Persecution

Yu, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. But evil men and seducers chatl wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. A.V.

Aye, and all who will to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. But bad man and impostors will advance ever to the worse, deceiving and being deceived. From his own experiences of trial, and also of divine 2 Tim. iii. deliverance, the Apostle turns again to Timothy and 12, 13. the thorny path in front of him. The two verses before The Personal us are general in their terms, but we can hardly doubt Bo Maee that they are directed specially to Timothy’s needs and intended first and most to animate Timothy’s troubled and discouraged heart. To him particularly the general truth was to come home that persecution, in some form and in some measure, must touch the life which is true to the Lord Jesus Christ; this prospect he must personally look in the face, even till his spirit should rise to meet it by a new contact of faith with the blessed Master and His will and power. Then also to Timothy particularly the fact was to come home, with a solemn consolation, that the propagandists of error and delusion around him, whatever might be their success in beguiling unwary and restless souls, were on their way to that tremendous failure which finally awaits all wanderings from God. They were themselves victims as well as leaders, ‘deceived’

2 Tim. iii.
T2153;

The Permanent Significance. as well as ‘deceiving’; and the ultimate issue of their assertions and their efforts could only be the discovery of their miserable mistake, as the delusion worked itself out to its moral catastrophe. Let the ‘man of God,’ strong in the consciousness of the holy sanity and truthfulness of his commission, regard them, even in their successes, with almost as much compassion as antagonism. ‘Firm on the rock and strong in Christ,’ let him take up the day’s burthen of persecution, ‘just for to-day,’ and let him also be patient, ‘just for to-day,’ over the problem of the successes of the ‘deceived deceiver.’ Meanwhile for ourselves the message, in its general terms, has an abiding significance. In our day also, and in some respects singularly in it, there is need of all the recollections which can keep the Christian quiet and hopeful under the trial of the apparent triumph of alien teachings. In the field of religious thought, never more than now, it would seem as if almost any form of aberration from the apostolic Gospel, or of contradiction to it, could get a hearing. ‘Many of the disciples go back, and walk no more with’ (Joh. vi. 66) the teacher who is so antiquated as to ‘know nothing but Jesus Christ, and Him crucified’ (1 Cor. ii. 2), so that such a teacher often needs solemnly to reaffirm to himself, not at all in a narrow or ‘obscurantist’ fashion, but in a deep fidelity, the unalterable truth of Christ, just in order that more persistently, and also more patiently, more kindly, he may keep his footing there and bear his witness thence. Nor seldom will he need particularly to remember those last words of the verses before us — ‘ being de-Persecution

cewed.’ They will help him to think not less gravely 2 Tim. iii. but more gently, prayerfully, and with desires full of 12, 13. love, even about those who may seem most active and most capable in some mission of spiritual delusion. Then further, the sternly faithful assertion of ver. 12 Persecution. is a message for us also in our day. Somehow, in some measure, ‘ persecution’ is still one natural incident of the fully Christian life. Let no unbalanced words be said about it. There is indeed another side. ‘When a man’s ways please the Lord, He maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him’ (Prov. xvi. 7); a truth largely illustrated in the Christian biography of all times. And the principle of our verse here touches different lives in indefinitely different degrees; no attentive observer can doubt that many and many a loving and humble disciple, called to lead a quiet life before the Lord in the ‘sequestered vale,’ ‘serves his generation’ with faithful diligence, and passes at last to rest, encountering scarcely one perceptible collision on the way. But all this leaves untouched the settled certainty that there lies an eternal difference, nay an eternal antithesis, between the ideal of ‘the world,’ that is to say of all around us which does not love God, and the ideal of the man or woman who ‘knows Christ, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings’ (Phil. iii. 10). And antithetical ideals, once brought together, must collide. And the collision, under the present order of things, must mean, for the disciple, pain. It may be the pain of sword or of fire. It may be the pain of neglect, reproach, slander, satire, obstruction. But somehow, and in some measure, the shock and the stress will come.

2 Tim. iii.
14, 15.
‘Stand fast.’

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