Original Meaning
“THE SPIRIT CLEARLY says” in 4:1 prompts the question, “Where?” When Paul addressed the elders of the Ephesian church—the same leaders who were now facing heresy—he warned of coming doctrinal defection (Acts 20:17–35). In the course of that talk he referred to the Holy Spirit both in connection with his own actions and with the elders’ appointment. We know from this and other instances that Paul was conscious of the Spirit’s direct activity in connection with that church. We also know that the Spirit inspired Paul in the writing of his letters, which included predictions about coming defections (e.g., 2 Thess. 2:1–11). In 1 Corinthians 7, when Paul did not have a direct command of the Lord Jesus on a matter, he wrote, not his own opinion, but what he understood the Spirit of God was teaching (cf. vv. 10–12, 40).
We know too that Jesus predicted the coming of deceitful false prophets (Matt. 24:11; Mark 13:22). Among the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2–3 was one to Ephesus, which predicted the church’s opposition to false apostles (Rev. 2:2). These letters were given to John by the glorified Lord, but also said to express “what the Spirit says to the churches” (2:7; see also 2:11, 17, 29; 3:6, 13, 22). Therefore we know that what Jesus said was also what the Spirit said: “The Lord is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:17). Paul therefore may have been referring to the Lord Jesus’ teaching about coming heresy, to warnings the Spirit included in the inspired Scriptures, or to prophecies the Spirit gave to believers and communicated to the churches in the Lord’s name (1 Cor. 14:26).
“Later times,” an expression found only in this passage, picks up the concept of time as viewed in phases. Jewish thinkers spoke of the present age and the age to come. From the Christian perspective we are already participating in the blessing of the coming age, since the Messiah has come. While conscious of a wait until he returns, we are in the new age, in the kingdom, and already experiencing the “heavenly realms” (Eph. 2:6; cf. Col. 3:1–4). Hebrews sets up a contrast between “the past [when] God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets” and “these last days,” when “he has spoken to us by” the one who is no less than his own Son (Heb. 1:1–2). These “last days” are characterized by the pouring out of God’s Spirit on men and women, young and old, and the availability of salvation by calling on the name of the Lord (Joel 2:28–32; Acts 2:17–21), but also by “scoffers” who reject God’s truth (2 Peter 3:3; Jude 18).
In 1 Timothy 4:1 Paul refers to those who “abandon the faith.” The verb used here (aphistemi) occurs in a number of passages in classical Greek literature, in the LXX, as well as in the New Testament to describe an act of separation or withdrawal.1 The implication in its use here is not simply that they carelessly fall away, but that they abandon or “renounce” (NRSV) the faith (i.e., the doctrine) that they formerly held.
This text gives us a behind-the-scenes glimpse and reveals that the real perpetrators of heresy are not only the heretics but the evil spiritual forces that deceived and taught them. This recalls Ephesians 6:12, which informs us that our spiritual battle is not against human beings but against unseen spiritual powers. The word “deceive” (planao) occurs several times in the Pastoral Letters. Paul refers pointedly to religious deception, 2 and such terminology marked disputes among preachers in paganism as well as in the sphere of Christianity.
The apostle’s use of the active and passive forms of that verb, “deceiving and being deceived,” occurs notably in 2 Timothy 3:13. Two further points of interest there bear on the present passage. (1) One is the reference to “evil men and impostors [goetes]” That latter word was a common term of abuse in the first century (a “sorcerer”), describing people perpetrating a scam of some sort, such as used to wander across the Roman empire, cheating or swindling people. Not only Christian, but pagan wandering preachers accused each other of being a goes or a magos (in its meaning of a sinister magician). Those who went to hear such persons had to be on guard against the religious or philosophical scam artists departing from the truth and deceiving others.3
(2) A second point of comparison between this passage and 2 Timothy 3:13 is that both describe a worsening situation (the impostors “will go from bad to worse”), although the latter does not use the phrase “later times.” In his Olivet eschatological discourse, Jesus predicted that impostors would “deceive even the elect—if that were possible” (Matt. 24:24).
Paul’s emphasis in 1 Timothy 4, however, is not so much on the human deceivers as on the supernatural powers that cause people to be deceived. They are called “spirits” and “demons,” and as such have superhuman influence. These evil spirit beings work through evil human beings, “hypocritical liars.” Three things characterize them: They are not what they seem to be, what they teach is false, and their own consciences are burned to the point of insensibility.
The two false teachings cited in verse 3—“forbid[ding] people to marry” and “order[ing] them to abstain from certain foods”—are not easy to understand. A clue may be found in 2 Timothy 2:18, where the teaching that the resurrection is past receives stern disapproval. The idea that Christians have already entered the next age has, as we have seen, an aspect of truth, but not the way it was apparently being taught by these heretics. For them this is not a matter of the new life in the Spirit or of personal discipline in cases where marriage may, under certain circumstances, be considered unwise.4 Nor does the second element seem to be fully explicable in terms of personal dietary convictions, Jewish food laws, or refraining from meat offered to idols.5 Rather, the error seems to be a judgment against all marriage and against certain foods6 as being wrong in themselves.
This conclusion is strongly countered by Paul’s statement in verse 4 that “everything God created is good.” If this false teaching has some affinity with the prohibitions Paul criticizes in Colossians 2:21 (“Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”), it may share with the Colossian heresy—and other teachings that eventually took the form we know as Gnosticism—the premise that the material world, or some aspects of it, were evil. The only clearly relevant information we have in 1 and 2 Timothy, however, is that some taught the resurrection was past. In some way the heretics were imagining an altered or heightened spiritual environment, in which marriage and certain foods were unnecessary, even wrong.7
Paul indicates that such ideas are false when he says that people who “believe and…know the truth” receive the food that God created with thanksgiving. We may assume by analogy that Paul would say the same about marriage, but as the passage goes on it deals only with food. Close observation of the semantic patterns is necessary here:
God created [food]…
[which false teachers forbid]
to be received
with thanksgiving
by those who believe and know the truth.
Everything God created is
good and nothing is to be rejected [as false teachers do when they forbid food]
if it is received
with thanksgiving
because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.
To reject food is to negate God’s creative work. To receive it and be thankful are to acknowledge that work and our dependence on God. There is a vital cause-and-effect connection between the true God and the created world, something the Gnostics later denied because of their mistaken idea that the world was evil and could only have been created by an intermediary, not directly by God himself. The false teachers were clearly thankless, a sin that lay at the core of human rebellion against God (Rom. 1:21).
How much the confusion of these heretics may have been a distortion of Jewish food laws is not certain. Peter himself had to recognize that no food was “impure that God has made clean” (Acts 10:15). Jesus had earlier dealt with the misapplication of Old Testament dietary laws by stating that “nothing outside a man can make him ‘unclean’ by going into him” (Mark 7:15). The emphasis on receiving implies a conscious act of accepting food from the hand of the God who created it. From the basic dependence on God for our “daily bread” (Matt. 6:11) to the experiencing of the beautiful mystery of marriage (Eph. 5:32), also rejected by the false teachers, we are to receive God’s gifts with thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving, prayer, and the Word of God render the food legitimate to eat. While this does not mean that a formal act of blessing is necessary every time food is taken, it does suggest that an acknowledgment of its source and of the fact that “everything God created is good” is appropriate and desirable. Each account of the Lord Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand and the four thousand is careful to mention that he gave thanks (Matt. 14:19; 15:36; Mark 6:41; 8:6; Luke 9:16; John 6:11), and, of course, Jesus gave thanks before breaking the bread and distributing the wine at the Last Supper (Matt. 26:26–27; Mark 14:22–23; Luke 22:17, 19). Also Jewish table benedictions have a long tradition.
We know that what is secular can be “sanctified,” that is, given over to God and considered to belong to him. If an unbelieving spouse and the couple’s children can be “sanctified” in the sense of 1 Corinthians 7:14, certainly God’s gift of food can be consecrated and eaten, no matter what doctrinal reason the heretics may have to the contrary. This consecration is accomplished by “the word of God and prayer.”
In spite of several suggestions as to what specific Scripture Paul has in mind in verse 5, the use within Paul’s writings of the expression “word of God” has a broader referent than the Old Testament. More to the point, when the Pastorals refer to specific biblical texts, the phrase “word of God” is not used to introduce them (1 Tim. 5:18; 2 Tim. 2:19); and when the Pastorals employ the single word logos (“word”), it does not refer to a specific text (see comments on 4:6; 2 Tim. 2:15; 4:2; Titus 1:3). This does not mean that Scripture is ruled out, but most likely the author has in mind the truth of God (known, of course, mainly from Scripture) that is recalled in the prayer of thanksgiving.8
Bridging Contexts
False teaching in
the “later times.” This section relates not only to the foregoing passages with regard to the ongoing concerns about false teachers but also, in a particular way, to the hymn of 3:16. There is a contrast between the open truths of the hymn and the deceitful lies described in 4:1–3.9 The insidious nature of the false teachings described in this chapter as well as the teachings themselves characterize the “later times.”
What period of history does this refer to? It is not unusual to find in the oral or written traditions of a culture a tribal memory of an early golden age. Such an age was remembered as a time of great accomplishment and peace. Civilizations rise and fall. Biblical history itself chronicles cycles of degeneration. In fact, the dispensational analysis of history concluded that every “dispensation” ended in failure as regards the ability of people to please God. Beyond this dreary path of failure lies what both Old and New Testaments speak of as the “day of the Lord,” a day on which God acts decisively. Those who complacently expect God to bring them special blessings when that time comes, while irresponsibly disobeying God, need to learn that the day of the Lord for them means not joy but judgment (Amos 5:18).
The expression used in verse 1, “later times,” does not refer to that specific point in time, but it does contain the idea of a period preceding that day. It recalls the somewhat similar phrase “the last days.” A form of that phrase is used in Hebrews 1 to refer to the time of Christ in contrast to the time of the Old Testament (Heb. 1:2). Peter, in Acts 2:17, uses the same phrase to interpret Joel 2:28. In other passages the phrase looks ahead to a significant time of God’s decisive action (Isa. 2:2; Hos. 3:5; Mic. 4:1; John 6:39–40, 44, 54; 11:24; 12:48; James 5:3; 2 Peter 3:3). In both this passage (1 Tim. 4:1) and in 2 Timothy 3:1 (which refers to “terrible times”), a description of the last days seems to be intended to alert the readers of what has already begun to take place. While times of greater moral degeneration may yet come, there would seem to be little point in Paul’s citing these times in the context of the Pastoral Letters if the conditions they describe were not taking place at the time of this correspondence.
The three forms of the expression just cited (“in these last days,” Heb. 1:2; “later times,” 1 Tim. 4:1; “last days,” 2 Tim. 3:1) seem to allow that the conditions described could, in one form or another, take place in any period of intense moral decline or doctrinal deviation during the church age and prior to the “day of the Lord.” It is useful to see what problems may be expected to recur during these last days. (1) One problem is departure from the faith (see also 2 Peter 2:1–22; Jude 8–16, which spell this out vividly). (2) Behind this apostasy are evil spirits. Surely not all error comes directly from Satan or demons, but repudiation of the faith and of truth is often demonically inspired. The devil is “the father of lies” (John 8:44). (3) The demonic spirits have human associates through whom they do their work; thus it is not surprising that his teachings “come through hypocritical liars” (1 Tim. 4:2).
Principles for receiving God’s gifts. The characteristics of the false doctrines that follow in the text may stem from a Gnostic-like, if not actually pre-Gnostic asceticism. The prohibitions may seem at first so particular and limited in scope that it is difficult to offer general principles dealing with them. Mere abstinence from specific foods is not unusual for a culture, but denying people the right to marry is uncommon except in some cults and religious orders.
Paul outlines several principles here that apply to any rules proposed in regard to these matters. (1) All things have been created by God and are, as stated repeatedly in Genesis 1, good. (2) God’s created gifts are to be received and not rejected. (3) God’s gifts are to be received with thanksgiving. (4) The consuming of God’s gifts should take place with an understanding of the truth and with faith and is to be consecrated by the Word of God and prayer.
It is a paradox that many people who have sought to be religious have tried to do so by rejecting God’s own created gifts. This is not the same as Christian fasting, which is a temporary exclusion of food or whatever else might distract us from full devotion to God. Normally, however, the Christian gladly accepts all of God’s provisions for a healthy and contented life.10 The problem with centering on what one does or does not consume as a rule for spirituality is that it directs attention away from God as creator and provider and from the true nature and practice of spirituality. “For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17).
Contemporary Significance
Facing the “last days.” Wherever we may be today within the total span of the church age and however far we may be into the “last days,” most would agree that there seems to be intense activity now on the part of deceiving spirits. Beliefs and practices that were usually only confronted by overseas missionaries a few generations ago are now found throughout North America. This is not the same as demon possession (also a threat in our times), which is the control of an individual by one or more evil spirits. What is in view in the present passage is the evil activity of blinding people to truth and persuading them of error.
The risen Jesus told Paul to go to the Gentiles “to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God” (Acts 26:18). Even persons who do not exhibit evidence of demonic control can be under the “dominion of darkness” and need to be brought “into the kingdom of the Son [God] loves” (Col. 1:13). Satan also deceives nations (Rev. 20:3). When these are added to the “made in America” cults, the opposition to biblical truth is formidable. The spirit of pluralism and postmodernism makes it difficult to confront competing systems of belief without incurring the charge of intolerance. In the 1960s many Christian parents were dismayed and perplexed when their children, who had grown up under orthodox Christian teaching, turned to Eastern religious. Later decades saw the coming of “New Age” teachings.
The situation has grown increasingly complex since then. Scripture tells us that one of the gifts God gives his church is distinguishing between spirits (1 Cor. 12:10). This gift is urgently needed today. But one does not need special gifting to study God’s Word and learn sound doctrine against which to test various claims. Churches that teach God’s truth clearly, that emphasize major doctrines, that avoid a dogmatic attitude about things that matter less (the so-called adiaphora), and that stress love as the goal of God’s commands are well able to deal with false teachings. They are in a good position to teach young people, who will be faithful to the truth and to Christian life.
Discerning between kinds of abstinence. Are there examples today of the kind of prohibitions issued by the false teachers in this passage? We can cite the Shakers, a sect that has forbidden marriage and has almost died out as a result. Many religions have had food laws of one sort or another. This passage has sometimes been used to critique the Catholic church, whose priests do not marry and who were expected (at least until several decades ago in the United States) to abstain from meat on Fridays. These practices, however, do not correspond to the intensely evil teachings of the reprobate false teachers, who are Timothy’s enemies.
This passage, therefore, clearly should not be used in an arbitrary way to condemn people for one or another form of abstinence. Romans 14 deals with this matter fully. The important truth to apply today from the present passage is that we should beware of people who are deceitful, whose teachings are contrary to Scripture (possibly originating in demonic sources), and whose practices are a result of their evil origin. The specific error that must be addressed is the assumption that God’s creation in part or in the whole is not good.
It would be trite, of course, to mention that some things, though part of creation, are harmful and ought not to be ingested. Poisons and certain drugs were never intended to be food. Tobacco has been at the center of much concern over the past decades, and tobacco executives have recently had to face charges of increasing sales by seeking to ensnare especially young people into dependence. Less clear is the use of alcohol. On the one hand, Scripture celebrates the joys of wine or its medicinal use (1 Tim. 5:23); on the other hand, it cautions moderation (3:3). But in the passage before us, it is not a matter of adverse chemical or social effects, but of denial of the inherent goodness of the material world.11
Asceticism and withdrawal from society can result from extreme self-discipline, from an under-evaluation of some parts of creation (assuming that they are good but dispensable), or from the belief, exemplified by the Gnostics, that the material world is inherently evil. It is the last of these that must be rejected. The others are matters of priority. God has created a wonderful world to be enjoyed—beauty, order, music, color, fragrance, and form, among many other delights.
1. A few examples among many in the Old Testament are Gen. 14:4; Num. 14:9; 2 Chron. 21:8; 29:6 (where it means to be unfaithful in a context of turning away from the Lord and his temple); Ezek. 20:38 (where it means to rebel). It occurs several times in the New Testament in a neutral or good sense (e.g., “turn away” in 2 Tim. 2:19). The negative meaning appears in the interpretation of the parable of the soils in Luke 8:13, regarding those who “fall away” in the time of testing. In Heb. 3:12–14 those who “turn away from the living God” are contrasted with those who are not “hardened by sin’s deceitfulness” but “hold firmly till the end.” The related noun, apostasia, is the source of our English word “apostasy” and is used in 2 Thess. 2:3 for the coming rebellion, when the “man of lawlessness” is revealed.
2. See esp. 2 Thess. 2:3–5.
3. For a description of how wandering preachers frequently denigrated each other using such terminology, see Walter Liefeld, The Wandering Preacher As a Social Figure in the Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1968), 272–99.
4. Paul deals with that in 1 Cor. 7, and in the course of his instructions he makes it clear that marriage in itself is not wrong or unspiritual.
5. Paul deals with such matters in, among other places, Rom. 14 and 1 Cor. 8.
6. The NIV inserts the word “certain” before foods. Since the word is general, and we may assume that these people did eat, they must have selected some and rejected other types of food.
7. Towner, offers a valuable observation: “But it is also possible that this behavior reflected the attempt to enact the life of resurrection paradise by following the model given in Genesis 1 and 2, before the fall into sin” (Towner, 1–2 Timothy & Titus, 104–5). He refers to Jesus’ teaching that in the resurrection there will be no marriage (Matt. 22:30) and suggests that “vegetarianism seems to have been the rule in Eden/paradise.”
8. Kelly’s proposal has merit, that the prayer is “the actual prayer of blessing” and the Word “the excerpts from Scripture which, according to Jewish custom, formed [the prayer’s] content” (Kelly, Pastoral Epistles, 97)—if one allows that along with “excerpts from Scripture” one could include “truths from Scripture.”
9. There is no grammatical break between 3:16 and 4:1. The use of a conjunction (de) signals a connection. It is true that it is customary in Greek grammar to connect most sentences with a conjunction, usually omitting it only when a new section or topic is being introduced, but when present its function must be observed. In this case it is not a strong conjunction (indicated only loosely by “now” in NRSV and omitted in NIV), yet its presence does indicate a level of continuity.
10. The sins of greed and excess are dealt with in ch. 6.
11. While Buddhism, for example, has views on this world, desire, and the nature of the ultimate “state” (or non-state) of Nirvana, which are different for Christians, even that is not the same as Gnosticism. It is perhaps a simple devaluing of the material world that should be addressed in our own culture from this passage.