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20 Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, 21 which some have professed and in so doing have departed from the faith. Grace be with you all. ~ 1 Timothy 6:20-21
Today, we come to the final two verses in 1 Timothy. In these two verses the Apostle Paul issues us a call to guard the truth which is a fitting way to end this letter.
When the Apostle Paul wrote, "Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care," he was speaking of the truth as is set forth in the Bible. Just like Timothy, we have all been given the truth, but we tend to take the truth for granted. It is the truth which enables us to know the difference between right and wrong. We live in a world full of deceit and many are being deceived and they do not have one idea of the deception that they are under.
We "guard" the truth by living by it, and by not allowing anybody to take it away from us, or to water it down with false teachings. The Bible is the self-revelation of God. This is our primary source for all that we know about God. If we say we believe it and we don’t live it, then we are not taking His word seriously. But, the Bible is the most sacred thing we will ever hold in our hands. This is the ultimate sacred trust.
Guarding the truth is not only a matter of right interpretation, it’s a matter of right living. When we think about the sacredness with which people treated the Bible who gave their lives for it, martyrs whose literal blood was poured out in their guarding of God's truth. And then, we have people who treat it flippantly by using the Scriptures to get rich.
In the remainder of v.20 we read, "Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge."
Paul commands us to “Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas.” The word "godless" is the Greek word bebēlos which originally was used by the Greeks to refer to everything outside the sacred grounds of a temple. It then came to mean anything unsacred. So these so-called intellectual musings that attack the Bible are unsacred, and have no connection with God. All that stuff, Paul says to us, keep turning away from it.
It seems in America today that education is spending our whole life learning error. To combat this, we must preserve the truth. We must guard and protect the truth. The word there for chatter is meaningless talk unrelated to the truth. Professors, who use “science” to oppose the words of God, say that God didn’t create the universe, it evolved. However, when applying science to this hypothesis we find that their theory of how we got here cannot be true. It takes more faith to believe in their "science" than in the intelligent Creator who created us all.
In v.21 we read, "knowledge which some have professed and in so doing have departed from the faith. Grace be with you all."
Those who picked up on this "knowledge" have deviated from the faith. And they have led a lot of other people with them. The word Paul uses for departed brings with it the idea that they have lost their way or they have lost sight of the Lord.
The final words in this epistle are: “Grace be with you all.” Paul uses no verb here. It literally reads, “Grace with you all.” The Apostle is very abrupt in this ending, because he knows we can’t do any of this unless the grace of God enable us. We must believe the Word of God to the point that it defines us. Then, we must defend it with our very lives. If we do, we will preserve all that keeps us and our culture from spinning out of control.
