INTRODUCTION TO FIRST TIMOTHY

Introduction

Today we will take up the study of Paul’s First Letter to Timothy. Now, while this is a short letter, it is also a dense letter, combining a lot of ideas in very few words, so it will take us a little while to unpack.

But that’s okay. This is not the sort of letter you want to hurry through. There are too many important subjects addressed here, including some that typically have been given a only cursory reading in the church, such as the roles and relationships between men and women in the body of Christ. Frequently these matters, when they are not simply dismissed, are only talked about in a very superficial way, creating the illusion that they have been dealt with when, in fact, they have not really been addressed at all.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that some things in this letter are hard to address. There certainly are some challenges before us if we are to understand this letter rightly. But we shouldn’t be afraid or frightened off simply because a portion of the Bible is hard for us to grasp, let alone to accept. On the contrary, all Scripture has been given to us for our benefit, for our understanding, for teaching, correcting, training and rebuking. And all Scripture has been inspired by God. Therefore, we must look carefully and reverently at the whole Bible, especially at those parts that are hardest for us to understand.

In thinking about this whole matter of scripture, and about the attention we pay to it, a couple passages come to mind — passages written by another apostle, from another letter, namely, 2 Peter 1:19-21:

“And we have the word of the prophets made more certain, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”

“Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.”

As we read Paul’s letter to Timothy, we must remember that we are not reading a mere record of one man’s opinions about God. We are reading the “prophetic” word of Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, as he spoke and wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. We are reading, as Peter himself described Paul’s writings, Scripture. True, it is Scripture that is sometimes hard to understand and which, therefore, is open to the distortions of “ignorant and unstable” people. But we still must be diligent and persevere to understand rightly what God is saying to us. And so, as we read, we must take care not to distort these words, because the end result of distorting these or any other Scriptures is, as Peter says, destruction.

Rationale

The reason I have chosen to investigate 1 Timothy is that my church is currently preparing to appoint some additional elders, and this book has much to say on this subject. For one thing, it teaches those who might become elders how they should live and train.

For another thing, it prepares congregations for the burden of recognizing and setting apart only those who are biblically qualified to serve as elders. And in order to do that, we need to know what the Bible says about who should and should not be an elder, and why. Further, we need to have some understanding not only of what qualifies a person to be an elder, but also of what being an elder is all about, what pastoral ministry involves, what sorts of things actually happen as well as what sorts of things ought to be happening in the local church.

With all this in mind, it makes sense that we take some time to hear what Paul has to say in his first letter to Timothy because it is a letter addressed to a young man who is a pastor of a young church — a church that needs some instruction on choosing elders and operating as it waits for Christ’s return. And so, both 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy, we get a great glimpse into the pastoral heart of Paul as he deals with difficulties, as he anticipates the needs and issues Timothy’s church will face, and as he addresses matters both great and small.

The Relationship Between Paul and Timothy

The letter before us is from the Apostle Paul to his favorite disciple, Timothy. So, it is helpful to have an understanding of how their relationship got started and how it developed.

During Paul’s ministry he made three “round trip” missionary journeys that we know of, and then a fourth journey to Rome, after which we have no more comment in the biblical record. It is possible that Paul never left Rome and was executed there and then.

However, when we reconstruct the evidence of the New Testament, what seems most likely is that Paul was released from his imprisonment in Rome, and that he then continued to minister, possibly making a missionary journey to Spain. Subsequently, perhaps on his return from Spain, he made his way back through Rome, where he was imprisoned again and finally executed.

In any event, it was during Paul’s second missionary journey that he met Timothy personally. However, it is likely that Timothy’s first exposure to Paul would have come during Paul’s first missionary journey.

You see, Timothy’s hometown was a place called Lystra, which Paul visited on his first mission trip. Acts 13 and 14 describe this first trip in some detail. There we learn that God healed a man through the ministry of Paul and Barnabas — a man who had been crippled from birth. After this healing, the local people, not being Christians, began jumping up and down and worshiping Paul and Barnabas. Evidently, they thought that these two men were the so called “gods” Zeus and Hermes, and that they had come down to visit them in human form. Now, for Paul and Barnabas who firmly believed that there was only one true God, this was a blasphemous idea, so the missionaries begged the people to stop doing what they were doing.

Well, not long after that incident, and while Paul and Barnabas were still trying to influence Lystra for the sake of the Gospel, some Jews swayed the fickle crowd of people in the opposite direction, moving them from a position of wanting to worship Paul and Barnabas to wanting to do away with them. Clearly these were quite emotional and volatile people! So, having been persuaded that Paul and Barnabas were to be hated, feared and destroyed, the people of Lystra stoned Paul and then dragged him outside the city, where they left him for dead, probably at the garbage dump.

Miraculously, God revived Paul soon after this and Paul, who was nothing if not courageous, got up and went straight back into the city. On the following day he and Barnabas left Lystra for the last stop on their journey: a city called Derbe.

Taking the chronology of Paul’s life as given to us by the Bible, it must have been during this first journey, when all these crazy things happened in Lystra, that Timothy’s grandmother Lois was converted to the Christian faith. We read about her in 2 Timothy 1:5. Not long after that, Timothy’s mother, Eunice, was also converted.

Since it was during the very next mission trip that Paul received Timothy as his disciple, it was probably the case that Timothy was a young man in Lystra when Paul and Barnabas had originally caused a stir. If Timothy did not actually see Paul get stoned, he would have at least heard about it from his mother Eunice and grandma Lois. But that is not all he would have heard from his mother and grandmother. 2 Timothy 3:15 tells us that from Timothy’s childhood he had been taught the Scriptures of the Old Testament, which, as Paul says, “are able to make a person wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” — that, by the way, is a remarkable statement about the Old Testament, in addition to being strong evidence of the fruit of Paul’s ministry.

And what an encouragement all of this must have been for Paul. During his first pass through the city Lois was converted and her daughter Eunice followed suit. And then sometime between then and his second visit to the city, these women were busy teaching and encouraging young Timothy in the Scriptures, and using them to point him to Jesus. Then when Paul came through town again, he met this godly young man who was a kind of “spiritual grandchild” to him. That must have been a great moment for Paul.

Upon this second visit, Paul recruited Timothy to join him. No doubt, Paul’s decision was guided in part by the strong recommendations of other believers from Lystra and Iconium who respected Timothy (Acts 16:1-3). Timothy was then set apart by the local elders in a service in which Paul himself participated, and which he alluded to in both 1 Timothy 4:14 and 2 Timothy 1:6. From there Timothy accompanied Paul and became his most trusted and faithful companion in the ministry.

Together Paul and Timothy planted churches in Philippi, Thessalonica and Berea. In addition, on subsequent journeys they ministered to previously established churches. On these subsequent journeys, they sometimes ministered together and sometimes ministered separately, as Paul would from time to time send Timothy to take care of a particular church on his own.

It is obvious from Paul’s writings that he depended a great deal upon Timothy, especially when there was a crisis. And, contrary to some viewpoints that Timothy was a rather shy, timid and fearful fellow, it appears that Timothy must have been quite a strong and courageous person. Any comments that Paul made to him about fear and timidity are not a reflection of something lacking in Timothy (e.g., 2 Tim. 1:7), but are simply a reflection of how very difficult and intimidating some of the situations were. They were so intimidating that even one as mature, faithful, trustworthy and courageous as Timothy would struggle.

One of those churches to which Paul sent Timothy was the one in Corinth, which was an absolute train wreck of a congregation. Another congregation to which Timothy was sent was that in Thessalonica, which was no picnic either. Timothy was also sent to Philippi where, among other things, there were two women who were struggling with one another. And he was sent to Ephesus as well, where he was ministering when he received these letters from Paul. Clearly, Paul counted on Timothy to be a strong and faithful companion and leader in ministry.

The General Purpose of 1 Timothy

After thinking for a bit about the relationship between Paul and Timothy, we need to ask why Paul sent this letter to Timothy while the latter was pastoring the Ephesian congregation. What was Paul’s reason for writing? Thankfully, the answer to that question is not too difficult to find. Paul stated it fairly plainly in 1 Timothy 3:14-15, where he said that he was sending this letter “so that, if [Paul was] delayed, [Timothy] may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God.”

These words are quite telling since, in fact, one of the main problems in the Ephesian church was the “behavior” of some people among them, specifically the behavior of certain false teachers who were promoting all sorts of crazy ideas, and thereby unsettling the whole congregation. And this explains why there is such an emphasis in this letter on the matter of leadership. In this situation where false teaching and its effects were all around, it was vitally important for Paul to promote the good order and functioning of the church by instructing Timothy regarding both the false teachers and good leadership.

So, as we examine the contents of the letter, we find that they tend to gravitate around this main idea of promoting the good order and functioning of the church of God. One way that Paul addressed this subject was by instructing Timothy to stop the false teachers, as well as to deal with the false ideas they were teaching. Doing that meant being very careful in choosing and setting apart good leaders who would not go the way of the false teachers. It also meant addressing issues like how believers are to take care of and treat one another. All these things and more can be found in Paul’s promotion of the good order and functioning of the church of God through his disciple Timothy. That, in a nutshell, is what I believe this letter is about.