2 Timothy 3:1-9 Difficult Times Are Ahead

2 Timothy 3:1-9 Difficult Times Are Ahead

I don’t know about you, but I have seen many changes in the religious landscape in the last fifteen years, and the changes have been increasing. When I entered the ministry, the Baby Boomers were entering the church. To accommodate them, churches built buildings, built bigger buildings, and made an a la carte approach to ministry: Celebrate Recovery, Singles groups, needs-based ministries like Divorce Care.

Yet over the course of the last fifteen years, the same changes that brought the Baby Boomers to the church also brought other moral ideas contrary to the church. At the same time, the cultural winds shifted as we saw last month. A wave of change within this country (which had already existed in other parts of the world) has changed the way the church is perceived and judged.

The church is not the first point of change in a person’s life. The church is not the place and people of influence like it used to be. The church has lost its salt and light in the general culture. In the past, we used to be the majority opinion. The values of the church (the Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments, the Great Commandment) have been taught as values in families and the nation. These values have been diminished in the last generation. As a result, the church now encounters new difficulties. This passage addresses these difficult times.

The church will encounter difficult times in the “last days.”

“But know this: Difficult times will come in the last days.” (2 Timothy 3:1, HCSB)

From other passages in the New Testament, it is clear that by the ‘last days’ is meant the whole Christian dispensation from the first advent of Christ to his second advent at the winding up of history. For example, Peter, preaching on the day of Pentecost, uses this expression in his quotation from the book of Joel. ‘In the last days, God says, “I will pour out my spirit on all people” ’ (Acts 2:17). Peter could not have applied that quotation to what was happening at Pentecost if it meant the days immediately before Christ’s return. Similarly in Hebrews the writer, speaking of God’s revelation says, ‘… but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son’ (Hebrews 1:2).¹

How difficult will these times be? Paul starts to list off a set of characteristics of people who will make things difficult for the church in the “last days.” The reason things will be difficult is because there will be an age of godlessness.

“For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, without love for what is good, traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to the form of godliness but denying its power. Avoid these people!” (2 Timothy 3:2–5, HCSB)

Godless people are not the lost who want to seek help. These are people who oppose the Gospel and oppose the church. The list starts with “lovers of themselves” and ends with the fact that they are not lovers of God. Romans 1 describes the godlessness that develops into the spiral of wickedness.

“For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth,” (Romans 1:18, HCSB)

Why do we avoid these people?

Godlessness defines this age and the people of this age. Paul tells Timothy to avoid these kind of people. We are not called to oppose them. We are told to avoid them. So if you encounter people who act this godless, you engage in arguments. You avoid them. I know people who try to engage these people online, especially on Facebook. It does no good. You can’t win the argument. It is better to find other formats to show the Gospel.

“For among them are those who worm their way into households and capture idle women burdened down with sins, led along by a variety of passions,” (2 Timothy 3:6, HCSB)

It was from the increasingly large group in society who displayed the preceding characteristics that the false teachers had emerged to plague the church. Their methods were insidious.²

The false teachers would come in to people who were morally weak and infect them with the virus of false faith.

“always learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.” (2 Timothy 3:7, HCSB)

This false faith consisted of learning, but they never would hear the freeing power of the Gospel.

Once more Paul connected false teaching with moral deficiency. Their carnality and immaturity rendered them easy targets for the false teachers (cf. Ephesians 4:14). Out of a so- called “openness to learn” they evidently embraced as a fad whatever new heresy came along. Their problem was that they could not recognize the truth when they saw it. ³

These teachers are compared to the magicians who opposed Moses and Aaron.

“Just as Jannes and Jambres resisted Moses, so these also resist the truth, men who are corrupt in mind, worthless in regard to the faith.” (2 Timothy 3:8, HCSB)

These names are the traditional names of the false magicians who opposed Moses and Aaron. They are not named in the Exodus account. However, rabbinic tradition gives them these names. Their names may mean to oppose and rebel.

Paul alludes to these figures generally in the way that the rabbinic writers did. His readers presumably know the developments surrounding these two characters in tradition.⁴

“But they will not make further progress, for their lack of understanding will be clear to all, as theirs was also.” (2 Timothy 3:9, HCSB)

What lessons do we learn from this passage?

First, bad times are made for good people. That is, when times get tough, good things start happening in our lives. What takes the wrinkles out of the shirt I wear? The heat and pressure of an iron. What turns a lump of coal into a sparkling diamond? Heat and pressure. So, too, I have noticed that the tougher the times—whether it be financially, spiritually, relationally—the more wrinkles are smoothed out, the more the brilliant light of Jesus shines, the more people grow in their walk with God.

Second, good people are made for bad times. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego were three kids who refused to bow the knee to Nebuchadnezzar’s statue. “Throw us into the fiery furnace,” they said. “If God chooses to deliver us, so be it. But if not, that’s okay, too” (see Daniel 3:17, 18). When were Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego seen in this light? When times were dark.

The darker your campus or your office, the easier it will be for you to shine for Jesus Christ. Perhaps it was tougher in some ways in the fifties when everything was white picket fences, home-cooked meals, and Ike. Perhaps it was tougher in some ways to stand out or stand up because the contrast may not have been as great. On the other hand, in these times when things are so perverse and polluted, we can stand out without even trying!⁵