The Challenge of a Soldier-A Crafty Enemy

2 Timothy 3:1-9

When I was in the Navy I spent my last couple of years training sailors in various areas like maintenance, alcohol awareness, and integrity. One of the questions I used to ask the men and women in uniform was, “What do we do?” I’d get lots of answers depending upon who I was training, like “We maintain ships,” “We support the fleet” or “We make steam to propel the boat.” “Simpler than that,” I’d say. “What is it that we do at our very core?”

After letting them think about it for a minute, I’d let them off the hook and say, “Guys, in the military our job is very simple: we kill the bad guys and blow up their stuff. And when we’re not killing the bad guys and blowing up their stuff, we’re training to kill bad guys and blow up their stuff and threatening to kill bad guys and blow up their stuff.”

Before we could fulfill our mission, though, we needed to know who the bad guys were! Picking out the bad guys is one of the biggest challenges anyone in the military faces. To be able to do our jobs as soldiers in Christ’s army we need to know who our enemy is as well. We have spent the last several weeks looking at our commission as soldiers in Christ’s army, and now Paul turns his attention to the challenges we face as we serve Jesus. Granted, we may not kill bad guys and blow stuff up, but we oppose Satan’s schemes and try to foil his plans. If we are going to do our job we need to know who the bad guys are, because the enemy is crafty and experienced! In our passage today we will learn about the device Satan uses, the disguise he employs, and his sure downfall as our enemy.

1. Satan’s Device: A Cascade of Bad Decisions. (3:1-4) As chapter 3 begins, Paul doesn’t want Timothy to look at life through “rose colored glasses.” Paul is a realist, and he was in the world and in the church enough to know that things don’t always go as planned! Even after encouraging Timothy to “cleanse himself” (2:21) and pursue Christ with others of like mind (2:22), Paul knew that there wouldn’t be only sunshine and rainbows ahead. Every soldier needs to know that they are employed to defend against an enemy, and Paul now turns his attention to showing us who our enemy is.

But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. (2 Timothy 3:1)

Paul isn’t under the illusion that Timothy will have smooth sailing if he commits to living out his commission as a soldier in Christ’s army. He instead prepares Timothy for the reality that despite his best efforts there would be difficulty in the days to come. Just because a soldier is well-prepared and well-equipped it does not guarantee that he will never have to face opposition.

As we continue to look at our passage we will see that Paul is describing the events happening at the church in Ephesus in Timothy’s day[1], which leads me to the conclusion that the “last days” Paul is discussing here speak of the time between Jesus’ first coming and His Second Coming. The New Testament speaks of “the last days” in some instances of the time of Jesus’ second coming, and others, as this one, of the relatively short interval between His first and second coming[2].

Paul is pretty clear that we shouldn’t be surprised at difficulty that arises despite our best efforts. We may think that as a church we can avoid problems and conflict if we try really hard to be devoted and diligent servants of Jesus, but things will not always go according to plan. We can only control ourselves, not the opposition. Because there will be plenty of people who would like to stand in our way the path will not be an easy one. The “last days,” the time between Jesus’ first and second coming, will be a time of opposition. There will be trouble and turmoil in life, but as the adage goes we’ve been promised a safe landing, not a smooth flight.

Verses two through four give us a clear and sad picture of what our opposition looks like. We will find as we look at these verses that we face a crafty enemy in Satan. When I think of Satan’s activity on earth I tend to be focused on the world outside of the church, and blatant opposition to a biblical view of our world and our condition as people. Paul makes us take a view here that looks inside the church as well as outside.

For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, (2 Timothy 3:2-4)

What a horrible list of vices! I look at the opposition that Timothy had to overcome and I get a little weary. This doesn’t look like the church I want to be a part of! It’s just a guess, but I don’t think Timothy wanted his church to look like this, either.

Let’s take a close look at this vice list, though, because if we slow down a little and “unpack” it, we will see that what Paul has in mind is more than wagging his finger at some degenerates in Ephesus. These verses, like 2 Timothy 2:11-13, are arranged in a chiasm[3]. Arranging them in their structure really helps us see Paul’s emphasis in this list:

lovers of self
lovers of money

boastful
arrogant
revilers

disobedient to parents
ungrateful
unholy
unloving
irreconcilable

malicious gossips

without self-control
brutal
haters of good

treacherous
reckless
conceited

lovers of pleasure
rather than lovers of God

The sin I want us to notice first and foremost is the one that is arranged farthest to the right (and just about in the middle), which is translated in the NASB as “malicious gossips.” The Greek word that lies under that translation is the word διάβολοι (diaboloi), from which we get the English word “devil.” If we look up a few lines in our text to 2 Timothy 2:26, we will see that Paul wants Timothy’s opponents to escape the snare of the devil. He uses the exact same word[4] there as we see here!

When we look at how Paul arranges this list, the random assault on immorality that we might at first see becomes a well-organized list. This list shows us the device that Satan uses to gain a foothold in our church. He uses a cascade of bad decisions (maybe even made by people with good intentions) to bend the church to his way of operating. We might wonder how Timothy’s opponents got trapped by Satan in the first place; Paul shows us the downward spiral of bad decisions in these verses:

The first step-A Misdirection of Love: The first two and last two items on the list all deal with love: “…lovers of self, lovers of money… lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God…” American society and pop-psychology tell us that having a good self-image is the most important thing in life. If we think we’re okay, that’s all that counts! We’ve become a nation of people that resemble a Saturday Night Live skit, when the character Stuart Smalley would look at himself in the mirror and say, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”[5]

If we look at this list from last to first we see that when we stop putting God in first place in our lives we will replace Him with something. First we replace Him with pleasure (maybe as simple as TV or as destructive as alcoholism), then with money and all the security that it brings, and finally we place ourselves on the throne that is reserved for God alone. The first step in Satan taking over a church is a misdirection of love. Jesus told us that the Great Commandment is to love God with everything we have and our neighbor as ourselves (Mark 12:30-31). When we fail to obey, eventually it leads to the next level in Paul’s list.

The second step-Pride and Hostility toward Others: The second tier in our list gets a little more intense than the first. We become “boastful, arrogant, revilers… treacherous, reckless, conceited…” Several of these terms are pretty straightforward (like boastful, arrogant, reckless, conceited), but a couple of them need to be unpacked a little. A “treacherous” person is one who doesn’t keep their word, a person who can’t be trusted to be honest and committed. If I occupy first place in my life, then even if I give my word to you about something the minute it becomes inconvenient I will ignore my commitment to you to focus on me. A “reviler” is someone who is demeaning toward others with their speech; they patronize or talk down to people, belittling or making fun of them.

This person gets so caught up in themselves in their misdirected love that they become conceited. In other words, they are full of themselves and can’t see anyone else’s needs around them. That causes them to become boastful of their own abilities, arrogant about their worth, reckless in their promises and hurtful in their speech toward others. Once God is removed from His position other people become pawns to help them achieve their ends. When God is number one in our lives we see other people as bearers of His image, but when we put ourselves in His position other people’s lives and feelings go out the window. If we leave ourselves unchecked, we will find ourselves even further into Satan’s plans.

The third step- Lack of Basic Civility: The next tier on our list gets even worse. The opponents are described as “disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable…without self-control, brutal, haters of good.” At this point a person has allowed all pretense of civility drop. They are unloving, brutal, and have no self control. They can’t see a fault in themselves (because their self-esteem is too high!), so they won’t seek reconciliation with people. They hold their parents in contempt, and God as well.

We can lament this state if we want, but it exists in our society and in our church. How many teens do we have who have never been taught how to control themselves and choose well? How many of us in our twenties and thirties have never learned how to curb our spending? We don’t thank the people who help us. When is the last time that we thanked the police who keep us from harm, or the veterans who fought for our freedom? We roll our eyes when our parents give us direction. No authority stands against a person whose life is driven by their own whims and desires. They won’t follow the Great Commandment (hence they are unloving and haters of good), and won’t allow others to have any priority in their lives. When we misplace love, we become prideful. When we become prideful, we cease to give even basic respect for others.

The final step-Becoming a Servant of Satan: The final step that Paul describes here is very scary. Back in 2:26 Paul wanted Timothy’s opposition to escape the snare of the devil, but here he describes how they got in his snare to begin with! The opponents started out okay, but eventually their own desires and the pressures of life got them to crowd God out a little. Eventually they were so full of themselves that they had no room for others either. Down and down they went until everything was about them. Nothing and no one else is important to these people; they’re looking out for Number One! They’ll bicker and fight and argue with anyone, because no one is going to tell them what to do! Eventually they slid so far that they embody the devil and do his will in church.

None of the steps on this list were “major.” I think the opponents may not have realized what a problem they were causing in the church because they were so focused on being right and on bending everyone to their will. One bad decision cascaded into the next, though, and before long these people were being used by the slanderer that they hated so much! Satan’s craftiest device is using a series of little decisions to take us where we never wanted to go.

I am reminded of the famous work by C.S. Lewis entitled The Screwtape Letters[6]. They are a collection of letters from a bureaucrat demon named Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, who had been sent to tempt and torment a man in Britain during WWII. Wormwood’s first advice was to keep the man so preoccupied that he wouldn’t come to know Christ; failing that, though, Screwtape continually counseled his demon nephew to distort what Christ wanted to do in his life into something that Satan could use.

The best recent illustration I’ve seen of this in modern media is in Star Wars episodes one through three. When we meet Anakin Skywalker in Episode I he’s a young boy with a good heart who thinks Obi-Wan Kenobi is the coolest Jedi ever[7]. He’s full of good intent, wanting to free his mother from slavery. When we last see him in Episode III he is screaming at Obi Wan that he hates him, having gone over fully to the dark side and become the apprentice to the Sith Lord Darth Sidious. Anakin never thought about turning to the dark side! However, through a cascade of little decisions he found himself on the side that he had sworn to fight earlier in life. Even an unbeliever like George Lucas sometimes hits on the truth that Satan can use little decisions and little errors to cause us to end up in big trouble.

Can you see yourself anywhere on this list? The slope is slippery and paved with tiny, seemingly insignificant decisions:

Have you let the love of God slip into second place in your life? The first step in a treacherous downward spiral is allowing pleasure, or money, or self to slip into first place. Is our American life of luxury creeping in on your heart for God?
Have you been living life with selfish aims and goals? Is it all about you, your goals, and your achievement and accomplishment? If others want to come along for the ride then great, but maybe you’ve found yourself disregarding the effect on those around you to focus on accomplishing your aims.
Maybe it’s even worse than that. Have you found yourself unable to control your appetites, your urges and longings? Maybe an addiction has you in its grasp; maybe you’ve dug your heels in against a parent or sibling and don’t want to allow them back into a relationship unless it’s on your terms.

If you can see yourself in this description, are you sure you’re on the path you want to be on? Is all of the preoccupation with yourself getting you the happiness you desire, or is the smile a thin covering of pleasure over a heart of pain? It’s no fun to think that maybe, despite your original good intentions, you’re not where you want to be with God. You might be tempted not to think about it, to push it out of your mind as irrelevant. Where do you think that thought is coming from? Is that God working in your heart, or His enemy?

2. Satan’s Disguise: Religion. (3:5-7) I wish that I had some secret x-ray goggles that could tell me what is going on inside of people. Maybe I could get by without them if everyone had to live out their insides on their outsides. Unfortunately I have neither of those advantages; any of us can be fooled by the image that someone presents on the outside. And no one does a better job of disguising the truth than Satan!

…holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these. (2 Timothy 3:5)

It absolutely shocks me that after the vice list in verses two through four Paul turns around and tells Timothy that the opponents have a “form of godliness.” My first look at the list above didn’t look like godliness to me at all! What Paul says here is that these men have an “outward show”[8] of godliness. In other words, they had all the trappings of being godly people! However, Paul says that they have “denied” the power behind the godliness. The word “denied” is the same term used in 2:12, and I doubt that Paul wrote it here on accident. Despite their appearance, these men are in big trouble when Jesus comes for them!

That tells me that the list of ungodly attitudes in v. 2-4 is a matter of the heart and not a matter of practice, at least at first. It absolutely shocks me that these men could have the church fooled while still being a tool of the enemy, but that’s the only option that Paul gives us. Ungodliness seldom announces itself in the church; rather it stays hidden and does its damage behind the scenes.

For among them are those who enter into households and captivate weak women weighed down with sins, led on by various impulses, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. (2 Timothy 3:6-7)

Paul next tells us that the opponents are able literally to “sneak” into households. They don’t knock on the front door with an announcement of their inner ungodliness! They have a veneer of respectability; they can say all the right things and mouth all the right phrases. They know when to drop a “Praise the Lord” or an “Amen” into a conversation. They can quote a verse, even if they can’t tell you what the author was talking about in context. That’s how they “captivate”! They look good and smell good and sound good, and with their “outward appearance of godliness” they are able to sneak into homes and take people captive. It’s almost like they are snake charmers, lulling people to sleep before they strike.

I want to be very clear that Paul is not picking on all women in v. 6. He doesn’t say that these men captivate women; he says that they captivate weak-willed women. The word he uses is a bit of a put-down[9], but as we look at verse 7 we see why he calls them out. They have been weighed down by the sins of the past, unwilling to let God take those sins and remove them out of their lives. Because they have a big pile of sins weighing them down they allow their lusts to drive them this way and that. And when the snake-oil salesman comes knocking with a miracle cure for their self-esteem woes, they follow him wherever he leads to feel good about themselves. They pick up on the latest new fad to quiet their conscience. It seems “the secret” is just another iteration of an old pattern of trying to find the latest and greatest fad.

We can see, then, that Satan’s disguise is religion. For all of the debauchery going on inside, these men look like they’ve got it together. They look good and smell good, but just like the Pharisees of Jesus day’s their insides are “full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”[10] The problem for us is that the disguise is a good one! It allows them access to authority within the church and in the lives of people. Our enemy is crafty indeed.

3. Satan’s Downfall: He Can’t Hide Forever! (3:8-9) Thankfully, Paul doesn’t leave us looking over our shoulder and wondering if everyone in our church is really who they say they are. Satan may use our own shortcomings to influence us, and he may have a crafty disguise, but his pride and arrogance won’t allow him or his operatives to stay in the shadows forever. Satan’s downfall, Paul tells us, is his pride; eventually he will be found out!

Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth, men of depraved mind, rejected in regard to the faith. But they will not make further progress; for their folly will be obvious to all, just as Jannes’s and Jambres’s folly was also. (2 Timothy 3:8-9)

We have to start by figuring out who Jannes and Jambres are. If you have a concordance in the back of your Bible, this passage is the only place you are going to find these names! These are the traditional names given to the magicians who were in Pharaoh’s court[11], which we can read about in Exodus 7:11 and following. They stood against Moses and opposed Moses’ attempts to show Pharaoh that God wanted him to let the Hebrews go. They used every trick they knew to try to undermine Moses’ authority and the signs that the Lord had given him to show to Pharaoh. Just as Jannes and Jambres were worthless to God’s mission to free Israel, so also Timothy’s opponents are worthless to the church at Ephesus. In Paul’s words, they are “men of depraved mind, rejected in regard to the faith.”

This reference is really helpful, because just like Jannes and Jambres, Timothy’s opponents were using every trick in the book to undermine him and get the people to ignore his cries for them to live a vibrant and committed life for Jesus Christ. And the good news of our passage today comes in verse 9. Eventually Jannes and Jambres were exposed for being frauds.

The first few miracles (Aaron’s rod, the Nile turned to blood, and frogs covering the land) the magicians could duplicate. However, starting with the plague of flies (see Exodus 8:18) Jannes and Jambres had to admit that they couldn’t duplicate Moses and Aaron’s miracles. In the same way, Paul says, eventually Timothy’s opponents will be shown for the frauds they are. They can’t hide all that hostility inside forever; eventually the church will see them for what they are!

Our toughest questions today come at the end of our passage. Nobody here can see inside your heart, but I want you to take a good, hard look inside and ask yourself some deep and difficult questions:

Am I working on my relationship with God through Jesus Christ, or am I here at church to look good and see friends?
Am I a person of integrity? Do my actions match my inner thoughts, or am I putting on a show for the people around me? Am I worried they will reject me, or not let me be a part of their life, or am I concerned with my joy in obeying Jesus?
Knowing that I can’t hide hypocrisy forever, where am I playacting in my life? Where am I wearing a mask and pretending to be what I am not?

If you found yourself on the slippery slope of sin this morning, the only answer is to repent and turn to God, asking Him to help you be the person He wants you to be. If you’ve been living a life of religion and show, don’t wait for tomorrow to start fresh. Tomorrow you may well find yourself further down the slope of sin, and have an even harder time coming back. Today is the day to change. No matter how many steps you’ve taken away from the worship of God, the good news is with the grace of God it’s always only one step back.

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[1] In verse 5 Timothy will be told to avoid these men, and that command is given in the present tense. Those who are the target of the vice list in verses 2-4 are discussed in the present tense in verse 6 as well.

[2] Jesus spoke of “the last days” in John (John 6:39, 40, 44, 54; 11:24; 12:48) with a reference to the resurrection; Peter seems to do the same in 1 Pet 1:5, 20. However, “the last days” is also seen as a present reality (see especially Acts 2:17; 2 Pet 3:3 [with the same idea as this passage]). Jude 18 looks at words such as these penned by Paul as confirmation to his readers of their situation! Therefore this seems unlikely to be a reference to the return of Christ, but rather to the “already” aspect of “the last days.” (there remains, however, a “not yet” to the last days that will not come until Jesus comes again)

[3] Please refer to my sermon entitled “2 Timothy 2:8-13 A Commission to Confidence” for a discussion on the basics of this common memory device. The arrangement of this chiasm is adapted from Knight, George W. The Pastoral Epistles: A Commentary on the Greek Text. (Grand Rapids, Mich.; W.B. Eerdmans; 1992.), 430

[4] Admittedly, he does use the singular form of διάβολος because he is dealing with a singular subject in 2:26.

[5] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Smalley (accessed 7/31/07) for more on his tongue-in-cheek take on American’s preoccupation with self-esteem.

[6] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (San Francisco; HarperCollins, 1942; 2001)

[7] Anakin is actually “found” by Obi-Wan’s mentor, Qui-Gon Jinn. However, he quickly becomes Obi-Wan’s padawan learner in the movies, calling him “master” and learning the Jedi ways from him. A full bio of this character can be found on the official Star Wars website at http://www.starwars.com/databank/character/anakinskywalker (accessed 7/31/07).

[8] The term μόρφωσις can have the idea of “embodiment” or “formulation,” but as Arndt, William, Frederick W. Danker and Walter Bauer. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) notes here the context requires that this be an outward manifestation.

[9] This word Paul uses (γυναικάρια) is the diminutive of γυνή (so Henry Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. Revised by Henry Stuart Jones [New York; Oxford Press, 1940; 1978]; s.v. γυναικάρια.). In other words, Paul is calling them literally “little” women. It is a term of derision (see the entry in Arndt, Danker, and Bauer).

[10] See Matt 23:37.

[11] For a list of sources on the historicity of the names, see Mounce, William D. Vol. 46, Pastoral Epistles. Word Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word, Inc., 2002), 550. There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of these names, and Timothy would have known them without comment.