Knowing from Whom - Pt. 2

Learning from Whom: Paul’s Example and the Call to Continue in Scripture

Please remain standing and open your scriptures to 2 Timothy chapter 3 starting at verse 10. 2 Timothy chapter 3 verse 10 going through chapter 4 verse 5. But you have carefully followed my doctrine, manner of life, purpose, faith, long-suffering, love, perseverance, persecutions, afflictions, which happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra, what persecutions I endured, and out of them all the Lord delivered me.

Yes, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution, but evil men and imposters will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them, and that from childhood you have known the holy scriptures which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

I charge you therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ who will judge the living and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom. Preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort with all long-suffering and teaching.

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers, and they will turn their ears away from the truth and be turned aside to fables.

But you be watchful in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. You may be seated. All right, if you don't have the handout, please raise your hand. Make sure we can get you one.

There's one over there for Mr. Boyston. All right, so go with me to page 2 in the handout. We talked last time about these verses and I emphasized to you verses really 10 through 14. We talked about learning from whom.

We talked about the fact that Timothy learned from God. But this idea that God uses instruments, he uses means, he uses men, and so we have in chapter 3 verse 10, there is this idea of carefully following what Paul brought.

The doctrine, the manner of life, his purpose, his faith, his long-suffering, his love, his perseverance, even his persecutions and afflictions. And so we recognize the fact that Paul trusted in God to be delivered out of these troubles.

And the example that's given there, God uses godly men to set a godly pattern and to be able to deliver things, but only the Lord Jesus Christ is a perfect pattern. And so all of us are in a condition where we have to deal with the reality that our pastors, our leaders, are going to be sinners.

They're going to be imperfect. And so we always have to judge and test by the scriptures. And so we recognize that there is a danger of apostasy and heresy and of persecution. And so in verse 12, we're reminded of the fact that everybody who desires to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution.

Verse 13 reminds us that evil men are going to grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. But not just evil men, it's not just wolves in wolves clothing, it's impostors too. And so there are wolves in sheep's clothing.

Those that seek to put on the appearances, the impostoring of sheep. And they grow worse and worse. Which means more and more elaborate methods of seeking to hide their false Gospels, false doctrines, evil practices.

And the church has to mature. And so the church has to deal with things like the controversies that occurred around Nicaea, where there's a debate about the doctrine of the Trinity. Or around the time of Chalcedon, that dealing with the doctrine of the Incarnation.

Or we deal with the Reformation and having to deal with all sorts of controversies relating to the doctrine of authority and how men are saved and how worship ought to be ordered. And the complications of opposition that pile up make it so that we have a duty to deal with more and more error, more and more clearly and well.

And so now, with the blessings of the maturing that have occurred in the church so far in history, we are able using the catechetical tools that have been given to us by our fathers in the faith to teach plainly and clearly the doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation and how to worship and how to live and the doctrine of the authority of Scripture.

And all of these things far more easily so that our children are able to deal with presenting and putting forward doctrine in an orderly and clear way by the time they leave our homes. And so there's great advancement.

And there's a need to hold on to the things that have been attained to. And so chapter 3 verse 14, but you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them.

So ultimately, Timothy did not learn these doctrines from his mother or his grandmother. He did not learn these doctrines ultimately from Paul. He learned them from God. And so we all must recognize that there is one teacher, the Lord Jesus Christ, and we must continue in the things which we have learned and been assured of.

That word there for being assured of is just literally the word faith really as a root. The things that you've learned and been given faith in, knowing from whom you have learned them. And that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

You know, when we think about the Scriptures, some people seek to deride the Scriptures as a tradition. And it is the case that we have received the Scriptures in the sense that they've been handed down to us across generations.

But we need to remember that the Protestant doctrine is not that there is some tradition that was handed down and then made into the Word of God. No, the biblical doctrine and the Protestant doctrine are laid out for us in the Westminster Confession in chapter 1, section 8, which says that the original Scriptures, the Old Testament in Hebrew, the New Testament in Greek, were immediately inspired by God.

They were immediately breathed out by God. Which means that these are the words of God. When we read the Scriptures, we are not merely reading the words of men, we are reading the words of God. These are not simply things that men wrote that were later viewed as acceptable and matched up with what God would want to reveal.

These are the words of God through his instruments, through his servants, the prophets and apostles. So these words are immediately inspired by God. Think about that word immediately. You go, wait, wait, that doesn't really make sense.

Aren't these mediated through a prophet or an apostle? Aren't these words mediated through the hand of a man and a pin? That's all true that there's men involved. It's all true that there's a pin involved.

It's true that it's put upon paper. But the words that are put down on paper, every jot and tittle of it, are the words that God intended to put there. God created the Apostle Paul, every element of his personality, so as to make him the perfect instrument that he predestined to use to get exactly the wording that he wanted on the page.

Those words God planned, and God put the means in place to get there, so that those words are immediately God-breathed. And then he uses instrumentality to get there. They are the words of God. They don't become the Word of God.

They are the Word of God. The words of God. And so these words, the Holy Scriptures, they are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. Now these words that are immediately inspired by God, have been kept pure in all ages by God's care and providence.

He's given it a singular or special care to preserve his Word, which makes it so that we have the Scriptures now, that they are not lost. Now we need to go back to the original languages when there's some controversy about a detail about the actual meaning of a text.

And so there's an importance to caring about the original languages, but it's also important that the Scriptures be translated into every language, to every nation that the Scriptures come to, so that the people of God would be filled with the knowledge of God, and be able to worship God acceptably.

And furthermore, by having the Scriptures brought to a people in a way where they're able to read them themselves, they, through patience and through patient enduring, seeking to understand through the ordinary means what the Scriptures say, they can grow in the comfort of the Scriptures and they can have hope in the promises of God.

The Scriptures are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. Look at page three. At the top of page three, remember, here's the Protestant doctrine of tradition. The Apocrypha is used to teach us that there is a false tradition that comes, and the Apocrypha is not of divine inspiration, and it is not a part of the canon of Scripture, and therefore it's of no authority.

It's of no authority. So when we think about a tradition that is the apostolic tradition, we need to remember that the apostolic tradition is captured for us in the Scriptures, which is immediately breathed out by God.

Now, when we recognize that we're learning from God, we deal with what we talked about last time, which was the doctrine of illumination. And we have to deal with the fact that the Word of God is the authority, the Scriptures are the authority, and they're the thing from which we argue, but there's also the reality that God causes us to be illuminated to understand and believe the Scriptures.

So we have these two things. What do we argue from? The Scriptures. And how do we come to believe? What's the cause in terms of metaphysics or the thing that brings about faith in us? It's the work of the Holy Spirit.

Now, jump with me to page 5. There's a lot here in page 4 and stuff that I'd love to encourage you to read on your own and to be aware of these doctrines. I have quotes from Calvin for you to look at, and I have a quote from the Shorter Catechism to emphasize, but I want to take you to page 5 where there's the quotes from Proverbs, and I want to remind you that we have learned from God, and we do not have any knowledge apart from God's giving us a word.

Proverbs 1 .7 says, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. Proverbs 9 .10 says, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

Psalm 111 verse 10 says, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. A good understanding have all those who do his commandments. His praise endures forever. So, notice that we're told three times that wisdom begins with the fear of God.

That's implicit in the fact that knowledge begins with the fear of the Lord, right? Wisdom is a subcategory of knowledge, and so, therefore, if knowledge begins with the fear of the Lord, wisdom does.

So, these points are plainly laid out in Scripture, and there's a lot that I have here laid out for you to understand that there's a historical basis for that in the church as well, but what I want to do is to spend time really focusing on the next few verses.

So, I'd like you to jump to page 8, 2 Timothy chapter 3, verse 14, at the top of page 8. But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them, and that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

Now, from childhood you've known the Holy Scriptures. We have this background of the way knowledge comes, but furthermore, the Holy Scriptures are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

The Holy Scriptures are able to make you wise. Let's think about that for a second. The Scriptures are able to make you wise because they carry the information of wisdom to you. They're able to make you wise because of the means that God normally uses to bring wisdom into your mind.

They're able to make you wise because there's a promise of the Holy Spirit giving wisdom to the people of God with the Scriptures. That the preaching of the Word is that which gives wisdom. We're taught in Romans, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.

So the way that we are built up in faith is by the Word of God coming to us and the Holy Spirit causing us to hear it. Our age is so controlled by humanistic thought and by mechanistic views of the way externals and mechanics work that we think when we hear about hearing, we think about the senses of the ear being able to pull in sound.

But what is taught here is that it's about the work of the Holy Spirit to cause you to understand and to believe. And that makes us dependent upon God for wisdom. Dependent in terms of Scriptures but dependent also on the internal and invisible work.

Wisdom is the knowledge of what's good and how to get it. Knowledge of what's good and how to get it. So what's the highest good? What's the best thing? What's the highest value? Well, God is. How do we possess God?

By knowing Him. So God's the good and Jesus is God. We're taught in John 17 3 that everlasting life is the knowledge of the true God and of Jesus Christ whom He sent. Now the point there is not to say that Jesus isn't God.

The point there in that text is to say everlasting life is the knowledge of the true God. That is to say the knowledge of Jesus Christ who was sent by the true God and who is the true God. He who is the promised seed of the woman.

He who is the eternal God. This wisdom saves. Where does this save us from? It saves us from foolishness by displacing foolishness and replacing it with wisdom. It saves us from the guilt of sin and the just wrath of God by being the instrument that connects us to the righteousness of Christ and His suffering the wrath of God in our place instead.

It saves us from the power of sin by being a lamp unto our feet to know the way to go. And it saves us because wisdom is faith in God's Word. When you believe God's Word, when you believe God, you are believing in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Because faith in God's Word is faith in Christ. So this is the scriptures are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. Now verse 16. All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Now this doctrine that all scripture is given by inspiration of God is not the main emphasis of this text right below. The emphasis is the idea that the scriptures are sufficient to make us complete, to be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

The inspiration is the emphasis that most people give on this text. It's the reason why the next part follows. Because it is breathed out by God, therefore it is authoritative and because it's breathed out by God who is all-wise, it is sufficient.

He's able to reveal sufficiently what we need to know and what we ought to do. So this sufficiency is the real point of this text. Yet it is not the emphasis that most people give when talking about or preaching on this text.

So all scripture is breathed out by God. Amen, hallelujah, praise the Lord. But we build from there and we find that all scripture is profitable. It's useful for something. God gives these texts. He gives these words and all of them, all of them are useful.

All of them are profitable. There is no passage in Scripture except that it is useful. Those lists of names that you like to skip over. The lists of stuff that people take from place to place that sometimes are difficult to find utility out of.

All of these things, all of those passages are useful. They are profitable. So the question is as we're considering them, as we're mulling them over, as we meditate upon them, as we try to consider their meaning, we need to be looking for their usefulness.

There is not a single sentence, not a word in Scripture that is not useful. And so if we take passages of Scripture and make them into meaningless texts, we make them useless. So much of our time that's spent by people who claim to be teachers of the Scriptures, people who are in seminaries or who go to seminaries, so much of their time is spent trying to figure out how to make passages that are offensive to men not mean what they say.

And when we try to take passages that are offensive to men and make them not mean what they say, we take things that are useful to show us our own stupidity and we turn them into things that are useless to help us to die in ignorance and sin.

Passages that are offensive to us are the passages we ought to spend time trying to figure out what's wrong with us in. When there's a passage that you're offended by, it's an indicator to you that you need to figure out what's wrong with you.

That's what offensive passages are for. They're offensive because of a problem with you. Now I'm not trying to pretend like I don't have any problems, but I'm talking to try to help you. And so when you are offended by the Word of God, that's what you should do.

That's what I should do too. We should, when we're offended by it, we should wrestle with it and try to figure out what does this mean? Why am I offended by it? What falsehood am I believing that makes this thing offensive?

All scripture is given by inspiration of God. It's God's Word and it's profitable. It's useful. Useful for what? Well it's useful for doctrine, which means it's useful for teaching us the truth. God's words are true.

Every one of them, every proposition of the Scriptures is true. And so when we read something and we don't believe it, it is us not believing what God has said. And if you have to choose between God being wrong or you being wrong, you pick you every time.

And when that's the case, you try to figure out what is it that you're believing that's wrong and how is it contrary to the Scriptures. And then as you understand what God's Word is saying and you say you believe it's true, but you still find something about it that makes you uncomfortable, you pray, Lord I believe, help my unbelief.

You ask God to help you to understand more clearly and to be taught the truth more fully that you might have right doctrine and put off lies and falsehood. Go to page 9. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

All Scripture is profitable not only for doctrine, for the general teaching of the truth, for the systematic arrangement of the truth, for the giving of the truth in terms of the laying out of what God's Word says, but it's also profitable for reproof.

It's profitable for rebuke. That is to say, to censure things that are evil. To give criticism for what is wrong. The Word of God is profitable for refutation of error. The Word of God is profitable to convict you of sin.

The Word of God is profitable to show you what you should put off. The stuff you should throw away and get rid of. The things to be pruned of. The Scriptures are profitable for reproof. J. Adams in his counseling work does a great job of explaining this, especially in How to Help People Change.

If you want a copy of that book, by the way, it's a fantastic book. It is the one book that I would most recommend to anybody who wants to be introduced to how to offer biblical counseling. You, as a Christian person seeking to counsel one another, his little book, How to Help People Change, is essentially him walking through this text of Scripture and explaining how to use and apply Scripture for yourself and for other people.

It is a beautiful little book. In it, he talks about how this Word translated as being reproof. He likes to emphasize that the Scripture is profitable, all of Scripture is profitable, for convicting people of sin.

People go, well, I mean, isn't that the Holy Spirit's job? To convict of sin? Well, yeah, it is. And you know how he typically convicts people of sin? Through the teaching of his Word. So when you bring the Scriptures, it's useful to bring about a sense of subjective conviction, or you might call it guilt feelings.

But people can feel guilty about things that are wrong, right? Sometimes you can feel guilty about rebuking a person for sin. You ever done a duty and felt bad about it afterwards? That's because there's something that we value that we're losing there.

Maybe pain that we're causing to somebody else. As we mature, we will feel more and more joyful in the performance of our duties, and less and less have conflicted feelings about doing our duties. So we can feel bad about doing the right thing sometimes, and that's wrong.

We should have properly ordered affections. But what's more important is that the Scriptures bring objective conviction. If somebody's in a court case, the court can convict a person of sin, of a crime, and say, you're guilty.

And the person might say, they're not guilty. You know, everybody in prison is innocent. If you ever visit one, I don't recommend it, but if you ever do, you talk to people there, you'll find a remarkably high percentage of wrong convictions, according to the inmates.

Just a shockingly high rate. So what's the deal? Are they just lying to themselves? Well, some of them are, and some of them probably are wrongly convicted. But you have this idea that there's external objective conviction, declaring a person to be guilty.

And what the Word of God does is, it comes and it shows objective guilt. And you can prove to people that they're in sin from the Word of God. That proof that something is sin is the argument by which you're able to see that you need to put this thing off.

And that ordinarily is what's used to bring about the internal sense of conviction. And that part is the part that the Holy Spirit does. Our duty is to bring the Scriptures and to rely upon the Holy Spirit to bring the inward conviction.

We bring external conviction, proving something to be sin by the Scriptures. And we rely upon the Holy Spirit to bring about the internal conviction. A sense of guilt. Now this is important because a sense of guilt, we all go, I don't want that.

But the sense of guilt, the sense of pain of conscience, is what helps us to discipline ourselves to put off sin. We go, the misery of sin the pain of conscience. God brings us to repentance through pains like these.

It is the loving chastisement of a father to bring about the pain of conscience being convicted. That pain is brought about for our good. It's the same reason you discipline your children. You don't discipline your children because you hate them.

You don't bring them temporary discomfort because you hate them. You bring them temporary discomfort to bring them long-lasting comfort. You bring them temporary discomfort because you love them and you want what is good for them.

The pain of conscience is brought about by the work of the Word and Spirit for the good of God's people to put off unrighteousness. And the Scriptures, all of the Scriptures, are profitable for this convicting work.

They're profitable for this convicting work in a sufficient way to make the man of God complete, thoroughly furnished for every good work. You know, if you know any expert hikers or climbers or soldiers, knowing which equipment to not take is as important as knowing what equipment to take.

Over miles, ounces are like pounds, and pounds exhaust you and consume your energy so that you can't do the task. Knowing what not to fill your time with, what not to equip yourself with, is as important as knowing what to equip yourself with.

And the Word of God is sufficient to show you what to throw away, what to put off. Now, the Scriptures are profitable also for correction. All of Scripture, every passage of Scripture, the whole of Scripture is profitable to show you positively what you ought to put on, what to improve in, what to do instead of, what to set right.

And this putting on, that's what correction is. The Scriptures are profitable, all of the Scriptures are profitable, for teaching the truth, for showing you what to put off, and showing you what to put on.

And in case this wasn't clear enough already, because putting off and putting on should be a sufficient set of things to show you the fullness of how to be instructed, the passage says, all Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for instruction in righteousness.

And instruction in righteousness, this word instruct, is Padian. The word Padia is a word that talks about this idea of enculturation, instruction, the rearing of a child, the raising of a child, the education of a man, the full discipleship that should be given to a student.

And so this instruction, this discipleship, this enculturation in righteousness, the point here is to say that the Scriptures are profitable. Every single proposition of Scripture is profitable to rear you in righteousness, to raise you up in righteousness, to train you in righteousness.

And so here we have the truth being given, the training being given, and the way in which the truth is used to show you what to throw away and to show you what to grab and hold on to, and that together provides the fullness of what's necessary for training.

And you have, at verse 17, what is called a hinnah clause. Now if you start to study Greek at all, you will be introduced to hinnah clauses. Hinnah clauses are clauses that are goal-oriented clauses.

In other words, this is in order that. So when you read in verse 17, it says, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work, you could replace the word that with in order that.

You could say so that. This is the goal, the goal to be achieved. So we have the Scriptures, and the Scriptures are inspired by God. They're breathed out by God, and they're profitable because God is all-wise, and every word he speaks is a word worth hearing, and it's useful.

So these profitable words are given to us in order that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. And this part right here, this little passage of Scripture, verse 17, is so important because it shows us that the Scriptures give us the full list of equipment that we need to carry.

Because there's all this danger that what we're going to do is we're going to load up our backpacks with a bunch of junk we don't need for the hike, and then we're going to be exhausted, having used up all of our energy, carrying stupid stuff.

There's all this danger that on the way to go meet the enemy in battle, we'll be carrying useless things into battle, and be exhausted by the time we get there. The Middle Ages was largely the story of people calling themselves Christians, and putting lots and lots of things into their backpacks that they didn't need.

And so you had pilgrimages, auricular confession, you had all of this stuff that wasn't necessary. And in fact, not only not necessary, but they were poisons. These were things that would kill you. They were soul-murdering errors.

And so we don't just put useless things in. No, we put things in that are self-destructive. Because our supposed wisdom about what we need, and what's good for us, is lies that are self-destructive.

And so the Scriptures, you need the Scriptures as sufficient to govern yourself, and you need the Scriptures as sufficient to judge the teaching that you receive. The Scriptures are breathed out by God.

All of it is breathed out by God, and it's all profitable for doctrine, and it's all profitable for reproof, and it's all profitable for correction, and it is all profitable for instruction in righteousness.

And it serves to accomplish this goal, that you would be complete, that you would be thoroughly equipped for every good work. There are no good works missing here. There is no equipment missing here. There's nothing that you need to be a mature man or woman that's missing here.

You know this because God wrote it. The God that designed you, the God that has predestined all of history, the God who has designed the purpose of creation and fixed it to an end, that God is the God that wrote the book.

That God is the God who gave us the instruction manual for us, and the instruction manual for creation. The Scriptures give us everything we need to know to do our duties. They are given in order that the man of God may be complete.

They are given in order that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. People will try to attack that last passage, and they will try to say, well complete doesn't really mean complete.

I've given you the Greek word to put right there. If you want the digital version so you can copy and paste it, I'll happily give it to you. You can research the Greek word yourself. It really does mean complete.

It really does mean having all the stuff that you need. Thoroughly equipped, it's put at the end. The way this is really written out in the Greek, it's that the man of God may be complete for every good work equipped or thoroughly equipped.

This equipping is equipping for all the good works. All of them, not just some of them, all of them. You can see right there in the Greek, pan, which means all. Ergon, which is to work, something ergonomic.

It's meant to help you so that you can work without causing injury. And then we have this agathon, which is good work. You get the name Agatha from that, which is just a Greek word for good turned into a feminine name.

So this idea of every good work, every work that's good, every work that's good. Matthew Poole says this about this passage. He says, the man of God may be perfect, that the man of God may be perfect, that both ministers and all godly men may be as perfect as they can be in the state of mortality, fitted for the duties of their several callings and places, thoroughly furnished unto all good works, and be prepared to every work which is good, acceptable, and well-pleasing unto God, whether it be a work of piety or justice and charity.

The scripture, as to all, is so full of direction that Christians need not go down to the Philistines to wet their tools. And there's this passage that is obscurely referred to there. This is, this is a key passage for us to understand.

In the book of 1 Samuel, we have, we have the place, the first time that's referenced for us, this idea of weapons control. The Philistines were occupying Israel and they made a law. You can't own a sword and you can't own a spear.

And in fact, in order to regulate, to make sure that nobody had these spears or swords, they made a law that if you're Israelite you actually can't even be a blacksmith. So actually you have to go to Philistia to get your sword sharpened.

But, oh wait, you're not allowed to take a sword, so what is it they were saying you could go and sharpen? It was so you could sharpen your plow or your pruning hook. The idea that you couldn't own any weapons of warfare.

And so Israel is largely without weapons, which is one of the reasons why you remember the story where Jonathan and his shield-bearer, they go and attack the camp of the Philistines by themselves. Nothing can hinder the Lord from saving by many or by few.

That story, you remember it? The reason it's just the two of them is because nobody else has a sword. Because the New York Democrats had taken away all their swords. That's what the Philistines did. They took away all their swords and all their spears.

And so this idea that, you know, you have to go to Philistia, you have to go outside of the people of God in order to get your equipment and to make it ready for use. That's the idea there. So what Matthew Poole is saying, he's saying God didn't fail to provide us with men to sharpen our swords.

He didn't fail to provide us with the weaponry of our warfare. No, the Word of God makes it so that we're thoroughly furnished unto all good works and to be prepared for every good work that is acceptable and pleasing unto God, whether it's a work of piety or justice or charity.

The Scripture as to all is so full of direction that Christians need not go down to the Philistines to wet their tools. That's what that's a reference to. Nor be beholden to unwritten traditions or to the writings of pagan philosophers for directions what to do, how to worship God, or manage any part of their conversation.