Introduction to Titus - Instructions For Peaceful Living

Park Meadows Church

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We did a topical lesson looking at a few examples of succession of God's leaders throughout the

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Old Testament. Moses and Joshua, David and Solomon, Elijah and Elisha.

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And the whole point in doing that was to kind of set the stage for discussing the fact that the foundation or kind of the fundamentals that make,

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I don't want to put it, but God's framework or fundamentals for doing that, for going from one godly leader of high rank in his kingdom to the next, isn't all that different fundamentally from how it was when you fast forward all the way to the

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New Testament in the time of the apostles. So we use that topical lesson as a way to introduce the pastoral epistles, which is what we're going to be doing next.

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Now, obviously, that's going to be a long time before we get through all three of those, but that's okay because I have been wanting to do that for quite some time.

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And so we did not mention which one we are starting with yet. Will be Titus, 1

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Timothy, we could really do something weird and start with 2 Timothy, I suppose, but we'll get to that in just a second.

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A couple of other things I want to go through is we introduce kind of all three of them together, but getting into the first one we'll start with.

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A thing I wanted to draw out was mentioning how sometimes it can be a little bit easy for us to get kind of caught up with the heavenly things, quote unquote, the deeper things, you know, wanting to continue to just get to the next level of the deep things of God, so to speak.

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And of course, that's obviously not a bad thing in and of itself to have that desire to want to dig as deep as you possibly can.

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And you know, when I say deep, I'm talking kind of about the coffee talk type discussions and things like that.

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They're wonderful. They can be edifying. They can help you grow. And of course, you can actually discover wonderful truths as we know at this church, since we've been doing that for so long.

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But because of our human nature, we can turn a good thing such as that, searching out, thinking about the really, really deep stuff, we can turn a really good thing like that into a little bit of a distraction sometimes, a distraction of a sort anyway, not that it's the same as others.

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And we can forget about some of the more nitty gritty details that we've been given as basically a cheat sheet for peaceful Christian living.

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Think about the manna in the wilderness. We are certainly, you know, as we remain in this pilgrimage on this earth, it's not all that different from walking around in a desert from the spiritual viewpoint.

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You know, we are constantly drugged down by so much of the wickedness of the world that it can be tough for us to live in the manner in which we should.

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But just like physically, God gave his people manna in the desert where there shouldn't have been food, they had food from heaven.

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We have that in a spiritual sense now as well in the form of his word.

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So we're walking around this earth, we're surrounded by wickedness, we're surrounded by constant attacks from the enemy, and yet we've been given this cheat sheet on how to live peacefully even in the midst of that.

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It's like manna from heaven. And so point in bringing all that up, not that it's bad in any way, shape or form to search out the deeper things of God by no means, but we don't want to forget about the nitty gritty details at the same time.

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We gotta have both. We're often amazed at stories in the Bible kind of like Josiah in the

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Old Testament with his great awakening. We'll look at that story and we'll think how awesome it is, but we often forget about the cause of what that awakening, or what it was that brought that awakening about.

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And the cause of that was him discovering the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy. Tons of details, tons of very practical stuff.

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And of course, the law itself was all rehashed by Moses, his final great work prior to going up into the mountain to go to the next phase of his life, which of course was going to be with the

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Lord in paradise. It was Deuteronomy that caused the great revival of Josiah that we talk about so often and we pray for and everyone wants to happen in this country and around the world and all this and that.

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But it was the law, it was Deuteronomy that caused that great revival in the first place.

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We can't get excited about the one, which would be the revival. That's the thing that people can get really excited about without talking about the cause, which was the law of God.

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In the pastoral epistles, Paul turns his focus, when he's talking to Timothy, when he's talking to Titus, he turns his focus to proper church governance.

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Think about it, this is the end of Paul's ministry. Moses gave Deuteronomy at the end of his,

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Paul is about to give the pastoral epistles at the end of his. In fact, 2 Timothy was the last letter he wrote before being killed.

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So he turns his focus to proper church governance and he does so as a primary point of concern as we go through all of these letters, that will be a common thread.

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He knows that because God works through means, in other words, through his people, something we have to keep in our remembrance all the time, regardless of what book we're looking at, regardless of the context, we have to remember that God works through his people, through means.

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Because Paul knows that, he needs to set some groundwork for what will be the greatest institution ever known to mankind.

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And that, of course, is the church, the New Testament church. Now, in the pastorals, we have an interesting historical parallel that actually makes for a really wonderful backdrop to these letters.

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Think about a couple of things with me here. So, we know that there are types and there are shadows all throughout the

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Old Testament that are repeated in the New Testament. Maybe they represent something. There are parallels everywhere.

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But one that I think is pretty neat, when you think about timelines, is in between the ascension of Jesus when he went to heaven and the destruction of the temple was pretty much right at 40 years.

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It was a period of 40 years, roughly. And, of course, that parallels the

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Israelites' 40 years in the wilderness with Moses. Now, the

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Israelites, in their 40 years in the wilderness, they had Moses. The early primitive church, the very beginning, the birth of the

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New Testament church, during their 40 years between Jesus going to heaven and the destruction of the temple, which did change a whole lot of things, they had the apostles.

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So, you have a parallel there. The Israelites had Moses. The early church had the apostles. During both 40 -year periods, you have examples of, let's say, extraordinary government structures.

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By government, I'm talking about the church, or in the case of Moses and the Israelites, that particular assembly.

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You had the apostles there, or you had the extraordinary aspect of it was namely

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Moses on one hand, and, of course, the apostles on the other. And in both cases, you have a transitionary period taking place as God's people were being prepared to enter a new dispensation.

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Now, you could say the dispensation already started, which is the moment Jesus rose from the dead, and I wouldn't, or perhaps more accurately, at Pentecost, and I wouldn't disagree with that, but as we've talked about recently, there's overlap in the dispensations.

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It's not necessarily a stop and then start butted right up against each other.

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There's a start while the other one is still ending, and then it continues while the other one ends, or one is going while one starts, and then the other keeps going while one of them ends.

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And so, for example, the dispensation of the

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Old Testament, the law, you had Moses still with them at the time it began, but Moses wasn't gonna be there forever.

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The law was, though, and so there was overlap there. The new dispensation, you could say, began at Pentecost, but the apostles were still there for another 40 years, and miracles and things like that were happening.

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There was overlap between things happening. These were two transitionary periods in both cases, but these peculiar times, these extraordinary times, were not intended to last.

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Moses' lifetime was not intended to last, the 40 years in the wilderness. The time of the apostles was not intended to last, and in both cases,

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Moses and the apostles were charged to leave their people with the framework for, let's just say, kind of in human terms, ordinary government.

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Does that make sense? Again, I'm talking in the context of, for us, the New Testament, the New Testament church.

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What is the way Park Meadows Church, how does it operate?

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What is it built upon? It's built upon the way that Paul and the other apostles tell us to run our church.

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How do we know who to have as an elder or who to have as a deacon?

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How do we know what to do if some people aren't acting right, and church discipline needs to be invoked in some form or fashion?

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How do we know these things at all? Well, it's because we were given all of this framework, and so the apostles were an example of extraordinary government.

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They were doing miracles. They had apostolic authority directly from Jesus, but they were setting the stage for the ordinary government that has lasted the last 2 ,000 years, and that we, as a church body here, as well as millions of other church bodies around the world, still, to this day, operate upon the structures that the apostles were given during that overlap phase.

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There were still very supernatural things going on, but before it ended, they were giving us everything we needed to continue even after the apostles were gone and the apostolic age was over, if you wanna call it that.

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In both cases, whether you're looking at Moses about to leave his people or the apostles about to leave theirs, in both cases, they were leaving the leadership to elders.

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So it went from a great prophet to elders. It went from apostles to elders. So in both cases, the ordinary government manifested itself in the form of elders.

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So as we go through this particular study, the whole of the pastoral epistles, keep in mind that Paul is giving the newborn church its quote -unquote 10 commandments, so to speak.

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It's law, quote -unquote. In other words, everything that it would need to function according to God's desires.

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Obviously, it's not the law. I'm just saying it's the equivalent of that. Just like Moses left the

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Israelites with the law, the apostles leave the church with God's structure, orderly structure for them.

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It was just as momentous as Moses leaving the 10 commandments to his people.

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That's kind of the parallel I wanna bring out there. Now, with all that being said, we're gonna start with Titus.

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We could have started with 1 Timothy. Technically, Titus was the second of the three pastoral epistles that were written.

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Paul wrote 1 Timothy first, then Titus, and then 2 Timothy was his last letter ever. But I kinda like the idea of doing 1 and 2

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Timothy back to back, so we're gonna start with Titus. This little letter, which happens to be the shortest of the three, is actually, well, again, it's

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Paul's next to last letter. It was written in between 1 and 2 Timothy. But while it's obviously its own thing, it obviously has its own distinct characteristics as a letter written from Paul to Titus.

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As we will see as we go through all of these together, it serves a very similar purpose to 1 and 2

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Timothy. Of course, that's why it's included in the quote -unquote pastorals.

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Now, something I wanna say really quick is that, and I'll probably bring this up again here in a few minutes, is that I get why they're called the pastoral epistles.

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It's kind of an unfortunate little nickname, if you will, only because, because obviously it tells us everything we need to know about the ordination of pastors and how pastors and elders should live their lives.

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So those are in there, it's more than appropriate to say it for that reason alone. But there's so much more in these letters than just has to do with pastors.

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We're gonna be talking about stuff that has to do with every single person in this room, every single believer in the whole world.

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And so, and not to mention some of the deep doctrines, the defense of the deity of Christ in these letters, the doctrines of election, the doctrines of so many things that we talk about constantly are baked into these quote -unquote pastoral epistles.

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So there's so much more here than just has to do with pastors, but obviously that is a huge key theme in it, hence the name.

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And so, don't think that, well, I wonder if this will, how applicable these books are to me.

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They are as applicable to the member of a church as it is to the pastor of a church.

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So I just wanted to say that off the top as well. Something that we're gonna be digging into quite a bit as we move through this study is that Paul's primary intention, at least so it seems to me, is to give

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Titus, which of course is one of his imminent successors. That's why we talked about that topic a couple of weeks ago, the succession of God's leaders.

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Titus is one of the imminent successors of Paul, is he wanted to give Titus a strong foundation, a foundation of doctrine, of course, but also he wanted to give him mentorship in the form of a letter, which of course is something that Titus could take with him even after Paul passed away.

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So we're going to be seeing a form of mentorship being given from Paul to Titus in the form of a letter so that Titus could have it then as well as after Paul was gone.

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And now we have it ourselves. It's really an amazing thing. Titus was a very young man like Timothy, but despite his age, he had a significant number of responsibilities and was preparing himself to face the very difficult task of, well, facing off against a lot of false teachers.

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And these false teachers were infiltrating a very young and a very impressionable church on the island of Crete.

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And we learned that that's where Titus was in verse five of the first chapter. And actually it wasn't even a single church either.

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There were multiple local church bodies on the island of Crete at the time Titus was there. And he was there to face off against false teachers and to give and to bring sound doctrine to these very young, impressionable churches.

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This is still at the time the apostles are alive. This is as early church as it gets.

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Now, the main task or tasks ahead of Titus, which Paul was preparing him for in this letter were to straighten out these churches doctrinally and to establish godly leadership.

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Of course, that's the part where, you know, pastorals come into play. To establish godly leadership, to help keep the churches pure.

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He wanted to establish leadership. And in doing so, that's where we'll see much of what makes this a pastoral epistle, quote unquote.

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Now, the opposition that Titus was facing is a young man. It cannot be overstated as we go throughout the study.

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Paul will flesh out what these enemies looked like for us in a little bit later on in the letter.

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But in order for Titus to stand a chance against these guys, to stand a chance against these enemies from the human viewpoint, he needed encouragement to get through it.

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That's number one. We talked about the importance of encouragement in our last study in Philemon, but Titus needed it big time and he needed it from his great mentor, the apostle

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Paul. He needed encouragement to get through it, but one big important thing that Titus needed to turn the ship around and to let all of these local churches know that he was the one they needed to follow and not these very perhaps eloquent orators that were these false teachers, he needed apostolic authority.

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Well, how was he gonna get that? We're gonna talk more about that shortly, but that was a very important thing that Titus needed as he was about to begin this very tough journey that he was starting here.

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Now, while the historical background is obviously important for context in this letter, we're gonna be talking a lot about the historical timeframe that Paul and Titus were living within at the time this was written.

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I don't want us to lose sight of how applicable this letter is to us today. Again, it's called a pastoral epistle, but that doesn't mean it's not just as applicable to any believer anywhere on the earth.

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Whether you're a member of a church, whether you're a leader of a church, whether you're a deacon, pastor, layman, minister, missionary, churchgoer, it doesn't matter.

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The application of Titus and as we'll eventually get to first and second Timothy are just as important to everybody, just as applicable to everybody.

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Now, within that idea, talking about how does

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Titus apply to me today, the overarching purpose of this letter today, I believe in throughout the last 2 ,000 years of church history is to instruct the church, to instruct every local church body to do what she ought to do to stay pure, to do what she ought to do to stay pure, to stay chaste as a bride, as the bride of Christ, to behave herself properly.

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How does the church at large, but even individual churches, how do they need to live in order to stay pure, to stay chaste?

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How do we know how to behave ourselves as a local church body and as individual members of that body?

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Well, I believe that is the overarching purpose of Titus, is learning how to do that, knowing how to do that.

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The letter focuses on the necessary character traits of church leaders, again, hence the name pastoral epistle or the name that's been given to Titus and the

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Timothys, but it also focuses on the necessary character and conduct of its members.

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So again, this is applicable to everybody. What we'll see is that all of it also spills into showing how we should conduct ourselves, teaching us how we should conduct ourselves as we become witnesses to the world outside of the church as well.

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So it's a three -prong approach here that Paul is taking in these pastoral epistles.

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It's to show leaders, church leaders, how to conduct themselves, how to live rightly.

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It tells the members of a church how to live rightly, how to conduct themselves, and then it teaches both groups how to conduct themselves when they go out to the world to be witnesses to the world outside of the church.

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It covers all of that in this very, very brief little letter. Paul, in this letter, gives the qualifications of our overseers, our pastors, our elders, our bishops, however you want to put it, they're all interchangeable.

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He confronts sin and heretical practices in the local church. He tells us about the spiritual roles and the obligations,

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I want to emphasize that word, the obligations of those who are the members of a local church body or the body of Christ at large.

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He teaches us how to be godly before the world, and he teaches us how to conduct necessary cleansing or purging of the local church when those times come.

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And those times aren't easy, but they do come. And so Paul is going to tell us how to get through that, what we need to do to get through such a time as that.

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All of that's covered in Titus, as short as it is. This little letter is incredibly compact.

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It's barely three chapters long, but that doesn't mean it's not absolutely rich with doctrine and perhaps more importantly, and I say that just because of the age we live in, not that doctrine isn't important, but because of the age we live in, because of the culture we find ourselves immersed in,

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Titus gives us God's standards of Christian living, God's standards of Christian living, and all of that, the doctrine, the standards we can expand upon and kind of use to reorient ourselves back to the straight and narrow, so to speak.

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So this is one of those types of letters. We're getting into the nitty gritty. Yes, the deep stuff is amazing.

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And there's some deep stuff here too. Again, Paul is going to defend the deity of Christ in this letter, but we can't lose track of the details, the fine print, if you want to put it that way, in the institutional paperwork that Paul is handing over to his successors to take the baton, to carry the tradition on, and to build

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God's church in the way in which God wants it to happen. So let's turn to Titus, if you haven't already.

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Let's read just the first four verses together, the salutation. We're not going to get any further than that today.

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In fact, we're not going to get past the first verse, but let's go ahead and read the first four verses together because as we're about to see, the first four verses are all one single sentence.

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Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the faith of God's elect, and the acknowledging of the truth, which is after godliness in hope of eternal life, which

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God that cannot lie promised before the world began, but hath in due times manifested his word through preaching, which is committed unto me according to the commandment of God our

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Savior, to Titus, mine own son, after the common faith, grace, mercy, and peace from God the

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Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior. Now, the first four verses, like I said a second ago, is one continual sentence.

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It's very wordy and it's meticulous. Paul is really packing a punch with his opening words, his opening statement, if you will, in this letter.

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You kind of get the feeling when you're reading it that Paul is trying to be very formal in his introduction here.

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And yet, what's odd about it is he's writing to a very close friend, similar to his relationship to Philemon, in fact, but the salutations between those two letters, the letter to Philemon that we already studied and this letter to Titus, are starkly different.

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To Philemon, it was very warm, it was from a very friendly place.

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And not that this isn't friendly, but to Titus, again, it seems pretty formal.

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And you kind of wonder, what's Paul getting at here? If he's writing to a personal friend to help Titus out with a few things, why is he approaching it this way?

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Well, of course, it's no accident on Paul's part, this very detailed, very technical intro, was for the purpose, and you guys, you gotta remember this as we read through the whole study, we can't forget this, the purpose of this whole thing is to give

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Titus, to delegate to Titus, apostolic authority. And he's doing that for a very important reason, as we'll get to.

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In other words, what is Paul doing? He is duplicating and delegating. That's exactly what he's doing, not only in Titus, but also with Timothy, as we'll get to later.

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Duplicating and delegating. Well, if he's gonna duplicate and delegate himself, we know that Paul had a lot of authority, so he had to impart some of that, in this case, to Titus.

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And that's what he's doing in this very meticulous intro. He's doing it throughout the whole letter, but he's starting it off really powerfully here.

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Paul was setting the stage for Titus to be one of his successors. And this long sentence that takes up the first four verses of the letter, for us, plays a big part in doing that.

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Now, though Titus was a very young guy at this time, he was gonna become a foundational part of the early church.

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That's another thing that can't really be overstated. The things that Titus and Timothy were to do, even after scripture had already been given, the only testimony of their lives beyond these letters that we have is just the testimony of the early church fathers, which was mainly an oral tradition.

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So we don't have any inspired scriptures that tell us exactly how their lives played out beyond Paul's instructions to them.

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But what we do know is that they played pivotal roles, both of them as young men, in setting the foundation for the early church, which is a really incredible thing.

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But given his age, think about Titus, this young guy going into the ministry. And not only that, but to some degree in isolation, he's by himself.

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We know that he's gonna be ordaining other elders and things like that. But at the time he's getting this letter, you kind of get the feeling that it's

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Titus against the world, or at least Titus against the island of Crete. And he's there, and he's this young guy going into ministry.

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He's nervous, he's scared. He has a slew of false teachers of enemies up against him that are trying to discredit him at every turn.

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You can imagine the fear, the anxiety, the stress that he's under as he receives this letter.

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Because of his age, the opposition that he's up against, all of these things, Paul knows that Titus' ministry is gonna require authority that Titus didn't have on his own just yet in order for these young church bodies to actually listen to Titus and not the false teachers.

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So Paul knew that. Without Paul's help, without the authority that Paul was about to impart via this letter, it would have been too much for young Titus to deal with all this stuff.

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It would have been too tough for him to persuade all of these churches that he was on the right side of truth.

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That was not gonna be an easy task by himself. From the human viewpoint, perhaps it would have been impossible.

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So Paul's gonna help him out a little bit. In fact, he's actually gonna help him out a lot. The battle that Titus is about to face will require

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Paul's acknowledging of Titus as his successor. Remember in that topical lesson we did a couple of weeks ago, how volatile a time it is when succession needs to take place, when the transfer of power has to take place.

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It was something Moses was stressed out about. And he went to the Lord pleading with him, raise up a godly leader for my people before you take me away from them.

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Now he already knew that Joshua was there. He may have even had the thought that Joshua was next in line, but he still went to the

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Lord with a heavy heart asking him to please do this. And of course, his prayer was answered and Joshua received his blessings.

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Elisha asked for a double portion of Elijah's spirit and he was given that. With David and Solomon, we're given a great example of the volatility.

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It was really rough. Some other guy, Adonijah, decided to take the throne while David was on his deathbed.

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And he had to rise up, use every bit of strength that he had left to put Solomon in his proper place.

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And so succession is a really scary time from the human viewpoint. We can read these stories and maybe not even comprehend exactly what the emotions were like for these people as they were going through it.

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But here we are. Paul is now at that place in his life. The apostle Paul knows that his life as ministry will come to an end.

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And so he has to get these young guys ready. And Paul in this letter is acknowledging to the world.

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He may not have, well, he may have known it. I think the apostles did know when they were writing under inspiration.

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So Paul most likely knew that he was acknowledging to the world, to the island of Crete first, but to the rest of the world that Titus is my successor, at least one of them.

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If anyone attempts to thwart the work of Titus to derail his delivery of sound doctrine and the ordination of the right leaders, because it was his job to go do that, to ordain elders, they will be up against the apostle

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Paul himself. If they try to mess with Titus, they are up against Paul. And of course, as we know, and as everyone else knew,

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Paul was a direct delegate from Christ. Christ duplicated and delegated himself before he left to the 12 apostles.

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And those apostles are now doing the same thing as they in the near end, or I'm sorry, near the end of their lives.

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So the process continues. Let's look at verse one a little bit more closely. We only have like seven minutes left, but we can get through a little bit of this.

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Paul, a servant of God, highlight that phrase because that's very important.

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Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the faith of God's elect and the acknowledging of the truth, which is after godliness.

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Now that's not the end of the sentence. Remember the first four verses are all one sentence. It's all one idea.

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So we have to be a little bit careful as we go verse by verse here. We gotta keep the full idea and the full flow going.

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But there are some things we have to stop and look at. What was it that made Paul such an impactful person, such an effective and fruitful leader that he was?

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Now, maybe that's an easy question because he was an apostle. He had his unbelievable conversion experience on the road to Damascus.

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And so there were a number of things that made him the kind of person that he was. So maybe a better question would be, can

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Paul's level of leadership be emulated? Can it be copied by us or by anyone else for that matter?

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Well, we're gonna kind of answer that question as we go throughout the whole study. But for starters, the reason that he was the kind of leader that he was, and this is something that every one of us can do.

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And so my answer would be yes, but it'll take work. It'll take spiritual maturity.

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But again, we'll flesh that out more and more as we go throughout this study. His first thing that made him the kind of leader that he was was because of his commitment to walking in the spirit.

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Paul's commitment to walking in the spirit in obedience as a servant of God.

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And in our opening verse, Paul demonstrates how this is the case using a few examples.

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I'll probably end with this idea, but this is a really powerful thing to me.

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We see that Paul is a man that saw himself under sovereign authority.

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It's one of the first things we learn about Paul that he tells us about himself at the beginning of this letter, a servant of God.

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Paul saw himself under sovereign authority. Are we not ourselves? Of course we are, but we have to recognize that.

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We have to commit ourselves to that reality. We're under sovereign authority, whether we want to recognize it or acknowledge it or not.

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And so one of the things that will make us a great leader or not a great leader is whether or not we recognize that, whether or not we commit ourselves to the reality that we are under sovereign authority.

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Paul, prior to his conversion, was a preeminent Pharisee, a preeminent scholar.

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After his conversion, he became the preeminent apostle. His credentials, his achievements, even his miracles were all widely known at this point.

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But none of that, not any of his background, not any of his current status as the preeminent apostle were what he based his authority on.

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The thing that he bases his authority on is the fact that he is a slave to God.

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He is commissioned by God directly. He is a servant or a slave of God. Remember the word, when we look at the word servant throughout the

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New Testament, this is the Greek word doulos. This is a word that Brother Otis talked about all the time. It's incredibly powerful, far more powerful than any of its

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English words, any of the English equivalents, certainly more powerful than the word servant in our minds.

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The closest, most potent English word that we have to be equivalent to doulos is the word slave.

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And of course, that is a very powerful word in the

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English language, as we know, because of the history of it. Paul, a slave of God, that word is very important in the context of the apostles and very important in the context of their succession plans as well.

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Interestingly, this is the only place in the New Testament in any of Paul's letters where Paul uses this title of himself, slave of God.

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Now, there are a couple of other places where he refers to himself as the slave of Jesus, as the slave of Christ, but this is the only letter in the

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New Testament where Paul uses the term for himself, slave of God.

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James, in his epistle, in his general epistle, uses that phrase too. James, and here

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Paul uses it. What's interesting about it is this is the same title that's given to Moses in both the

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Old Testament and the New Testament. And so what Paul is doing, and we're about to find out, well, probably next week we'll find out, why

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Paul chose to begin the letter as the slave of God rather than the slave of Jesus Christ specifically.

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But in doing so, what Paul is doing is he's putting himself on equal ground of authority with Moses, and that's very important.

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In Revelation chapter 15, verse three, New Testament, we hear this, and they sang the song of Moses, which of course was given to us,

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I believe, in the book of Numbers. And in Revelation, we hear they're singing the song of Moses, the slave of God, and the song of the lamb saying, great and marvelous are thy works,

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Lord God almighty. Just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints. So Moses himself is called the slave of God.

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Paul is saying, I am also a slave of God. There's no coincidence that Paul chose this particular title in this historical context because, and I'll end with this, we learn in verses 10 and 14 that some of the false teachers that were infiltrating these churches were legalistic

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Jews. So Paul, in saying, I am a slave of God, I am a slave of the one

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God of Moses, I am a slave of Jehovah, those

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Jews see that, and they immediately know what Paul is doing. They immediately know that Paul is putting himself on that same plane as Moses and the prophets.

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He's not doing it because he thinks so highly of himself. He's doing it because God told him to do it, because God commissioned him to be that thing, to be that person on that equal plane with the great prophets of the

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Old Testament. So sometimes we'll read these things and we'll think, sure, of course, of course, Paul is a servant of God, but you have to think about it in the historical context as well.

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You have to think, what would this be like to the Jews that were hearing this, that were trying to thwart

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Titus's work? Well, Paul in doing this sets the tone for his authority, and what we're about to find out is he's gonna give that authority to Titus, and he's the one that's directly involved with these

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Judaizers. So, really interesting stuff. We'll end it today, because we're out of time, but we'll pick it back up where we left off here in a couple of weeks.

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If you guys have any thoughts, feel free to share. We have a minute or two. Yes. This was really awesome.

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This is one of Anthony's favorite books, so it's pretty special. I'm excited about it. Going into it, I just think it's interesting how you said that completely giving over to God's authority is where these strong men, like, of course, we know that.

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That's where their hearts are, but hearing just the things that they do and knowing that, honestly, in their mindset, they were surrendering to God and his supreme authority, not even looking at their own power.

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They were totally surrendering a deep commitment to God who obeyed, served, and then constantly were dying for themselves so that they could, you know, accurately walk and be led by God to do their work.

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And then to humanize, it's like these guys all get authority. But in their hearts, they didn't even look at themselves that way at all.

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Well, and the apostles had a particularly powerful way of doing that that is maybe harder for a lot of us to do it because,

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I mean, they walked and talked with Jesus. And so they were humbled 24 -7.

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Now, they're obviously Paul. In Romans 7, I mean, you got Romans 7, so you know that Paul had issues.

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He was still in the flesh. They were still human. But they were a lot more humble than we are, even though they had way more power and way more authority than we have.

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But to Matt's point, the recognition that they as well as we are under sovereign authority and seeing that one of the reasons that made them such fruitful leaders was their commitment to that reality and their acknowledging of that reality.

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That is something that we can imitate within reason. The copy is never going to be as good as the original.

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Jesus, again, to use Dad's phrase, Jesus duplicated and delegated himself with the apostles, but the apostles were not as strong as Jesus.

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And the same thing is true from the apostles to the next line. That's why Titus wasn't an apostle. He had apostolic authority because it was coming from Paul.

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But Titus himself wasn't an apostle. And the next line after that, it wasn't quite as strong as Titus and Timothy, the first bishops of the early church.

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And so obviously there are differences. There's a hierarchy there, but the characteristics or the foundation can be the same for everybody.

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And that is a commitment to being under God's authority, which Paul recognizes here. And we can do the same thing.

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So I agree that's a good point. Any other thoughts? Okay. Okay.

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Okay. Okay.

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Well, all I was saying, I was talking at the very beginning about how there's overlap in the dispensations.

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For example, Moses was still alive at the time the law was given, then he died, but the law continued.

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The apostles were alive and they were giving us all the letters that we use today.

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But I'll address Brian's question really quick. I'll say this, you could probably make a pretty strong argument that the moment the veil was torn, that's the moment things changed.

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And then they did change. I guess the specific question is, is that when the church age began? I think it's interesting that God didn't destroy the temple for 40 years after the veil was torn.

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I really don't know what that represents other than perhaps it gave the apostles the ability to go out and show...

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For example, when I believe it was Paul preaching to the Hebrews where we get the letter to the Hebrews, I think he's sitting there showing them this is a dead building.

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He's saying, you can't go back to that because the sacrifice has been made and the final atonement has been made.

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The final sacrifice has been made. There's nothing to go back to. And I think that that was a more powerful object lesson when he had to build the temple to point to and say that is now a dead institution.

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And then it was destroyed 70 AD. I still tend to believe that the official church age began at Pentecost, but maybe to Brian's point, the dispensation began, or at least flickers of the new dispensation began at the moment the veil was torn.

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I think the reason the veil was torn so much earlier than the other things is because Christ died.

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And at that moment, God was no longer separate from man or man no longer had to be separated from God.

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I think something worth thinking about is I know you may think very similar beginning of the church age was at Pentecost along with most, most theologians would agree with that.

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But I just don't know how you do that if you're willing to say that the Old Testament ended when the curtain was torn.

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The New Testament obviously had to begin right there. Jesus lived for 40 days in the

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New Testament time and then ascended and 10 days later Pentecost happened and that's when the church age began.

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So there was a transitional period of 40 days there, but we've always thought that that there's a transitional period.

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Well, even continued longer after that but you still had like you thought the poor

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Jewish stuff was still happening. You know, midway through the book of Acts, that stopped. So a lot of that stopped happening.

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It was a transitional period in the book of Acts. Well, Schofield would agree with Brian to some degree.

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Schofield has a note at verse Matthew 27, 50. It says, Jesus, when he cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost and behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain and Schofield has a note that says the dispensation of law ends.

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Now, obviously that is his opinion, but the point in saying that is that number one, it's not a private interpretation,

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Brian. So that's valid. And number two, again, I think a good argument can be made for that, but I haven't put a whole lot of thought into it before.

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So it's something we might have to chew on a little bit. Well, that's a great thought,

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Brian. There's overlap either way. The question is, how long does it last?

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How long does the overlap go into one and away from the other? Well, let's go ahead and dismiss and we'll pick this up here in a couple of weeks.

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Hey, Dave, would you mind dismissing for us? It's taking the time to go through and study carefully what this book is all about and how we can learn from it.

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We ask that you bless this study and help us to apply everything we've learned, including today.

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We are your slaves. Help us to remind ourselves that we are in the service of God.

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Help us to act accordingly. We love you and thank you for everything you've done for us. We ask this of you.