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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Have you ever taken the time to locate an Old Testament passage which was quoted by a New Testament author? If so, you probably noticed that, frequently, the wording is not exactly the same. What is going on? Why did the New Testament authors not quite get the quote right? It’s not because they were being sloppy, nor was it because they quoted from memory and got it a little wrong. It was because they were quoting from the Septuagint.
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When a modern Westerner reads about an arranged marriage in the Bible it looks to us like a man was buying a wife. For example, consider the story in Genesis 24 where Abraham sent his servant to find a wife for his son Isaac. To us, this looks more like a business transaction than a proposal.
After Abraham’s servant encountered Rebekah at the well, her family welcomed him into their home. No doubt the golden jewelry he gave her helped pave the way for him (Gen 24:22, 47). Abraham’s servant then explained how his master had made him swear to go back to his homeland to find a wife for Isaac. After Rebekah’s family agreed for her to become Isaac’s bride, the servant gave gifts of gold and other costly items. These “presents” were given to Rebekah, her brother, and her mother (Gen 24:50-53).
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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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