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.

Titus 1:10-16

¹⁰ For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party. ¹¹ They must be silenced, since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach. ¹² One of the Cretans,^[a] a prophet of their own, said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.”^{[b] 13} This testimony is true. Therefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith, ¹⁴ not devoting themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people who turn away from the Truth. ¹⁵ To the Pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled. ¹⁶ They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.

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Yesterday’s post covered verses 10 through 13.

Today’s will cover the remaining three.

The island of Crete had a number of new churches and Titus’s assignment from Paul was to install elders in each one (see my posts, parts 1 and 2, on Titus 1:5-9).

Many false teachers had arisen in the new congregations. They were Judaizers — the circumcision party — who wanted the new Christians to become circumcised and lead a life based on Mosaic law. They falsely taught that God would love them more if they practised Judaism and that only through it could they become good Christians. These false teachers claimed to have special, enlightened knowledge.

Therefore, Paul tells Titus that the Cretans must not listen to Jewish myths and commands from false teachers who had turned away from the truth (verse 14).

Similarly, Paul gave Timothy a similar instruction in 1 Timothy 1:3-4 (more about which here):

³ As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, ⁴ nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship^[a] from God that is by faith.

Paul repeated it in 1 Timothy 4:7 (more here):

⁷ Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness;

As Matthew Henry’s commentary explains, Jesus Christ fulfilled the law, which meant that the ancient requirements from God had come to an end (emphases mine):

(3.) A special means to soundness in the faith is to turn away the ear from fables and the fancies of men (1 Tim 1 4): Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, that minister questions rather than godly edifying, which is in faith. So ch. 4 7, Refuse profane and old wives’ fables, and exercise thyself rather to godliness. Fancies and devices of men in the worship of God are contrary to truth and piety. Jewish ceremonies and rites, that were at first divine appointments, the substance having come and their season and use being over, are now but unwarranted commands of men, which not only stand not with, but turn from, the truth, the pure gospel truth and spiritual worship, set up by Christ instead of that bodily service under the law. (4.) A fearful judgment it is to be turned away from the truth, to leave Christ for Moses, the spiritual worship of the gospel for the carnal ordinances of the law, or the true divine institutions and precepts for human inventions and appointments. Who hath bewitched you (said Paul to the Galatians, ch. 3 1, 3) that you should not obey the truth? Having begun in the Spirit, are you made perfect by the flesh?

John MacArthur says:

Verse 14, “Not paying attention to Jewish myths and commandments of men who turn away from the truth.”  “Not paying attention” means “not devoted to.”  You don’t devote yourself to it.  You don’t listen to it.  You don’t heed it.  Avoid listening to error at all costs.  You’ve reproved it, now turn away from it and reject it.

Paul gave very similar instruction to Timothy.  First Timothy 1:4, “Don’t pay attention to myths and endless genealogies, which give rise to mere speculation rather than furthering the administration of God which is by faith.”  I watch people who start out somewhat of an evangelical perspective, and they listen to error, and they listen to error, and they listen to error, and they never rebuke it, and they never reprove it. They just listen and listen.  And you watch them leave the basis of the Christian faith and just drift, set loose by the confusion stimulated in their minds because they exposed themselves to endless error.  First Timothy 4:7, “Have nothing to do with worldly fables.” Pay no attention to them.  Stay away from them.

Now the particular heresy that he’s talking about here and there are myriad of ones in church history and many today. It’s hard to even keep up with all of them.  But the particular one that he’s talking about had to do with Jews, as we noted back at the end of verse 10, “of the circumcision.”  Now he defines it a little more in verse 14 without labeling it or giving us a lot – we still get a little feel for it.  You need to reject these “Jewish myths and commandments who come from, which come from men who turn away from the truth.”  The bottom line is the people purveying this have turned away from the truth. That could mean the truth of the gospel and they’re not saved.  That’s very reasonable to assume.  It certainly does mean the truth in regard to what Scripture affirms, from which they turn in favor of their own concoctions and their own speculations and their own dreams and their own visions and their own allegories and their own mystical comprehensions and whatever.  It’s, there’s every reason to assume that these false teachers are not Christians. Some of them might be, but there’s every reason to assume that if they’ve turned away from the truth that might even include the truth of the gospel. It could even include the truth of the Trinity, the truth of Christ, the truth of His atoning work, His resurrection, who knows what.  But whatever, they are men who do not espouse the truth, and you are to make sure that you reject them.

MacArthur says that a form of pre-Gnosticism and numerology were bound up in these theological errors and heresies:

First of all, “Jewish myths.”  The Jews tended to take the Old Testament and interpret it allegorically and mystically.  I mean, they came up with some of the wildest and most bizarre interpretations of the Old Testament. And I’m not going to belabor the issue by pointing out many of them, but they would come up with very silly kinds of allegorical, mystical, fanciful interpretations.  One, for example, would be that if you take the name of Abraham – and this is in the Talmud – if you take the name of Abraham and you drop all … the vowels out … you have three remaining consonants.  In English we would know them as “r” and “b” and “m”.  And if you take the numerical value of those – because in the Hebrew, letters had numerical value – if you take the numerical value of those and add them up you get 318. And every time you see the name Abraham what it really means is there were 318 servants of the Lord.  So you get all of these kind of fantastic, mystical concoctions, and they become – what they become is the private myths that these people hold to that elevates them above everybody else because they know the secret things.

Very much like what you have in secret societies today among those who believe they’re the initiates into the secret levels.  It’s very much like Gnosticism, and certainly the incipient Gnosticism of the day of Paul and Titus would have fed into this, when people were believing that if you could ascend to mystical and transcendent levels of experiences with the deities, you would ascend and you would rise above the normal hoi poloi, the normal crowd.  So these Jews felt that they had insights into the secret meanings of the Old Testament.  They could read between the lines. They were stuffing things in the white spaces between the letters, between the words, the sentences, and the paragraphs. They were taking the genealogies – they’re noted also in 1 Timothy – taking the genealogies of the Old Testament and sticking names in there, names of mystical characters that they invented, and concocting all kinds of stories about these mystical characters.  And all this secret knowledge allowed them to rise above the crowd.  It’s really a sad thing, because they weren’t true believers, because their lives really weren’t given to God. Because they didn’t possess the life of God, they were trying to fill the vacuum with these supposed ascending mystical things.  It was going on in Ephesus, and that’s what Paul was talking about when he wrote to Timothy in 1 Timothy, in 1 Timothy – and here it is going on …  Fictitious names in the genealogies of Moses and all kinds of mystical speculations that caused them to believe they had transcended the normal people and they were living on a higher plain and knew God in a mystical way.

The second thing that’s come through Jewish history is obviously ceremonial legalism.  The Jews who believed that all God wanted was a sacrifice, all God wanted was a ritual, all God wanted was a ceremony. And if you did all of that stuff you pleased God. And so, since God wanted that, they invented more of those things, more rules, more laws, more commandments, more traditions.  And you just kept them all, and that’s what pleased God.

So the two heresies that have always kind of hung around and hovered around Judaism: one, this mystical kind of ascending thing; and the other, this legalistic deal where you just keep spinning off and spewing out new rules. And if you keep the rules then God’s going to accept you.  That’s what was going on.  Some form of that kind of concoction of traditional legalism with mystical Judaism, meshed together in some form of heresy being taught in Crete.

Then Paul says something that should resonate with us today: to the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; both their minds and their consciences are defiled (verse 15).

What comes to mind were the trends for exercise and personal trainers that began in the United States in the late 1970s. Meditation began the decade before with transcendentalism. Celebrities became picky about what they ate. Remember the trend for brown rice that has become normal today in a quest for notionally cleaner living.

Those celebrities who had gym memberships, personal trainers and a macrobiotic diet were somehow purifying themselves. However, at the same time they led troubled and unbelieving lives that made the supermarket tabloid headlines every week: extramarital affairs, divorces, violent arguments.

Paul is speaking of Judaizers here, but it isn’t a leap to get to exercise, transcendentalism and brown rice. It’s no different to following a ritualistic religion.

Henry’s commentary says that false teachers turn what is good into sin:

To good Christians that are sound in the faith and thereby purified all things are pure. Meats and drinks, and such things as were forbidden under the law (the observances of which some still maintain), in these there is now no such distinction, all are pure (lawful and free in their use), but to those that are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; things lawful and good they abuse and turn to sin; they suck poison out of that from which others draw sweetness; their mind and conscience, those leading faculties, being defiled, a taint is communicated to all they do.

MacArthur says:

Verse 15, “To the pure, all things are pure; but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled.” Now when you start to read that, the continuity of it may not seem very obvious to you so let me help you. Now remember, the context is Jewish and remember, they believed in this – whatever this cultish thing was that they were espousing – they believed that if you did all the ceremonies and kept all the traditions, fulfilled all the “commandments of men” – everything that you were supposed to do – you would purify yourself. In other words, they were working from the outside in. That’s, by the way, what sacramental religion does, that’s what legalistic religion does – ceremonial religion of any form, and it was certainly true in Judaism. If you maintained the Jewish ceremonial law, if you kept all the traditions and all the rituals and all the clean and unclean distinctions in food and everything else in life, you would make yourself pure on the inside. That’s right. If you didn’t touch anything defiled, if you didn’t touch anything forbidden, you’d make yourself pure.

But if you didn’t keep the “commandments of men,” and if you didn’t follow these mystical traditions – whatever they might have been – and if you touched something unclean, and if you violated some of these deals, you would defile yourself, and you’d become defiled before God …

But Jesus said, “It is not that which comes into a man that defiles him, but that which comes out of him.” And so Paul says they are dead wrong. “To the pure all things are” – What? – “pure.” If you’re pure on the inside, then everything you do is pure. Everything you touch is purified because the issue of true religion is on the inside, not on the outside. That whole, that whole thing is at the very heart of this confusion about ceremonial religion – people who believe that because they do things on the outside, because they have certain mystical experiences – dreams, and visions, or whatever – because they carry out certain functions, they by doing those things and experiencing those things purify the inside are dead wrong and they’re damned if they believe that. “To the pure, all things are pure.” If you’re pure on the inside and you’re right with God, everything you do is pure, everything you touch is purified. “But, to those who are defiled and unbelieving on the inside, then nothing is pure.” If your insides are rotten, you’ll make everything you touch rotten. If your inside is impure, you’re going to make everything you touch defiled. You’re going to desecrate everything you touch. Very important truth.

… You desecrate the cause of Christ and the name of Christ. You make it impure. It’s a mockery. It’s a blasphemy.

… To those who are defiled and unbelieving on the inside like these false teachers, everything they touch is defiled. This is a devastating blow, by the way, to the false teachers who think that you can become pure by your legal observances or your mystical experiences. And everything they touch is contaminated. All their religiosity is sickening to God.

MacArthur quotes the Scottish theologian Patrick Fairbairn (1805-1874):

Patrick Fairbairn said years ago, “They have a fountain of pollution which spreads itself over and infects everything about them. Their food and drink, their possessions, their employment, their comforts, their actions, all are in the reckoning of God tainted with iniquity because they are putting away from them that which alone has for the soul regenerating and cleansing efficacy.” They push Christ away, they push the truth away, they take mystical experiences and ceremonial observances and try to purge the inside with that – doesn’t do it.

MacArthur continues his examination of Paul’s words:

Since the inside is defiled and filthy, everything they touch is defiled. In fact, they’re so defiled on the inside, he says in verse 15, “both their mind and their conscience are defiled.” He’s trying to show you the depth of their internal defilement. “Their mind” means “their intellect.” “Their conscience” means “their discerning faculties.” “Their mind” is “defiled” – their thoughts, their desires, their purposes are “defiled.” So whatever theology they concoct is “defiled.” “Their conscience” – What does that mean? Their moral judgment, their sense of right and wrong, their morality, their discernment – that too is “defiled.” So you can’t trust what they say. Why? Their mind is too defiled to conceive of truth, and they are too defiled to make true judgments. They’re defiled deeply. They’ll touch everything and defile it.

… People who come along and say, “Have these visions and revelations and mystical experiences and you’ll transcend and you’ll come up to the high level of knowing God, and etc. And this will, this will purify your inside.” That’s wrong. First of all, you come to know Christ. He washes you on the inside and then everything you are, everything you do, becomes purified. That’s the evaluation of the inside.

Paul goes on to say that false teachers — and their followers — profess to know God but deny Him by their works; they are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work (verse 16).

Henry puts this into a universal context for us:

There are many who in word and tongue profess to know God, and yet in their lives and conversations deny and reject him; their practice is a contradiction to their profession. They come unto thee as the people cometh, and they sit before thee as my people, and they hear thy words, but they will not do them: with their mouth they show much love, but their heart goeth after their covetousness, Ezek 33 31. Being abominable, and disobedient, and to every good work reprobate. The apostle, instructing Titus to rebuke sharply, does himself rebuke sharply; he gives them very hard words, yet doubtless no harder than their case warranted and their need required. Being abominable—bdelyktoi, deserving that God and good men should turn away their eyes from them as nauseous and offensive. And disobedient—apeitheis, unpersuadable and unbelieving. They might do divers things; but it was not the obedience of faith, nor what was commanded, or short of the command. To every good work reprobate, without skill or judgment to do any thing aright. See the miserable condition of hypocrites, such as have a form of godliness, but without the power; yet let us not be so ready to fix this charge on others as careful that it agree not to ourselves, that there be not in us an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God; but that we be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ, being filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ unto the glory and praise of God, Phil 1 10, 11.

MacArthur says:

Look at the evaluation of their outward part in verse 16.  “They profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him, being detestable and disobedient and worthless for any good deed.”  Now the next time you’re speaking to a false prophet, you can add these three words too: “detestable,” “disobedient,” and “worthless.”  This is a description of the outside.  They profess to know God. Now what do you mean by that?  They claim to be Christians?  Of course they claim to be Christians. Obviously they are around the church hovering like vultures, and they claim to be Christians.  But I don’t think that’s the limit of what he’s saying here.  They profess to know God, not just as Christians know God, but they profess this transcendent knowledge, this Gnostic knowledge, this knowledge above knowledge – like we are the ascended masters, you know; we have been elevated to the higher level.  We by our mystical experiences and the secret knowledge of the Old Testament, which you can’t know by the comprehension of these private allegories and all of these other fantasies – we, by observing all of these traditions and commandments and ceremonies and all of that, have ascended to a higher level of knowing God than all the rest of you – we know God.  And they’re elevating themselves in their pride. And he says they profess to know God higher and more grand than anyone else. They think they have a superior knowledge of God.  The truth is, take a look at their deeds, and by their deeds they deny Him, they deny Him.

They don’t know God on a more intimate level than those who are His children.  Their deeds – just look at them.  Their fruits reveal them, as Jesus said.  Like it says in 2 Timothy 3:5, they have “a form of godliness” with no power – avoid such men.  Their conduct proves they’re liars and hypocrites who don’t know God at all.  In fact, they are “detestable,” that is, “repulsive, abominable, despicable” to God – a very strong word, a very strong word, bdeluktos. It’s used of heathen images and heathen idols. It’s the same root as the word “abomination.”  They are “disobedient” to the Lord, to the Word, to the church, to the elders, and they are “worthless for any good deed.” That’s the final commentary. They are absolutely “worthless.” Takes you right back to Jeremiah 23:32 – they’re useless; they provide nothing – hot air, wind; they fog up your windows, that’s all.  And you have to turn on the defrost of truth to clear them back.  In spite of all they claim, all they do is confuse.

These are the people who have to be silenced because they do damaging work in the church.  They do damaging work in the kingdom.  They harm the purposes of Christ …

MacArthur concludes by citing Titus 2:1, which I will cover next week:

We need to understand the description of false teachers. We need to know who we’re looking for to silence. We need to understand the proper reaction. We reprove them, and then we turn away and reject them completely. And we need to understand God’s evaluation of them, that their whole approach is wrong. They think you can clean the inside by what you do on the outside. The Bible says you have to clean the inside by coming to Christ, and that takes care of the outside. They reverse that, and that’s why they are detestable, disobedient, and worthless to produce any noble spiritual accomplishment. They’re good for nothing. “As for you, speak the things suitable for healthy teaching.” That’s the call of God for those in leadership in His church.

In Titus 2 Paul moves on to the conduct expected of Titus and of the various Cretan congregations.

Next time — Titus 2:1