literally say and Jesus was seen at some point by ministering spirits.

The word angel here, remember the word angel means messenger. We see the word angel used to refer to a few things.

Those who are just messengers generally. Those who are ministering spirits and also those who are given a message by God to communicate and very specifically the idea of office holders that have an obligation to communicate

God's message. Which angels has a which angels having seen

Jesus after the resurrection has a significant doctrinal position in Christian theology.

The apostles as messengers having seen the resurrected

Lord is emphasized throughout the scriptures and when you see the apostle Paul summarizing the doctrine of the gospel in 1

Corinthians 15 you find him emphasizing the apostolic witness. That's what this doctrine is here.

Seen by angels is the apostolic witness that they saw the Lord Jesus Christ resurrected and they communicated his words.

Preached among the Gentiles. They took his words not just to the

Jews but also to the Gentiles, to the nations. And so that's the doctrine of the catholicity of the church.

That the nations are being brought into the church. That the church is not just provincial or parochial or stuck in a small local place.

It is catholic. It is universal. It is worldwide. So Christ is preached among the

Gentiles. And that preaching is not in vain and it's not even just to bring judgment.

It's a preaching that will result in the world believing in Jesus. And so he was believed on in the world.

We have God was manifested in the flesh. God was justified in the spirit. God was seen by angels.

God was preached among the Gentiles and God was believed on in the world. This is the post -millennial hope.

This is the baptism of the nations. This is the covenanting of the nations. This is the world coming in to the church.

And lastly, we have Christ was received up in glory and notice the order here.

There was a going out of the word of God even in a way that has to do with this going out of the word early on but the receiving up in glory is something that we look at in terms of very early on.

There's this ascension. We have Pentecost that follows right there after his ascension.

Very short after Christ's ascension. The point of listing here is not to give a chronological order there.

The point is for us to see the apostolic witness results in preaching to all the nations, results in the nations believing and it's the rule of Christ on display.

The received up into glory occurred at the ascension and this ascension has to do with the fact that Christ is at the right hand of the

Father and is being received into glory is him as king reigning from his throne right now.

So the reign of Christ at the right hand of the

Father is something that had already happened at the time that this was written.

His received up into glory. This is not a future tense thing. These are things that have already happened.

God was manifested in the flesh. God was justified in the spirit. God was seen by angels.

God was preached among the Gentiles. God was believed on in the world. God was received up in glory.

These are things that we confess about the Lord Jesus Christ and what he has already done.

He is at the right hand of the Father and this mystery of godliness laid out here. These are heads of doctrine that we need to study and as you understand these heads of doctrine you will find that these things are laid out for us in a way that's useful to explain in our own catechetical documents but these would have been used as heads of doctrine to catechize people and to explain things.

So that's what confessions of faith are useful for. So now, having gone through that big chunk of dense text are there any comments, questions, or objections from the voting members, those with speaking privileges?

Let's pray. Father, we ask that you would bless the reading and preaching of your word.

We ask that you help us to understand these qualifications, to understand this controversial text at verses 14 and 15 and to understand verse 16 with the mystery of godliness and to believe these things and to be able to explain them well to others.

We thank you that you have given to us this text, these dense things, these important and powerful truths and we ask that you would help us to see the greatness of this confession of faith that is the mystery of godliness.