The Avoidance of Strife

Bot foolish and unlearned questions avoid, knowing that they do gender strifes. And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient; in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth; and that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will. A.V.

But those foolish and unchastened enquiries decline, knowing that they beget fightings; and the Lord’s bondservant must not be a fighter, but gentle towards all men, explanatory, forbearing under wrong; in meekness correcting those contentiously disposed, in the hope that God may sometime give them repentance, leading to a full knowledge of truth, and that they may wake up and escape out of the devil’s trap, held willing captives henceforth by him who sets them free to do His will, the will of God. Tue closing words of this passage have demanded, 2 Tim. ii. as the reader will have seen, a certain paraphrase. 23-26. As Greek they are not easy, and we are obliged to pied gga turn for help in our rendering to the general context and to the probabilities of thought. Upon the whole the grammar favours our referring the ‘captivity, or literally, the ‘taking alive,’ to the happy surrender of the once-erring soul to the instruction and guidance of ‘the Lord’s bondservant. And on many grounds we may be sure that the ‘will’ spoken of in the last words is the will of God, not that of His and our great enemy.

The Apostle developes here in most interesting Unchastened detail one main instruction for Timothy’s exercise of Enquiries.

2 Tim. ii.
23-26.

How to decline Strife. self-forgetting patience, love, and peace. Around him, ‘in the air’ of his place and time, were agitated certain ‘ enquiries,’ tempting enough to an unwise curiosity but really far worse than useless; ‘unchastened enquiries, ‘undisciplined,’ almost ‘uneducated ’ — so the Greek may be rendered. These beyond doubt were attempts by sheer speculation to pierce secrets which only revelation can open; ‘enquiries’ into such problems as the origin of evil, and the origin of finite being; a type of thought to which we have had allusion already, in ver. 16 of this chapter, and also in the First Epistle (1 Tim. i. 4). Very noteworthy is the Apostle’s description of the thing: ‘unchastened,’ ‘undisciplined.’ A crude ignorance lay at the heart of such would-be wisdom; ignorance of limits and prohibitive conditions where data cannot be other than fragmentary; above all, ignorance of the awful realities of sin, and of the dread holiness of God, and of the consequent urgency of the problem of man’s salvation from guilt and from moral slavery. The ‘school of thought’ in question lacked one supreme Educator within it, the Holy Spirit of God, who convinces the world of sin, and who glorifies Christ to the soul so convinced, and to it alone. His teaching will blunt no intellectual faculty; nay, it will develope the whole mental world. But it will give a wisdom and humility of direction which will ‘decline’ the alluring, but never satisfying and never sanctifying, ‘ enquiry.’

Timothy is to ‘decline’ taking these problems up as a mere disputant. He may be right to inform

The Avoidance of Strife

himself as to opinion, but he is not to ‘fight’ the 2 Tim. ii. ‘enquirers’ — in their own arena. For he, ‘the 23-26. Lord’s bondservant,’ is not a philosopher but a messenger, not a theorist but an ambassador, carrying a commission holy, unalterable, divine. In his relations with alien thought he is bead therefore, most and a to keep true in spirit to his Master. The ‘independent thinker’ is to find him invariably dependent upon a Person who is, for him, absolute Truth and absolute Authority. He is not indeed to make a virtue of ignorance, or a merit of unintelligence. He is to be ‘explanatory,’ ‘apt to teach’; to take care that his holy message is delivered with all the reasonableness of one who has really learned at the feet of Christ, and who can sympathize with perplexity, and who understands something of his own limitations. But above all he is ‘not to be a fighter,’ in the sense of loving a mere mental duel for its own sake, or in the yet worse sense of loving his own way and will in the world of thought for his own sake. He is to bring to bear on strange and non-believing theories that influence so sublimely alien to them, the chastened, humbled, beautiful patience of one who forgets himself in his Lord, and in his brother. He is to recollect that there must be a moral element somewhere in the rejection of the eternal Love and Redemption, so it be truly presented; that man’s mysterious enemy has to do with such a rejection somehow, through that deep influence which the will can exercise upon the intellect. And that element of difficulty will never be rightly handled by the crude combative spirit;

2 Tim. ii. nay, that spirit will only call all the evil out into a

23-20.

blinder prejudice. Rather, the victory must be sought along the lines of love and sympathy, which grace will delight to follow. Then happy shall be the ‘bondservant’ who sees his once misguided brother ‘wake from the fumes’ of moral illusion; set free, but instantly again a captive; self-yielded, with a strange new joy, to the hands of his loving emancipator; blessing him, and rejoicing to become with him the ennobled vassal of the will of God.