“Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned” (1 Tim. 1:5). The Apostle’s aim in this whole exhortation to Timothy was love. The charge he was giving Timothy touched the truth of the Gospel; it was, in fact, jealous care for the true doctrine, for only by guarding truth could there be love, and the administration of the economy of God, bringing out the true Christian life.
In the pastoral epistles, “a good conscience” is joined with soundness in “the faith.” Faith is the root; the trunk, a good conscience; the leafage on the branches, a pure heart; and the fruit, charity―love, the bond of all the Christian virtues. This is against the modern notion that if you have what men call charity, you may dispense with faith, indulge in all sorts of mental questionings, and throw loose the whole of the doctrines of Christianity.
But love must have faith―not doubt or questionings―for its root; but most people would have fruit from an imaginary tree. However, the foundation or root is faith (vs. 4), the end or aim is love (vs. 4) ― (Titus 3:15). Contentions are unfavourable to this love.
We have a pure heart also in 2 Tim. 2:22; Titus 1:15. A good conscience, in chapter 3:9; 2 Timothy 1:3; 1 John 3:19. See 1 Timothy 1:19, 4. 1, 2―faith and a good conscience. It is wonderful how faith purifies the heart, and gives a good conscience; and how essential it is above all things to keep a good conscience―a conscience not only once purged by the blood of Christ, but kept good by faith and proper conduct; living in the holding or practice of nothing that one condemns one’s self in, for the conscience thereby gets defiled, and if not purged by honest confession, and the Fatherly forgiveness (1 John 1:9), it may lead to shipwreck of faith (1 Tim. 1:19).
The end and aim of practical teaching should be love out of a pure heart and good conscience, and unhypocritical faith: “Having purified their hearts by faith” (Acts 15:9). “Faith worketh by love” (Gal. 5:6). If love be present in good, unhampered, working order, out of a pure heart, a good conscience, and faith unfeigned, wonders will be wrought by it. A professor without love to God and man is of no manner of use in Christianity; but if love be present in power, the love of Christ constraining, the Christian goes to the discharge of all practical moral duties with vigor and determination. Nothing is a trouble to him; he can do all things through Him that strengtheneth him. But an impure heart or a bad conscience is like a hair in the balance-wheel of a watch; the watch either stops or keeps unreliable time―going by fits and starts.
“From which some having swerved, having turned aside into vain jangling,” &c. From which dispositions or qualities, some having failed or missed their mark―or rather, have not had regard to the proper mark―have turned aside. They have neglected the three sources of love―heart, conscience, and faith—and have run all to intellect or mere mental notions, instead of heart-work. They have turned aside from the aim and end they ought to have ever had before them, to foolish talking (literally), or speaking―viz., the foolish and empty questionings about the law which so fearfully troubled the early Church―wishing to be law-teachers (one word in Greek).
There is nothing more wearisome than to hear or read a man who is not truthfully teaching the Word of God. Faith is not nourished with its divine “words,” or exercised in sound doctrine, and therefore, not in exercise, it grows not; and can find, in fact, nothing to live by, under such a foolish-word ministry. Law-teachers to this day do not understand the subject they discuss, nor the things concerning which they make affirmations. No man that wishes to put Christians under law is to be trusted in his exposition of Holy Scripture, for, not knowing Christianity, and not holding “the form of sound words” he must be hazy and unintelligent on every point of doctrine. If he were intelligent, he would desire to be a Gospel-teacher― not a law-teacher. He would be wide awake enough to know what o’clock it is dispensationally; that the sun of Christianity is striking the dial at twelve noon, and that the shadows of law had fled away at its rising eighteen hundred years ago.
Besides law-teachers are not honest men, speaking from conviction, for when a man does that he speaks lucidly. It is difficult to make a lying story appear coherent; a thing that is straightforward can be lucidly put, and it carries conviction; but a wrong teaching does not hang together in the preacher’s mind or discourse, and of course the hearers get only vain, jangling―mere words―foolish and empty words. There is a fundamentally right state of spiritual and moral health needed (as in vs. 6) for right teaching. It is from the want of unfeigned faith and a good conscience―a conscience not only purified by the blood of Christ, but in harmony with the divine mind, and will, and truth, and a pure heart―that “vain jangling” proceeds.
They say the Judaisers cannot be referred to, for they would know all about the law. But they do not, to this day. Take any man who would put Christians under the law as a rule of life, in opposition to God’s Word (Rom. 6:14), and he makes a perfect jumble of both law and Goel. He does not know what he says, nor whereof he affirms; he cannot make the two things square; he does not know what he would be at; he cannot make such legalism harmonize with Christianity. “A good teacher ought to be intelligent, and at the same time well-informed,” says Bengel, but a law-teacher is always steeped in the grossest ignorance of great foundation truths.
These law-teachers, or men who wished to be so, were still in the Church, or else Timothy would have had no authority over them; but Paul left him at Ephesus to put them down, or keep them from getting up their heads. Much need is there of a few Timothy’s in our day in these lands! The teaching of the law with the Gospel confuses sinners regarding what to believe to have peace with God; the mixing of law for the life of the Christian confuses as to practical living, and lowers and enfeebles Christian walk.
At creation God sent the planets straight into space when they proceeded from His creative hand, and by the great central attraction of the sun, they have kept moving round him ever since, in the most perfect order, not by any written law, but by the very law of their being—a law within; and so Christians may sing―
“Free from the law,
Oh happy condition,”
and though free, “not under law but under grace,” they are the only people who, by love, give “the fullness of the law” (Rom. 13:10) “the righteous requirement (δικαἱωμα) of law is fulfilled in us who walk, not after the flesh, but after the Spirit” (Rom. 8:4). Man’s plan for ensuring holiness is to put Christians under law; God’s plan is to prove in the most careful manner that “we are not under the law but under grace” ―not in the flesh to which law applied, but in the Spirit, where law can never come. Law never yet made a bad man good or a good man better, but grace both saves and sanctifies (Titus 2). The holiest saints are the people who have the deepest consciousness of their place and portion in Christ, and the strongest sense of being in the full favor of God, and led of the Spirit, who implants and develops graces “against which there is no law.”