Timothy and His Position

Ovr reflections thus far have led us to recall the darkness, the awfulness, of the probable time and conditions of the writing of the Epistle, as they regarded the Writer. We may follow the same thought out with its Receiver in our view.

What do we know of Timothy, as he stood then in face of life and labour, of duty and sorrow? His name is abundantly familiar to us from the Acts, and from repeated mentions by St. Paul in his Epistles. The earliest mention comes to us in Acts xvi. 1, where we read of his Gentile father and Jewish mother, the Eunice of this Epistle (i. 5). The latest

‘mention is before us here. From the time when St

Paul first adopted him as his personal missionary helper (say in 51 or 52) till now, when he is the superintending Pastor of the great Ephesian mission, Timothy appears as labouring always in close and endeared connexion with St. Paul, ‘as son with father’ (Phil. ii. 22). Their characters would seem to have exactly tended to draw their hearts and affections together. On the one side was the Apostle, in whom were wonderfully blended a supreme strength of purpose and a far-seeing natural genius with exquisite sensibilities and sympathies and a lovewelcoming heart. On the other side was his spiritual ‘son,’ like him in a devotion, deep as the soul, to the

Timothy and his Position

name and cause of the Lord Jesus, while manifestly unlike him in a character (we cannot mistake it as we trace the fine unconscious touches of allusive description in the Epistles, e.g. 1 Cor. xvi. 10, 11), shy and sensitive even to timidity, anxious in the face of difficult duty, clinging to a stronger personality than his own, born rather to second — with a noble fidelity — than to lead. Such likenesses and such differences would together draw those hearts into a friendship of the tenderest and deepest, when once Christ had made them one. The strong man would find a joy and solace in the devotion to him of the less strong. The younger man and weaker would feel as if the presence, or at least the knowledge of the life and possible presence, of his glorious yet most humanly tender chief constituted the inmost light and power of his being, under God. Joined to each other in the Lord, with that peculiarly strong and holy bond which links the converter to the converted, the helper to the helped, they would need each other, meet each other, bless each other, in a thousand ways.

And now, in the year 66 or 67, what aspect does His dark life take for Timothy? He stands at the darkest 4°” hour of all his day. He has been doing his best for some while to be leader, not follower, under his dear ‘Father’s’ commission. He has been trying, so the First Epistle informs us, to act as ministerial and administrative head of the Ephesian mission with its many daughter-missions around it; a task far less to his soul’s liking, we may be sure, than the happy simplicity of taking and doing, one by one, the orders of a beloved chief. He has had the pain, the strain, the solitary and anxious trouble, for such it would be to him, of standing alone and in the front; tasting the dreariness of a prominence for which he felt no natural gift. This would be a sad experience at any time for a Timothy; but what would it be at a crisis when the Neronian terror grew daily more formidable, and when to be prominent among the hated Christians was to be marked for probable destruction? Then, on the other hand, just then, under just that strain of circumstance, apparently in and from Timothy’s very presence, while he wept an agony of tears (i. 4), St. Paul, who had joined him for a time, was torn from him by the police or soldiers of the persecutor and carried out and away for martyrdom. Who that has the least power to feel through the heart of another does not ache with some sense of that agony as he thinks upon it? It was death in life to a Timothy. The burthened mind and the broken heart were blent into one dreadful consciousness of blind distress. Timothy stood awfully lonely, yet awfully exposed, in face of a world of thronging sorrows. Well might he have been shaken to the root of his faith. He might almost have tasted a drop of that last despair which gives up God and wishes that being could cease to be.

To such a heart, when some sad weeks had passed away, came this Letter, our Second Epistle to Timothy, to pour its mighty sympathies into his sorrow and to bid him be strong again in the living Lord Jesus Christ.

Christian reader, do you know what great grief

Timothy and his Position

means? Do ‘the clouds return after the rain,’ even more heavy than before, upon your lot? ‘The Bible knows all about it.’ Its saints have tasted this cup before you. And now through their pains, and through their long eternal peace, the Book says to you that a great and wonderful joy is on its way

towards you to end the night, ‘coming in the morning.’

The Gospel
in apparent
Peril.