The Law Is Good Series

Scripture

About fifteen years after Paul planted the church in Ephesus, some elders, who wanted to style themselves after teachers of the law in Jewish synagogues, were teaching “myths and endless genealogies” (1 Timothy 1:4). This led to speculations and was causing misunderstanding and confusion among the people of God. The false teachers had a complete misunderstanding of the law of God. So, Paul urged Timothy to remain at Ephesus to correct the false doctrine that was being taught.

Let’s read about the law that is good in 1 Timothy 1:6-11:

6 Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, 7 desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions.

8 Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, 9 understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, 10 the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, 11 in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted. (1 Timothy 1:6-11)

Introduction

Lord of the Flies is a 1954 debut novel by William Golding. The book focuses on a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempt to govern themselves. Themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality. In a sense, the boys demonstrate the law written on their hearts and the great difficulty they have in applying it justly in their situation.

God’s law has existed since the Garden of Eden. At that time, God gave just one law, as we read in Genesis 2:16–17, “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’ ” The man, Adam, disobeyed God’s law and was cast out of the Garden of Eden and eventually died.

God gave Moses a summary of his moral law when he gave him the Ten Commandments (see Exodus 20:1-17; Deuteronomy 5:6-21). All people have disobeyed God’s law and either have died or will die. The only one who has ever fully kept God’s law is the Second Adam, Jesus. He also died but he did not die for his own sin; he died to pay the penalty for the sins of his elect.

Jesus called Paul to be one of his apostles to take the message of the gospel to the Gentiles. Paul wrote thirteen letters in which he recorded God’s truth for God’s people.

In his First Letter to Timothy, one of Paul’s concerns was about the misunderstanding and misuse of God’s law.

Lesson

1 Timothy 1:6-11 teaches us how to use the law of God.

Let’s use the following outline:

1. The Improper Use of the Law (1:6-7)

2. The Proper Use of the Law (1:8-11)

I. The Improper Use of the Law (1:6-7)

First, I want to begin with the improper use of the law.

As I mentioned, Paul wrote his First Letter to Timothy to charge certain persons not to teach false doctrine. He wrote in 1 Timothy 1:6-7, “Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions.” These “certain persons” are the same “certain persons” that Paul mentioned in verse 3. They were most likely elders in the church since they were the ones doing the teaching. These “certain persons” desired to be “teachers of the law.” They apparently wanted to have a role in the Christian Church something equivalent to the role that Jewish teachers had in a Jewish community. The fact that they did not “understand either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions” suggests that they were not qualified to teach. They were not able to discern their own errors.

Commentators suggest that the false teachers may have had too much reliance upon The Book of Jubilees. It was dated between 135 and 105 BC and it retells from a Pharisaic perspective the Old Testament story from the creation of the world to the giving of the law by God to Moses at Mt. Sinai. It divides history into “jubilees” (that is, periods of forty-nine years) and asserts the uniqueness of Israel among the nations. This book supplies us with the names of all of Adam’s children, of Enoch’s family, of Noah’s predecessors and descendants, and of the seventy people who went with Jacob to Egypt. Regarding, the false teachers, John Stott writes, “They may have been allegorizers. They were certainly speculators. They treated the law (that is, the Old Testament) as a happy hunting-ground for their conjectures. To Paul their whole approach was frivolous; God had given his law to his people for a much more serious purpose.”