Book of Titus - Ch. 1, v. 7

Titus 1:6–7 and the Pastorals

All righty, if y 'all would like to turn to Titus chapter one, Carlo and Melina, I think the last time y 'all were with us, we were in verse five. We're just now finishing verse six. So we've been working our way slowly through this book.

And of course I have, I told you guys, one of the reasons why I am taking my sweet time in these early verses of the book of Titus or the epistle to Titus is because, well, twofold. Number one, we are studying, we're gonna be studying all of the, what's commonly known as the pastoral epistles.

That's first and second Timothy and Titus. We're gonna be going through all three of them. And when you get to first Timothy chapter three, Paul rehashes these qualifications to Timothy. He's telling Titus in this context, he'll be telling them to Timothy later.

And so I figured why not spend a little bit extra time through these qualifications here in Titus. When we get to first Timothy, there will be a couple of distinctions, a couple of things to point out there as well, but we will have done kind of the main work here in Titus, if you will.

And so that's one reason we're taking our time through. The second reason though, of course, is because these qualifications are directly applicable to me. And so this has been, I picked this particular study through the pastorals on purpose.

This is, I would say for me, first and foremost, as selfish as that sounds, but I do believe that it is an incredibly applicable study for everybody because they're called the pastoral epistles, but they are far from exclusive to pastors.

These epistles talk about what it is to be a good church member. Of course, that covers just about everybody. Qualifications for elders, great insights for church members and just good Christian living, all of these types of things.

And so there's a lot that we get out of this, no doubt, aside from just the pastoral qualification stuff. Now, really quickly, I kind of owe everybody an apology because I told you I ended last week by letting you know I was gonna cite, I had one last thought that I wanted to share for verse six before moving on to verse seven.

And that was some insights that I got. I had to call in some help for some of the Greek issues in verse six. And I left you guys with the thought. I said, I want you guys to think about, in verse six of Titus chapter one, where it says, if any be blameless, the husband of one wife having faithful children, not accused of riot or unruly.

We've talked about all of this, but I made it clear that most translations, the large majority of translations in verse six there actually translate it having believing children, not accused of riot or unruly.

And you think, well, why would it be translated that way? And it's because the underlying Greek word there is pistos, which the most literal rendering of it typically is belief or believing, depending on whether it's in the present or passive or whatever, and or whether it's the participle or not.

And so in this case, you have this word here in this context, and most translations have it as believing. KJV here has it as faithful. And of course, when you translate it that way, you can kind of breeze right through it.

And the connotation that comes along with it is that we're talking about faithful, the obedient kids. So now we have to ask, well, which is the appropriate translation? What's the connotation that Paul intends here?

Not, it doesn't really matter what our interpretation is. We have to take the intent that Paul gave us in the first place. And so I had a really tough time. I mentioned to you guys that I have never consulted more commentaries, lexicons, sermons, all of the sources for this one verse than any study I've ever done before.

And so again, I had to call in a little bit of help. And one of the guys that I reach out to, I don't know if anyone in here knows about him. I think I've talked about him before, but his name is Dr. James White.

And he's the director of my favorite, my personal favorite apologetics ministry, Alpha and Omega. So he's a pastor. He's been in the ministry for over 40 years, but he has his own ministry, his own apologetics ministry that involves helping, equipping Christians, equipping the church with ready defenses for their faith against literally every single false religion, cult, any attack that you can imagine on the Bible, everything from Roman Catholicism to Mormonism to Jehovah's Witnesses to Islam, to defending the integrity of the text of scripture, the transmission of the Bible, atheism, obviously, every kind of skeptic you can imagine.

He's done over almost 190 publicly moderated debates on all of these issues with the leading scholars on the other side of all these issues from the 1990s all the way through present day. And he has a debate coming up in just a couple of days.

He's still doing it. My dad and I had the honor and Ashton as well. My dad and I watched one debate, Ashton and I saw the other. Back in March, he was in Houston. He did like five debates between March and April.

And four of them were in Houston, two of them we got to go to. The one that Ashton and I went to was an interesting one because he is also a significant proponent of reformed theology, defending the reformed systematic.

And so the debate that Ashton and I went to see was him against what is now called provisionism. There's terms for everything. Just to, you know, dad talks about Arminianism a lot. Imagine Arminianism on steroids.

That's what provisionism is. And so basically libertarian free will, it kind of breaches along the lines of God not even really knowing the future because if God knew the future perfectly, then that would violate man's free will because if he knows the future, then the future is fixed.

All this crazy kind of stuff. That's the debate me and Ash went to. It was John six, him and his opponent debated John six. And that was very interesting. The one that dad and I went to was completely different.

Two nights later, he's there debating the leading Unitarian in North America. Now Unitarian, we in this church, we would call ourselves Trinitarians. We believe in the Trinity. We believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

One God, three distinct persons. A Unitarian denies that. A Unitarian denies the deity of Christ. Jehovah's Witnesses are a great example of what a Unitarian is. Jesus was a great guy, great prophet. In fact, he is the agent of God, but there's only one God, Jehovah.

And so, but there's all kinds of different groups of Unitarians. And so we heard him debate a Unitarian. That was unbelievable, wonderfully edifying. So that's the guy I'm talking about, Dr. James Wyatt.

Y 'all should look him up. Y 'all should look up his ministry. Everything he puts out is excellent. I emailed him and it was a long shot, of course. I didn't necessarily think I would get a response. He is an expert in the original languages, Greek at the forefront of all of that.

And I sent him an email. The subject line was something along the lines of young pastor in need of exegetical assistance or something and he actually responded within three hours. And he sent me an eight page study that he did on this one phrase in this one verse, for Titus 1 .6, that he had written like 25 years ago.

Now, here's what's interesting about it. The reason he wrote it was because he was an elder of a church in Phoenix, Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. And apparently, this is my assumption, this was what he sent me was an inquiry to the elders, the other elders of this church on this passage in determining Paul's intent because the implications here, if you haven't already imagined, are very serious.

And so he wrote this inquiry to his elders and he sent that to me. It's not anything in his published material, so I have no idea if he, it's not like I'm gonna go distribute it or anything like that, but just to give you the nutshell version of it, eight pages of looking at the original languages, looking at every use of this word pistos in the New Testament and the context that it's found in and the context here in Titus, as well as the parallel passage in 1 Timothy 3, which eventually we'll get to.

And his conclusion was the same as my original conclusion and it's the conclusion of many, but there are two sides to the interpretation of this verse. And in my opinion, one just seems obvious and that is it is talking about the trustworthiness of the children, not their salvation.

Because think about it, if the translation having believing children is accurate, this would disqualify every elder, every pastor, every minister of the gospel that does not have a saved kid throughout all of church history.

Now, this isn't necessarily diluting the importance of pastors evangelizing their own kids. I think I made that perfectly clear in the previous three Sundays we've talked about all of this that I believe the children in the household of a pastor are the most important part of his congregation.

There's a, Ashton has read a wonderful book once that put it this way, it's focusing on the congregation at home. And it was in the context of the pastor's wife, but certainly for the pastor himself. So yes, you should, as a pastor, you prioritize the evangelizing of your own kids before anyone else.

But in this church, we affirm that salvation is of God. And so, again, the implications of translating it or interpreting it in that a pastor has to have, all of his kids have to be saved before they leave his house or he's disqualified from the ministry carries some very heavy theological implications because all of a sudden the responsibility of the eternal salvation of these individual people with their own wills, with their own moral responsibilities is now in the hands of this one guy.

Pastors aren't perfect, they're not sinless. When Paul says, let them be blameless, which we're about to look at again in verse seven, he's not talking about sinless perfection. He's talking about meeting the particular criteria that he's setting out for us in these qualifications.

Again, that is a bridge too far to take that interpretation, I believe. There are some out there that do. But receiving Dr. White's study and seeing the argumentation to get to the conclusion that this is, in context, talking about the obedience of kids, the trustworthiness of kids as they're in the home of the pastor is what is in view here, not their salvation, not their literal believing in the sense of saving faith.

Rather, they are faithful, trustworthy to the pastor while they're in his home. So I forgot to bring, I was gonna bring the study. I had everything marked up that I wanted to read you guys and I forgot it this morning because our dog decided to jump over our fence, go to our neighbor's house, run in their house, get in a dog fight with their dog.

I had to deal with all that this morning. And in the frenzy of getting out the door on time, I forgot that printout. So if I can remember it, I'll still bring it. We can still go through it even if we're in a different place than Titus later.

So I can read some of the argumentation to y 'all as well as look at some of the passages that he cites where the context of faithfulness or trustworthiness is in view rather than believing. In every single case that word is used.

And it was very helpful to me. I also reached out to our dear brother Raj Kripalani and he came to the same conclusion in his response. And so I had to get some help, but the help was very edifying and wonderful.

And so with that being said, let's take a look at verse seven. That was the nutshell version of the study and some of the other things I was gonna share with y 'all this morning. But let's move on. Let's make some progress in this study here.

Verse seven of Titus chapter one. It says, for a bishop must be blameless as the steward of God, not self-willed, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre. So in verse seven here, we start to see this cascade of additional character traits that the elders of God, that the pastors of God must have in order to be qualified for the office of pastor.

Obviously, lots to break down in this verse. So let's go through it. Paul inserts a new term for us here. And it's just within two verses. For the men that are in question, in verse five, he refers to them as elders.

Of course, we covered that term in detail when we studied verse five. He refers to these men as elders of verse five. And now, at least in the JV, he uses the term bishop. So totally new term, but he's still referring to the same group of guys.

The Greek word underneath this word bishop here is episkopos. The Greek word for elders is presbyteros. And here we have episkopos, two totally different Greek words, but talking about the same exact men.

Both of these terms are interchangeable throughout the New Testament. But interestingly, even though they're used interchangeably, you could talk, you know, you could have dad up here, he is pastor, he is bishop, he is overseer, he is elder.

All of those are synonymous. All of those are interchangeable. But interestingly, you can still see some distinctions in the words that actually give us some insight into the office itself. So they address distinct things.

In the case of elder, which is the term that Paul uses in verse five, Paul is borrowing a common Greek term, again, presbyteros, which simply means older mature men. When it's typically used, the large majority of the usage of that word is just talking about old guys.

There are times when it could be referring maybe to the older brother in a family. So kind of the elder, elder brother. There are even contexts, at least one that I can think of where it's talking about elderly women.

Same word used in all these contexts. So we asked the question weeks and weeks ago when we were in verse five, how do we know what Paul actually means here when he uses this term that is a somewhat broad term?

Well, you use the context. That's how you determine what you might call the authorial intent. What is the author, the guy writing this letter, the guy writing this book? I mean, this is something you use for any literature that you're studying.

What is the intent of the author? That's how you interpret his words. You don't get to just make stuff up. You can take things out of context all day long from any book, of any genre, from any point in history, and it can say what you want it to say.

How do you know what the author meant, though? You look at the context. That could include the historical context in which he's writing it. It obviously includes his own words in the flow of the letter itself.

And so as you get to the qualifications of these men, and you see he's talking about an office, we can see, oh, he's taking this Greek term that we get elder from, and he is applying it to a specific office for the first time in church history.

And so, again, the word that we get elder from usually just means older, mature men, but Paul here gives it new meaning in that it signifies not necessarily maturity in age, but maturity in spiritual, in a spiritual sense, in spiritual maturity, in spiritual wisdom of the called man.

Now, he might be older in age, too, but he's definitely older in spirit. That's what Paul is talking about, and there are other places as well. It's not just in Titus. So you can let the Bible interpret the Bible, look at other passages as well.

And so he's talking about spiritual maturity when he refers to an elder. What's a great example of that? Well, there are many examples, actually, but Charles Hayden Spurgeon, 19 years old, when he took the senior pastorate at, oh, goodness, West Street Chapel?

I can't remember. And so there's a great example. 19 years old, he's not an elder in age, but he was certainly an elder in spirit. And that's obviously a great example. I think you all would agree that he fit the bill there.

And so now, so that was elder, verse five, but now think about bishop for a second, new term. In the case of bishop, Paul is now giving us a little bit more insight into the function of the job, which, of course, as a pastor, as a bishop, as an elder, it's a function of leadership.

It is a very specific form of leadership, arguably the most important form of leadership. It's God's church, it's God's house we're talking about after all. So episkopos, this is the word, the Greek word.

It can also be translated overseer. So if you're looking at other translations, it may say overseer here instead of bishop. What's funny about it is that even the KJV will translate it as overseer in some places, but here we have bishop.

So bishop, overseer, and what it means is that the person that is this thing, the person that is bishop, the person that is overseer, is expressly charged with being the superintendent of this congregation, the overseer of this congregation, or metaphorically, the overseer of this flock, the shepherd, the overseer, the superintendent.

And it's actually a very simple leadership structure here. This is another thing that men throughout time have gotten terribly wrong in more denominations than one. Think about the Catholics for just a second.

Think about the hierarchy of leadership. You've got the pope, then you have the cardinals, I think, are next, and then there's another thing below the cardinals, and then there's the bishops, and then there's the priests, and then there's the deacons, and there's probably some stuff in there I can't even remember.

You have this crazy hierarchy that's totally made up, and of course, it comes from misinterpretations, misuses of some of these Greek terms, but God gave us this structure. It couldn't be more simple.

It couldn't be more, here's how it works, run with it. Under God's design for church leadership, you appoint men who are spiritually mature, so there's a big part there, who have the oversight of the congregation they are over, so they have maturity, and they are now the overseers of this congregation that they are over, and then what do they do after that?

They shepherd, and they feed the flock. That's where the term pastor comes into play. Pastor just means shepherd. They shepherd the flock. They take care of the sheep. That's the leadership structure of the church.

That's how God intended it. This hierarchy in Catholicism, in Eastern Orthodoxy, in the Anglican church, even to some degree within Lutheranism and Presbyterianism, to a lesser degree, but it's still there, you have these complex structures, whereas here, you have one guy, essentially, I mean, there can be more than one pastor in a church, obviously, but you have these one, two, maybe three guys over one congregation that are supposed to be able to fulfill all these themselves.

Look at 1 Peter chapter five for a second. I want to show you guys something. Again, there's all these terms, new words entering the picture, 1 Peter chapter five, and yet, you know, and of course, over time, it starts to all just kind of fit together and things like that, but in 1 Peter, the apostle Peter here actually kind of wraps everything into just a couple of quick verses for us.

All of the job descriptions, all of the terms are alluded to here. Look at 1 Peter chapter five, we'll start in verse one. So he says, the elders, which are among you, I exhort, who am also an elder and a witness of the sufferers of Christ, also a partaker of the glory that shall be revealed.

Feed the flock of God, which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly, not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind, neither as being lords over God's heritage, but being in samples to the flock.

And when the chief shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away. So in this brief passage here, you actually have Peter again, alluding at the very least to all of the terms that can be used interchangeably to this one office, this one guy.

So you have him describing kind of the full orbed job description of the pastor here. He addresses the elders first. So there's that term, presbyteros, the same term that Paul uses. He refers to the elders.

He exhorts those elders to feed the flock. That is a reference to the pastor, the term from which we get pastor from. Just means shepherd, feed the flock, be the shepherd, be the pastor, and take the oversight of them.

That is the overseer. That's the bishop that Paul is using here. So you have all of these terms at the very least being alluded to by Peter. They all refer to the same guy, but they have some distinctions.

They have some distinct things that, some distinct colors within these terms to give us some insight as to what does this, what does this role entail exactly? So elders, bishops, overseers, they have a significant job description in the terms alone, the terms themselves.

These words flesh out the job description a little bit. And what's funny about it is it's right in the middle of the qualifications themselves. So Paul in verse five mentions the elders and verse seven now mentions the overseers or the bishops.

These new terms that can flesh out the job description a little bit, but it's also right in the middle of the qualifications. So these guys have to be qualified. They have to meet this criteria in order to serve God's house, God's church.

So I've said it several times in the study already, but it's just, you can't say it enough. It is by God's grace alone that any man can fit these criteria, that any man can meet all of these qualifications, any one of them, let alone all of them at the same time, because that is necessary.

It's not that you get to cherry pick which of these qualifications I meet and therefore I should get to be a pastor. No, it is meeting all of these qualifications simultaneously, having the character and being able to fulfill the job description all at once.

It is only by God's grace that any human being could ever accomplish that. No man could do that himself. No man could do that in and of himself. It all comes from God's spirit. Not a bit of it comes from the man himself, which of course should keep the man humble.

It should keep every single person that is serving in pastoral ministry the most humble man on the face of the earth. Think about the prophets. Think about the way the prophets were continually humbled.

There's some pretty explicit ways they were humbled, some humiliating ways. And not that the prophets in the role of pastors are analogous, but there's something there. There's something about being in a spiritual position where you have the honor and privilege of serving in a very honorable role, but not feeling all lifted up, puffed up, and elevated above the rest of the world because of it.

There's a balance there. So yes, it's an honorable, irrevocable calling, but you have to stay humble or else you could disqualify yourself. We're actually gonna look at that more in just a second because verse seven touches on some of these things.

Now, as we progress throughout this little letter, we're going to find that strong, faithful leadership is paramount in order to keep these young believers in Crete, remember the island of Crete. This is the immediate historical context of this letter.

That's where Titus is. He's a young minister himself. He's on this ancient pagan island of Crete with all of these new churches being planted not long after the church was born. And he is gonna have to go out and remember, set things in order.

Well, being able to find that strong and faithful leadership of course will be paramount in order to keep all of these young believers down the straight and narrow. And that's what an episkopos or an overseer does.

He super intends all of these people. He oversees all of these people to ensure that they are not going astray. They have to have the shepherd. They have to have a shepherd to help them do that. So interestingly, this is getting a little bit in the weeds, but I think this is amazing.

Episkopos, that is the Greek word where we get bishop from or overseer from. There is a small Greek term in the middle of that word. So episkopos is a compound word. There's some smaller Greek words that make up the whole word.

There's a smaller word right in the middle of it. And that smaller word is where we get the English word skeptic from, skeptic. Now, what does a skeptic do? Obviously, there's a negative connotation to it in our more modern vernacular.

In fact, we'll even use it in that context. When we refer to the skeptics, we're talking about people that are enemies of the word of God and that will attack the veracity of scripture, the sufficiency of scripture, so on and so forth.

So there's a negative connotation to the skeptic nowadays. But historically, what it did was it made reference to a person that was peering into something, a person that was examining something very closely, a person that was very analytical about the thing they were observing.

Again, they were peering into something. So you have a person that's very analytical, that is able to look at situations and pull from those situations things that are going good and things that aren't going so well.

He's being analytical. He's figuring out what needs to be handled as the overseer in straightening things out again and again and again. So you have that term baked in to this Greek word from which we get overseer or bishop.

He's a skeptic, but not in the negative sense. He's a skeptic in the sense that he is analyzing everything all the time as it pertains to his flock, as it pertains to his people, as it pertains to his congregation, ensuring that the devil that's roaming around like a roaring lion is not setting up ploys and traps all around them, that they're not going to fall into any of those ploys or traps.

They're not going to be lured into the dark forest where the wolves are. He's gonna keep them steering back again toward the straight and narrow. And there's only one way you can do that regardless of how big the flock is.

Let's say it's 100 like the parable that Jesus gives us. That's a lot of analyzing that you have to be doing to make sure each individual one of those sheep are not going astray or that something's not wrong or that any of them seem maybe a little sickly or need a little bit of help, need a little bit more nourishment than the others, need a little bit more nutrition than the others.

It takes great analyzing in order to make sure this happens. All of that's baked into the term from which we get overseer from. The term episkopos, this is interesting, was literally used by the pagans to describe the gods who kept watch over their people.

So think about it in a secular pagan sense for a second. You have the pagans that picture these plurality of gods out in the sky and they relied and trusted on them to keep watch over humanity and to keep watch over the nation from which that god was the god over.

Paul takes that pagan term that was usually applied to the gods and he applies it to pastors. He says, these men are episkopos. These men are the overseers. These are the true overseers that God ordained, not some false gods that don't even exist.

They are the true overseers that God ordained. These are the ones that keep people in check, but in a loving, meek, worthy way. Paul takes yet another secular term and he applies it in a Christian context.

There was a tremendous need at this time for sound doctrine, for the confirmation, excuse me, the confrontation of false teachers. We're gonna be getting into this more and more as we progress throughout the letter.

The confrontation of false teachers for dealing with an ancient pagan culture and to bring everybody in the church, in these local churches into a proper understanding of what their role was. Think about it.

You have young men and old men. You have young women and old women. You had slaves and you had slave masters. You had all of these people in a local church, none of them knowing what to do or what their roles were as members.

You think the pastor's the only one running stuff or maybe the pastor and the deacons. Every single person is a member of the body. And by member, I'm talking about the metaphorical body, legs, arms, neck, all of it, the internal organs.

Every member of a local church is a unique member on the body, the metaphorical body of Christ. And so how do you know what you are? How do you know which member you are? How do you know what spirit, you may not even know what spiritual gifts you have.

And so it takes guys like Titus that Paul is training, guys like Paul, but also guys like Titus and Timothy to lay all this out and let the old women and the young women know what their unique roles are.

The old men and the young men know what their unique roles are. How should slave masters react in this ancient context where slavery was still the predominant foundational institution of all of these places on the map, the Roman Empire and all of the places the Roman Empire was?

How do they know what to do? So this is a big job, overseeing, being analytical, knowing what's happening, knowing what instruction to give your people. When Paul brings the term bishop into the mix here, of course, he's doing it very intentionally as he does with everything, to let Titus, as well as us here in the 21st century reading this letter, to let us know that this role, which will in turn, help him straighten the situation out.

In verse five, we looked at a Greek term that means to straighten out, to set things in order. It all involves God-given leadership capabilities in order to fulfill any of it. It's all of God. So really, really interesting stuff.

Now that is all just the term bishop. Do y 'all have any questions or thoughts before, we have a little bit of time, we could progress a little bit more, but if y 'all have thoughts or questions or anything you'd like to share now, I'd love to hear it.

Yes. I have a question and I don't know, just tell me if I'm reading this wrong or right. So when I first read it, before I heard your lesson the other day, I was kind of reading verse six and seven together, like this, if any be blameless, the husband of whom I'm not, having faithful children, not accused of riot or unruly.

And then I was reading like, for a bishop must be blameless and so on and so forth. Does, do all of these qualifications also have to do with how to achieve.

The blamelessness and the family stuff?

Like if you are, for example, this is kind of how I was reading it. If you are self-willed and you're easily angered or given to wine or a striker or given to filthy liquor, you're going to have riotous and unruly children.

And you're more likely not to be a faithful husband. I don't know, is that, why is the four there?

Well, first of all, I a hundred percent agree with all of that. And the four is there for the reason that you, that just the plain reading gives. There is a reason why you have, you notice blameless at the beginning of verse six, blameless at the beginning of verse seven.

It's like bookends on either side of being a faithful husband and being a good father, interestingly enough. But it also, of course, flows directly into the, not self-willed, not soon angry, not being a striker, not given to wine, et cetera, et cetera.

And so again, if blameless doesn't mean sinless perfection, which it can't because no human being is other than the Lord Jesus himself, what does Paul mean by blameless? And to your point, it's all of this stuff.

It's all of this stuff together. All of these qualifications, when they are met, produces a man that is considered blameless in the eyes of God. And because of the way God ordains things is he would even be considered blameless by the populace as well.

So you may have the Pharisees out there or some false teachers, some false legalizers, a number of false teachers that Tim, excuse me, that Titus had to be up against, all throwing everything they've got at you.

But if you're blameless, the people can see through it. Not just you, not just God, but the people at large can see through it and they can see, no, this is a blameless man above reproach, which is what the word means.

And so, yes, Ash, it all fits together. If you are not quick to be angry, if you are not an alcoholic, if you are not all in it for the money and you have all of these things that are driving your ministry, quote unquote, then most likely you're not going to have kids that hate you and that hate the ministry and that hate the word of God because the only thing they have to associate with the word of God is an angry dad and a dad that neglects them and a dad that cares about the money and that gets angry when people aren't falling in line with his opinions and his interpretations and et cetera, et cetera.