The three-year Lectionary that many Catholics and Protestants hear in public worship gives us a great variety of Holy Scripture.

Yet, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

My series Forbidden Bible Verses — ones the Lectionary editors and their clergy omit — examines the passages we do not hear in Church. These missing verses are also Essential Bible Verses, ones we should study with care and attention. Often, we find that they carry difficult messages and warnings.

Today’s reading is from the English Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK) with commentary by Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.

2 Timothy 3:1-5

Godlessness in the Last Days

3 But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. ² For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, ³ heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, ⁴ treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, ⁵ having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.

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Last week’s post discussed Paul’s instructions to Timothy on conducting himself with gentleness, ‘patiently enduring evil’. The verses preceding those — 2 Timothy 2:20-21 — talk about both honourable and dishonourable people within the Church.

Timothy was in Ephesus, trying to rid that church of the dangerous false teachers that had arisen in the congregation.

Yesterday’s post covered the first two verses in this reading and the dangers that the sins listed, beginning with self-love, posed not only to Ephesus but still pose to the Church as a whole.

Today’s post will cover the remaining three verses.

Paul lists more types of sinners that were prevalent not only when Timothy was in Ephesus in AD 66 but also today: heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good (verse 3).

The one that stands out for me there is ‘unappeasable‘. In any grievance making the news cycle in the Western world, what we notice is that when people ask for an inch, they try to take a mile — and often succeed.

Matthew Henry’s commentary analyses the sins in verse 3 (emphases mine):

See what a corruption of nature sin is, how it deprives men even of that which nature has implanted in them for the support of their own kind; for the natural affection of parents to their children is that which contributes very much to the keeping up of mankind upon the earth. And those who will not be bound by natural affection, no marvel that they will not be bound by the most solemn leagues and covenants. They are truce-breakers, that make no conscience of the engagements they have laid themselves under. 7. The times are perilous when men are false accusers one of another, diaboloi—devils one to another, having no regard to the good name of others, or to the religious obligations of an oath, but thinking themselves at liberty to say and do what they please, Ps 12 4. 8. When men have no government of themselves and their own appetites: not of their own appetites, for they are incontinent; not of their own passions, for they are fierce; when they have no rule over their own spirits, and therefore are like a city that is broken down, and has no walls; they are soon fired, upon the least provocation. 9. When that which is good and ought to be honoured is generally despised and looked upon with contempt. It is the pride of persecutors that they look with contempt upon good people, though they are more excellent than their neighbours.

John MacArthur addresses these sins one by one, beginning with ‘heartless’, which is ‘unloving’ in his translation:

In verse 3 he uses the word “unloving,” astorgos. It basically has to do with natural affection. It’s not love in the sense of agapaō, which is the love of will, choosing to love. It’s not love in the sense of phileō, which is a warm affection, even including a kiss. It’s the love that is natural to the family. It is a natural movement of the soul like gravity, or some other force of our nature, to love the people that are a part of our family. It’s to love someone who is bound up with us in relationships. It’s a quiet and abiding feeling within us that we are closely bound up with and take satisfaction in the relationships of our family, so says Benjamin B. Warfield in an old Princeton theological review in 1918. It’s family love.

But the people in the church here who are a danger are unloving. What does that mean? They don’t even have natural affection. They are heartless to people who are a part of the intimate circle of their life. It’s talking about a heartlessness at the most natural level of love. It is not natural for me to love all of you. It is not natural for me to love God. It is not natural for me to love the unlovely. But it is natural for me to love my family. That’s part of the residual image of God within me. It’s not part of my fallenness, it’s part of the residual image of God that I carry, that I bear.

But when men go bad, they go bad at the deepest level, and they don’t even love those that are naturally lovable and to be loved, the family. And so what do you have in our society? Women abusing their children, men abusing their children, battering their children, beating up their children, burning their children with an iron, drowning their children in a toilet or a bathtub – the utter absence of natural love. Why? Because they are consumed with self-love, and self-love crowds everybody out, it doesn’t matter who they are. And if that kid keeps screaming when I’m trying to watch the soap opera, I’m going to drown that kid, because it’s me that matters. That’s the legacy of self-love. That’s more of the stuff coming down the sewer pipe. Heartlessness.

And then you have husbands that beat up their wives where the natural bond of intimate affection between a man and a woman should secure against that … heartlessness, heinous sins of people consumed with loving themselves; and if you get in their way, you have no place. That’s why there’s such alienation between parents and children, between husbands and wives, between children and parents, in families even, extended families. That’s a danger to the church, because we are now inheriting in the church this kind of mentality, this kind of attitude. And if we keep propagating self-love, we’re going to keep getting people who really want to do away with anybody who stands in the way of their fulfillment.

Then we come to ‘unappeasable’, or ‘irreconcilable’. MacArthur views this as Henry does. Think of special interest groups here, which are also infiltrating the Church:

The next word he uses is “irreconcilable;” a synonym for that would be “implacable.” That means a person who doesn’t respond to an appeal. No matter what you say to them, they’re unmovable, they will not change, they will not alter. “This is what I said, this is what I mean. And I don’t care what you say, I’ll never be any different. I’ll never change, I’m not interested in it.” This is a person who is bitter, a person who is so full of hate, that he never wants to make things right.

It is even used to refer to a truce-breaker. It doesn’t matter what agreements he’s made, what vows, what promises, he will disregard them for his own personal desires. You cannot go to him and appeal for harmony. You cannot go to her and appeal for resolution. There is conflict that is inevitable and ongoing, because they are implacable, they are irreconcilable. They cannot be made to agree, to give in, to compromise, to adjust, to think another person’s thoughts, to give themselves away on behalf of someone else; they just won’t do it.

Why? Because they love themselves. And the supreme expression of self-love is that I will do what I will do, and there is no court of appeal; I will think what I will think, and there is no court of appeal. This is so self-centered, so hard, that literally the person is cut off from every other relationship …

And by the way, the word “irreconcilable” knows nothing of forgiveness and cares nothing about forgiveness. It’s massive egoism.

That is so true!

There is the sin of being ‘slanderous’; note that the Greek root refers to the devil:

Out of self-love also flows another sin, “malicious gossips, malicious gossips,” diaboloi, slanderers; it’s the word for “the devil;” and every time you maliciously gossip, you take on the character of the devil.

I think of that in my own life and have for a number of years, that when you slander someone else or abuse them, you are really acting in a satanic fashion. You’re taking on the character of your former father, not God. For Satan is a slanderer, he speaks evil against all who represent God in Christ. He is malicious, he attacks with venom. And that’s one of the sins that comes out of self-love. Self-love is malicious toward anyone that stands in its way as it pursues its satisfaction. Its evil heart’s desire compels it down the path; and if you’re in the way, you’re going to be destroyed.

Malicious gossip also is a reflection of self-love, because it enables someone to push himself up by virtue of pushing everyone him down. And so people who are deeply in love with themselves will destroy everybody around them in order to push themselves up. To appear better than they are in their own eyes and in the eyes of others, they make everyone else look worse. Again, this comes into the church. Malicious, slanderous, diabolical gossip, spawned out of hearts that are controlled by self-love; people speaking evil against other people, gossiping wickedly against them. This is of great danger in the church.

And believe me, the world in which we live is into this. I mean, the attacks are unbelievable in our world. I’d hate to be out there. I mean, the attacks are unbelievable. It seems like everyone is fair game, and everything wicked that can be said about anyone ought to be said and put on the front page of some paper. Malicious, sort of self-justification acts of condemning other people. And that mentality can get into the church; and instead of being loving and gracious and kind and tender hearted and forgiving, we become as malicious as the world around us.

I never thought I would see the day when this would happen in the church that I attend. It involved a shocking — and false — verbal accusation against a prominent person in the congregation. The person who made it eventually left, thankfully, but not without taking that accusation to a high ecclesiastical level, preventing the normal functioning of our church for several months. I inadvertently met the accuser one day near the end of the ordeal: nice as pie, well-presented, giving an instant level of credibility — as do all deceivers.

The next sin is lack of self-control. MacArthur continues:

It’s an adjective used only here, akratēs. It really means that they just don’t have any inhibitions. They’re just slaves to passion, unrestrained lust. The noun form of this word appears in Matthew 23:25 and 1 Corinthians 7:5; it has to do with an uninhibited desire. I mean, when they get power in their eyes, they just blow over everybody in the path. They get their goal; they can’t check their ambition, they can’t check their compulsion, they can’t check their passion. They’re just driving. The danger to the church, men of passion controlled by that passion, that desire that lust; men and women who are compelled without control to accomplish their goals.

We also have brutality:

… he adds the word “brutal” in verse 3. That word basically means “savage like a wild beast,” that’s used to speak of a wild beast that rips and tears and violently destroys. “Ruthless” might be another way to translate it, “merciless,” “without sensitivity or sympathy.” Put those three words together: malicious gossips without control who are brutal.

You have people who feel that the deepest expression of their self-love must be made known, and so they maliciously attack. They attack other people without control and without restraint, fulfilling their own desires, and they do it brutality. Savage, ruthless, merciless, no sensitivity, no sympathy.

Beloved, this is the world around us, there’s no question about it. And I see it like never before encroaching upon the church, with people ripping and tearing and shredding others for their own expression of self-love and pride. And then when we come along and try to justify self-love, what a terrible disservice.

MacArthur delivered this sermon in 1987. Times have not changed. In fact, they have grown worse, as Jesus said they would in Matthew 13, when He explained the mystery era not revealed in the Old Testament, the era of the Church:

Readings for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity — Year A — and exegesis on the Gospel, Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 (July 16, 2023, Parable of the Sower and significance of Matthew 13)

Readings for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity — exegesis on the Gospel, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 (July 23, 2023)

Readings for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity, Year A — exegesis on the Gospel, Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52, part 1 (July 30, 2023)

Readings for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity, Year A — exegesis on the Gospel, Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52, part 2 (July 30, 2023)

Readings for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity, Year A — exegesis on the Gospel, Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52, part 3 (July 30, 2023)

The final sin in the third verse is ‘not loving good’:

Then he mentions “haters of good, haters of good.” Imagine, no love for anything that’s beneficial to others. They are sunk to the animal level, yet remain sufficiently human to at least recognize what is good so they can hate it. They’re brutal-like beasts, but at least they’re smart enough as men to know what’s good so they can hate it. Unbelievable that people would get to the place where they actually hate what is good, where they hate what is righteous, where they attack what is righteous.

You know, I see in the church today an attack on righteousness. I see an attack on goodness. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,” says Isaiah 5:20. If you’re teaching the truth and preaching the truth and trying to live godly, you’ll be attacked, you’ll be attacked. If you’re teaching some false teaching and living a dissolute life, you seem to be able to flourish in some quarters. There is an attack mentality that hates good, and it’s a result of self-love. Obviously if you’re led by self-love, you’re going to hate the good things; you’re going to love what that self-love pursues, and that will be what is evil.

If you try to teach scriptural truths, you’ll either be drummed out of an Anglican seminary or, if you do see your ordination day, you won’t be allowed to even be a deacon in the Church of England. The Revd Calvin Robinson had to join GAFCON, a global association of traditional Anglican churches, in order to obtain his first assignment as a deacon in London.

Paul then lists the next set of sinners, those who are treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God (verse 4).

Henry provides this analysis:

When men are generally treacherous, wilful, and haughty, the times are perilous (v. 4)— when men are traitors, heady, high-minded. Our Saviour has foretold that the brother shall betray the brother to death and the father the child (Matt 10 21), and those are the worst sort of traitors: those who delivered up their Bibles to persecutors were called traditores, for they betrayed the trust committed to them. When men are petulant and puffed up, behaving scornfully to all about them, and when this temper generally prevails, then the times are perilous. 11. When men are generally lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God. When there are more epicures than true Christians, then the times are bad indeed. God is to be loved above all. That is a carnal mind, and is full of enmity against him, which prefers any thing before him, especially such a sordid thing as carnal pleasure is.

MacArthur has more, beginning with ‘treacherous’, also mentioning, as Henry does, church history:

The word basically means “ready to betray.” It’s a word that speaks about a traitor literally. It draws attention to the idea of disloyalty, disloyalty.

We all agree when we serve the Lord that the most wonderful relational attribute in a person is loyalty. Isn’t it wonderful when you have someone who is loyal to you, someone doesn’t believe the evil gossip, someone who doesn’t believe when people say things about you that aren’t true, someone who stands by you in your failures; someone who is there to hold you up, and pray for you, and undergird you, and strengthen you, and love you, and forgive you, and has loyalty? That’s such a beautiful, marvelous grace.

But the danger to the church is people who are treacherous. They’re treacherous. They get close to you in order to stick the knife in you; they want to destroy you. They want to come and talk to you and feign friendship, and then they want to take that information which they have gleaned from you and use it to destroy you. They want to cut and cut at the very heart.

It’s interesting to read church history and read about the people who betrayed the Christians, who feigned loyalty to Christ in a persecuting environment. And when they feigned their loyalty to Christ and the persecution broke out, the ones who weren’t genuinely believers began to turn in the true believers to be persecuted and executed. That’s a place where this word fits: betrayal, disloyalty, a traitor. Easy for them to deliver others if they can gain something for themselves; that’s self-love again. Protect myself at all costs, even if it means the end of you. Treacherous people. Listen, the church is full of those treacherous people. They’re not genuine, they’re not sincere, they’re not real; and they’ll betray.

Recklessness is also dangerous:

These people are aggressive. The word “reckless” has that idea. It literally means “head strong” or “falling forward” actually. It’s the idea of moving with your headfast, disregarding anything and everything around you. It’s used only here and in Acts 19:36 where it’s the idea of rash behavior. You’re just going so fast you’re like a bowling ball hitting the ten-pin, everything flies in every direction. You just move recklessly, stopping at nothing in the pursuit of fulfillment of self-loving desire, swept on by self-love. People flying out of the way everywhere you go, just making room for you to blast down the alley; nobody get in your way.

We have those who are ‘swollen with conceit’:

The root for that is from the word “smoke.” People who are blowing smoke, to put it in the vernacular, who are puffed up, perhaps the idea, inflated with their own sense of self-importance, full of smoke, unable to see reality. All those kind of thoughts could wrap around this word. It’s used in 1 Timothy 3:6 and 6:4, and it has the idea of someone whose head is engulfed in smoke so he can’t see reality. He’s in his own little world. He’s created his own little environment where he blows smoke in his own eyes and his own face, in a fog, consumed with himself.

It came to mean to be “conceited,” “to preoccupy yourself with your little world.” And we’re right back to self-love, aren’t we? Right back to self-love, conceited, developed ingrown eyeballs. All you see is yourself. And when you get to the point where that has happened, then all this other garbage is going to come along.

Then we come to the final group of sinners, ‘lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God’, which is the perfect bookend to the first sin, ‘lovers of self’:

He sort of wraps this section up with the last statement in verse 4, “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.” That’s an appropriate climax, by the way, to the list of vices flowing out of the sewer of self-love. Lovers of self are lovers of money. Lovers of money are lovers of pleasure. Lovers of pleasure do not love God.

And that’s where we are in our world: self, money, pleasure. We love self, we love money, we love pleasure; we don’t love God. It’s not “more than” as the Authorized says it, it’s “rather than” as the Greek text indicates. The emphasis is not that there is some love for God, exceeded by love for pleasure; but rather there is no love for God, only love for pleasure. And she that lives in pleasure is dead while she lives, Paul said. The whole life is lived in pursuit of self-love, self-aggrandizement, self-pleasure. This is hedonism.

The word is philēdonos: phileō, love, hedonism. Love and hedonism brought together, love of pleasure. That’s the characteristic of those who are a danger to the church. We have to watch out for self-lovers in the church. They are a grave, grave peril.

How do you know them? They love money. They brag out of their arrogant hearts. They slander others. They resist authority. They have no gratitude. They have little affection for those who are in the circle of intimacy in their own life and family. They’re obstinate, bitter truce-breakers, eager to slander others if they can gain from it. They’re out-of-control slaves to their passions, who hate what is noble, and will betray anyone for gain; and who pursue their vices with an abandon and an inflated sense of self-importance; and they love pleasure rather than loving God. You have to watch for such dangerous people.

You can turn this whole thing around with the last phrase: “rather than love for God.” They are lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. May I say to you, that if you’re a lover of God, you’re not going to be a lover of self, you’re not going to be a lover of money, you’re not going to be a lover of all the rest of this stuff; because if you truly love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, you’re going to be consumed with Him. You’re going to have that deep, deep desire to know and commune with God.

All of these types of sins and sinners bring Paul to his statement about false teachers: having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Timothy is to avoid those people (verse 5), all of whom encompass one or more of those characteristics, self-love being universal to them all.

Henry tells us:

… they have the form of godliness (v. 5), are called by the Christian name, baptized into the Christian faith, and make a show of religion; but, how plausible soever their form of godliness is, they deny the power of it. When they take upon them the form which should and would bring along with it the power thereof, they will put asunder what God hath joined together: they will assume the form of godliness, to take away their reproach; but they will not submit to the power of it, to take away their sin. Observe here, (1.) Men may be very bad and wicked under a profession of religion; they may be lovers of themselves, etc., yet have a form of godliness. (2.) A form of godliness is a very different thing from the power of it; men may have the one and be wholly destitute of the other; yea, they deny it, at least practically in their lives. (3.) From such good Christians must withdraw themselves.

MacArthur goes further:

The people who are bringing about this danger, who are fostering these false systems are not only lovers of self, but notice number two. They are charlatans of religion, verse 5. Follow closely now, we’re going to go through this pretty quick. They are charlatans of religion. Verse 5, “holding to a form” – morphosis, a structure, a shape – “of godliness,” – or true religion, spiritual virtue – “although they have denied its power, and avoid such men as these.”

Spiritual fakes, phony religionists masquerading as representatives of God’s truth. when in fact they are not. May I say theirs is a paganized Christianity. Theirs is a paganized Christianity. It is a form of Christianity. It is an outside silhouette. It has the shape of Christianity and that’s all. There’s no power. There’s no power. This, by the way, isn’t new. Isaiah spoke against it. Ezekiel spoke against it. Paul spoke against it in Romans chapter 2. Paul spoke against it in 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy in several places. In Titus 1 in verse 16 Paul says, “They profess to know God but their deeds give evidence that they deny Him. They are detestable, disobedient and worthless.”

They profess to know God. That’s the key you want to understand. Satan is subtle. He never tells you the truth about who he really is and his emissaries never tell you the truth about who they are either. They come in with a paganized form of Christianity to deceive, to lull people, to sucker people. They are charlatans of religion. Listen, beloved, the enemy of the church is not the man standing on the outside speaking against religion. The enemy that threatens the life of the church is the man on the inside who says he’s religious and lies. That’s the subtlety.

And so he says, “They are men and women with a form of godliness,” eusebeia, form of reverence, a form of commitment to the true religion although they have denied its power. That is they have positively rejected its reality. They have the form without the reality, the structure without the life. The Holy Spirit is not in them, the life of God is not in them. They are hypocrites. They have no love for God, they have no love for His truth, they have no love for His people. They love themselves. We saw that and they want to feed themselves, aggrandize themselves, indulge themselves and reach their own goals.

So he says keep on – present tense imperative – turning away from “such men as these.” Keep on avoiding. Very strong verb. Very strong verb, apotrepō. Trep — trep is the little thing from which we get in trepidation, which means fear. The idea is strongly fear them, avoid them with terror, avoid them with horror, avoid them because you’re afraid of them. Don’t have anything to do with these kinds of people. Spiritual phonies, false teachers, hypocrites, liars. And they appear on the scene of Christianity from season to season.

They come in sacramental robes. They come in rationalistic attire with their intellectual mindset and all their degrees and their academic garb. They come in the form of orthodoxy but they are dead and without life. They come with their political goals and dreams and ends. They come with their ecumenical agenda, they come with their experiential approach to everything. They come with their overriding subjectivism. Whatever it is, they are spiritual phonies. They lead the church away from the truth. And they accumulate. They get worse and worse as time goes on.

MacArthur gives us three ways to recognise false teachers so that we can avoid them:

Now how do you recognize these so you can avoid them? Just three little things can help. Number one, check the character, check their character. Put it simply, folks, truth and virtue are two sides of the same coin. Truth and virtue go together. You don’t have truth without virtue. You don’t have virtue without truth. If some, when you look at their life, if you see virtue there, if you see genuine godliness there, if you see holiness there, then they’re connected to that which produces that which is truth. If you look at the life and you see all the ungodliness and the unholiness and the things that are not honoring to God, you can be sure that that is born out of a lack of the truth. Truth and virtue go together, they’re twins. They go back to back, so check their character.

Secondly, check their creed. What do they teach? Does it consistently square with the Word of God? Are they saturated with the Scripture? Do they open their mouth and speak the truth of God? Or are you getting their opinion and their whims and their fancies and their perspectives? And is it contrary to Scripture? Or is it subtlety deviated from Scripture? Or does it misinterpret Scripture? Check their creed.

Thirdly, check their converts. Boy, what a telling thing this is. Find out what the people who follow them are like. Are they justifying their sin by the sin of their leader? Are they into the same materialism that their leader is into? Or are they walking in a godly way, exalting Jesus Christ, loving God’s Word, holding it high? If they are, that’s because somebody is leading them that way. You can tell by their character.

Look at their life. By their creed, are they biblical to the core? You can also tell by their converts. Take a look at who is following them. What kind of people do they attract? The kind of people who will hold high the banner of truth and integrity and virtue and holiness? Grave danger to the church from the charlatans of religion. Watch out then for the lovers of self and the charlatans of religion. And, beloved, I confess to you that it’s hard to avoid them because they’re everywhere. And with media the way it is today you can’t escape if you wanted to escape. They have ways: radio, television, printed page.

That leads us to the third identifying mark. They are called captors of the weak, captors of the weak in verses 6 and 7.

That is where I will resume next week.

MacArthur closes with this prayer:

Lord, we know the church is in danger from this just because of what is in the fallen human heart. But, O God, how dangerous it is when the church accepts this, when the church allows for a self-love that is pervasive, or when it allows for people to come in as leaders and teachers whose lives are characterized by this, and this becomes then a tolerable thing. I’m sure even in some cases a desirable way of life. How frightening.

We can sense the danger of the church because we sense the encroachment in our own lives and our own hearts of this thinking, this worldly philosophy. Lord, help us to step away from this, to be set apart. Help us to be lovers of God, not lovers of pleasure. Help us to be just the antithesis of all of this, to be humble and meek, to speak well of people, to be obedient to parents, to be filled with gratitude, to be holy and reverent and decent, to be full of love for the people in our intimate family, to be easy to be entreated, to be one who speaks kindly, under self-control, tender, loving what is good, loyal and faithful, gracious in spirit, so that we may not just have a form of godliness on the outside, but that we may genuinely be righteous on the inside.

And help us to recognize what’s happening around us, Lord, and protect Your church. And we know it’s not the people on the outside that cause the problem, it’s the people on the inside who have caught the disease on the outside. It’s the cancer inside, it’s the internal rebellion of the cells that are within the body that pose the dire threat. Save us, Lord, from all these wicked things, and preserve Your church faithful, pure, until Jesus comes, that as Paul said, she might be presented to You as a chaste virgin. And help us to be on guard, and let that watch begin at our own life. We ask this in order that our Savior might be honored, we pray in His name. Amen.

So many denominations are in danger these days. That said, there are still good, solid churches within them: the remnant, i.e. a small number. May God continue to bless the leaders of those individual churches and the laypeople who serve them in the name of Jesus Christ, our only Mediator and Advocate.

Next time — 2 Timothy 3:6-9