“But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; and that from a babe thou hast known the sacred writings, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.
“Every scripture is inspired of God, and profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction, that is in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, throughly furnished unto every good work.”
There is no question that the words we have just read have a direct application to us at this present time, and that we may take them as a direct exhortation of the Spirit to our souls, as well as a needed instruction with regard to the blessed character of the word of God. We know that these words were addressed especially to Timothy; and Timothy was a man who, unlike Paul or Peter or John or James had, so far as we know, no direct revelation himself from the Lord. The apostles were men who received at firsthand from the Lord, as did the prophets also, and both, in the power of the Spirit, communicated what they received to the church of God. But here was a person who did not himself receive from the Lord; he received what he knew from the apostles, and, therefore, in this respect he corresponds exactly with ourselves, because what we have received of spiritual knowledge we have received from the writings of the apostle and prophets. I am speaking particularly with regard to New Testament truths of course, and therefore the exhortation here applied to him, the obligation that is laid upon him, may very well be taken home to ourselves.
EARLY DECLENSION AND PRESENT DANGER
It is for us to continue, to abide in the things that we have heard. Now we know that this Second Epistle to Timothy contemplates what was a very terrible state of things a state of things which was discerned by the apostle in his day, because the testimony by the early church to the heavenly Christ had been corrupted. The truth was there, but through the inattention of the saints, through their failure in responsibility, error came in and was mixed with the truth. This mixed state of things was foreshadowed; indeed it had already begun when the apostle wrote his First Epistle, and in the Second things had developed from bad to worse. The particular evil is not before me to point out now, nor the particular aspects of that declension and apostasy. But the peculiar difficulty then, as it seems to me, was the difficulty which we all have, a difficulty arising from the fact that wherever we go, wherever we contemplate seriously the things associated with the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we invariably find this one thing—that mixed up with the truth, intimately associated with the truth of God, there is that which is not the truth; and we, if we realize our responsibilities to the Lord, if we realize the danger to our own souls of such a medley, must feel what a grave difficulty this is.
There is no sane person who wishes to poison himself; there is no person who wants deliberately to run into danger; there is no person who desires to corrupt his soul with that which is not of God. But, beloved friends, the danger that we all must feel, either more or less, is this: that we may find ourselves in association with, or imbibing that which we in our simplicity suppose to be of God, and all the while there is that connected with it which is of the enemy, and which tends to ruin the peace and joy of our hearts, and to destroy our personal communion with the Lord Jesus Christ. I suppose we have all to some degree found this.
DELUSION AS TO THE PRESENT DANGER
It is a sad thing that there are persons who are living in what we may call a fool’s paradise, and who go on supposing that everything around us is all well. No, beloved friends, it is not well. A man directly in the world and not professing any allegiance to Christ may cry out, “What is wrong with the world we live in?” He believes it is the very best state of things possible, and everything is proceeding to a perfect felicity. A man of the world may talk like this, but we ought not to deceive ourselves; we ought to face the fact that we are in circumstances of considerable danger. We are usually thoughtful enough about our bodies; we would not risk injury to life or limb. As far as the body is concerned we are very careful, and take all precautions that such a thing as physical vicissitude shall not be. But is it not a fact that the soul is greater than the body? Is it not a fact that the new nature which I have by the Spirit of God, that new thing which is born of God, that this is more precious than my body? Is it not that which God has begotten in me by His word and Spirit, and which enables me to hold communion with the Highest and with Him who is on the right hand of the Highest? And if some error creeps into my heart and robs me of that enjoyment, is it not a danger? It is a danger, for while I have lost present communion, I am in a condition to lose still more; and I am sure you are all with me in feeling that this is a danger to which we are daily and hourly exposed.
SPIRITUAL DESPAIR
There are some persons who are imbued with such a sense of the extraordinary nature of the times in which we find ourselves that they think things are so hopelessly bad that it is not easy to take any precaution whatever. They say, “Let things take their course; let us go forward, and trust to God that all things will come out right in the end.” Now, in preaching the gospel we lay down the truth very emphatically to unbelievers who talk like this. It is the unbeliever who says, “Never mind about the future; let us go on; let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.” But there are believers who, if they do not say the same thing, act in that manner. They say, “All the testimony is gone; the truth is overthrown; it is trodden under foot in our streets; and, therefore, all our responsibility is over, we can do as we please, we shall all get to heaven, and then things will be right.”
Now, beloved friends, such a spirit as this is wrong, absolutely wrong; it is a spirit of downright cowardice, to call it by no worse name. No, the truth is unalterable, and our responsibility with regard to it is unchanged. We are here in the world, and, as we surely know, in this holy book we have a sacred deposit. Did not God’s ancient people esteem the living oracles a great deposit? Was it not to them a matter of national pride that to no other people did God speak with His own voice, and communicate His words? And, beloved friends, as representing the church of God, we have that word just as it was given at the beginning, and ought not we to love it? ought not we to reverence it, and ought not we to seek to be bound and guided by it?
THE CHARGE TO TIMOTHY
Well, now, in the words that are addressed to his son in the faith by the apostle, we have what applied directly to Timothy (vers. 14, 15), and in the second place what was of more general concern (vers. 16, 17). In the first two of the verses Timothy is particularly addressed, but, as we have seen, the words apply to ourselves. The apostle says to him particularly, “But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them, and that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.” Timothy learned from the apostles, and he had learned particularly the doctrine about the church of God, because it was in the apostles’ day that these truths were made known, and the apostle Paul was the specially honored instrument of God to make the revelation known that there was “one new man,” no longer Jew and Gentile, but the church of God united by the Spirit of God to Christ, the living Head in heaven. This and other things the apostle had communicated to Timothy, and Timothy was exhorted to abide in the sense of their origin and nature.
DANGER OF DRIFTING
In other cases we have an exhortation for him and others to hold fast what they had. Well, to do this we require a fund of energy. There is another exhortation to hold forth the word of life. This again requires energy. Here we are told to abide in the things that we have heard; this requires energy too, but energy of a different kind. It is more of the character of what we might call passive resistance, resisting the power of evil which tends to cause us to drift away from the truth. The truth never alters, beloved friends. The truth will never drift away from us, but we may drift away from the truth, and this is our danger. What we knew last year, what we knew yesterday we may even now be departing from: Insensibly we move, at first; the first step is easy and so near the right path that we scarcely hesitate to take it. But having taken it we have not continued in the truth. There was the truth, we had it in our hearts, we enjoyed it, but now we have left it. You all know to what I allude. I am not referring to any particular thing, any one special doctrine of the New Testament more than another, but I am certain of this, that everyone here must have realized in his heart that many things taught in the Scriptures are unquestionably from God. You have had them from the Scriptures, and they have come home with power to your souls. Suppose it to be, for the sake of an example, the truth of the Lord’s coming again. When it first dawned upon our souls that there was a promise here in the Scriptures of the return of the Lord Jesus Christ to this earth, and that His personal advent was imminent, and that we were called to wait for the Son of God from heaven, did not this truth come with a power that laid hold of our hearts and affections and moved our whole beings? We knew that it was of God; we knew that it was not a cunningly-devised fable. How are we to-day? Is it that we have stepped aside from the power of this truth, or are we abiding in the things that we have heard? We are called to abide in Christ; we are called to abide in the doctrine of Christ; indeed, we must abide, beloved friends, in the place and in the associations and in the enjoyment of the truths that God has made known to us.
LEARNING AND ASSURANCE
There is a distinction here which I think we should do well to consider. The apostle says, “Continue thou in the things which thou hast learned, and hast been assured of.” Now this phrase does not at all imply that we study the Scriptures and that we thus come to a mental conclusion that they are true. We must study the Bible in quite a different manner from that in which a man studies science. A man studies science to find out the truth, and anyone that is at all acquainted with the history of science knows that its pathway as we look back is strewn with the wrecks of exploded theories which men have had to abandon. For the moment they fought for their hypotheses with their lives, but time has gone on, other investigators have arisen, and what was believed to be the truth has subsequently been proved to be a false hypothesis.
But, beloved friends, in the word of God we have nothing of this kind. We do not come to the word of God as we come to the tentative theories of a scientific text-book. We come to the word of God as to a Book which is an infallible and unquestionable authority for our souls. We come to it as the word of God; we come to it as a book which has a paramount demand upon our whole persons, and coming to it in this way we receive it by faith; and such a spirit, I take it, is what the assurance means. It is one thing to learn the doctrine of Scripture. There are persons who learn the truth of God almost of necessity. It has been their fortunate circumstance to be in the immediate sphere where the proclamation of God’s special truth as revealed in the New Testament is continually ministered, and so the thing insensibly finds it way into their hearts. Did I say hearts? Let us hope so—into their minds at any rate, and they in this manner become acquainted with New Testament facts and New Testament doctrine. They may have learned the truth in such a way, but I take it the apostle meant much more than this by “assurance.”
You Must indeed first receive the truth in this way. God will not communicate anything to you or to me directly. We cannot expect a vision or a revelation. We have everything complete in the written word—everything that is good for us to know; and we are left in the world to learn these things. But, beloved friends, the question for each of us is just this: in learning scripture have we been fully assured of it, have we laid hold of it with our whole being, has the sum of our affections been concentrated upon the Living Person who is the center and subject of the revelation of God’s holy word?
CHRIST IN THE SCRIPTURES
It is, in point of fact, only the personal Christ that can lay hold of our affections. We do not reverence and worship the Book as a book. We worship the Book because therein is the medium through which we know our Savior and Lord, and coming to him as our Lord we have in the Scriptures His guide-book for us. We have the Book of His commandments, not grievous to us, but still they are His commandments; and He therein conveys His word of authority to us in that sweet and winning tone of love which finds its way into our hearts, beloved friends, and causes us to feel thoroughly assured that we are hearing the voice of the Son of God.
It is thus we are “assured” of the truth of God, and in no other way. And, my beloved friends, it is of no value whatever simply to become acquainted with a set of doctrines, however judiciously they may have been selected for us. We must come to the Scriptures, to the fountainhead of all wisdom, and learn our lessons at the feet of Him who can teach us as no other can. He taught Timothy, but He taught him Christianity through His apostle. The written word was not then, it was then the spoken word, but still it was the word of the Lord. “I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you,” as Paul said. The Corinthians, like all the early saints, had the will of the blessed Lord through the lips of the apostles, but the apostles took care that their personality did not stand between themselves and their Master, and thus those to whom their communications were made were under no delusion at all. They looked through the apostles to the living God, who was giving all things through His servants.
Well, we see that there is the need of this personal assurance in the heart, and, my beloved friends, if you will allow me to say so, I think that the spot where declension invariably begins, where the sense of tiredness with the things of God commences, is invariably in the heart. We then lose our appetite for divine things, and it becomes the more difficult to abide in the things which we have learned.
THE DIVINE ORIGIN OF THE THINGS
The apostle here, in exhorting Timothy to abide, gives two reasons for his continuance. “Knowing of whom thou hast learned them,” is the first. What was the origin of this truth which he had known and was assured of? He had received it by apostolical authority; he received it on the word of the apostle, who had transmitted to him the word and the will of the Lord, and therefore Timothy had a divine warrant for what he believed to be the truth, and this was the reason why he should not depart from it. He was not told to cleave to a system on the ground that it was hoary with antiquity, that it had a splendid retrospect, and could call up miraculous deeds in the past. There was no argument of this kind, no sensual appeal in any way, but the ground was simply this—the authority of the word of the Lord. And, beloved friends, I do not think we need anything further than this to-day. We are in a day of extremest difficulty, and the question, “What is truth?” is the question that is being generally canvassed, both in the world and in Christendom. But we need not to argue about the matter. We have simply to open our ears and learn, by coming to the Scriptures. Here we have the truth from the Lord Himself. Now, having received that word, having had it directly from the Lord Himself through His word, how can we do other than abide in it?
Beloved friends, what shall we say in that day when we must all stand before the judgment-seat of Christ. The Lord has His claim upon us; we are in the world for Him. He has opened our eyes to see a little here and a little there of His revealed truth. But however little it may be it is precious, too precious to surrender; and in view of the fact that we received it from Him what shall we say to Him in the day of account if we have allowed ourselves to slip away from it? It is not that we run away from our duties; it is not that we make a violent effort and simply bolt from our responsibilities. No, beloved friends, but we slide, we move just gradually along in the contrary direction; the soporific influences of the moment creep upon our hearts and cause us to leave the positions assigned us as soldiers of Jesus Christ in the great campaign; and so we become the victims of the great enemy of our souls.
No, it remains that we have to abide in the things which we have heard and been assured of, knowing from whom we have learned them. The theories and views of men can never stand the light of the judgment-seat, but what we have from the Lord we know that He will stand to in that day. If He has told us this or that, we know that He will never charge us with holding it for Him. He has given it to us; it is for us to produce it unsullied in the day that is to come.
[W. J. H.]
(To be continued)