A Sigh and a Longing

Do thy diligence to come shortly unto me: for Demas hath

forsaken me, having loved this present world, and is departed unto Thessalonica; Crescens to Galatia, Titus unto Dalmatia. A.V.

Do thy best to come to me quickly; for Demas hath left me in the lurch, loving this present life, and hath gone away to Thessalonica. Crescens hath left for Galatia, Titus for Dalmatia.

2 Tim. iv. We pass at this point into a new paragraph of 9, 10. the Epistle and more immediately approach the close. From the contemplation of his blissful future

the old Apostle returns to the persons and things of

his surroundings. He has still abundant suggestion

and message for our hearts, but along a different line.

A Group The paragraph is full of names, and three of of Names. them are grouped within these two verses. Of these three Demas and Titus have met us in earlier Epistles, Demas in Colossians (iv. 14) and

Philemon (24), Titus repeatedly, and in important connexions, in 2 Corinthians (e.g. vii. 6,

13, 14, viii. 6, 16, 23) and in Galatians (ii. 1, 3).

Crescens is a new name. All three appear here as

friends and followers who have lately left St.

Paul, and one, Demas, as having left him under the

saddest circumstances, drawn or driven away by

‘love of this present life’ (aién); that is to

say apparently by a preference of temporal to

eternal interests, by a sheer dread of sacrificing

A Sigh and a Longing

liberty and life for the unseen things. If I 2 Tim. iv. interpret the words aright, Demas was not what 9, 10. Bunyan takes him to have been, in that dark episode of the silver mine at the hill of Lucre; a covetous man, set upon making a fortune, a Balaam, hankering to his soul’s ruin after a house full of silver and gold. Rather he was a man smitten with cowardice in that reign of terror; he went away to Thessalonica (where surely he would find warmer and truer disciples than himself, to put him to shame and perhaps to save him) simply to be out of the way of the dungeon and the scaffold. Of the reasons why Crescens, and why Titus, went away we know nothing, and it is impossible not to ask whether St. Paul, however faintly, does not sigh over them also. But assuredly he does not group them definitely with Demas; the structure of the sentences deprecates that thought. And the Corinthian Epistle seems to put Titus before us as so distinctly strong and true a Christian and missionary that we are at least loth to think that his withdrawal here had any unworthy motive behind it.

We lay the three names aside with the single further remark that they offer, standing as they do here, one of the numberless internal evidences to the genuineness of the Epistle. We may confidently say that no old-world fabricator would have written down such names at all with just so much incident about them — and no more. The inimitable note of fact and of nature is in the words.

But now, whatever has occasioned these three The removals, the three men are gone, and the human ce

2 Tim. iv. heart of this loving and love-asking being, St. Paul,

9, 10.

feels the absences profoundly. The broken circle lets in upon his tired and wounded heart something of ‘the cold of space,’ the dread pain of solitude.

Is it inconsistent that he should feel thus, and should betray his sadness with the sigh which we almost hear uttered from the page? Has he not just written glorious words about the finished course and the coming crown? What does it matter that he should be left a little lonelier than usual, for a short final hour, just outside the door of Home? Ah, it is the old story of the manifold heart of man, never for one moment denaturalized by grace. He who sighs does yet victoriously believe; and the believer, because he is true man, does yet sigh. Christ the Lord is with him, and he is about to be face to face with Christ. But he misses the familiar mortal faces; and ah, he sorrows over a friend’s unfaithfulness to both Christ and him.

Above all, in that warm and yearning humanity of his, he longs for his dearest Timothy. The dawning of the heavenly rest still leaves him intensely anxious to see that beloved face once more. They will be together with the Lord, ere very long. Nevertheless, ‘do thy best to come to me quickly,’ here in Rome, here on earth, here in the body.

We shall never know for certain whether Timothy came, and came in time. And for long ages of bliss now Paul and he have been together. But the pleading call stands here immortal on the Scripture page, to witness to the place of the human heart in the life of faith.