Book of 1 Timothy - Ch. 1, vv. 1-2

Park Meadows Church

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Last week we started a new study in the book of 1 Timothy and we didn't cover much ground other than just introducing the book itself and mainly introducing this man that we know of as Timothy and a little bit about what made him the man that he was, prepared for the ministry, prepared for taking the baton from the

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Apostle Paul, so to speak. He was one of Paul's successors in the ministry after the

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Apostle Paul was martyred. And while Paul trained and discipled a great number of men from Barnabas to Silas to Timothy and Titus and Aristarchus and a number of these guys we learn about in the

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New Testament, Timothy was perhaps the preeminent successor of Paul as we kind of demonstrated last week.

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He was one of Paul's closest companions. He was with him just about everywhere. It's some of the most important parts of Paul's ministry.

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We'll talk a little bit more about that again this morning, but before we jump into our verse -by -verse study, starting at verse 1 in just a second, just one thing to keep in mind as we go through this epistle is much like Titus, it is an incredibly practical epistle.

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This is the Apostle Paul writing with almost a sense of urgency, a sense of urgency behind the instruction that he is given because he knows his time is short on the earth and he knows that all of these young churches that he just helped plant, including the church at Ephesus, which happens to be where Timothy is at the time this letter is being written, the

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Apostle Paul knows that they are about to face a number of battles, a number of enemies of varying degrees from the legalistic

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Judaizers to the libertarian Gnostics, all of these different types of enemies, false teachers that are going to come in and try to totally subvert everything that Paul had spent his life teaching.

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And of course, we know that while on one hand, the truth of God's grace and his sovereignty, his protection over his people is absolutely true, on the other side of the same token, you have the responsibility of man and the responsibility of church leaders protecting the flock from all sorts of false teaching coming in.

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When that responsibility is abdicated, you have situations like in Galatia, where Paul has to write to them after having spent time with them in person, teaching them the gospel, teaching them the doctrines of the

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New Testament, having to ask them the question, who has bewitched you? So we know that when false teachers are let in and their teaching is allowed to kind of get their claws in that church, so to speak, even the best of Christians can fall prey to it.

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That's what happened to those at the church of Galatia. And so as we read Timothy, the first epistle to Timothy here, just like with Titus, we have to understand one of the reasons why we are seeing the kind of instruction we're seeing from Paul, by the

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Spirit through Paul, rather, is because he is preparing that next generation. And of course, every generation of Christians and every generation of churches after the apostles were gone.

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So just remember that as we go through it. Now, of course, this morning, we're gonna begin with the salutation. And typically what we will see in the opening verses of any epistle is the apostle, regardless of who it is, setting the tone, addressing the audience they want to address, and reminding us of doctrinal truths to, again, kind of set that foundation, set the bedrock for us as we get into the instruction.

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In other words, as we'll see here in just a moment, in this epistle, certain things are said to set the foundation so that five chapters later, three chapters later, when you start to get into some of the more nitty gritty instruction, we're not so quick to forget where that instruction is coming from.

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We're not so quick to forget, oh, wait a minute, this isn't arbitrary. This isn't just Paul coming up with stuff.

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This is coming from God himself. And that is why we often see the introductions that we see in these epistles.

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So in the opening two verses, we'll read them here, we see a combination of two things.

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The first is the bond between these two men, because we have to remember, this is a letter written from one man to another,

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Paul to Timothy. We're going to see the bond between these two in the opening couple of verses, but at the same time, we are also going to see

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Paul's concern with the church more broadly, and that'll be demonstrated as well.

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In other words, it's clear that Paul intended for this letter to be read publicly from the start.

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This was never meant to be just a personal letter to Timothy only. He always intended for this to be read for the entire church, and for the church to take the instruction to heart, not just Timothy, and we'll see that in a moment.

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Because of that, just like we saw in the letter to Titus, of course, we just finished that study seven or eight weeks ago,

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Paul's apostleship is a very important thing here, because what's happening, you have a young man, in this case,

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Timothy, in our last study, it was Titus on the island of Crete, now we have a young Timothy at the church of Ephesus, and their authority is going to be questioned, not only perhaps among the younger

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Christians that are there in these congregations, but certainly by the false teachers, certainly by the ones that are going to want to get their death grip on these young Christians and convince them that they are the ones that know what they're talking about, not this young Timothy guy.

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In fact, we're going to see that here either next week or the week after that, we're going to see the kinds of false teachers that Timothy will be up against.

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And so what does Paul do? How does he support Timothy? He brings up his apostleship from the get -go so that people know what's going on.

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We're going to see this throughout this letter. Timothy had his hands as full as a young pastor could possibly have them.

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And so Paul sets this up by reminding every single reader for all, every generation for 2000 years, reminds every single reader who is behind it.

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And of course that is the apostle himself. So take a look at verse one with me. First Timothy chapter one, verse one.

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We see this, Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the commandment of God, our savior and Lord Jesus Christ, which is our hope.

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And I'll go ahead and read the second verse with it because it's all one sentence. Unto Timothy, my own son in the faith, grace, mercy, and peace from God our father and Jesus Christ, our

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Lord. So let's hone in on verse one for just a second. And you'll see what I was talking about pretty quickly.

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We see the fact that Paul says an apostle of Jesus Christ. Again, he's intending for everyone to read this letter.

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Timothy was one of his closest companions. Timothy did not need to be reminded that Paul was an apostle. And so if Paul intended for this to be merely a personal letter for just to maybe give

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Timothy some encouragement, put it in his drawer and then move on with life, he wouldn't have started the letter this way. He wouldn't have addressed

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Timothy as Paul the apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ because Timothy already knew that.

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He didn't need to be reminded of it. And yet here's what's cool about it. It was for Timothy's sake that Paul opened the letter this way.

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It was for Timothy that he opened it by saying Paul an apostle of Jesus Christ because he knew that Timothy would have detractors that were gonna be questioning his authority and that Timothy would need

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Paul's authority behind him, supporting him, giving him everything that he needed. And so it wasn't,

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Timothy didn't need to hear that or be reminded of the fact that Paul was an apostle. And yet it was for his sake that Paul said it in the first place.

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And then he goes on, and this is interesting. He explains that his very writing of this letter, the fact that the letter itself is being written is by what?

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The commandment of God himself. So in other words, the importance of this letter, the importance of the contents that we will see, and we have to remember this, we will probably recall back to this more times than one throughout the study because you get to chapter two, you get to chapter three, chapter four.

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Again, Paul gets into some really meticulous detail, very specific instructions for men, for women, for pastors, for deacons, for their wives.

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You think, okay, what's all this about? We have to remember every bit of it was given by the commandment of God himself.

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The importance of this letter, the importance of his contents, they can't be overstated as we go through it.

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At no point can we diminish one teaching over the other. All of it is by the commandment of God the

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Father. In this commandment from God also confirms the assertion that Paul is after all an apostle, not a self -proclaimed apostle, but an apostle by mandate.

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It's by the commandment of God the Father that Paul is an apostle and that he is delivering this particular writing.

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This is very, very important stuff that we're gonna be seeing unfold here. But we know this is true.

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We can kind of gather that, but I wanna point out a couple of other things. Again, in the salutations of these epistles, sometimes we can go through them somewhat quickly because there is some repetition across all the epistles.

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There's usually some refrains that you will see the apostles bring up over and over again.

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And yet every time we see it, it's important. And here we do see Paul attribute a very unique title to God.

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And of course, in this context, God is the Father here. He's talking about God the Father specifically.

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We know that because he makes the distinction with Jesus Christ, our hope. And so in this context, he's talking about the

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Father. And what does he say? He says, God the Father, our Savior. Now, this is a title that isn't unique in and of itself.

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We see it pop up all throughout the New Testament. The thing that's unique about it in this instance is that typically it is attributed to the

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Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior. And here we see Paul giving it to the

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Father. Now, why is that? Well, first of all, it's important just to recognize off the top that the title of Savior is no less, let me put it this way, the

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Father has no less right to that title than the Son. God the Father in no less belongs to the

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Father because after all, he is the one who gave the Son in the first place. So yes,

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Christ is our Savior. He is the one that went to the cross. He is the one that humbled himself. He is the one that gave himself on the cross, but the

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Father in like manner gave the Son, gave his only begotten Son. This is the basis of John 3 .16,

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the most famous and one of the most beautiful passages in the entire Bible, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten

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Son. God the Father played an extremely important role in the salvation of his people, and for that purpose, he has the right to the title of Savior, and Paul recognizes that, and he simply gives it to him here.

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Now, turn over to 2 Timothy for just a second, and I just wanna show you one passage that demonstrates this a little bit, because this isn't gonna be the last time we see

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Paul attribute this title to the Father in this epistle, and it's really interesting to consider the reasons why.

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We're gonna see that Paul emphasizes God as Savior in this epistle, talking to Timothy to then deliver it to the church at Ephesus.

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Why is that? Well, there's a chance that they were already dealing with some heretical teachings, maybe trying to reduce this reality of God as a

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Savior of men that don't deserve saving. We don't know all the details, but what we do know is that Paul emphasizes it, and there was a reason for it.

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His original audience needed to be reminded of the fact that God was, in fact, a

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Savior, and in this case, he is talking specifically of the Father. Look at 2 Timothy 1, and look at verse eight, and we're gonna get kind of a taste as to the role that God the

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Father played as Savior. In verse eight, he says, and this is Paul talking to Timothy again, just a different letter.

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Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me, his prisoner, but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God, this is the

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Father he's speaking of here, who hath saved us. So there, you see God the

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Father's action in space -time saving us, but then Paul takes it even deeper than that.

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He says, who hath saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and his own grace, which was given to us in Christ before the world began.

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Now, think about that for a second, because in the same verse, you have Paul speaking in very temporal language.

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He is talking about things happening in space -time, the Father calling us, the

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Father calling us not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace.

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He has saved us, called us with a holy calling, and then at the very end of it, Paul just gives us this little flicker into a totally different higher dimension without regard to time, that has nothing to do with us or our works, or at what point in history we were born.

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And he says this by saying, which was given to us in Christ Jesus before the world began.

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Okay, we weren't alive before the world began. So what on earth does that even mean?

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Well, it is a reference to the fact that God in his foreknowledge, in his foreloving of his people, knowing them intimately, even before we were conceived, made a covenant with his

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Son that again, had nothing to do with us or anything we bring into the picture, anything we could provide to God ourselves.

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And by that covenant between these two persons of the Godhead itself gave us to Jesus Christ.

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We were literally given to Jesus and we were in Jesus at the time this covenant was made.

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It's a really amazing thing. Now, of course, the thing I wanna highlight here is at the very top of verse nine there, the

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Father has saved us. So God the Father, again, plays an important role in the salvation of his people.

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Therefore, he receives the title of Savior by the Apostle Paul here. Okay, so these are some things worth noticing, worth taking note of, but there's more.

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And again, this is just verse one of 1 Timothy here. I want to take special note of the pronouns that are in verse one.

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Perhaps even circle these in your Bible as you see them pop up, because it's so important for us as we read these passages, as we read these epistles, for things like this to pop out, for us to be reminded of them, because it's things like this that play a part into our assurance of salvation that gives us confidence in our standing in Christ Jesus, that again, gives us boldness as we go out into the world.

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And so take a look at this, perhaps, if you have a physical Bible, think about circling these, but look at the pronouns in verse one.

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It says, God, our Savior. And then below that, it says, Jesus Christ, our hope.

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These are personal pronouns. This is Paul telling us and reminding us that we, in a sense, possess the

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Lord Jesus Christ. We possess the Father as our own. He is our Father. He is our

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God. He is our Savior. Jesus is our hope. And this is

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Paul in a not so subtle way. Again, we can kind of breeze past stuff like this pretty easily, but that doesn't mean that it's subtle, that it's hidden.

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It's very clear. The God of the Bible, the triune God of the Bible, is not a deist

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God. He is not someone that created everything and then escaped into total transcendence and is out there and impersonal, and the universe is just playing out whatever happens, happens kind of thing.

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The God of Christianity is not a deist God. He's also not a pantheist God. In other words, God is everything, so you walk outside and the trees are

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God, the grass is God, the sky is God. God is just kind of in everything and is everything. He's not that either, because again, that's just a sneaky way of impersonalizing

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God. On the contrary, He is a very personal God. We have an intimate, personal relationship with Him.

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We possess Him to a degree in the way that a son possesses his father and his mother. They are His parents, and nothing can happen to change that, and so we have this intimate relationship with, in the possession of, the triune

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God of the Bible. It is God, our Savior. It is Jesus Christ, our hope, and the apostle

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Paul is putting these things in the salutation for very important reasons.

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Of course, it's very significant that Paul phrases this opening verse the way that he does for a number of reasons, because while it might not seem super obvious to us at a quick glance, it's actually a wonderful testimony of the deity of Christ.

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This is a very important topic here, because all false religions of the world in some way, shape, or form ultimately come back to denying

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Jesus as God in the same way that the Father is God. Now, there's like the

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Mormons will say Jesus is a God, even the Jehovah's Witnesses will refer to Jesus as a

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God, but He's not the God. He's not the true God. He does not share in the same authority as the

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Father, who is the ultimate supreme God, and then, of course, you have monotheistic false religions such as Islam and Judaism that totally dismiss

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Jesus Christ's deity wholesale, and so regardless of what false religion you're talking about, whether it's that of the

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Jews, that of the Muslims, that of our American cults, like Mormonism or Jehovah's Witnesses or whatever it may be, the deity of Christ will ultimately come into that debate at some point, and so when we see these arguments by the apostles for Christ's deity, in other words, saying, no,

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He is God Himself, He is God in the flesh, we need to take note of it, and we need to think about how the argument works so that that way we're primed and ready to go when those want to challenge our faith out there, when we have the

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Jehovah's Witnesses knocking at our door and things like that. So how does Paul do this?

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How does he affirm the deity of Christ in this first verse with the way that he phrases things? Well, number one, in referring to the

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Father as Savior, and then in the same breath, referring to Christ as Lord and hope, what he's doing is he is bringing to light the co -equality of the

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Son and the Father while also distinguishing them at the same time. So we have to remember this always, when it comes to the

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Godhead, Father, Son, and Spirit, distinctions in their role does not negate their deity, does not negate their co -equality with the other persons of the

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Godhead. So when we say that Christ the Son and the Holy Spirit are co -equal with the

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Father, what do we mean by that? It means that all three of them share in what you might call the essence of God.

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That which makes God God in the first place, all three persons share that totally.

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It's not lesser than, in other words, it's not that the Father has the supreme, filled to the brim version of deity in the essence of God, and then the

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Son has some, but a little bit less, and then the Spirit has some, but a little bit less. They all equally share in this divine essence.

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They all equally share in what makes God God in the first place, but that doesn't negate the distinctions that they have.

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In other words, the Father is not the Son. The Son is not the Father. The Spirit is not the Son. The Father did not come and was crucified on the cross.

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The Son, or excuse me, the Holy Spirit was not crucified on the cross. It was the Son. He bore our sins that propitiated the

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Father's wrath toward sin. It wasn't the Father propitiating the Son. It was vice versa.

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So we see distinctions there, while at the same time, they completely share in deity.

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They completely share in the essence of God. Just to kind of hash out the distinctions a little bit more,

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Christ is the one who was made Lord. In Matthew 28, 18, at the very end of that amazing gospel, you have

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Jesus saying, all power was given to me in heaven and on earth. So Christ was made

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Lord over the universe. He is the figurehead of our religion, of Christianity.

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He is the king that will eventually rule with a rod of iron. He's ruling now in the sense that nothing can happen outside of his sovereign hand.

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He literally can, the entire universe is consisted by his hand.

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It's held together by him now. There will come a day where there will be this kind of full consummate fulfillment of Christ as king when he comes back to earth and he rules and restores what

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Adam was supposed to be in the first place. He will come and he will do that. So Christ was made Lord and he is our hope as we await his appearing in glory.

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We're not awaiting the appearing of the Father in the same way that we are awaiting the appearing of Jesus in the clouds.

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So there's a distinction there. It doesn't make the Son less God than the Father. It's one being, three divine persons, but there are still distinctions.

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So Christ is our hope, we're waiting for him to come. The Father, on the other hand, assumes different roles in the lives of his people.

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For example, the Father chastens us when we sin. We learn about this in Hebrews chapter 12.

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He chastens us like a loving Father. This is how we know that we are not spiritual bastards, but whether we are legitimate children of God, because his chastening of us is actually a proof that we are saved in the first place.

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Just like a loving earthly father will not let his kids just go rampant and kind of throw their lives away from an early age and then it just exacerbates over time.

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It's compounding, the older they get, the worse it gets. A loving father will discipline his children accordingly. Why? Because he loves them.

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The Father does that with us. So the Father chastens us. It's the Father that sent the Son, not vice versa.

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So again, we learn about this in John 3 .16. For God, that being the Father, so loved the world that he gave his only begotten

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Son. The Father did that, not the Son. So there's a distinction in role there. And then of course, one of the most important to remember is while Christ came and was the propitiation for our sins, in other words, he satisfied divine justice by bearing our sins and killing them on the cross.

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He was the propitiation, but what was the Father? He was the one that was propitiated, not vice versa.

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So there's a distinction in roles there. The Father was the one who was propitiated by Jesus's death.

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So again, we see the co -equality of the Son and the Father in this opening verse, but we also see distinctiveness between them as well, all in one phrase.

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Now, Jesus did a very similar thing. Just, you know, you think, well, okay, look, you know, you're talking to a

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Unitarian and they're like, no, no, no, there's obviously, this is obviously Paul just saying, you know,

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God is our Savior, the Father's our Savior. Jesus is our Lord, he's our hope. This isn't anything about saying they're both

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God that, you know, that'll be the Unitarian argument there. But what's interesting is all

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Paul is doing is he is following in a very similar tradition that Jesus himself started when he came to earth and when he was refuting the

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Pharisees, the Sadducees and all the false teachers. How did Jesus Christ prove his deity?

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Well, one of the first ways that he did it, you go back to the Gospel of John and you look at the fifth chapter. And he said this very simple phrase at one point.

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And what he said was, my Father worketh and I work. That's all he said, my

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Father worketh hitherto and I work. That's John 5 .17. And what happened?

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In saying that, the Apostle John, the Gospel writer, tells us that he was literally claiming equality with God.

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That's the words of John. And as a result of him simply saying, my Father works and so I work, it made the

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Jews want to kill him on the spot. Because the Jews recognized that that was a claim of deity. That was a claim of equality with the

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Father. We don't think like this as 21st century Americans all the time. And that's one of the problems with things like Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and Unitarians is they aren't thinking the way that the people of God would have been thinking.

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I'm talking about believing people of God in the Old Testament. And it certainly wasn't how the false

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Pharisees, the false Judaizers and the Pharisees were thinking at the time of the first century when

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Jesus was alive. They understood that claiming to be the son of the

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Father and sharing in the work of the Father was just as much a claim of deity and a claim of equality with the

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Father as saying, I am God. So if Jesus had just flat out said, hey guys,

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I am God, and then of course in that case, they also would have wanted to pick up stones to stone him. He didn't have to word it that way.

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Instead, he worded it in a far more rich and deep fashion because what he did was he reminded us that the works of the

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Father and the Son and of course by implication, the Spirit are inseparable. They work in complete unity or one way you could put it is complete tri -unity.

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Everything they do is together. Nothing they do is inseparable from the other.

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And that was enough to make the Jews want to kill Jesus on the spot. So in verse one, we see that salvation began with the

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Father in his benevolence toward mankind by doing what? By sending his only begotten son,

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God our Savior. Now you look at that, that's past tense. God our Savior, that's past tense.

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He did the work necessary for providing salvation to his people. But how does

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Paul word the next phrase? Jesus Christ, our hope. What is that a reference to? That's a reference to the future.

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And so Paul is in a sense here kind of going up above time and he is reminding us that this is something that stretches across all of it.

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So there are past tense aspects of our salvation, one of them being that God the

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Father sent the Son who died on the cross. Of course, let's not forget that covenant that was made between the

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Father and Son before the world began. There's very much a past tense and passive role to our salvation that the

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Father locked in long before we were ever around or ever thought of by our earthly parents.

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So there's a past tense aspect to it there. God our Savior, and at the same time, he says,

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Jesus Christ, our hope. Now that's a future promise. That is something we are waiting on.

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That's something we are looking forward to. And of course, we see this reality appear over and over again in the

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New Testament. Our hope is always tied to Jesus Christ, the Son. I have a bunch of different passages here and we're running short on time at this point.

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I'll just kind of breeze through them really, really quick. But in Colossians 1, verse 27, it says, "'To whom

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God would make known "'what the riches of the glory of this mystery "'among the Gentiles, which is

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Christ in you, "'the hope of glory.'" There's hope. There is hope tied to the person of Jesus Christ.

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In one of my favorite verses ever, Philippians chapter three, the very end of Philippians chapter three, in verse 20, it says, "'For our citizenship is in heaven.'"

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Where is our home? It's in heaven. Yes, we are here as pilgrims.

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We are here claiming and expanding the kingdom of God, but our citizenship is in heaven.

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From whence we also look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. We look in the future,

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He is our hope. And by the way, there you notice the title of Savior is attributed to the Son. So it's attributed equally to the

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Father and the Son. And then lastly here in 1

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John chapter three, verse two, it says, "'Beloved, now are we the sons of God, "'and it doth not yet appear what we shall be.

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"'But we know that when He shall appear, "'we shall be like Him, for we shall see

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Him as He is.'" That is our hope. That is our future glory. We will see Him appear as He is, and we will be like Him.

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And so constantly throughout the New Testament, we have the reality of our future hope being tied specifically to the

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Son. And that's what Paul is doing here as well. Now look at verse two briefly.

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We have a little bit of time left. Does anyone have any thoughts on verse one before we move on? I've kind of been just breezing right through it.

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Okay, let's take a look at verse two. He says, "'Unto Timothy, mine own son in the faith.'"

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That's a very important phrase there we'll look at. "'Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father "'and

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Jesus Christ our Lord.'" Now Timothy, I can't remember if we talked about this last week or not when we introduced

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Timothy the person, but Timothy itself is a pretty special name. It's very fitting for this man who was raised, again, by his mother and his grandmother in the scriptures from the time of his youth.

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His name Timothy means one who honors God. And of course, you can picture his mother and grandmother,

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I assume, playing a significant role in his naming. By all implications, his father was a pagan.

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So he had a Greek father, he had a Jewish mother. His father is not talked about anywhere. We assume his father was probably a

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Greek. I mean, he was a Greek, but we assume he was a pagan Greek and not a Christian. And so it was probable that his mother was the one that named him

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Timothy, one who honors God. Timothy was Paul's constant companion through numerous points of his ministry.

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He was with him, Timothy was with Paul at the time that he wrote his letters to the Thessalonians.

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He was with Paul when he wrote to the Philippians, when he wrote to the Colossians, and when he wrote his letter to Philemon.

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And so a good portion of the epistles of Paul that we have and that we study, Timothy was right there alongside of them as they were being penned, which is, again, just a testimony of how close these two guys were, how big of a role

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Timothy played in Paul's life. The fact that Paul refers to him as my own son in the faith, again, is very significant here.

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Because the word son, well, it means just that. It means he's saying that he is my son.

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And of course, he's talking in a spiritual sense. Paul was not Timothy's Greek father. He was his spiritual father.

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He's the one that evangelized him, that played a role in his growth in the

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Lord, his discipleship and things like that. Now, keep in mind, Timothy was probably saved at a young age, but salvation doesn't end at the point we call upon the name of the

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Lord. Sanctification is equally a part of the salvation experience as justification.

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And so while Timothy, by all accounts, was saved at the time he and Paul were first introduced,

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Paul would have played a significant role in Timothy's sanctification process, discipling him, pointing him back to the gospel, teaching him in the scriptures and things like that.

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So for that reason, Paul just claims Timothy as his son, as a spiritual son, just as a matter of fact.

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But while the Greek term here, it means son, if you look at the root of it, it clearly carries the connotation of a son that was begotten by me.

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In other words, it's a very specific term referring to birthing a son, begetting a son.

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And so once more, this isn't necessarily Paul just referencing Timothy as a son, but rather he's recognizing the fact that Paul played a part in bringing

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Timothy up in the nurture, in the admonition of the Lord. And so for that reason,

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Timothy is his genuine son. And to play off of the role, not the role, but the reality we referenced in Hebrews 12 a little bit ago, when it says, when the writer of Hebrews says, we are not bastards, we know this because God the

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Father chastens us, the word, the Greek term underneath the phrase my own, so when

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Paul says my own son, it is the opposite of a bastard.

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In other words, he's saying, this is my legitimate son. Rather than being illegitimate, he's saying he is very much legitimate.

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Again, he's saying Timothy is the real deal here. I know him, I beget him in a spiritual sense, he is legitimate, he is the real deal.

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And this is because of Paul's labor in stewarding his soul and preaching him the gospel, discipling him in the faith, helping him grow and mature as a

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Christian. They were together for the better part of 20 years. So that's a lot of time for Paul to pour into this young man.

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They most likely met when Timothy was around 15 years old. By the time you're getting these epistles, he probably would have been in his mid 30s, still relatively young.

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But the point is, he was legitimate. He was the real deal. Yes, Robert, please.

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So think of any parallels to two mentors to humans.

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One would be that Hannah sacrificed, donated her son.

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Sure. Was to be in charge of him, but he is an active pastor.

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That's right. Yeah, that's a great point. And all would know so much about all of the history of the scripture.

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And then the first priest, Aaron, had two sons that acted with their foolishness of the fire.

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And so Paul knelt on his shoulders, to not be an

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Eli, to not be a bad father. He knows to not bring up a bastard, because he knows in Timothy is so much more that the ripple effect of the outpouring and come through this.

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And so on Paul's shoulders is to be a good father, not a bad example like an Eli. Because in that opening of Samuel, Eli was getting payoffs out of the affiliates' grief.

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But he was getting back off of it. He knew about their sins. And I was part of Eli's, Samuel's voice of prophecy.

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He's like, you haven't raised your sons right. Treated them poorly and all that.

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So like, this is a much righteous parallel to that.

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Sure. You know, of Timothy being like a standard. Yeah, there's a lot there,

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Robert. And that's a fantastic parallel. You didn't derail me at all. I'm glad you brought it up.

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There's a lot there in the sense that we see a couple of things happening at the same time. Number one is, we know that there is a higher spiritual reality.

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I say higher meaning dimensionally, not necessarily higher in importance. Because we know that God cares very much about the physical.

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We are to present our bodies a living sacrifice. We're not Gnostics. We believe that the physical and the spiritual realm are interlocked.

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But dimensionally, there is a higher spiritual sense with regard to fatherhood. And in this case, that's what Paul is referring to.

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But in those stories that you mentioned, whether it be Eli and then his two sons, and then

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Aaron with Nahab and Abihu, they blew it as dads. They were significant spiritual players in the game, but they blew it as dads and they reaped what they sowed.

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And in the case of Samuel coming up, yes, it was Hannah, like you said, dedicating her own flesh and blood to be the spiritual son of this prophet.

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And so it was almost like sort of a redemption story for Eli, but not really, because he was still ultimately judged for his poor fatherhood in the physical realm.

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Even though he played a part in raising Samuel spiritually. And so, yes, as dad often says, the

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Old Testament in the physical stories that we get can add color to the spiritual truths of the

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New Testament. And I think the two stories you gave there, Robert, do a terrific job at explaining the gravity of what

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Paul is doing here in claiming Timothy as legitimate and saying, I put in the work, unlike abdicating fathers of our

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Old Testament scriptures, I put in the work, and Timothy's the real deal. He's legitimate. So that's fantastic.

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I'm glad you shared that, Robert. That's wonderful. Now, okay, so we have the physical aspect of fatherhood.

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We have fatherhood in a spiritual sense, such as with Paul and Timothy, Paul claiming Timothy as his son, and he did the same thing with Titus.

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But what about the reality that we know God the Father is our ultimate spiritual father?

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Where is there tension here between Paul claiming this spiritual fatherhood over Timothy when we know the truth of God the

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Father? Is there tension there? And again, this is a terrific example of how

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God works in time. So we have to remember this. God the Father, one of his attributes is in fact transcendence.

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In other words, he is in a place beyond our comprehension outside of the realm of our sin in time, and yet at the same time, he is very active in time.

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Again, he's a higher dimension. He's completely unique. If we could come up with some kind of an allegory or analogy that would make it make sense to us, he would no longer be unique.

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And so there are some things that are above our pay grade, so to speak. And so you have the

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Father in this transcendent place. He's present in one sense, but he's in a place that's not a place, as the head says as well.

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And so how does he work? How does he do things in space time? Well, he does it in a number of ways.

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One of them, of course, the pinnacle of it was the revelation of Jesus Christ, the incarnation, Jesus coming,

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God in the flesh. But it wasn't it. That wasn't all. He also works through his people.

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And we talk about this so often. And the reason why is because we see it pop up time and time and time again.

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We know that God alone is the father of all those who believe. God alone is the father of all those who believe.

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It is by his spirit that we are regenerated. It is his gift that we receive saving faith.

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And so when a person asks, who is your true father? We respond and we say,

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God is our true father. That is correct. That is absolutely right. But at the same time, as we have discussed so many times before, what does that true father do?

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How does he work in space time? He sends forth ministers of his gospel for the honorable purpose of bringing his elect into the fold.

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And we saw this in detail at the very beginning of Titus, chapter one, verse one. Paul brings this amazing dynamic of God and his elect, his fold, and Paul's responsibility to bring them to a saving faith, to evangelize them and things like that.

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God the father puts the words necessary into the mouths of these ministers so that God's words can be proclaimed in the open air.

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God the father is not speaking regularly. He only did that a couple of times.

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And both times had to do with his son. Once it is baptism, once it is transfiguration.

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That's not the norm. The norm is him speaking through his ministers of the gospel. In a verse that everyone's familiar with,

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Romans 10, 14, Paul says, how shall they call on him in whom they have not believed?

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And how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how should they hear without a preacher?

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That's how God speaks. And that is how Paul was able to claim a spiritual fatherhood over Timothy because he did that faithfully.

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He evangelized faithfully. He brought a multitude of people to saving faith as an instrument of God, not as God, but as an instrument of God.

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And therefore he was able to rightly claim this title of spiritual father, which is an honorable title.

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So yes, God alone in a strict theological sense was Timothy's spiritual father.

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But by God's grace, he granted the honorable mission of evangelizing

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Timothy to Paul, who played a part in the begetting of Timothy himself.

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In other words, God didn't do it alone. He did it alongside his people, such as the apostle

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Paul. And therefore it was perfectly within Paul's right to claim the spiritual fatherhood of Timothy in time.

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The way that Calvin put it once is he said, Paul lays claim to this title by what may be called a subordinate right.

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So it's not Paul trying to come in there and take a title that belongs to the father and name it, claim it for himself.

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No, he is assuming a subordinate right, which is you have the true father of all those who believe and below him, a multitude of ministers proclaiming the gospel and by the word, people believing.

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And then the father says, okay, Paul, you now get to take part in the spiritual birth.

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You get to, how do I want to word this? You get to say that you were a part of the spiritual birth of the people you evangelized to and that came to a saving knowledge of me.

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Paul didn't do the regenerating. Paul didn't do the saving. Paul didn't do the dying on the cross. But what he did was he proclaimed the gospel by whose power brings people to a saving faith.

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And then Paul could rightfully claim spiritual fatherhood in a subordinate sense, as Calvin put it, to God, underneath God the father.

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Now we have like two minutes left, one final note on verse two, and then we can move on to verse three and beyond next week.

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But one final note on verse two here is I find it really interesting. Some of the things you pick up when you do a meticulous verse by verse study, you just notice things going slowly through it that you may miss in just your regular reading time.

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Both are necessary, by the way, both are wonderful. But if you look at all of Paul's epistles side by side, you'll notice that in every single salutation of every single epistle, with a couple of exceptions, and I'll get there, he says, in his salutation, he puts the form of grace be to you and peace, and then he'll follow it up by God our father, the

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Lord Jesus Christ, or something like that. Grace to you and peace. But here in 1

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Timothy, and we also see this, the only other places we see this happen is in the pastoral epistles.

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To Titus, and then twice to Timothy. In those three epistles alone, you see a different form.

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You see him say, and you look at this in verse two, grace, mercy, and peace. He adds mercy.

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You don't see that anywhere else. You only see it in the pastoral epistles. And not that I'm trying to look more into anything than is necessary,

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I do think there is a special reason behind the fact that Paul reminds

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Timothy and Titus, these two young pastors, of God's mercy in his salutation, because you consider what these young men were about to embark on, the things they were about to face.

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These young pastors at this point in history, what was Paul doing? He was recalling to their mind

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God's mercy, yes, but in the context of God mercifully assisting in their pastoral work, in their fight against the false teachers, in their fight to disciple their own people, and that can very much be a fight sometimes.

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The grittiness of discipleship, the just varying dynamics of trying to raise a flock in the household of God, Paul knew that in their pastoral work, they would need to be reminded that God's mercy is there.

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It is ever -present. He is there to assist them in their work. He will be there to support them and to nourish them in the midst of all the trials they will face as young bishops in the early church.

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So that's why I believe you see that word mercy inserted in Paul's salutation, only in the pastoral epistles and nowhere else.

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Is that the reason where it's not spelled out for us? But I think there might be something to that. There might be something to whom

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Paul is writing to and them needing a special reminder of God's mercy there.

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So we'll end it there. If anyone has any other thoughts or anything they'd like to share before we dismiss, feel free to do so really quick.

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And next week, we'll jump right into verse three. Begin the first section of the book, which of course has to do with the roles of elders.

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These are the pastoral epistles after all. We'll see some crossover that we've already studied in the epistle to Titus, but with some added information that is incredibly helpful.

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So we'll get to that next week. All right, let's go ahead and dismiss and we'll move on to the next part of our service.

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Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this wonderful day, for bringing us together once more and giving us the opportunity to open up the pages of scripture and to be edified by them, to grow in them, to be sanctified, to be set apart.

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We know that your scriptures as the standard for our lives is exactly what we need in order to know how to navigate in a world gone mad, in a world all around us that has departed from your words, departed from your standards, departed from your morals, and living in certain ways that are in direct contradiction to your scriptures.

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So what do you do? You give us epistles like 1 Timothy that are about as practical as it can possibly get so that we can come back to the straight and narrow so we can know and see that you are a

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God that is not silent, but has spoken and has given us exactly what we need to not have to wander around flailing about, trying to figure stuff out, but can rather just simply lock in to these very plain and practical instructions that you have given us by the mouth of your apostle, put them in practice and receive the blessings for doing so.

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We thank you for all of these graces and mercies that you give us just through your word.

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We ask you to continue to be with us for the remainder of our services today. Bless our fellowship, refresh all of us, edify all of us, and we ask these things in your name, amen.