Episode 245: Disordered Loves, Corrupted Truth | Tim Henderson+

Introduction

Hey everybody, good morning. Hope you're doing well. We are gonna continue our study of Second Timothy. If you got a Bible, you wanna open up to that, we're gonna be in chapter three, passage that we just listened to again this morning here. When we do, I want you to be mindful of the three buckets, okay? I mentioned to guys a couple weeks ago that Second Timothy is the last letter that Paul wrote to his favorite protege, a young pastor named Timothy. And as far as we know, it's the last thing that he wrote at all. Certainly, it's the last thing that he wrote that made it into the New Testament. And everything that he said, everything that he wrote about can be divided into kind of one of three different buckets, three topics or areas.

The Three Buckets of Second Timothy

First bucket, you guys remember what that was? Suffer, stay in the game, don't quit, take the hit, don't be a sissy, finish, right? Number one. Number two, what was that? False teachers are coming. This is warning Timothy, the false teachers are coming, get ready, prepare your people, know the scriptures. The liars are climbing the wall, right? And number three, what was that? Lonely. I'm sad. Bring a Bible and a blankie and get here before winter. Right? That's the three buckets of Second Timothy.

This morning's passage, could you tell which bucket that was? Did you hear it? What was it? Pretty squarely in the second bucket. It's about false teachers. So Paul is passionate that everyone in the world would hear the good news of the love and the kindness of God as expressed through the cross-bought kingship of Jesus. But he knew that communicating that message would be costly, not everybody would like it, there would be opposition, there would be contrary messages that would arise. He knew that it would be worth what it cost, but that there would be persistent opposition with false ideas.

The Passage on False Teachers

This morning's passage is about one of the several expressions about those false teachers, those false ideas, and we're just gonna pick it up in verse one. And I will warn you, I got a lot of stuff that I wanna talk about this morning, so we're gonna move through it, especially kind of quick in the beginning, because I wanna slow down a little bit at the end, because it's gonna be more complicated. So just kind of like lean in, get smart, you ready? It's gonna be, where does this, this is, I'm a little nervous about this, but stay with me. It's gonna be fun, I think.

Mark this, there will be terrible times in the last days. — 2 Timothy 3:1

The first thing I think you gotta understand here is what Paul means, what the New Testament writers mean when they talk about last days, because it's not what we often assume. I think we have a tendency to think last days is like the weeks, maybe the month, if you're generous, the year before Jesus comes back. Right? But in fact, that's not the way the New Testament speaks about the last days.

In Acts two, you might recall, when there is the, we call it Pentecost and the Spirit is poured out and people are speaking in tongues and Peter has to defend himself that we're not drunk because it's only nine in the morning, which is kind of a funny line if you think about it. He calls that moment the last days. He quotes one of the minor prophets who said, in the last days, the Spirit will be poured out. That was last days, and that was a long time ago, right?

Where else does it happen? Hebrews one, in the beginning of Hebrews, it says that in the past, God has spoken to us through the prophets of various times in various ways, but now in these last days, he's spoken to us through his Son. That was last days. James five does the same thing. James says, essentially, y'all are hoarding wealth. You are being greedy in the last days.

Now if you cling to your understanding that the last days are the very last days, then you're like, these guys are all wrong. They thought it was now and they missed it. But they're not wrong, we're wrong. You should probably generally assume that.

What's really going on is that the Bible's picture is that the eschaton, the last days, is the whole epic from the first coming of Christ to the second coming of Christ. You've lived your whole life in the last days. And the things that Paul is describing about the last days characterize the whole age, not just the very last little bit of it. Okay? So, these are the last days. As he talks about it, this is what he says it's gonna be like, and it's kinda rough.

I want you to notice these things that he says are gonna characterize people's behavior in this time. He gives a lot of particulars, this is what we call a vice list, where Paul just says this, this, this, this, this, big long list of things. But I want you to see, I think if you squint at it, what might pop out at you is that there's really two things that he's saying, and everything else kinda like falls under that.

The first thing is what we would call a disordering of our loves. I put the peg do we have it on both screens yet? No. Okay. Put it up here. Here, thanks Emily. So notice everything that's yellow. Right? Paul says they'll be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, without love, not lovers of the good, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.

This idea of disordered loves, this traces back to Augustine, and he essentially argued that it's just one of the functions of the human heart is that we love worthy things too much. And we, or we love unworthy things too much, excuse me. And we love worthy things too little. There's been this kind of trading about.

What I want you to do is imagine you've got a deck of cards, only it's not like, you know, the ace of spades and such, but every card represents something that you might love. Right? So maybe you've got a card here, and this card is the well-being of your neighbor. Right? That's a card in your deck. Maybe another card is your own bank account. Right? Maybe another card is that event from somebody that you just don't like finally gets their comeuppance. That's a card. Right? Maybe it's justice for the poor. Maybe it's sexual integrity. Maybe it's sexual lasciviousness. Right? There's a whole deck of cards. And what happens is there's a proper order. There's a proper stack. This one should be on top, and this one should be on the bottom. But what ends up happening is that we all shuffle the deck. Right? And we love some of the cards that should be near the bottom, we're like, oh, I love that one. Put it right up here. And some of the things perhaps that God really loves, we're like, yeah, but I don't really actually care about that. And our loves get disordered or reordered. The deck gets shuffled.

What Paul is doing here is he's pointing out that this era, the one that we have lived our entire lives in, is characterized by disordered loves. Have you ever noticed this? I will confess, it's easier to see it in other people than it is to see in yourself. Right? There is a disordered love. We love unworthy things way more than we should. We love a lot of really worthy things less than we ought. Right? Our loves are misordered. Okay? That characterizes the age.

The second thing is not a disordering of loves, but is a corrupting of the truth. This, what he's gonna do, the way he's gonna unpack this is a little more complicated, so bear with me on this. Okay? He says this, verse six, they are the kind, he's talking about these false teachers, these people that are coming. He says, they are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over weak-willed women who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth.

This is a pretty clear reference to something that's happening in Paul's, or really in Timothy's, immediate context, but the problem is we don't know what it is. We don't, we don't—I don't know what he's referring to. We had to kind of reverse engineer it. But it seems to be the case that there are some group of people, they're outsiders, they're not part of the community of believers, but they've infiltrated. They've snuck in. They've kind of crept to the gate, and they are representing themselves as believers, and in particular, they are targeting women.

Now, it seems to be that some deceptions work better on men, and some deceptions work better on women. Some, there are some baits that the young are more likely to go for, and there are some ways, some techniques that are more likely to take advantage of old people. In this particular moment, this thing that Paul is describing is these guys are targeting women, a subset of women in particular, and they're leading them astray in such a way that these women have lost the ability to discern the truth. They're tricked. They're deceived, and they're believing things that just aren't true. And of course they do, because that was the goal. Right? The people that have snuck in, their whole point, Paul's gonna say in a moment here, is that they oppose the truth. They're trickers. Right? They're deceivers, and it's working. Right? And Paul is warning them about this thing. And he does so with a very particular illustration that almost a 100% of the time falls flat with us because we don't know what he's talking about. He's using an illustration about deception.

Now, I want you—I wanna read you something here because whether you know it or not, you're being lied to every day. Do you know it? Have you noticed this? That there is this endless stream of falsehoods constantly repeated, endlessly over and over and over again, and you live in a world where you're lied to all the time. Listen to this. The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is born in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the most important requirement for success. Anybody know? Anybody recognize that? You know who said that? That's Adolf Hitler. Right there. Is he right? He is right. This is the strategy. This has been the strategy for centuries. It is the strategy today. Just keep on lying. Lie and keep lying until people believe it. That strategy has worked for centuries. It is well at work today. It works like a charm. And when Paul says these men oppose the truth, he likens them to characters whose names you probably don't recognize at all. Do you remember the names? Who are they? Who are the two? Yeah. Nobody knows how to say them. I don't know how to say them either. Janus and Jambres. Janus and Jambres. I don't know how to say it. Janus and Jambres. Okay. These are names you don't find anywhere else in the Bible. They're not in the Old Testament, but the people are. These names are the traditional Jewish appellations given to the magicians that opposed Moses during the early days of the Exodus. Okay? Again, it's not in the scriptures, but centuries of Jewish writings call them Janus and Jambres. And so when Paul refers to that, Timothy knows exactly who he's talking about. We just don't.

So I wanna take you back for a second because there's something important about what happens with these guys that colors what's going on here. I'm gonna read this to you. This is from Exodus seven. I think Emily probably has it on screen.

So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh, and he did just as the Lord commanded. Aaron threw down his staff in front of the Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. Pharaoh then summoned wise Egyptian magicians, this is Janus and Jambres, also did the same things by their secret arts. Each one threw down his staff, and it became a snake. But Aaron's staff swallowed up their staffs. Yet Pharaoh's heart became hard and he would not listen to them, just as the Lord had said. — Exodus 7:10

Those are the guys that he's talking about. And it would be completely understandable if you read that and you think, well, tell me this, when Aaron takes the stick and he throws it on the ground, does it actually transform into a snake? Does that happen in real life? It did. Do you think I'm doubting you? Like, you heretic. No. He really did. I believe that he did. Right? Because God can make man out of dirt. He can make a snake out of a stick. Okay? It was real. It happened. When Janus and Jambres do the same thing and they throw their stick on the ground and it becomes a snake, did they actually do that? They did not. They have no power, only God can create life. Nobody makes life out of non-life. It doesn't happen. They were magicians. They were illusionists. They were deceivers.

And we see it in this, there's this kind of contest between, you know, Moses and Aaron, and then Janus and Jambres. And Moses will do some miracle and they will imitate it, but they're imitating it in a false form. It's a trick. It's an illusion. And they get to the point where like, well, we don't have a trick for that. Stop. And even when they do pull it off, like Moses' snake eats their snake. Right? What you need to understand about those guys is that they're frauds. They're lying. They don't have supernatural powers. Right? They are deceivers. And Paul is invoking them, just as Janus and Jambres opposed the truth. These guys opposed the truth. They're liars.

The World of Deception

It's all into the space that we live in—this world where we're constantly being lied to. Okay? So I would suggest to you that Paul is saying, as was in Moses' day, so it is in our day. And all we have to do is pick that up and say, and so it is this day, our day. Nothing has changed about that. We still live in a world where the prevailing strategies are a disordering of loves, such that we love wrong things too much, and the right things too little, and this corruption of the truth. These two strategies—just hit repeat, replay, replay, and every age over all the centuries. These are the two strategies, they just keep being trotted out over and over again, just in different ways at different times.

In fact, I'm sure that not only is it being played out in my age, in my life, but I'm sure that I've fallen for some of the deceptions. Is there anybody here who thinks that they are so wise that you never have taken the bait? That you've never believed things that just aren't true? Or how about this, if you do, does anybody think that their deck of cards is stacked perfectly? That you love everything to the degree and in the sequence that God loves it? Does anybody? No. Right? You have. Does this make sense? You’re a missed stacked deck? Have you ever bought the false lies? I mean, it's just—it's been going on for a very long time. And I doubt any of us are even wise enough to grasp all the strategies that are being played against us, but it's not that hard to see that we're being lied to, and that sometimes we believe it.

Now, I don't have time this morning, and I sure as heck don't have the wisdom this morning to be comprehensive about this. What are the lies? Let's just make a list of all the lies that we're currently believing, and let's try to unpack them, and let's try to correct them. That would be just an onerous task. Okay? But I do want to pick one, and this is where it's gonna get a little dicey, so just stay with me.

I want to follow one particular idea with you over a span of about a hundred years. And we're gonna have three stops along the way. We're gonna look at something beginning of the century, mid-century, and then in our, well, last century, and then today, over about a 100 years. And I want to just follow the thoughts about one idea from people that I think have a great insight about this.

Our first stop is gonna be 1926 with GK Chesterton. Anybody recognize the name Chesterton? Do you guys know him? Chesterton is a brilliant guy. He was a Catholic, I guess I would say writer, for lack of a better term. He wrote prolifically. He was incredibly insightful. He loves kind of verbal, kind of word play, and he's a little bit difficult to read. His most famous work is a book called Orthodoxy. He also wrote the Father Brown mysteries. He invented kind of the mystery novel, and he's fantastic. But he wrote this column for a newspaper for years and years, and he wrote so many articles. But one in particular is prescient. I mean, dude is like, this is so prophetic, it's ridiculous. Okay? So listen to what he says. We'll walk through this. It's five slides, so strap in, okay?

The Declaration of Independence, once the charter of democracy, begins by saying that certain things are self-evident. They're obvious, everybody knows them, right? If we were to trace the history of the American mind from Thomas Jefferson to William James, you know Thomas Jefferson, William James is the founder of American psychology, we would find that fewer and fewer things were self-evident, until at last hardly anything is self-evident. This is his case, that it used to be that we all had this we were all singing off the same sheet. Everybody knows this, it's obvious. And he's saying in 1926, you know, fewer things are obvious than used to be. Okay?

And he goes on with the declaration of independence. So far from it being evident to the modern man, to the modern that men are created equal, it's not self-evident that men are created, or even that men are men. They are sometimes supposed to be monkeys muddling through a transition stage before the superman. So the common body is shrinking as obvious things become doubted. He says, but there's not only doubt about mystical things, not even only about moral things. Okay? This might be understandable and explainable, like, well, we have different understandings of the spiritual world, different understandings of the moral world. Like, yeah, yeah, I'm not even talking about that. I'm saying even more fundamental stuff. There is doubt, there is most doubt of all about rational things. I do not mean that I feel these doubts, either rational or mystical, but I mean that a sufficient number of modern people feel them to not be true, to make unanimity an absurd assumption.

Something has changed, and we no longer can just take for granted that we all recognize the plain realities that are before us. And then here's the punch line. He says, but this skepticism is throwing thousands into a condition of doubt, not about occult, meaning spiritual things, but about obvious things. We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure and hang a man for maddening the mob with the news that grass is green. How did he know? That was a hundred years ago. And he's like, oh, insanity, lunacy is coming. Was he right? He was right. I'm literally like, how did you know? What were you paying attention to that made you realize the world that we're building for ourselves? This is stunning.

Application

Okay, so that was 1926. Come forward with me. Are you with me alright? Are we okay? 1948, C. S. Lewis, because who else are we gonna quote? And C. S. Lewis wrote an essay that I only just read, like, in the last six months. I've never seen this before. Is brilliant. It's called Priestesses in the Church. And in Priestesses in the Church, Lewis is dealing with one of these things. One of the things that Chesterton would have understood was just obvious. This is self-evident, and that is namely that men and women are different, that we are made in the image of God, each of us. We are filled equally with glory, with value, and with worth. But we're made in different ways. We have distinct roles. We have equal value, but distinct roles.

Chesterton would have thought that was obvious. Lewis saw that it was cratering, it was collapsing. And he argues in his essay here that we are not, and here's the key idea, interchangeable. We're distinct. We're complementary. Okay? Here's how he explains this. This is, what is it, seventy years ago. Lewis says, as the state grows more like a hive or an anthill, it needs an increasing number of workers that can be treated as neuters. You get that? Like all the ants, they just march. They just do what they're told. They're not distinguishable. They're just like, they're just little cogs in the machine. Bees, worker bees, the drone bees, whatever we call those things, they just do what they're supposed to do. Right? The state loves this. Everything's interchangeable. Everything's a cog in the wheel. Lewis says, this may be inevitable for our secular life, but in our Christian life, we must return to reality. There, here, we are not homogeneous units, rather we are different and complementary organs of a mystical body. We're eyes and we're feet. We're hands and we're kidneys. Right? We have different purposes. And the kind of equality which implies that the equals are interchangeable, like counters or identical machines, is among humans a legal fiction. It may be a useful legal fiction, but again, in the church, we turn our backs on fiction. And one of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolize to us the hidden things of God. K? What he's about to say, what he means, is that we have meaning and we point to greater meaning outside of ourselves. Here's his punchline. One of the functions of human marriage is to express the nature of the union between Christ and the church. We have no authority to take the living and summative figures, meaning the symbolic figures which God has painted on the canvas of our nature, and shift them about as if they were mere geometric figures. Lewis is saying that in our very being we symbolize things. We mean God meant something when he made us male and when he made us female. And we are in our persons representatives of things greater than ourselves. We have no authority to change that or to pretend that our sex is accidental or incidental. We are not interchangeable neuters, but we are distinct. We are complementary. And he was arguing this in 1948.

Today: The Current Culture and Our Response

Alright? Okay. You ready for today? One more stop. Was that funny? I don't know what I said. Okay. Today, we bring it up to right now. Our last stop is somebody that I know far less than I know, Chesterton and Lewis. Okay? There's a brand new prime minister of Italy, and her name, I can't remember her name. What's her name? Georgia Maloney. She was just elected like two weeks ago, and I my some knowledge about Italian politics could be like written on my own thumbnail. Okay? I know nothing. I know nothing about this woman. All I know is that I heard this speech, and I thought it was exceptional. So I may agree with her about a lot of stuff. I may disagree with her. I just I have no idea who she is or what she stands for. But in this speech, she is drawing, she's gonna literally quote Chesterton, which is what caught my ear. And she is, she's gonna say things that I think are true. I think she is following the logic that Chesterton and Lewis have placed. Whereas, Chesterton is arguing, man, people are gonna say things that are obviously not true because they have an agenda. Lewis says, yeah, and one of the places they're gonna do that is on sex and gender, or maleness and femaleness, is gonna get questioned. She's just following that up to what they perhaps saw in shadow, but were now experiencing in the actual moment. Okay? Now, it's gonna be in Italian because she's Italian. I mean, whatever, you know. And so it's subtitled. So I could have read it to you, but nobody goes off quite like an Italian, and I wanted you to hear her say it, even though you don't know what she's saying. Okay? So read the subtitle, but feel the Italian. And I think this is just, I think she's spot on. And she's following the argument here. Okay? Let's go with the new prime minister.

Like I said, I don't know anything about her, but she was right. For those two minutes, I think she is right. Begins with obvious things. Right? Obvious things. In particular, perhaps the fact that men and women are different with different glories, play different roles, are coming to be lost. God's purpose in making us in his image in this way is coming to be lost in the pursuit of neutered, interchangeable everything. One reason that she observes is that perhaps it serves some people's economic interests. To be honest, I'm not sure that I had thought about that. I don't, I don't know that I had considered that angle on it, but it strikes me as true.

But I think the current attack, and it's only one of many, but the current attack on maleness and femaleness and gender, they're not just about sex. And I don't think it's merely about economy, as she is suggesting, but I think there's a bigger game afoot. Reason itself is under attack. The truth is being corrupted, and loves are well disordered at this point. But you guys, it doesn't need to be that way with us.

See, we who live under the sunshine of Jesus' grace and his truth, his love and his kindness, his mercy to undeserving people like us, means that when we are wrong, we can admit it. We can laugh at ourselves. I—I used to think this, but now I've come to see that. And there's all kinds of space for us to just admit. We don't need to pretend. We don't need to like double down on foolish things that we've ever believed. We can just be like, man, I don't know what I was thinking, but this, I've come to see that is true. We're always trying to move our understanding of reality closer and closer to what actually is, that we believe true things. And when we recognize that, man, my loves are all out of whack. There's so many things that just delight me that I'm afraid might not delight him. And there's things that he loves that are of no consequence to me. That's, I mean, I get it. We're all living there. But we can—we can reshuffle our decks. We can become, increasingly, over time, the men and the women that we were meant to be.

We just recognize, hey, I just admit it. My loves are disordered, and I wanna see the deck get reshuffled. Raising some things up, pushing other things down, replacing false ideas I believe with things that are true. And you guys, as we know the truth, as we come to see the world as it actually is, and as we rightly order our loves, we can and we must live as Jesus did.

His life, I've said it a hundred times, was characterized by grace and truth. That means that we can and we must say truthful things while filled with grace, and refusing to say false things. We can patiently suffer even when we are hated for doing so. We just—we're gonna be a truthful people. We're gonna be a gracious people. And if people don't like it, we just stay the course. And in fact, we do that even so far as that we emulate Jesus, and we love our enemies. The very ones who hate us, we do not revile them in return. We simply say true things. We say them graciously, and we refuse to say false things.

God's purposes will prevail necessarily, but it will be costly. But that's what we've been invited into. We are the people who live out the grace and the truth of Jesus Christ in a world gone mad. The world goes mad in every age, and ours is no exception. But we get to be the people that look like him.

Conclusion

Take the hit, suffer, say true things. Today, this morning, right now, for some of you, this might land in a particular way. You're like, my loves are a train wreck. Would you not be embarrassed if I put your cards up on the screen? I would be embarrassed. Right? Maybe there's like one or two cards, that's gotta come up and this one's gotta go down. This would be a great time for you to talk about it. Like, Jesus, I don't know. And by the way, good luck doing that. Right? It's not like you could just will yourself to change. This is a work of the Spirit. If you need his grace in your life, say, Lord, I don't know how this could possibly diminish, how you could possibly increase. I don't know how that would happen. Well, it's his job, not your job. All we do is we surrender, we cooperate, but he's always the initiator. Right? Or maybe there's some lie that you believe that you gotta get out of, or some lie even more pointedly that you've told that you're like, I need to stop saying that. I need to stop going along with that. I need to stop being part of that system. Just come down and tell him. He's endlessly gracious and he longs to forgive and to restore. So the curved rail is a place for you to be alone, straight edge. Folks can meet you there to pray with you. And it'll be our pleasure to do that.

Let's pray together. Jesus, you are the one who is endlessly gracious, perfectly truthful. You always say true things. You never say false things. And it seems like most other people that we engage with are altogether too happy to utilize us for their own ends. And we're surrounded by people that oppose the truth. And sometimes we do too.

Be gracious to us, Lord. Forgive us. Let us be a people that are truthful and gracious, that we would believe things, we would be discerning and wise, gracious and patient. Would you help us love the world to the degrees and in the order that you do, that we would be more like you. We love you. Amen.