‘But as for you, O man of God, flee these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith.’

1 Timothy 6:11-12a

Those words written to Timothy could not have been timelier. The young Ephesian pastor and his fledgeling congregation had to flee many things whilst living in a city dominated by pagan religion (specifically the worship of Artemis, Acts 19:23-41): he had to deal with false teachers (1 Timothy 1:3 NIV) spouting all sorts of nonsense (v4, 6-7), leading to two erstwhile colleagues making a ‘shipwreck of their faith’ (v19); there were a whole host of blights and pitfalls (1 Timothy 3:6-8, 4:1-2, 5:6-13, 6:3-9) including, supremely, ‘the love of money’ as ‘a root of all kinds of evil’ (1 Timothy 6:10).

It is in this messy first-century context that Paul’s first letter to Timothy is written; and it is in a similarly messy context that we find ourselves in the twenty-first century. So too, these words of the Spirit breathed through Paul could not be timelier for us today. We’re awash with false teachers flying around in their fast jets mugging off millions from the poor; the world is just as hedonistic and pleasure-seeking as ever. There’s nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9). As mankind has ‘progressed’, as time has gone on, as technology has advanced, the world has just found more ingenious ways of sinning against each other – take one look at what’s trending on Twitter (actually don’t… that’ll be 30 minutes of your life you won’t get back!). It’s no wonder creation groans (Romans 8:22)! The problem of course has never been the technology or the means itself. The same medicine that can heal the sick can kill if overdosed on.

The Commander’s perspective

As Christians, we’ve identified many enemies: ‘wokery’, or political extremes of the left or right, or atheists and atheism, or secular humanism, the gender revolution, progressive liberalism, Postmodernism or any number of other isms. These may well all be great enemies, no doubt, but let me cast you back to another time when a small group based on the same Judeo-Christian values that we hold so dear faced a great, uphill struggle against a determined enemy held under the sway of evil and powerful ideologies…

The seasoned general stood gazing at the impregnable fortress beyond him. He thought hard about how best to penetrate through the well-equipped, well-defended force that they must defeat to fulfill his army’s objective. He sighed, it would be a long and hard struggle, their hardest yet. Suddenly, he sprang back in shock: before him stood an imposing figure with drawn sword in his hand.

‘Are you for us or for our enemies?’ the general asked the figure (a reasonable question in the circumstances!).

‘No,’ came the reply, and suddenly General Joshua would have known this was no mere man. ‘But I am the commander of the army of the LORD and I have come’ (Joshua 5:13-6:5).

Why answer like that with a ‘No’? If it had been just a man the reply might have been, ‘I’m for you’ or ‘I’m against you’ or perhaps even ‘I’m a neutral’. But He answered, ‘No’. Why? Because He is above all things; He is from another realm, fighting a different and bigger war. From His perspective, whilst He was indeed for them (Deuteronomy 9:3), it was not as simple as Israel versus Jericho or the Israelite worldview versus the Canaanite worldview. We see this tragically in the aftermath of the battle of Jericho when Achan, an Israelite (of the tribe of Judah no less!), helps himself to some shiny stuff causing absolute mayhem (Joshua 7). No, the real battle then and now is a spiritual one, a great cosmic struggle between Good and Evil, between God and the devil. We see this clearly in Deuteronomy 9:4-6. The conquest of Canaan was never about Israel and their principles over anybody else’s, it was always about God’s wrath, justice and judgement.

Fight the right fight

So in the same way, ‘our struggle is not against flesh and blood’ (Ephesians 6:12a NIV), but ‘against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places’ (Ephesians 6:12b). Just like circumcision was never just about an outward, physical distinction between God’s friends and His enemies but a reflection of an inward, spiritual distinction (Deuteronomy 10:16, 30:6; Jeremiah 4:4, 9:25).

In order to ‘fight the good fight’, we must fight the right fight. Ours is a fight ‘of faith’. I fear too often we are fighting the wrong fight, whether it be standing up to authoritarian governments on vaccine mandates or campaigning for freedom of speech (important though fighting there may be). We can sometimes miss the bus, attacking the twigs and branches when we must strike at the trunk and roots. What or who is really the problem in this world? ‘I am’ – or so GK Chesterton once famously put it. The truth is it’s you and me, sinful depraved human beings, who are at the root of the problem. Each successive generation merely finds new and ever more perverse ways to work out the sin that lies within our hearts, and the devil is only too glad to be of assistance. Yet like critical theories – or the original sinners in the garden – we point the blame at everybody and everything other than ourselves. The truth is we are our own worst enemies, even within the Church.

When Paul speaks of the dangers facing Timothy and the Ephesian church, he doesn’t spend time denouncing the world and its paganism, but warns of dangers within the church, of the danger of indulging in pride and greed (1 Timothy 3:6-8), of self-indulgence and idleness (1 Timothy 5:6-13), of toying with money and dabbling with little excesses in many other things besides (1 Timothy 6:3-10). Interestingly, Paul also states in 1 Timothy 5:8 that whoever doesn’t provide for the poor and needy in his or her own family is ‘worse’ than a pagan (or as we could say today, worse than an atheist ideologue!).

Satan and his minions have slipped sleeper agents into the church. Their tactics aren’t as obvious as when they sent a demon-possessed slave girl to loudly disrupt Paul and Timothy’s sharing of the good news to the lost in Philippi (Acts 16:16-18), but the aim is just the same, and they’re just as effective – if not more so. And so Paul warns Timothy of spiritual incursions within the Church from deceitful spirits, demons and liars (1 Timothy 4:1-2). I fear many outwardly respectable Christians may well likewise be departing from the faith. We must keep watch (Matthew 26:41)!

Let the fire burn

There’s an almost tangible sense of urgency, even desperation, in both Paul’s letters to Timothy. It’s a hastily written despatch from one side of the battlefield to another. We don’t have time to mess around. We need the antidote to the poison of sin that drains the life from us.

So, brothers and sisters, I would urge you, don’t focus on the fleeting things. ‘What shadows we are and what shadows we pursue,’ lamented the philosopher Edmund Burke on the death of a friend. And a young man who only lived a short while on this earth wrote:

‘The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love.’

Henry Scougal (1650-78) from a letter written to a friend, later published as ‘The Life of God in the Soul of Man‘

Who or what do you give your soul’s love to? Scougal cries out for us to ‘behold the glory of the Lord’ (2 Corinthians 3:18). Herein lies the solution. Scougal goes on:

‘[Let us contemplate] that visible representation of him which was made in our own nature by his Son, who was the “brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person,” and who appeared in the world to discover at once what God is, and what we ought to be. Let us represent him unto our minds as we find him described in the gospel, and there we shall behold the perfections of the divine nature, though covered with the veil of human infirmities; and when we have framed unto ourselves the clearest notion that we can of a Being infinite in power, in wisdom, and goodness, the Author and fountain of all perfections, let us fix the eyes of our souls upon it, that our eyes may affect our heart—and while we are musing the fire will burn.’

Let’s fight for that fire, then take it and spread it (Luke 24:32-35).