Thoughts on 2 Timothy: In Trust

He is altogether lovely. He is both our Beloved and Friend. See Song of Solomon 5:16. And as such, his words are also lovely, and ever rich with meaning, beauty, and truth. I want to place one such lovely word before you. It can be translated as deposit or trust. Paul uses this word three times:

O Timothy, guard the deposit. Avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions of what is falsely called “knowledge,” or by professing it some have swerved from the faith. (1 Tim. 6:20)

But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard my deposit until that day. (2 Timothy 1:12)

Guard the good deposit by the Holy Spirit that indwells us. (2 Timothy 1:14)

And in each instance, Paul commands Timothy to guard the deposit or trust. That word is a military term; and it should inform our understanding of Paul’s use of “fighting the good fight” and “warring the warfare” in the letters. The things of God for the people of God have been hard won by Christ himself; and we therefore should not trifle with them—but instead guard as Adam should have.

Those instances of fighting the good fight of faith may include standing for the faith against outside persecution; but the thrust of these two letters is to keep the integrity of the doctrine inside the Church, which was being challenged by false doctrine, against which Paul rails frequently in these two the letters (and others).

You may recall that false teaching from lupine teachers, which and who would harm and mislead God’s people, was the very thing Paul warned the Ephesian elders about in Miletus in Acts 20:

Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood. I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them. So be on your guard!

Sound familiar? This admonition Paul repeats multiple times with Timothy in both letters to underscore the absolute importance of protecting and maintaining the integrity of the truth with a right understanding of the truth, a right application of the truth, and by right-hearted shepherds of the sheep.

And so Chapter 2 of Paul’s second letter to Timothy begins:

You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.

Paul asks Timothy to place what Timothy has heard from Paul into trust, into the hands of faithful men. In other words, Paul is placing his life and doctrine (which he has testified on other occasions came by direct revelation) in trust with Timothy; and Timothy is to place that very same life and doctrine (which Paul asserts is the gift of God and the gift of faith from his mother and grandmother) in trust with faithful men, who in turn are to place that life and doctrine in trust with other faithful men. Paul deemed Timothy trustworthy, Timothy was to find equally trustworthy men, and they too were to find trustworthy men, and so on.

We saw this same thought earlier in Paul’s first letter to Timothy:

This charge I entrust to you, Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies previously made about you, that by them you may wage the good warfare, holding faith and a good conscience.

The charge you may recall was a correction Paul wanted made among the Ephesian Christians—that they adhere to the doctrine and eschew all myths and endless genealogies, which served no other end than controversy and strife.

“Hold on to the pattern of sound teaching you have heard from me, with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus,” Paul admonished Timothy in Chapter 1:13.

For Paul, his life and doctrine had such heavenly and earthly value for present and successive generations of believers that he committed to Timothy the fiduciary obligation of taking the pure, unadulterated truth of God’s word—his gospel in Christ Jesus—forward into the next generation of Christians.

The word in Greek that Paul uses is paratithemi. It means to set before or to place near (para = beside or near; and tithemi = place). Paratheke, the word for deposit or trust, derives from paratithemi.

I want to focus on paratithemi from which paratheke (deposit) derives because we see a color of meaning that is quite lovely. Deposit connotes a financial transaction; and paratithemi can absolutely mean to deposit or to commit to one’s charge or trust; but something much more intimate than a commercial transaction is present.

First, let’s go to Acts 16. Paul and Silas are in the Philippian jail, praising God until the earthquake burst open the prison, cracked it in half even. The jailer was completely undone, as you recall. Let’s pick the narrative up at verse 29:

The jailer called for lights, rushed in and fell trembling before Paul and Silas. He then brought them out and asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household.” Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house. At that hour of the night the jailer took them and washed their wounds; then immediately he and all his household were baptized. The jailer brought them into his house and set a meal before them; he was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God—he and his whole household.

He set before Paul and Silas a meal; he welcomed them into his home; and they believed with joy. The “set before them” is paratithemi.

Next, let’s turn to 1 Corinthians 10:27: “If an unbeliever invites you to a meal and you want to go, eat whatever is put before you without raising questions of conscience.” “Put before you” is paratithemi.

Can you see an element of trust in this? In each instance, we have a home and a meal and hospitality; and trust is offered by the host and received by the guest and established between the two of them. An intimacy should be apparent with this use of the word that a commercial transaction does not necessarily convey. An invitation to share and to commune and to come together of two people;when one the invitation accepts, a trust is born.

Here is where the word gets interesting, and comes very close to how Paul intends the word the word to apply. Matthew in his gospel uses the same verb twice in Chapter 13:24, 31:

Jesus put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field . . . “

He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field . . . “

God’s word is a meal; let me just say that at the start. But we have another overlay of meaning. Jesus is committing the truth to his hearers. The same transaction is occurring as with the jailer. Jesus takes something of himself (grace and truth in himself) and entrusts it and himself to the hearers. He very much intends them to take it in—to eat was he has placed before them, in exactly the same way as when Paul and Silas ate in the home and of the hospitality of the jailer in Philippi. By speaking truth, by offering himself, Jesus places within his hearers, through the human organs of hearing and understanding, a deposit of truth—or, he is trusting they will accept his trust—namely, himself. I suppose it was then up to them to guard it with all diligence. And presumably that trust would only occur if they appreciated and loved Jesus since we naturally guard and protect what we value. And we guard most zealously that which we cherish most.

I am reminded of Paul’s words in 1 Timothy: the aim of this charge (to demand truth versus false doctrine) was love. Why? because we will guard that which we love with our lives if we have to. The truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ was worth protecting—Paul had in fact staked his life on it.

He expected Timothy to maintain the same ardor for the truth, with the same affection for Christ, and to find others would understand Christ’s invitation of trust and relationship, and respond with the same faithfulness Paul had in running his course. He expected Timothy to be a keeper of the flame and to find others so that the light, which had brought life and incorruptibility to light, would continue to burn bright long after Paul and Timothy had gone.

Have you broken bread with Christ Jesus? Have to taken the body that was broken for you and sipped from the cup in church? Has he placed his words before you? There’s an invitation to a trust between possible friends in that. Do we value him? Have we made the Lord our trust? Good questions, these. But let me remind you: you will guard what you cherish, you will betray what you do not. So we should by the Holy Spirit who indwells us and guard the deposit, this treasure within us, with all diligence for out of it will indeed flow all the issues of life

Image by Bruce Cheek. Sourced via Unsplash.