To Boldly Go

As Christians we should realise that God’s Word will be unpopular with many people. This is because it challenges pride, selfishness and independence. The gospel requires that we admit that we are not good enough for God, that we accept His free gift of forgiveness through Jesus, and that we submit to Him and those he places in authority, that we put other people’s interests before our own. This is difficult to deal with.

This week I was playing ’The Corrs’ on the car cassette player as I was taking Joshua home from school. He asked me to turn it off, put his fingers in his ears and claimed he could not hear it !

Paul writes that the people who cannot cope with the challenge of Christianity 4 will turn their ears away from the truth. They will not listen to the truth of the gospel, weigh it up and reject it. No, they will refuse to listen.

What will they listen to ? They will listen to what they want to hear. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.

Itching ears want to hear something that is comfortable, new, entertaining, fashionable, and popular.

Today there are people in the church who pervert the teachings of the Bible to make it more acceptable to people. One area in which this is happening is the acceptance of sexual partnerships that are clearly contrary to God’s revealed will.

Co-habitation is seen by some to be equal to marriage. It is not. Marriage is a public, life-long, exclusive, loving commitment of a man and woman to one another. It was invented by God to provide a right environment for sex, mutual dependence and the raising of children. Statistics support this. For example, 50% of cohabiting couples who have children split up by the time their first child is five compared to 8% of married couples.

Homosexuality is seen by some within the church as an acceptable lifestyle. I am not denouncing someone who feels that they have a homosexual orientation, but it is the expression of that in homosexual genital acts that is contrary to God’s ways. Just as it is also against God’s way for a heterosexual to have sex outside marriage.

We must not pursue itching ears but adhere to sound doctrine.

4 They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.

These ’myths’ that Paul is referring to are counterfeit beliefs included the false teachings he has mentioned in both letters to Timothy. In 1 Timothy 4:3 we discover that false teachers were forbidding people to marry and ordering them to abstain from certain foods.

In 2 Timothy 2:18 we have another, more teaching as Paul informs Timothy that Hymenaeus and Philetus say that the resurrection has already taken place.

This denial of a future, bodily resurrection was found elsewhere ( cf. 1 Corinthians 15 ), and one way of avoiding this is to claim that it has already happened spiritually.

This heresy is found today in the Jehovah’s Witness movement. They believe that Jesus resurrection was a spiritual and not a material one. They predicted that Jesus returned invisibly in 1874; that the world would end in 1914 and then again in 1975; and that all members of the body of Christ would be changed from heavenly glory in 1925.