In this week’s message from 1 Timothy 2, we confront the relativism and tribalism of our modern age with the power of the Gospel. There is only one God and one mediator, Jesus Christ. Christ’s infinite ransom breaks down worldly divisions, unites us as a church family, and calls us to earnestly pray for the salvation of all people.
Transcript
Turn with me once again to 1 Timothy chapter 2. We’re going to continue looking at the same passage we’ve looked at for the last two weeks. I’m going to focus this morning on two verses, verses 5 and 6. But I’m going to read this section once again, verses 1 to 8, and then we’ll consider verses 5 and 6. All of this goes together, so we need to think about the whole context of this passage. This is God’s holy and inerrant word.
“First of all, then, I urge that entreaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings, be made on behalf of all men, for kings and all who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity. This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all, the testimony given at the proper time. For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying) as a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth. Therefore I want the men in every place to pray, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and dissension.”
Father, we thank you that you have given us this sure word. We thank you, Father, that you have given us a Savior, Jesus Christ. And we ask, Lord, that as we think about this passage and the truth of your word this morning, that you would shine the light of your truth on our heart. Lord, that by the power of your Holy Spirit, we would both comprehend and apply this truth. Help us, Father, to appreciate the beauty of your word, the wonderful counsel that you have given to us. And Father, help us to realize not just the historical significance of these words to the church at Ephesus, but Father, that we would be able to see the relevance of the truth to our lives today. Guide us in these things, we pray in Christ’s name. Amen.
Living in an Age of Relativism and Tribalism
Well, we live in a rather difficult time, a time where we live with the chaos of our age and people in tribal groups. It seems like the movement toward tribalism, I don’t know if you sense that very much. We live in a time when people don’t know what truth is, the relativism of our age where no one seems to believe in anything sure or solid, but that truth is a matter of opinion. That’s the age we live in. And it’s interesting because I think when we look at this passage today, we’re going to see that what was true then gives us wisdom and counsel for our life today.
Because we live in a time when God, when you look at God’s word, He hasn’t left us to find our own way. He’s provided a solid way for us. In a world that looks at your truth and my truth, the Apostle Paul points to the only truth, the one God and the one mediator, the one ransom who is given for all. So we’re going to look at this this morning and consider it.
The Ground for Praying for All People
Let me explain my thinking as we approach the passage. Just a casual review here. In verse 1, we have the exhortation that Paul gives to Timothy for the church at Ephesus, that they pray, that as part of their worship service, they offer prayer to God, and prayer and thanksgiving be made on behalf of all mankind. Particularly for kings and for those in authorities, and for this expected result, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity. The idea of us living a tranquil life, a life together in unity.
God’s Desire for Salvation
And then it gives the reason we’re to do this:
“This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”
It’s the moral will of God that people recognize who Jesus Christ is and put their trust in Him.
The Foundation of Our Prayers (Verse 5)
When I first started studying this passage, looking at the words, repetition, and trying to understand how the passage flows logically, the word that struck me in verse 5 is that very first word, “For.” That’s an important word because what it is saying is, we have seen what the result of praying for mankind is—leading a tranquil life in all godliness and dignity—and we’re seeing the reason why, because it’s the will of God. But when we come to verse 5, it gives us the ground for what Paul is saying. It’s interesting, with that influence happening at Ephesus, that he focuses on this word: “For there is one God and one mediator between God and men.”
First Century Ephesus and the Roman Empire
The Influence of the Judaizers
Why are we to pray for all mankind? The thing that he focuses on is something that the Judaizers would absolutely agree with, in the sense that they were very familiar with this Old Testament verse, Deuteronomy 6:4, the great Shema of Israel. Today, if you go anywhere in the world, if you go to Cleveland or if you go to Israel, and you find an orthodox group of Jews, the Jewish call to worship is that verse. They recite it in Hebrew: Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. They sing that out as their call to worship. It’s their most important verse:
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”
There is one God, and Yahweh is that God. He calls their attention back to that. If that’s the ground of praying for all people, I thought, why is that the ground? What is he saying here?
The Pax Romana
Let’s think about the first century and how these Gentile converts to faith, getting the influence from these Judaizers, how they would think about this, and how a Jew at that time thought about their relationship with God. In the first century, it was an interesting time. The Romans had conquered pretty much the known world. You almost had a one-world government. Not quite, but almost, and that’s what they were striving for. They were powerful conquerors. For the first time in history, those geographical borders began to disappear, and people hardly paid attention to them, even though their culture, background, and beliefs were very different.
Rome built a massive culture. They built roads everywhere; the Roman roads are famous. With their military, they guaranteed peace, a military peace for all these peoples called Pax Romana, the Peace of Rome. They took the Greek language, and that became the trade language for this entire empire. All these nations brought together under Roman rule. A Jew would speak Hebrew, a Roman would speak Latin, but most people learned Greek because Greek was the language of the marketplace where they came together. They were able to communicate with each other. The point was unity. We’re going to get along so we can get along in the marketplace.
You had these communities coming together in all these cities, these city-states, places like Ephesus or Antioch or Athens. You had a conglomerate of different kinds of people coming in. You had Greeks, Arabs, Roman soldiers, and all sorts of different cultures coming together in one city, using the same roads, going to the same marketplace, communicating together in the Greek language. And yet, they were socially fragmented. They were isolated from one another. They lived in the city together, but in their little ghetto groups. Or they lived in the same household together, some as masters and some as slaves. The masters may have liked their slaves and got along as friends in some way, but there was a radical difference. They didn’t socialize together.
The Problem of Pluralism
Rome’s Pluralistic Religion
They guaranteed this peace by making sure that every religion is accepted. Every religion is good. You can’t criticize anybody else’s religion because all religions are good. The Roman government guaranteed a kind of freedom of religion.
Edward Gibbon, who spent his life studying the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, observed this about the society:
- The common people saw all religions as equally true.
- The philosophers thought them all equally false.
- The magistrates saw them as equally useful.
That sounds rather familiar to me. Politicians cater to religion in order to win voters, and they favor this one or that one. Well, that was what was going on in the first century. You go to a place like Athens, and the government supported all different kinds of religions. It was said that in Athens, there were more statues and icons for gods across the city than there were people in the city. If you remember the story in Acts when Paul goes there, they didn’t just have icons for all the gods you could think of; they decided to put one up for the unknown god. They put one up for him too. It was this idea of pluralism. The idea that we need to respect and value as true every religion because they’re just worshipping a different god in different ways. We all worship our gods in different ways, so we have to acknowledge their truth, and we worship our god as our truth.
The Exclusivity of the Gospel
In Ephesus, with the Judaizers and the Jews, they believed in one God, but they believed that the one God was for the Jews. Other people could worship their gods, but the God was for the Jews. They lived to themselves, an isolated group. Rome wasn’t concerned about Jewish monotheism because they stayed to themselves. But Rome didn’t approve when people broke out of that and said that their religion was the true religion, when they said that their God was the only God.
Paul is saying exactly that in verse 5. You think that there’s all these gods? Maybe people are pursuing God in their own way, and we’re going to leave them that way. I want to explain something, because there’s generational differences. When I was young and you were taught pluralism, it’s radically different than the pluralism today. When I was young, you were taught that you need to respect other religions in the sense that people had a right to believe what they wanted. It was a matter of respect, but you didn’t have to say that you thought they were true. That’s changed today. Today, people see truth as relative, pretty much the way they did then. They pursue their truth, and we pursue our truth. The atheistic philosophers don’t believe any of it’s true. The people commonly believe that all these religions are true, they’re just different ways to come to God.
John Hick’s Mountain Path Analogy
Today, you see the motivation. You see why Rome wanted that. John Stott pointed out that the survival of the human race seems to depend on our learning to live together in harmony, and whatever divides us, including our religions, is regarded with disfavor, causing a conflict. That’s the way Rome thought about it, that’s the way people think about it today.
There was a philosopher and theologian a generation ago named John Hick. His “Mountain Path” analogy was adopted. I’ve had multiple conversations about this with people over the years, where they see all the religions as paths to God. He says we’re all climbing toward a mountain, and there’s all different roads and paths up that mountain. At the top of the mountain is God or heaven, and we’re just on different paths, but we all end up at the same place.
It’s not an analogy that is rational. You can’t look at that and think that that can possibly actually be true. Because who is that God that’s on the mountain?
- A Buddhist would say that there’s really no God on the mountain, they just have The Way there.
- A Hindu says there’s thousands of gods on the mountain.
- Christians say that there’s one God, who exists in three persons, that’s on the mountain.
Can those things be true? It’s not possible that they all be true. If one says that there’s no one on the mountain, and another says that there is a God there, those aren’t paths converging on the same truth. Those are paths running in exactly opposite directions. We’re dealing with something that is irrational. They don’t try to explain the logic of it, they just want people to get along. I think at the heart of it is an atheistic thought.
The One God and the One Mediator
Paul reminds them why we need to pray for all peoples to come to Christ: because there is one God. He says there’s one God for everyone. There’s only one God in existence, and all people have to come to that God. That creates a problem because there is one holy God, and all men worldwide are accountable to that one God. And all men have a problem. We’re born in sin, we’re sinners from infancy. We’ve failed to bring glory to that God. We are at war with God, there’s a hostility between man and God.
What happens if there’s a hostility between two parties? How do they ever get together? Job said in Job 9:33, struggling with his suffering and appealing to God who seemed beyond his reach:
“There is no umpire between us, who may lay his hand upon us both.”
There needs to be a mediator. There needs to be an arbitrator, an umpire between me and God. There needs to be someone to come in between to help us to be able to unify us, to bring us together. So we have a unique Savior who was given. There’s one God, and one mediator between God and men. The man, he says, Christ Jesus.
The God-Man
There’s an infinite gap between sinful humanity and the perfect holy God. To meet that need, we have a Savior who mediates. He’s the only one who can do it because He alone is the God-Man. When Paul emphasizes that He is the man Christ Jesus, it means that because He’s completely a man, He has solidarity, a connection with all mankind. He becomes the representative man for all humanity, for all who put their trust in Him. We’re born in this world under Adam as our federal head. If we put our trust in Jesus Christ, Christ Himself, as the second Adam as Paul writes in Romans, becomes our federal head. He’s the mediator.
In the Reformation, they talked about Solus Christus, Christ alone. There’s no other way for us to come to God except Christ alone. If you look at other religions of the world, they have moral teachers, they have patterns of life that you follow, but they don’t have a mediator. They don’t have one who comes in between. They don’t have a Savior. The only way for us to come to God is to come through the one Savior who God has given to us, and that’s the Lord Jesus. The one who is both God and man.
The Narrow Way
That is exclusively Christ. Christ alone. There’s one God, one mediator between God and men. There’s no other Savior but Jesus. The way is narrow, Jesus said. It’s narrow because it only comes through Him.
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.”
He’s the only access to the Father. He is the truth. He’s the one who reveals everything that is true about God. The only way we can really understand truth about God is through Jesus Christ Himself; He is the perfect revelation of the Father. He is the life, the very life of God that awakens us to God.
The Ransom for All
The Apostle Peter told the high priest and the rulers of Israel in Acts 4:12:
“And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.”
Worldwide, there’s only one way for people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. That’s exclusive. If you come to faith in Jesus Christ, you are the church of Jesus Christ. We are the called-out body of Christ, called out of darkness into His light, just like these people in Ephesus. They come to Jesus Christ who is the light of the world, and then they take the truth of Christ, the gospel, and as Jesus said to His disciples, “You are the light of the world.” They become the candles that light up this world.
The world loves the darkness rather than light. They don’t like it. There’s hostility to this message, and so there’s persecution. If you’re going to be a candle, you’ve got to endure the burning. If you’re going to bring light to this world, there is a cost to that. The world doesn’t like this message, until by the grace of God, they embrace the truth of the message. Then that’s radically different. You have Onesimus, the runaway slave, being brought back to Philemon, the slave owner, not to return as a slave, but to return as his brother in the Lord, because they both have come to faith in Jesus Christ.
True Unity in Christ
Chuck Colson gave examples of men who were radical Black Panthers and men who were the White Knights, a militant branch of the Ku Klux Klan. Both radical groups, militant to win their rights. Coming together, arrested because of their horrible crimes, brought into prison, meeting Christ, and coming together in friendship as brothers in Christ. That is sociologically impossible, but it happens in Jesus Christ. When they experience the love of God for them, their hearts are awakened to the love of God for brothers and sisters in Christ. It’s a different thing. You are brought out of this group, and you’re brought into the church of Jesus Christ. You become brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. It’s a powerful thing, the transforming grace of Christ, and what we receive in Him.
Conclusion
Jesus is the one who did this. He’s the ransom. He’s the one who went to the cross and paid the debt for our sin, so that people can put their trust in Him. You’re not excluded because of your background. You’re not excluded because you’re of a different race, or you’re not wealthy, or you’re too wealthy. There’s no exclusion for anyone, for any reason. All can come to Jesus Christ. All can meet at the foot of the cross, and every one of us is equal at the foot of the cross. Jesus paid the ransom price. He’s the one mediator, and He is the one who gave Himself as the ransom for all. It’s a purchase price that He paid that is infinite in its value. The blood of Jesus Christ is infinite in its value, and it’s applied to all those who put their trust in Jesus Christ. So it’s offered to everyone. Everyone is responsible to come, and the blood of Christ has been applied to all those who believe in Him.
That’s what we celebrate when we celebrate the Lord’s table. We need to think about the Lord’s table and the description that that is of the ransom price that God has made available to us in Jesus Christ, His sacrifice. He was the one human being who could live a perfect life before God in our place. And He’s the one infinite God who could take the whole wrath of God and pay that debt of sin that we owe. There’s only one of Him. No religion in the world has a Savior like that. If there is a gospel, if people in any church are preaching that we all are finding our way to God, then that’s no gospel at all. There’s no gospel apart from the work of Jesus Christ on the cross for us, and His saving grace for us.
When we come together as a church, Paul says it’s important that we remember to pray for mankind, for all people to come to faith in Christ, because it’s God’s desire for people to come to faith in Christ. Every one of us knows people who need the Lord. We don’t talk to them always because we’re afraid we might offend them, or they might get in a discussion, that they might be alienated from us, and exclude us as some member of their family, and not want to associate with us anymore. If you’re a candle of the light, you have to endure the burning. If you’re going to bring light to this world, there is a cost to that. The world doesn’t like this message until by the grace of God they embrace the truth of the message, and then that’s radically different. You have Onesimus the slave who ran away, a runaway slave being brought back to Philemon the slave owner, not to return him as his slave, but to return him as his brother in the Lord, because they both have come to faith in Jesus Christ.
Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your abundant grace in Christ Jesus. We have provision made for us, a Savior. And Lord, what a precious, incredible gift that we can come to know you, to come to the Father through the mediation of our Savior, the Lord Jesus. What an amazing, wonderful gift that our sins have been taken away, that there’s now no hindrance between us and you. Because our sins have been forgiven, washed, and purified from all the sinful deeds that they have performed in their past. That gone. And we’re pure before you. Not something that we could ever do for ourselves. We could never wash our hands clean. But Christ can wash them clean. And because of that, Father, we have access to you, and we can come before you. We thank you, Father, that you have made provision for us through Jesus our Savior. At infinite cost. At a cost that’s unimaginable. His body broken for us, His blood poured out for us. Him on the cross in those dark hours experiencing all your wrath, the wrath of hell that we deserve. And Father, we thank you that He emerged from that victorious, because He was sinless, because He was the perfect Son of God, because He is God in the flesh. We thank you that through that He’s conquered death for us, and we have a future that is glorious together with Him. Bless us, Lord Jesus today. Bless the elements as we share them. We ask Father this grace in Jesus’ name. Amen.
