1 Timothy2chapter 2

1 Timothy 2:1-2

first of all: The house of God's first business is prayer, and its first scope is everyone: supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, four words the old writers loved to distinguish, made for all men. Kings and all in authority head the list while Nero holds the throne, so the command was costly the day it was written. The aim is stated modestly, a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty, the church's flourishing sought through the peace of the city.

1 Timothy 2:3-4

The warrant for praying so widely is God's own disposition: he will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth. The scope readings are the old ones, all without exception and all without distinction, every kind of man including kings, and the lines divide as at the election passages, each with its holders. On either reading the verse grounds the widest possible prayer in the Saviour's own will, and the church that stops praying for anyone has left the text.

1 Timothy 2:5-6

one mediator between God and men: The creed is counted on two fingers: one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, his manhood named because a mediator must stand on both sides he joins. He gave himself a ransom for all, antilutron, the price in exchange, the willing self-payment testified in due time. The verse is where Scripture speaks to intercession sought from the departed: the office of mediation is filled and is not shared, and prayer offered to saints or to Mary is contrary to this text; the history of such practice belongs to the church's story, but the text's own teaching is one mediator.

1 Timothy 2:7

Whereunto I am ordained ties Paul's whole office to the ransom just stated: preacher, apostle, and teacher of the Gentiles in faith and verity, the threefold commission he will repeat at 2 Timothy 1:11. The parenthetical oath, I speak the truth in Christ, and lie not, marks how contested that Gentile commission still was. The universal ransom of verse 6 is the ground of a universal mission.

1 Timothy 2:8

lifting up holy hands: Men are to pray every where, the synagogue's fixed places widened to the world, and the posture named is the ancient one, standing with hands spread upward, the attitude carved on the orant figures of the catacombs. The condition is not eloquence but character and temper: holy hands, without wrath and doubting, hands clean of violence and a mind neither quarreling nor disputing. Prayer led by angry men is the first disorder the chapter corrects.

1 Timothy 2:9-10

In like manner extends the same worship concern to the women of the assembly: adornment in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety, the two Greek words naming modesty's inward instinct and its self-command. The negatives, broided hair, gold, pearls, costly array, describe the display wardrobe of wealthy Ephesus, and the alternative is dressed in good works, which becometh women professing godliness. The verse regulates ostentation in worship, not beauty itself, as the parallel at 1 Peter 3:3-4 confirms.

1 Timothy 2:11-12

The first command is the startling one for its century: let the woman learn, a directive the synagogue's stricter voices would not have given, with in silence, hesuchia, meaning the quiet, teachable manner verse 2 asked of the whole church rather than a muzzle. I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority, authentein, a verb found nowhere else in Scripture, is read by many honored teachers across church history as a standing ordinance for the assembly, Derek Prince among those who taught it so in his own careful words, and by others as Paul's ruling for a specific Ephesian disorder, the false teaching of 1:3-7 then spreading through untaught women, a reading the Wesleyan and Pentecostal tradition follows with its long line of women preachers. Both readings are argued from the text by those who hold them, the difference is a difference among brothers, and the verse's own certain ground is that learning comes before teaching for any disciple.

1 Timothy 2:13-14

Paul grounds his ruling in Genesis: Adam was first formed, then Eve, the order of creation, and the woman being deceived was in the transgression, the order of the fall. What the appeal establishes is read with the passage itself: those who hold the standing-ordinance reading take the creation order as a permanent ground, while those who hold the situational reading observe that Eve's deception answers the Ephesian scene of untaught women misled by deceivers, and that Adam, not deceived, sinned with open eyes, which is no credit. Romans 5 lays the race's fall at Adam's door, so neither verse makes the woman the greater sinner.

1 Timothy 2:15

She shall be saved in childbearing has drawn readings for two thousand years, and the Greek carries a definite article, through the childbearing. The candidates stand with their holders: preservation through the perils of childbirth in a life of faith; salvation lived out in the woman's ordinary calling rather than the false teachers' asceticism, which forbade marriage at 4:3; and the reading many older and newer teachers share, that the childbearing is THE birth, the promised Seed of Genesis 3:15 come of the woman. The condition returns to the plural and to the ordinary marks of grace, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.