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and therefore could refer to Timothy himself (as the A.V.), or to men generally (as the
R.V.) or both:
"These things write I unto thee, hoping to come unto thee shortly; but if I tarry long,
that thou mayest know how men ought to behave themselves in the house of God, which
is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth" (3: 14, 15, R.V.).
Paul hoped to meet Timothy soon, but he wrote his instructions in case he was
delayed. This was most likely to be confirmatory of oral advice given to Timothy at the
Apostle's departure, thus strengthening Timothy's authority. At this point we come to
the key to this epistle and the Pastoral Epistles as a whole, which was to give Timothy
and those leaders under his charge explicit guidance as to the discharge of their official
Christian duties.
The idea of the assembly as an household has already been given in verse 5. This is
no material building but a spiritual one, and the absence of the definite article before
`church' here and in verse 5 suggests that the local community is envisaged, yet
conceived as a part of a large whole.
The phrase `pillar and ground of the truth' has caused great difficulties because it
appears to give greater eminence to the church than to the truth represented by Christ, the
living Word and the Scriptures the written Word of God. Bengel and other Protestant
expositors got over the difficult by re-punctuating the sentence to read:
"The pillar and ground of the truth and confessedly great is the mystery of godliness."
On the surface this looks attractive and would act as an antidote to any Romish
pretensions, but alas this does violence to the Greek original. E. K. Simpson pronounces
it as `fatally artificial and cumbersome'. Dean Alford goes so far as to say that such a
clumsy Greek would be sufficient to prove the Epistle spurious.
When we give this context a closer inspection we shall see that such an explanation is
unnecessary and is like putting out our hand to stay the ark of God. We will give the
problem a closer study in our next article.