Sermon Transcript
Every so often, I’m sure this happens to you too, I hear somebody say something along the lines of, the Bible contradicts itself, don’t you know? So I just want to respond to that claim. I want to go on record so all of you know where I stand and say, I agree, it contradicts itself. So now, some of you are like, I knew it! And some of you are like, we need to fire that guy!
So, if you’re stressed right now, don’t worry, either way, if you’re stressed, it’s only an intro to get you to pay attention, alright? So, I’ll give you an example of where the Bible contradicts itself. Proverbs 26:4-5. Ready? You’ve probably read Proverbs, some of you.
Proverbs 26:4-5, do not answer a fool according to his folly. Or you yourself will be just like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.
Now, what do you make of that?
What are you supposed to do? Do you answer a fool according to his folly, or do you not answer a fool according to his folly? One verse says, don’t do it! And the next verse says, do it.
It’s a contradiction, right? But here’s what I like about this. Typically, when somebody says, the Bible contradicts itself, don’t you know? They say that to mean that we shouldn’t take what is written seriously, like the Bible can’t be relied upon as a guide for how to live our lives because it can’t even get its own story straight, so how could we trust it for us. What I like about Proverbs 26:4-5 is that that conclusion doesn’t really fit.
Like, we see this apparent contradiction, but we just, as readers, we just naturally assume that the writer probably has his story straight and he’s trying to convey something by saying it one way and then saying it the other way. If we have any intellectual integrity at all, we would we would probably think he is very intentionally wanting us to believe both. It’s provocative on purpose. It’s supposed to grab our attention and make us wonder, how can both be true at the same time? There is a way in which we should answer fools, and there is a way in which we shouldn’t.
Or there’s a reason we should, and there’s a reason we shouldn’t. And if we reflect on our own lives, our own experience, our own past, everything we’ve been through, especially if we’re just thinking about how we deal with fools, we can probably see why somebody would say both of those. They’re both important. They’re both necessary, which actually gives us a good strategy. This is beyond the scope of what we’re talking about this morning, but it gives us a good strategy for understanding all biblical texts that seem to contradict.
Some examples, like, does James contradict Paul? Does the God of the Old Testament contradict the God of the New Testament? Is God sovereign or are people responsible for their actions? Are we saved by grace or do we need to live lives of purity? Do we answer the fool or not, right?
In each of those instances, there can be a way, we have probably experienced a way, that both are true and they don’t really contradict. So, that’s our strategy. Is there a way to believe both are true? If we look on our own experience, we can, in all of those, we can probably say yes, like we’ve lived both, we’ve experienced both, we need both, and if we— we’re kind of holding on to both of them, and if we let either go, then we’ve lost something. Which brings us back to, don’t answer a fool according to his folly.
But also, while you are at it, answer a fool according to his folly. And it brings us to our text for today. For the past several weeks, we have been working our way through an ancient letter that was written by an experienced Christian leader, Paul, and he is writing to a younger Christian leader, Timothy. And Timothy, the younger Christian leader, has some fools. That he needs to deal with.
So, Paul is telling Timothy how to deal with the fool. And since Timothy is a leader, remember, Paul also tells Timothy to pass these same principles on to others as they are leading people. So, in his instruction, this is kind of the cool part, it almost seems like Paul is trying to apply our Proverbs 26:4-5 verse, like, Timothy, answer the fool. And also, Timothy, just so you know, don’t answer the phone. It seems like that is what Paul is saying throughout this text.
So, our text is 2 Timothy 2:14-19. You can follow along in your bulletin insert or it will be up on the screen. Verse 14, remind them of these things. Okay, who is them and what are these things? Them is the people that Timothy is leading and these things are Christian doctrines which were talked about previously.
In the letter. And charge them, continuing, and charge them, that’s the people that you’re leading, Timothy, charge them before God not to quarrel about words, which does no good but only ruins the hearers. That sounds like, don’t answer the fool according to his folly. People say wrong things about God. Don’t quarrel with them.
Don’t get all caught up in that. Timothy. Verse 15, do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. Timothy, don’t be like these guys who are getting it wrong. You make sure that you are getting it right.
Verse 16, but avoid irreverent babble, for it will lead people into more and more ungodliness. And their talk will spread like gangrene. Again, don’t answer the fool, because if you do, it can lead to ungodliness. Continuing, among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already happened. Now, this is kind of the odd part, right?
He’s calling out specific people for a specific error, which is answering a fool according to his folly. He is saying, hey, Mr. Philetus, this is how you are wrong. That is answering a fool according to his folly. Alright, going on. They, that is Philetus and Hymenaeus, are upsetting the faith of some.
But God’s firm foundation stands bearing this seal: The Lord knows those who are His. And let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from inequity. So, in this text, we’ll see why we answer a fool, what can happen when we do, and finally, some hope for ourselves and for others. Answer a fool because. All right, there are times that you have to answer the fool, you need to.
We’re not always supposed to just let a fool be foolish, just let him spout off his nonsense and not worry about it. Maybe your friend only dates really trashy guys and you think, she will probably figure it out, you know, maybe after she gets burned 18,000 or 20,000 times, it will click for her. We are not always supposed to do that. We need to respond to the fool. And if you have any doubt that Paul wants Timothy to engage with these people, like if you thought when we were reading our verses, a second ago that Paul didn’t really engage with these fools, he just told Timothy why they were bad news and without Paul himself confronting them.
If you are thinking, well, he didn’t really confront them, so I don’t know if I have to. In just a few verses after ours, which we are going to look at in a couple of weeks, Paul instructs Timothy, opponents must be gently instructed in the hope that God will grant them repentance and they will come to their senses. So, Paul flat out tells Timothy to correct these people, which is answering the fool. And in our verses today, Paul himself called out the fools for being wrong. So, why would he do that?
Why call out the fool? Answer, because folly hurts people. We answer a fool because folly hurts people. Paul calls out these 2 fools, Hymenaeus and Philetus, because they have erred on the resurrection. So, more on that in a minute.
But the result of their error is that people are getting hurt. Verse 18, they, Hymenaeus and Philetus, are upsetting the faith of some. That upsetting is not to mean that people are sad. That upsetting is like a boat gets upset. Capsized.
Verse 16, this folly has led to ungodliness. This folly is turning people away from Christ. And like gangrene will kill you unless it is dealt with, false ideas about God can ruin whoever hears them. So, Paul is saying, Timothy, like, Timothy, you are somebody who knows your stuff. So, you have got to respond to the fool because he doesn’t know his stuff and his error is causing ruin.
Now, of course, Timothy, you have to correct the fool gently as he explains in verses we will look at in a couple of weeks because if you quarrel, that is verse 14 from our set today, if you quarrel that will ruin people as well. If it actually looks like an argument, If you are berating someone for being wrong, even if you are right, right? If you are berating them, it is still going to turn people away, which means they will still be ruined. So, you can’t quarrel when you engage, but you have to engage. It is like in our cable news outlets right now, we just have people yelling at each other, tearing each other down with these character attacks, which probably gives good ratings.
But you’re like, you know, even though I agree with your policies, I can’t support you because of how you are treating this other person. And we might think that about what we hear even if we already agree with the policies. So, imagine the undecided person who is watching this interchange of ideas and screaming match, right? Like the person who is quarreling, Squirreling, that would be fun to do sometime. The person who is quarreling is less likely to win anyone.
Like, even if they are right, even if their ideas are completely solid, they are still probably going to push people away who might have bought in if they had only approached it more gently with respectful dialogue. Okay, so we’ve got to be gentle in our confrontations. Now, Hymenaeus and Philetus erred Because they believed that the resurrection had already taken place. You might not know what that is, and you might think no one thinks that today, but we actually do. So, let’s just walk through this a little bit.
When they said the resurrection had already taken place, they believed that Jesus had raised from the dead, which is true, but that no one else would raise from the dead, which Which is not true. You can check out 1 Corinthians 15 if you want to see a longer explanation of what’s going on. But they were saying that the only resurrection that ever will happen, Jesus, has already happened. And we, the followers of Christ, will not raise from the dead. And right now, again, I know at least some of you want to say something like, okay, that just sounds weird.
Like, what do you even mean? Who talks about that at all, let alone like denies that it is going to happen? So, okay, here is where we see this very commonly coming up in Christianity today. People will talk about dying and going to heaven as if that is the end of the story.
And while dying and going to heaven is true for followers of Christ, I am not saying it isn’t, Okay, absent from the body, present with the Lord. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who are people who have already passed away. So, they, the people who have already passed away, have some sort of awareness of what is happening here and now with us. So, yes, there is a spiritual, ethereal heaven that is possible to live in when you die, but that is not the end of the story. And if we don’t talk about the end of the story, we have de facto fallen into the heresy of Hymenaeus and Philetus.
So, here is the rest of the story. The God in Christianity, and this, He is pretty unique among world religions actually, is not very interested in getting our spirit out of this bad world and into a better place. Instead of getting us out of here, God is much more interested in redeeming here. The material world matters in Christianity. In other words, we are not escapists like the monks who went to go live on a hill to escape the world.
They got it wrong. Unlike them, we are instead much more like maybe extreme home makeover contractors. We go to work co-laboring with God But we take what is broken and we fix it, and we believe that it has the potential to last forever. Like, literally forever. Now, if you’re familiar with either Christian doctrine or modern science, you might be thinking, oh, wait a minute there.
The Earth doesn’t last forever. The Sun is going to turn into a red giant, and the Earth will be obliterated, and if we somehow survive that, then there’s the energy death of the universe. So the Earth doesn’t last forever, that’s true, and you might be surprised to know that Jesus let us in on that little secret about 2,000 years ago when he said, heaven and Earth will pass away. So Christians were kind of expecting the energy death of the universe, we just didn’t know that that’s what it was going to be called. So that’s all true, okay?
Heaven and Earth will pass away, true. The problem is That fact has led people, some people, both Christian and non-Christian, to the very wrong conclusion that if the earth is going to fry in the end anyway, then who cares about what happens on the planet now? And while we’re at it, who cares about people’s physical needs? We only need to care about their spiritual needs because the spiritual is the only thing that’s going to last forever. Is the wrong conclusion.
Both of those would be the error of Hymenaeus and Philetus. Both of those are denying the resurrection will happen because not only does every person have the potential to last forever, but every effort we make, whether it is interpersonal or cultural or professional, also has the potential to last forever. How is that, you ask? Well, let me show you. When heaven and earth pass away, not everything on the earth passes away.
Most notably, you. You don’t disappear. You, if you are a Christian, outrageously, you plan to outlive the earth.
Your personality, who you are, What you like to do, the way you look, your body, if it was like Jesus’ body when He was resurrected, will be recognizable as you. And you’re like, I hope it’s my 25-year-old self, not— or the self after I went on the diet. Okay, I don’t know how that works, but it’ll be recognizable as you. When you speak, people will know it is you. You are going to make it out of here.
Which might make us ask, does anything else make it out of here? Answer, yes, everything that has been redeemed. At the end of time, when God has created a new eternal earth that is both physical and material, it’s not just smoke and spirits, it’s tangible, it’s solid. In that physical reality, it’s not only the people who have been redeemed by Jesus that enter into that city, But it’s also, so not just people, right, but it’s also, listen to this, this is in Revelation, the last book in the Bible, the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it, and the glory and honor of nations will be brought into it. But nothing impure will enter into it, only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.
You and me, we’re impure, we’re sinful, that’s why Jesus needs to redeem us before we enter. He gives us His goodness and status, and then we get to enter into that city with the purity that He earned. But it wasn’t just people that entered into that city, right? Did you catch that? It’s the honor and glory of nations and splendor of kings.
Now, what do you suppose the honor and glory of nations and splendor of kings means? I’m not entirely sure, so I’ll start with that. But let’s just take a few guesses. Like, what’s the honor and glory of France, for instance? In my estimation, bread and wine, right?
Like, France, you got a lot of other things wrong, like a lot, but man, did you get those right. You nailed those 2, right? Bread and wine. We salute you, France, for your bread and wine. So, all the French people who have contributed to the development of those accomplishments have done something that might actually last forever.
What’s the honor and glory of Italy? Coffee, pasta, sure, and supercars, right? Cappuccino, espresso, Ferrari, right? Like, well done, Italy. Good work there, and Michelangelo too, sure, why not?
Like, somebody engineered the espresso machine. Someone developed the craft of designing that little leaf they can put into the foam, right? And it was like, these are good things. So, like, as Christians, we believe in the goodness of the material. Creation.
We don’t believe the material world is something from which we need to escape. Now, of course, we don’t get wrapped up in the corruption and the sinfulness that is here. Of course, we avoid that. We try to overcome that. We try to get in there and redeem that, obviously.
But we don’t believe there is anything wrong. We don’t believe there is anything even lesser about the physical creation compared to the spiritual. Jesus had a physical body and yet He was completely good. That didn’t make Him lesser somehow. When God made the world at the beginning, He made it good.
Now, we messed it up, right? Like, boy, have we messed it up, sure, but God is going to remake it. And when He does, there are aspects of our cultural efforts that get redeemed along with everything else that He is remaking. So, I don’t know, I don’t know if you are going to have a Ferrari and a cappuccino there or not. I don’t know.
So, don’t say that I said that. But I do know that there will be aspects from each culture that have been purified so that now their sole purpose is to bring honor and glory to God, and we will look at those cultural accomplishments as they really are, which are gifts that God gave to humanity. And then with pure hearts, we will use them, whether it’s supercars or art or something else. You figure there is music there and it is not just a cappella, right? So, we bring instruments, like somebody invented the drum set at some point.
I don’t know what it is going to be, but we will partake of them in complete gratitude to the true giver of them, which will be part of the worship that we offer God for forever.
That’s one reason why resurrection matters. We don’t just die and go to heaven. I heard somebody’s testimony one time, an older gentleman sharing his complete journey of faith, how he came to faith, kind of the ups and downs of his entire life with God over his lifespan, and he said when he was a little kid, he really didn’t like the idea of heaven because he thought he couldn’t play baseball there. He is like, if I am a ghost, like, how do I put a glove on to catch a baseball? He had figured that out as a little kid.
And so, he was thrilled to find out later that like heaven at the very end of the story is not just smoke and spirits and ghosts, it is like this physical reality that we get to live in for forever, and maybe there will be baseball there. We believe in the goodness of the physical and material world, and we believe we will live in a physical world for forever. So, second reason why resurrection is important. I’m only going to give you 2, by the way. There’s probably a bunch more.
That’s one of the questions on the back of your sheet. Try to think of a bunch more, but just the second reason why resurrection is important is that it is proof that the penalty of sin has been lifted. The wages of sin is death, Romans 6:23. The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law, 1 Corinthians 15:56. Death is a curse on humanity because of sin.
But Christ is supposed to have taken away the penalty of our sin. When Jesus died on the cross, His death is supposed to be a substitute for the death that we deserve. Then when He raises to life again, He supposedly gives us that new life as well. Like, the Spirit who is in us is the same one who rose Christ from the dead. So, if we have no resurrection, it means none of that is true.
It means death has won. It means death has victory over us. It means Christ’s death didn’t stand as a sufficient substitute for ours. It means the Spirit who is in us, who is supposedly the same one who was in Jesus, was not powerful enough to raise us from the dead. It means the curse of sin is still weighing on us.
It means we are not really free from the penalty of sin if we don’t resurrect. If we are not really free from the penalty of sin, we are not really forgiven. We are still accountable to pay the debt that we owe for our sin. We are still paying for our sin if we are not resurrected. So, Jesus didn’t pay it all.
That’s what it means. To deny our resurrection has implications that cut the very heart out of Christianity. So, Paul tells Timothy, you must confront this. Confront it so the people saying it might realize they are wrong, and confront it so everybody listening knows that it’s nonsense. Confront it gently, of course, we’ll talk about that in a couple of weeks, but right now, know that you must answer a fool according to his folly, or he will think that he is right in his own eyes and everybody else will as well, and they will all be ruined.
But at the same time, don’t confront a fool according to his folly, or you may be like him. These are like 2 guardrails. On one hand, you must confront, but on the other hand, don’t confront in such a way that you fall into the same folly. This is the danger. By answering the fool, we might get hurt ourselves.
So, Paul tells Timothy, verses 16 and 17, avoid this babble. It spreads like gangrene. It leads to ungodliness. You can hear Paul’s concern that Timothy might fall into this heresy as well. Verse 15, he says, present yourself to God as one approved.
A worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth, like Timothy. Don’t get messed up like these guys got messed up.
He is worried for Timothy.
As someone in full-time ministry who has watched the trajectory of many different lives, I totally understand why Paul would be concerned about this. I started thinking about people I know who were once professing Christians and now they reject all or nearly all of a Christian faith. It’s actually a good bit of people. I’ll tell you how they ended up there.
They began believing either on their own or they were formally taught, but either way, they began believing that something in Scripture was wrong. So, either one, they came across a verse on their own and they thought, I can’t get on board with that. Something like doctrine of hell or sexual ethics or God is all-powerful, which means He could heal every kid that has cancer, but He doesn’t. And they think, I can’t get on board with that. They come across something, they are like, I can’t get on board with that.
Therefore, they think the Bible is wrong, or at least that part of the Bible. That is how their falling away starts.
Or, second scenario, they go to a seminary or Bible college or just a freshman English class at a secular institution, and the professor says, this portion of the Bible is wrong or inaccurate. Many reasons. It was added later, it wasn’t written by who it says it was written by, it’s only culturally conditioned, we know that doesn’t apply today, there’s no archaeological evidence to support this claim, whatever. And the student, for some reason, believes the professor that the Bible is wrong, even though there’s great evidence and other professors that would counter all of those claims. The student either doesn’t look at those or doesn’t believe them, and that that idea that the Bible is wrong about this one topic gets locked in their head.
It’s like a hook. And then that starts to spread, to grow like gangrene. Well, if that’s false, then this other thing is false. And if that’s false, then this other thing is false. And eventually, everything has fallen.
The people I know who have fallen away, which means they once thought Christianity was true and now they don’t, they fell away One step at a time. They believed everything, and then they thought one thing was false, and then it grew. Okay, that’s not to say— here’s what I’m not saying, so I have to make sure people don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that 100% of the people who think one aspect is false eventually reject everything. That’s not what I said.
I don’t think that that’s true. There are plenty of people who reject some and believe the rest, and they seem to be able to live in that kind of inconsistent space for forever. So, that can happen. I am also not saying— here is another thing I am not saying. I am not saying you must wholesale believe everything in the Bible in order to become a Christian.
You can have a lot of question marks and still become a Christian. You think about the people who believed in Jesus in the first century. Many of them would have never even read the Old Testament. Like, there is so much they didn’t know. Or we have kids come to faith when they are like 9, and you are like, okay, there are like buckets of stuff you have never heard of, right?
So, you don’t need to sign off on everything that is in the Bible in order to become a Christian, right? We don’t think that. I am just saying that the people who fall away completely, it started for them by thinking that one thing was false.
I’ve had old students of mine sometimes contact me and say, I’m going to seminary. Cool! Where? And sometimes they’ll tell me and I think, oh no, I didn’t want to hear that. Why?
they ask. And I say, that seminary is going to dismantle your faith. Not every seminary does. That seminary will. They are going to deconstruct the validity of Scripture and make you believe that you can’t believe any of it, and I don’t want that for you.
At the same time, I tell them, I don’t want you to go to some super-Christian place that tells you not to question anything. I don’t want that. That’s what cults do. They say, this is the way it is and don’t argue. That’s a cult, just red flag immediately.
I don’t want you to go there either. I want you to ask all the questions that you have. Absolutely. Don’t put your head in the sand. But here’s the deal about putting your head in the sand.
That applies in both directions. If you go to the place that only teaches, don’t trust the Bible, the Bible is false, that is putting your head in the sand too. They say, this is false, and don’t question me when I tell you this is false. Cult.
Right? That is a cult the same as saying, this is true and don’t question me when I tell you this is true. Both of those are putting your head in the sand. You can be in a conservative cult or a liberal cult.
My recommendation is that you would go to a school, that you would go to a church that teaches, this is what is in the Bible, this is how it all fits together, This is why some people believe that it doesn’t all fit together. And now, ask as many questions as you want. Poke holes in what we have said and we’ll talk about it. Like, come back as much as you want. Like, door’s always open.
I love what Matt, our missionary, this morning was sharing about, about his group that meets to just ask whatever questions. Like, that’s awesome. That’s what we want to go for. Okay, so Paul is concerned that Timothy is going to fall away. Timothy, don’t answer the fool or you may become like him.
Paul’s worried this guy Timothy, who he has mentored for so long, has the potential to walk away if he starts believing false things. So, our last verse here is almost like Paul is comforting himself, which ends up being a comfort to us about ourselves, ends up being a comfort to us about the people that we care about. We are freaking out that we have the potential to fall away, that our kids have the potential to fall away, to start rejecting Christianity. So, Paul tells himself, he says to Timothy, he says to us, the Lord knows those who are His.
Timothy isn’t going to fall away because the Lord knows those who are His. That doesn’t mean believe anything you want and you are still fine. That doesn’t mean do anything you want and you are still fine, because he adds, let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity. If you are the Lord’s, if you are His, you will depart from iniquity. You won’t keep rejecting if you are rejecting now.
If Timothy gets caught up in this heresy and he starts to get confused, even then, even if he is in that space, If he really belongs to the Lord, he will depart from that iniquity. If you went to that freshman English class and the professor was a cult leader employed by the state of California, but a cult leader who said that the Bible is false and don’t argue with me when I tell you that the Bible is false, and that screwed with your head and you felt disoriented or lost, listen, here is our comfort. If we belong to the Lord, he will keep us. We will come back to him. We will get it sorted out.
We will find our faith again. God will use all the means at his disposal. He will put people in our lives who influence us. He will give us experiences that make us see the world in a different way, and he will reel us back in. Who knows?
Maybe that’s why you’re sitting in here today.
Maybe your heart has been stirred. Maybe your affections have been turned to Christ. Maybe you’re aware of your need for rescue from the penalty of your sin.
If that’s you, my guess is that you still have doubts. I do too.
But Jesus looks like this point of light in the midst of a storm and chaos. Like the storm is all of our questions and doubts, but in the middle of all of this uncertainty, there is this point of clarity. Like I don’t know what else is true. I still have so many questions, but I do know that Jesus is real. And I do know that I need Him.
If that’s you this morning, tell Him that. Tell Him that in your heart right now. You can say, I know You’re true and I know I need You. And I don’t know where all this is going to go, but I know where I’m going to start. I’m going to start with You.
I’m going to follow that one point of clarity in the midst of all of this. Uncertainty.
