The books of 1 and 2 Timothy were written to deal with the church’s decline and to inoculate the believers against this decline. This is true especially of 2 Timothy, which was written at a time when the churches established through Paul’s ministry in the Gentile world were in a trend of degradation. That situation was a prefigure of the situation of decline in today’s Christianity. Because of the influence of this decline, we need to train our young people with everything that Paul taught Timothy. This kind of teaching will be a strong inoculation against the decline and degradation of the church. The fact that Paul wrote concerning “the last days” (2 Tim. 3:1) indicates his writing applied not only to his time but applies also to the times in which we live. We all need to be inoculated against the decline by knowing the truth revealed in these two books.
The matter of truth is emphasized strongly in 1 and 2 Timothy. Paul tells us that God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the full knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4). The church’s decline was due to the lack of the adequate knowledge of the truth. In 1 Timothy the decline crept in subtly through different teachings (1:3), and in 2 Timothy it developed openly and even worsened through heresies (2:16-18). To deal with such a decline, the truth must be maintained. First Timothy emphasizes that God desires all His saved ones to have the full knowledge of the truth and that the church is the pillar and base of the truth (3:15). Second Timothy stresses that the word of the truth should be unfolded rightly and straightly without distortion (2:15) and that the ones who have deviated should return to the truth (v. 25).
Unfortunately, the word truth has been wrongly understood. Many readers of the Bible regard truth as a matter of doctrine. In the New Testament, especially in 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy, truth refers not to doctrine but to the real things revealed in the New Testament concerning Christ and the church according to God’s New Testament economy. If we would have the proper understanding of the word truth in the New Testament, we need to realize that it denotes all the realities of the divine economy as the content of the divine revelation, conveyed and disclosed by the holy Word (see note 6 on 1 John 1:6).
Before you begin to teach the young people in the Summer School of Truth, you yourself need to receive Paul’s inoculation and be filled, soaked, and saturated with the truth. If you study 1 and 2 Timothy carefully, you will see that the structure of these two books is actually the structure of the truth and that the structure of the truth is the element of Paul’s inoculation.
What is the element of this inoculation? What is the structure of the truth? Through a careful reading of 1 and 2 Timothy we can realize that the structure of the truth is the Triune God with His all-inclusive redemption. God’s redemption implies, or includes, salvation. Redemption has been accomplished by God. When God’s accomplished redemption is applied to us, it becomes salvation. Thus, salvation is our experience of God’s redemption. The structure of the divine truth is nothing less than the Triune God plus His redemption, which becomes our salvation.
In order to teach the young people in a living way, you need to learn all the aspects of the truth in the Scriptures concerning the Triune God-the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. This means that you need to become saturated with the truth, the reality, of the Divine Trinity. Furthermore, you need to dive into the truth regarding the divine redemption-how it was planned by the Father, how it was accomplished by the Son, and how it is applied by the Spirit. Then you need to have a clear view of how the redemption accomplished by the Triune God becomes our full salvation.
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