On two different occasions when discussing unrepentant Christians, the apostle Paul said that they had been “handed over to Satan.”
you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. (1 Cor. 5:5 ESV)
19 By rejecting this, some have made shipwreck of their faith, 20 among whom are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme. (1 Tim. 1:19–20 ESV)
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There is no shortage of false teachers. False teachers abound today just as they did in the earliest days of the church. They have sown chaos and led people astray for centuries and will continue to do so.
The term “false teacher” often gets thrown around casually today. Some people will accuse a person of being a false teacher if he holds to some trivial matter which disagrees with local congregational consensus. The New Testament doesn’t use the term “false teacher” the way many people do today. How does the Bible define a false teacher? Let’s make a few observations from 1 Timothy 1 and notice some traits of real false teachers.
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False teaching always has consequences. We can’t be taught wrong and live right. False teaching was taking place in Ephesus resulting in extremely poor conduct in the Ephesian church. Paul wrote his first letter to Timothy to teach the Christians in Ephesus how they should conduct themselves as members of God’s family.
Paul never details for us exactly what the false teachings in Ephesus were. Nevertheless, we can learn a few things about false teaching in general in the first chapter of 1 Timothy.
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…our dear brother Paul has written to you according to the wisdom given to him. He speaks about these things in all his letters. There are some things hard to understand in them… (2 Pet. 3:15–16 CSB17)
As we noted in the overview of 1 Timothy, we have to read between the lines when studying this letter. We are, after all, reading someone else’s mail. When we have access to only one side of a conversation, we have to attempt to fill in the gaps.
Some of these gaps come in the form of following Paul’s flow of thought from one paragraph to the next. There are a couple of times in the first chapter of 1 Timothy where it appears that Paul abruptly changes subjects. At first glance, it is not always obvious how the paragraphs relate to each other.
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A study of the book of 1 Timothy is best begun in the middle. It isn’t until the middle of the book that Paul specifically tells us the reason for the letter:
14 I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these things to you so that, 15 if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth. (1 Tim. 3:14–15 ESV)
Paul is writing the letter so that the Christians in Ephesus could know how they should conduct themselves as members of God’s family. Even though Paul addressed this letter to Timothy, it would appear it was not meant to be a private letter. The very last words of the letter, “Grace be with you” (1 Tim 6:21), implies a wider audience because “you” is plural. Paul intended for this letter to be read by others in the Ephesian church.
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