Ancient Truth and Modern Confusion

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As I said earlier, we’re going to be in 2 Timothy chapter 3 this morning. 2 Timothy chapter 3. There’s a scene toward the beginning of the movie Patton, which is one of my favorite movies, where General Patton shows up in North Africa to inspect the troops that are about to be under his command.

And I would have tried to show you the clip this morning, just like in the movie, General Patton was known for his colorful language, and I’d like to keep pastoring here. So I’ll just tell you about it. But there’s a scene where he arrives, and he finds these troops that are now under his command.

They’re just in total disarray. I mean, everybody’s running around. There’s total confusion.

Nobody knows what they’re doing or what they’re supposed to be doing. And he walks in, finds some of the men who are supposed to be on duty, and one of them is sleeping. And he ends up waking the man up and says, what are you trying to do?

And the man, not realizing it’s General Patton, said, leave me alone. I’m trying to get some sleep. I’m paraphrasing here.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie. Leave me alone. I’m trying to get some sleep.

And Patton finally tells him, well, get back to it because you’re the only one around here who knows what you’re trying to do. The whole garrison of troops was just in utter confusion and disarray. And sometimes I feel like that’s the world we live in.

That everybody’s running around like crazy just trying to keep up with what’s going on, but nobody really knows what they’re trying to do or where they’re headed or why. We live in a world of absolute confusion. Turn on the news and you’ll see that I’m right.

We live in a country now where we cannot all agree. And please understand, I’m not trying to pick on anybody. I’m just trying to give you an illustration.

But we live in a country now where we cannot all agree on how many genders there are. And the only thing that people seem to agree on is that those of us who think there are two are haters. We live in a country where we cannot agree on what marriage is.

right? We live in a country where we can’t agree on what right and wrong is. It used to be we knew what right and wrong were.

Not everybody did right, but we knew what they were. We as a society were in agreement on those things more or less. Now everything’s just topsy-turvy.

We can’t tell who the bad guys are from the good guys. I mean the country as a whole. We can’t tell who the good guys are from the bad guys.

Everything is confusion. It’s all confused. Maybe you’re sitting there this morning saying, well, I’m not confused.

Good for you. I don’t feel particularly confused either except, what are you all thinking? That’s where my confusion comes from.

But I’m saying as a society as a whole, we are confused. We don’t know where we’ve come from because in our society we look at two different sets of history. We look at, maybe more than that, we look at multiple ideas of morality.

We don’t know where we’ve come from. We don’t know where we’re going. We don’t know how we’ll know when we get there, and we don’t know what’s expected of us in the meantime.

And I think some of this is by design. See, there’s a movement called postmodernism, and maybe you’ve heard this term before. But in general, postmodernism comes down to to a rejection of absolute truth.

Now, when I was in college, there was a lot of debate in the philosophy classes and such about what the truth is, and there was a lot of confusion about what the truth was. Nowadays, we’ve gotten into, in just a short time, we’ve gotten into a postmodern mindset where we can’t even decide whether there is truth or not. And that’s why you’ll hear things like, well, this is my truth.

Silly me, I thought there was one. I thought the idea here was for us to figure out what is true. As a Christian, maybe what I’m saying is true.

As a non-Christian, maybe what you’re saying is true. And our job here is to try to figure out which one is true. No, no, we’re now in a postmodern era where everything is true and nothing is true all at the same time.

We’ve gotten into this era of confusion, I believe, as a result of man’s rejection of God’s truth. You read Romans chapter 1 and you see the downward spiral. I’d encourage you to go read Romans chapter 1 for yourself. You know what?

Read on into Romans chapter 2 and chapter 3. It tells the whole story. But we see the downward spiral that takes place as a society gets further and further from God.

The first thing is to reject God’s truth and say, no, we don’t want to listen to you anymore. And then it just ends up in mass confusion and everybody doing, as in the book of Judges, what is right in their own eyes. and nobody knows what’s going on.

Our society faces this confusion because our society has rejected God’s truth. And we shouldn’t be amazed that it’s happened because that’s human nature. Men have been rejecting God’s truth since the Garden of Eden.

It’s not that human nature has gotten particularly worse. It’s just that it’s come out in the open in the last few years. But man has consistently rejected God’s truth.

And there’s a lot of pressure, as I said in the welcome this morning, in kind of introducing this series to you where we’re going about how the church is supposed to go against the current of our culture. There’s a lot of pressure on churches today to conform or shut up or be run over. I don’t think any of those are good options for us.

We’re like the disciples who were told, stop talking about Jesus, and they said, we cannot but speak what we have seen and heard. We know Jesus, and we can’t stop talking about him. I don’t think we can stop talking about God and his truth.

I don’t think we can go along with it. Some churches are now giving in to this postmodern idea that we’re going to tweak what we believe so it’s presentable, it’s acceptable to the culture, and that is a slippery slope. There’s a lot of pressure to do that.

All churches, I think, are under pressure to some extent to do that. And some, unfortunately, are giving in to the pressure of rejecting or compromising on God’s truth. That, too, is nothing new.

As we look at 2 Timothy chapter 3, we’re going to see that there was a faithful young Christian named Timothy who was under similar pressure 2,000 years ago from a culture that rejected God and his truth. There was a pressure to conform, a pressure to give up God’s truth, a pressure to just go along with what society said. And the Apostle Paul wrote to him to encourage him to continue swimming against the current of his society and to continue embracing God’s word.

And now, I want to make clear that in this message, in this series, I don’t want this to be just me throwing red meat to the crowd and saying shame on the world outside. I want us to look at what the things are that we are supposed to believe, the things that as a church we are supposed to stand for in contrast to the world around us, and that we are supposed to live by. And again, these are just four things that I think are particularly controversial today, not all the things that we’re supposed to live by.

But I want this to be for us. This is where we’re supposed to stand. This is where we’re supposed to draw the line.

And it doesn’t mean we hate anybody who disagrees. We are called to love others. We’re called to speak the truth in love.

Some of you have heard the story yesterday of a couple of young missionaries who came by my house. And normally I’m just, you know, kind of fight or flight, just ready to let’s go. I’m going to make my point.

Yesterday I just decided, here’s a funny idea that I should have known from God’s word years ago, speak the truth in love. I thought, I’m just going to talk to these guys as people. Don’t look at them as Mormon missionaries.

Look at them as people. And I stood there and I talked with them, visited with them for a little bit, and I thought, I really like these guys. And, you know, in the course of the conversation, I worked in the fact that Jesus died and paid for our sins in full, which is where we differ.

But, you know, it wasn’t you’re the enemy and I’m going to try to make an argument and prove the point. It was, you know, I kind of like you, and here’s something you need to hear. We can disagree with people without hating them.

That’s another problem of postmodernism. If you disagree, you automatically are the enemy and automatically hate. I want to preface all of this by saying that’s not our motivation.

Our motivation is not to say, we disagree, and so we hate you. Our motivation is to say, we disagree, and this is where we have to stand. We love you, but we can’t move off this spot because this is where God’s word tells us to be.

And that was the same thing that Paul was telling Timothy. This is where you need to stand. And so we’re going to look at 2 Timothy chapter 3 this morning, verses 1 through 15.

I’m going to have to move through it fairly quickly, 15 verses. But starting in verse 1, he says, But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come. And first of all, when it says the last days, we see this phrase a lot in the New Testament.

The last days doesn’t mean that automatically we’re getting close to the tribulation. I believe that Jesus could come at any moment. He could come before the end of this message.

He could come another thousand years from now. I don’t actually know when he’s coming, but he could come at any time. This phrase, the last days, as it’s used in the communications between the churches in the New Testament, a lot of times what it meant was just this period between Jesus’ ascension and his second coming.

okay so in the last days we’re in the last days they were in the last days it’s this period on on God’s calendar where Jesus finished his first coming and we’re now waiting for his second coming so Timothy was in the last days by that definition we’re in the last days too and he says perilous times will come so it shouldn’t be surprising to us that we live in times of trouble that we live in times of difficulty, times of confusion, it didn’t come as a surprise to God. God said it was going to happen, speaking through the Apostle Paul. And so it didn’t come as a surprise to God, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise to us that we are where we are.

But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come. Now let’s look at verses 2 through 7. Verses 2 through 7.

For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power, and from such people turn away. For of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins led away by various lusts, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. It’s like he’s reading from our headlines today, isn’t it?

This pretty much describes the world. I mean, we’re in dire straits, but then again, we always have been. It’s human nature.

So Paul, in this section of verses, he’s describing the people who reject God’s truth, And his descriptions tell us a lot about the possible motivations for rejecting God’s truth. In this whole list of things, I’m not going to go through every word that was spoken in there and what the definitions are. There’s a lot of overlap with some of these words.

But we see selfishness in there. We see bitterness toward others. We see lust, the idea that I just want to do whatever feels good.

That doesn’t necessarily only mean sexual lust, but just I’m going to do whatever feels good to me. There’s greed. I want more, whether it’s money, whether it’s power.

I just want more, this greed for whatever. There’s pride where we like to think of ourselves higher than we really are, more important than we really are. There’s rebellion that says, you can’t tell me what to do.

If there was a slogan of our culture today, it’s you can’t tell me what to do. And you know what? I’m guilty of that as well.

My wife said something yesterday. Oh, I figured I’d tell you to do that. I said you were going to tell me.

Is that how this works? Now, I told her when we got married, anything you do, or anything you ask me to do, pretty much, I will do for you. Don’t tell me to do anything.

You know what? That’s an issue I deal with. But that’s where a lot of us are in our culture.

You can’t tell me what to do. That’s rebellion. We see hatred for others in this list, that people hate their fellow men, and maybe they hate individuals for what they’ve done to them.

Maybe they hate groups of people. You know, I hate you because of your race. I hate you because of your religion.

Try to combine those two words there, your race. Your race or your religion or your social class or whatever. You know what?

The human heart doesn’t need an excuse to hate others. And we also see hatred of God. Hatred of God in that list. And I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush here.

Because I have met some people who don’t believe in God, who reject the authority of his word, and they can take you through the philosophical arguments for why they don’t believe. There are some of those people out there. That they’ve been convinced by philosophy, by rational argument, not to believe in God.

I happen to have been convinced the other way by argument and rational thought that, you know, there’s more than enough evidence for God. So I’ve met those people who can say, here’s my rational argument for why I don’t believe in God, don’t accept the authority of his word. But for those people that I have met, I have met far more people where their motivation goes something like this.

They say, I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe the Bible. Well, why not?

Because I hate him. For a lot of people. Again, I’m not saying everybody, I’m not saying everybody, but there are people out there who it’s not because they are convinced he doesn’t exist. They reject him and they reject his authority because of something else.

Because they’re mad at him. Because they want to do what they want to do. I can’t bring myself to believe in God because it would spoil my fun.

I couldn’t live the way I wanted to if I believed in God. I don’t believe in God because he let this happen to me. I knew a man, a brilliant man, could actually argue circles around me.

Who did not, I mean, he emphatically, he didn’t just not believe there was a God. I believe there’s no God. And he could walk you through all these rational arguments.

Again, argued circles around me. I’d have to go home and research. Okay, how do I come back at this?

Because it’s just not right here. But after talking to him for weeks and weeks and weeks, got down to the root of it, he had a sister he was very close to that he loved dearly, who died of cancer when they were teenagers. And he’d never forgiven God for letting that happen.

I’m not saying everybody, but a lot of people, a lot of people reject God not because they don’t believe, but for one of these other reasons. There’s something in their hearts where they put up walls against God. And that’s what Paul was describing to Timothy.

That in his day there were people who rejected God’s truth because of their lust, their greed, their pride, the hatred of God. You go through that whole list of things I gave you. The whole list that he gave you.

Mine was just more of a summary. And these are some of the reasons. Some of the reasons why people reject God’s truth today.

And in verse 7 we see that they’re always seeking some truth they can cling to that’s going to replace God’s truth. But they get further and further from the truth in the process. So we are designed to need to believe something.

We are designed to need something bigger than just ourselves. And so when you take a belief in God and His authority and His truth, when you take that out of us, when you take that belief in His authority away from us, we go looking for some other truth. And a lot of people who go looking for that other truth without God never find it.

He says in verse 7, he says in verse 7 that they are always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. That the further from God we seek the source of our truth, the farther we are from finding truth itself. And many people will bounce between this philosophy and that philosophy, this lifestyle, this choice, this idea, this new invention of themselves.

some people just hop around looking for the truth because they have decided they can’t find it in God, so they’re going to look for it somewhere else. And they get further and further from it. And we look backward at verse 6.

Paul even knew some women who had fallen into this trap. Now, don’t look at this as the Apostle Paul putting down women. There are a few verses in the New Testament that I think get taken out of context to say, well, it’s anti-women, it’s sexist, it’s this, it’s that.

Christianity did more to elevate the status of women in the Roman Empire in the ancient world than anything else. We need to understand that. Jesus, some of his closest followers, were women.

Women were the witnesses, the first witnesses of the resurrection. The Bible is not anti-women. Paul, in verse 6, happens, though, to have known some women.

If he had known some men it had happened to, I’m sure he would have mentioned them as well. But Paul happens to have known some women who had been caught up in sins that they loved. You know, sometimes we get that sin that we just don’t want to let go of.

It’s our pet. We love it. They had some sins they loved and they couldn’t let go of.

And what they had done is rather than deal with God about it, rather than repent about it, rather than admit that God’s word was true and they were wrong, they had gone looking for some false teachers who were going to slither their way into the church slither their way into their houses and tell them it was okay and here’s why and undermine the authority of God’s word and convince them that they were okay in what they were doing. And you know what? When that happens, we tend to go, thank goodness I can do X, Y, and Z and not feel guilty.

Sometimes when there’s something that God’s word tells us is wrong, God’s word tells us we ought not to do that, and somebody else comes along and says, you know what? It’s okay that you do that and here’s why. Oh boy, we like to go with that person.

And in Paul’s day, there were people that were convincing some in the churches to follow them because they didn’t adhere quite as strictly to God’s standards. And heart and rebellion, we see this in our world too, a heart and rebellion against God is rarely content just to rebel on its own. It wants others to join it, and it wants others to approve it.

That’s why it’s not enough today. It’s not enough today that things in our society that the church stands against are allowed to happen. The church is, I think we’re coming close to a time where the church is going to be penalized if we refuse to say, hey, not only accept it, but celebrate it.

And these false teachers weren’t content to just reject God’s truth on their own. They wanted to snare others and drag them in as well. And in verse 5, God tells us we’ve got to reject those influences.

Again, not that we hate them, not that we demonize them, not that we want them all rounded up, but we can’t follow the influence of those teachers who lead us to reject the truth of God’s word. Now look at verses 8 and 9. Now as Janus and Jambres resisted Moses, so do these also resist the truth.

Men of corrupt minds disapproved concerning the faith, but they will progress no further, for their folly will be manifest to all. as theirs also was. So Paul here is comparing these false teachers in Timothy’s day, he’s comparing them to Pharaoh’s court magicians.

We believe that’s who he’s talking about. Pharaoh’s court magicians who used their little parlor tricks to try to oppose Moses. Their tricks were really designed with one purpose in mind, and that was to undermine the authority of God’s word.

Because if you think back to that story, Moses came into Pharaoh’s court and said on God’s behalf let my people go that was the message from God let my people go and God had sent him there with signs to validate the message and prove that he was speaking on God’s behalf one of those was that he would be able to throw his stick down his staff down and it would turn into a serpent and that he could then take the serpent by the tail good luck I’m glad I’m not Moses take the serpent by the tail and pick it up and it turns back into a snake again I’m sorry I don’t have that much faith I’d be afraid I’d end up with a big handful of snake and then yeah I’m honest about it though I have a lot of faith in God but I’m not sure I have that much so for him to be able to transform the staff into a snake and back and we know from the story that the court magicians came out and said we can make our sticks look like snakes as well and so what they were doing was trying to the authority of God’s word.

Oh yeah, your God says that? Well, we can do it too. And yet Moses’ stick ate the other sticks.

And they were kind of humiliated. It was shown that they really couldn’t undermine the authority of God’s word no matter how much they tried. That’s why it says they will progress no further.

They won’t get any further, not one step back, because Janice and Jambres didn’t succeed in trying to undermine the authority of God’s word. And Paul was telling Timothy, These false teachers won’t really get any further than Janice and Jambres did. When God demonstrated his power, they couldn’t do anything to stop him.

They couldn’t do anything to topple or undermine his authority. They just had to stand there and watch while God showed who he was. And here’s the honest truth.

Here’s the honest truth. The fact that people don’t like what God’s word says, that alone does not make God’s word not true. Let me say that again.

the fact that some people don’t like what God’s word says. That alone does not make God’s word not true. All right, I hear things on the news all the time that I don’t like.

I hear things that were done. I hear crimes that were committed. I hear things that were done in Washington or Oklahoma City that Charlie has to talk me down because I’m walking through the house foaming at the mouth and screaming at nobody about what our government’s done.

You know, all the time, doesn’t matter who it is, they all do stuff I don’t like. And just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not true. He said they would not progress any further just because people don’t believe God’s word, that in and of itself doesn’t mean it’s not true.

And I think there’s plenty of evidence. One of these days we’re going to go over some of that evidence. I think there’s plenty of evidence to demonstrate that God’s word is true.

We look at verses 10 through 12. We’re coming close to the end of the text here. Verses 10 through 12.

But you, he’s speaking to Timothy, but you have carefully followed my doctrine, manner of life, purpose, faith, long-suffering, love, perseverance, here we go, persecutions, afflictions, which happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra. What persecutions I endured, and out of them all the Lord has delivered me. Yes, and all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution.

So Paul talks about what faithfulness to God’s word looks like. Paul had been faithful to God’s word even when it had cost him something. And Timothy had up to this point been as obedient to God’s word as Paul had been.

And Paul is not writing to correct somebody who’s been disobedient. What Paul is doing, he’s writing to somebody who’s been obedient, but is facing a lot of pressure from the world outside to conform, and Paul is saying, keep going. Keep doing what you know to do.

And because of his faithfulness, Paul says, you know, don’t worry about, oh, something bad might happen to me because I’m obedient to God’s word. Paul says, it’s going to. You don’t need to worry about it because it’s going to happen.

It’s not a question of if, but when. And because he knew this, Paul did firsthand, because of his faithfulness, Paul had suffered. and so he said Timothy was going to need to prepare himself to suffer as well.

He lists three cities here. And Paul was thrown out of Antioch for preaching the gospel. Paul was stoned.

I’m sorry, he was assaulted at Iconium and he was stoned nearly to death at Lystra. But in all these things, you know, I think I would be complaining and saying, God, hello, God, here I am serving you and you’re letting all this happen to me. But Paul was incredibly faithful.

He’s looking at it and saying, how good is God, even though I was assaulted and I was exiled and I was stoned nearly to death, God. . .

That’s looking on the bright side. He says, through it all, it didn’t matter what it cost, because God was faithful. God was faithful to take care of me in all this.

And you and I need to understand, write it down, mark it down somewhere, there will be a cost to us in following Jesus Christ. We don’t need to worry about, well, if I follow him, it might, you know, there might be a cost. No, there’s going to be. Just mark it down. Just know it.

Sear it into your brain. There’s a cost for following Jesus Christ. There’s a cost to us if we hold fast to the truth of God’s word and we live by it. Now, for you and me in our lifetimes, the cost may be relatively very light.

There are people today who are in labor camps because they remain true to God’s word. There are people today who are in prison. There are people who have had their children taken away.

There are people who will lose their lives today because of their faithfulness to God’s word. What it costs us is just some social pressure. Maybe in some isolated incidents, there’s more than that.

I think of the baker in Colorado who’s being sued again. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this. He’s being sued again even after the Supreme Court backed him up.

Somebody else wanted him to make a cake for something else. He said, I can’t. And now they’re suing him again.

The state of Colorado has a vendetta against this man. in some isolated incidents there may be a higher cost for most of us the cost is going to be we don’t fit into this world but you know what we were never designed to in the first place we were never designed to fit in here this world is not our home and as much as we see what goes on in the news and we want to rail against it we could look at it as a good reminder that hey I’m not supposed to be too comfortable here is that what that’s that’s what happens for me there will be a cost to all of us if we hold fast to the truth of God’s word and live by it. It may be a small cost. It may be a big cost. But there’s a cost, and we just need to price that in ahead of time and know that that’s part of it, that that’s part of serving him and being faithful.

So he says in verse 13, But evil men and imposters will grow worse and worse. He doesn’t say they’re going to get better. He says they’re going to get worse and worse.

But evil men and imposters will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. They’re going to lie, they’re going to convince people of the lies, and they’re going to be convinced of lies themselves. But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them, and that from childhood you have known the holy scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

So Paul here draws a contrast between the false teachers and Timothy. He draws a contrast between those who reject God’s word and those who accept the truth of God’s word. See, these false teachers, he says those who reject God’s word, they’re just going to plunge deeper and deeper into confusion.

The confusion is only going to get worse as long as they continue to reject God’s word. But he says, Timothy, on the other hand, you’ve got to cling ever tighter to the truth of God’s word. The fact that the world around us spirals into confusion should not give us an incentive to say, gee, I sure would like to have that.

There’s all this pressure on me to leave the certainty of God’s truth and jump into the confusion. Doesn’t that look fun, getting sucked into the whirlpool? No, I think I’m going to stay over here and cling to this boulder and not get sucked downstream.

That makes more sense to me. We are called, just as Timothy was called, to cling ever more faithfully, ever more forcefully to God’s truth. And speaking specifically to Timothy, he says, what you’ve known all along is the truth of God’s word.

You’ve known the truth of God’s word since you were a little boy. And he says, think about where you’ve learned this from. Think about who you really trust. Is it the pagan world out here at Ephesus that’s telling you one thing, or is it all the people that you’ve learned from?

Paul knew who he’d learned from. He’d been taught the scriptures by his mother and his grandmother from the time that he was a little boy. He’d been taught by the Apostle Paul.

He’d been mentored by the Apostle Paul. And ultimately, since he’s been reading God’s word, he’s been studying God’s word, and since we believe the scriptures are the literal word of God, he was ultimately taught these principles by God himself. Now, if we can’t trust the word of an unchanging God, why would we let go of that and throw ourselves into the ever-changing whims of a culture that can’t even make up its mind about matters that have been certain for thousands of years.

If you can’t trust God in all his certainty, why would you trust this instead? Paul reminds him that in God’s word we find