2 Timothy3chapter 3

2 Timothy 3:1-5

Perilous is chalepos, the word used of the Gadarene demoniacs, times hard to bear, and the catalogue that follows runs nineteen marks from lovers of their own selves to lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God, self-love at the head and God displaced at the foot. The last days span the whole age between the advents in the apostles' usage, the degeneracy recurring and ripening toward the end the site's posture expects. The summit of the list is religious: having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof, morphosis without dunamis, and the command is from such turn away, for the form without the power is the danger inside the church, not outside it.

2 Timothy 3:6-7

The method is infiltration, they creep into houses, and the prey is described with a diminutive, gunaikaria, little women, not womankind but a particular sort the Ephesian error had already exploited, laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, guilt and appetite making them governable. Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth is the portrait's saddest line, perpetual instruction with no arrival, epignosis never reached. The verse condemns the predators and pities the prey; the exposition keeps that order.

2 Timothy 3:8-9

as Jannes and Jambres: The names are not in Exodus: Jannes and Jambres are the magicians of Pharaoh's court as Jewish tradition named them, in the Targum of Jonathan on Exodus 7:11 and in the Damascus Document among others, and Paul uses the received names as common knowledge, one of Scripture's own touches of the tradition literature. As they withstood Moses by counterfeiting his signs, so the Ephesian deceivers resist the truth by imitation rather than denial, men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith. The comfort is verse 9, they shall proceed no further, for the counterfeiters' folly was manifest when the sign failed, as theirs also was.

2 Timothy 3:10-12

Against the counterfeit stands an open life: thou hast fully known my doctrine, manner of life, purpose, faith, longsuffering, charity, patience, nine items with teaching first and character inseparable from it. The persecutions named, Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, are the Acts 13-14 mission through Timothy's own home country; the boy from Lystra saw the apostle stoned and left for dead there, and out of them all the Lord delivered me is testimony Timothy can check against memory. The conclusion is a promise wearing the grammar of a warning: all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution, normal Christianity, not its failure.

2 Timothy 3:13-14

Two trajectories diverge: evil men and seducers, goetes, the enchanter's word, shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived, the deceiver's own descent into his lie. But continue thou, the letter's steady verb, in the things learned and assured of, and the ground given is personal, knowing of whom thou hast learned them, the plural of the oldest witnesses reaching back past Paul to Lois and Eunice. Stability in the last days is not novelty but continuance.

2 Timothy 3:15

From a child, brephos, from infancy, Timothy has known the holy scriptures, hiera grammata, the sacred writings of the synagogue, the Old Testament taught him by a Jewish mother and grandmother whose faith 1:5 honors by name. Those scriptures are able to make thee wise unto salvation, but the wisdom runs through a door, through faith which is in Christ Jesus; the Old Testament saves by leading to the Messiah it promised. The verse is the letter's tribute to the Jewish nurture of the church's next generation.

2 Timothy 3:16-17

The word is theopneustos, God-breathed: all scripture is breathed out by God, the strongest statement of inspiration in the Bible, and the rendering question is old and honest, all scripture is God-breathed and profitable against every God-breathed scripture is also profitable, with the first reading carrying most translators and the doctrine standing on either. What Scripture is breathed for follows in four offices, doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness, teaching what is true, exposing what is false, restoring what is broken, training what is young. The end is a workman equipped, that the man of God may be perfect, artios, complete, throughly furnished unto all good works, and 2 Peter 3:16 already ranks Paul's own letters with the other scriptures this verse describes.