Main news for 23 September 2020

King James Version (en)

2 Timothy, Chapter 2, verses 8-9

¹ He is exhorted again to constancy and perseverance, and to do the duty of a faithful servant of the Lord in dividing the word aright, and staying profane and vain babblings

⁸Remember that Jesus Christ of the seed of David was raised from the dead according to my gospel:

⁹Wherein I suffer trouble, as an evil doer, even unto bonds; but the word of God is not bound.

NOTES

Continuing the conversation about witness, Paul draws attention to the witness's responsibility. For the apostle, witness is...

Continuing the conversation about witness, Paul draws attention to the witness's responsibility. For the apostle, witness is a kind of spiritual relay, in the course of which everyone who has received the possibility of sharing in the life of the Kingdom afterward becomes a witness for those seeking new life (vv. 1-2). And the issue here, as we can see, is not merely a sense of duty, even a duty that people sometimes call sacred. The point is that witness is the normal spiritual state of a Christian. Of course, this does not mean that a Christian must spend whole days preaching, telling everyone around him about Christ and the Kingdom. It means something else: if Christianity for a person is truly new life, and not simply a new religion or a new morality, he will not be able to hide this new life from those around him, and will hardly want to hide it. The issue is not only the joy experienced by everyone who knows what the Kingdom is.

The point is also that the Kingdom can exist only by continuously expanding and including new inhabitants within itself. The breath of the Kingdom was not accidentally experienced, particularly on the day of Pentecost, as wind: like the wind, it knows no barriers, and like air, it penetrates everywhere it possibly can, occupying all available space. The difference between this breath and physical air is only that it spreads from heart to heart, and love for neighbor becomes for it the same organic medium of spreading that the atmosphere is for the wind. And a Christian, unless he wants to lose the Kingdom, must certainly become part of this process, this spiritual movement connected with the spread of the Kingdom in our world, which is being transformed but is not yet fully transformed. Only then will his own spiritual life be complete, as Paul reminds Timothy (vv. 3-7).

He also reminds his disciple of something else: the faithfulness to Christ without which there is no Kingdom (vv. 8-13). For Paul it is obvious that faithfulness to Christ and faithfulness to the Kingdom are one and the same, because Jesus of Nazareth is not simply a Teacher who shows the way. He Himself is the Kingdom; He bears it in Himself in all its fullness. A Christian can renounce the Kingdom to the extent that, before the complete transformation of his human nature, he still lives a divided life. Belonging to the Kingdom only in part, he also still belongs in part to the old, untransformed order of things. Christ is different: He is wholly the Kingdom. There is no other life in Him, and for Him to renounce the Kingdom would mean to renounce Himself. And Paul, as we can see, calls Timothy and all other Christians to become like Christ precisely in this fullness, in the fullness of the life of the Kingdom.

The question of suffering for Christ is always one of the most difficult. Unbelievers consider it foolish to defend one's right to faith...

What Paul means, by saying that "the word of God is not bound"? It would have been of course possible to say that the truth will win in every case, in spite of all the persecutions and the pursuits. But it would have been possible to speak so, only in the case if the truth was something completely independent from man and from his choice. The famous "and all the same the earth turns!" is a good example for that: if "the earth" really "turns", no matter what people think, quite as no matter, if shall be obliged to give up his words, the one who spoke of this to others: who heard, has heard, after each makes his conclusions, and the reality will not change an iota because of these conclusions.

Of course, for the scholar, his position and loyalty to the truth revealed by him is a question of spiritual choice, but the human weakness in that case change nothing: "the earth” will “turn" in any case, and the personal spiritual qualities of each and his choice in a concrete situation influence only on his own destiny. And everyone who will like to study what was revealed to others, will be able to do that independently of the position and the personal qualities of his predecessor.

When it is about the witness of the Kingdom, everything turns out otherwise. Only the one who is a member of this Kingdom can witness about the life in the Kingdom, and from his witness depends the spiritual fate of the seekers. And here the loyalty of the witness is important not only for the one who witnesses; it just stops being his personal affair. But the testimony already turns out here not only the word, but also the life of the one who witnesses, and even his death.

It is not accidentally that, those whom we began to call later martyrs were called witnesses in the times of early Christianity: parting from the earthly life, they thus proved that there is another life, life of the Kingdom, of which before they told those who were ready to listen. And for the sake of this life, a life in all its plenitude, it is not regrettable to part from this small grain of plenitude, which forms our life in this non-transformed world. Well then it turns out that God's word is really "not bound": because if it is not only the life, but also the death of the one who witnesses, that is the witness, then it is impossible to mute such word.

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