Preach the Word!

26 August 2025

Do we preach in church? No.

But isn’t that what Paul tells Timothy to do? “Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season….” No. The word translated “preach” there is kerusso. It means public announcement, not private commentary to an in-group. (Check the lexicon; do the word study in Scripture; expand the word study to the secular literature – all the evidence points the same way, as I’ve argued elsewhere.) It’s not something you do with an in-group in a home; it’s something you do in the marketplace at the top of your lungs for anybody in earshot. That’s just what the word means throughout the literature (notwithstanding our English misappropriation of it).

2 Timothy 4:2 is not an exception to the general usage of kerusso. Absent a compelling contextual reason to read the Sunday meeting into the passage — and it isn’t there — Timothy would have heard the word in its ordinary sense. The only reason we don’t hear it that way is because we’re imposing our usage of “preach” on the passage. Public proclamation was a mainstay of Paul’s ministry, and it’s not exactly a surprise that he charges Timothy to carry on this aspect of his work. The inclusio with “do the work of an evangelist” in v. 5 clinches it, if we needed additional evidence of its public-facing meaning.

Should we thunder the Word from the pulpit? Absolutely. Arguably, that falls under the biblical headings of teaching and prophecy, but in any case there’s not much exegetical case for calling it “preaching.”

But let’s look more closely at the context here. In chapter 1, Paul addresses Timothy’s qualifications and his inner life/personal prerequisites for ministry. He continues that theme in 2:1-13, challenging Timothy to endure hardship for the sake of God’s chosen people. 2:14 forward specifically addresses the way Timothy should minister to those people within the church community, and then (3:1ff) begins to address the hazardous people Timothy will face in that endeavor. Beginning in 3:10, Paul returns his focus to Timothy, contrasting him to the people in 3:1-9 and challenging him to continue in what he’s been taught, knowing that the God-breathed Scriptures themselves will fully equip him.

4:1 begins Paul’s final charge to Timothy, and here he begins with a command that specifically means public announcement and concludes in v.5 with “do the work of an evangelist.” As with his instructions for Timothy’s conduct within the church in 2:14-3:17, Paul leads off with the command (2:14//4:1-2), follows with a warning that it’s likely to be ill-received (3:1-9//4:3-4), and returns to Timothy with “But you…” (3:10ff//4:5). He follows the same pattern of instruction as when he was talking about Timothy’s ministry within the church, but this time, he’s talking about how Timothy faces the world.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

A Fuller Fulfillment

11 February 2025

When we talk about “fulfilled prophecy,” what we usually mean is a straightforward prediction along the lines of Micah 5:2, which says that Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. Matthew shows how the prophecy was fulfilled. But that’s not the only thing that “fulfilled” can mean.

“Fulfill” has a fuller sense (if you’ll pardon the expression) than just the Micah 5:2 predictive prophecy meaning. In the Hosea 11//Matthew 2 usage, the original sense in Hosea is critical to Matthew’s meaning. Knowing that Israel is God’s son is necessary to understanding the points that Matthew is making: first, that Jesus is Israel (in exactly what sense is a question Matthew will spend the whole book exploring), and second, that the land of Israel has become spiritual Egypt.

Don’t miss that latter point. Matthew invokes “out of Egypt I called My Son” not when Jesus leaves literal Egypt, but when Jesus flees Judea. Judea is the “Egypt” Jesus is fleeing, and Herod is the baby-boy-slaughtering “Pharaoh.” John the Baptist will later reinforce this same point by calling repentant Israelites to come out into the desert to pass through water, a new Exodus forming a new people of God (Jesus joins the new people of God “to fulfill all righteousness”). John the evangelist will much later make the point explicit in Revelation 11:8.

We don’t want to read something into the text that isn’t there, but neither do we want to miss something that is there—and the NT shows us repeatedly that there’s a LOT more there than one might think at first glance. From Jesus Himself proving the resurrection by exegeting a verb tense in Genesis (Matt. 22:32) to the fulfillments of the first few chapters of Matthew to the dizzying displays of Hebrews, the NT shows us a way of reading the OT that we perhaps wouldn’t have come up with on our own, but that’s ok. God is revealing it to us in the way He handles His own revelation.

In conservative circles, we have gotten our hermeneutics from the Book of Nature (mostly as read by E. D. Hirsch), which is very useful as far as it goes. But if that’s all we have, then our hermeneutic will force us to condemn the Holy Spirit’s exegesis of His own work. There has to be something wrong with that picture. What is it? Easy: the Book of Nature isn’t all we have. The Book of Scripture also has something to teach us about how to read.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Pax Christi

25 December 2024

“Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace, goodwill toward men.”
-the “multitude of the heavenly host” (King James translation)

That word “host” is στρατιά, and it doesn’t mean “choir.” It means “army.” See, “peace on earth” isn’t a feel-good slogan to embroider on pillows. Have you met us? Bringing peace to our world is a serious undertaking. Nobody’s successfully done it yet.

But the Man who will has already been born: Jesus of Nazareth, the construction-worker son of an unwed mother in a town 5 miles from nowhere. Even as a baby, He had a supernatural army at His back. He’s going to need one. His methods are not what we expected; instead of slaying the wicked, He died so that the wicked could live and be transformed. (That’s you and me, in case you were wondering: “the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.”)

So eat the fat and drink the sweet; taste and see that the Lord is GOOD! The eternal Son became man that man might partake in the divine nature; nothing less could get the job done. It takes supernatural power to bring peace; join His army on earth. Rebuke, convince, encourage, with all humility. Let the peace of God rule in your heart, that in your peace others may also have peace, and in theirs still others. None of this comes easy; we’re following a Man who was murdered by a coalition of the Respectable People: the mainline liberals (Sadduccees), conservative grassroots (Pharisees), the politically-connected (Herodians), the deep state (Scribes), the Roman civil power — they were all His enemies, and their spiritual descendants will hate you too.

But we keep going. We extend peace everywhere, to everyone, and in the end, there will be fewer stragglers for that angelic army to mop up, and “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as water covers the sea.” Start being part of the peace of Christ today, with your in-laws.

Merry Christmas!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Can We Afford It?

20 November 2024

Treating someone graciously is a form of generosity. As with all forms of generosity, graciousness is greatly cramped when we don’t think we can afford it. This is true whether we can actually afford it or not.

Say we have a single mother in the church who asks one of the men in the church to come look at her tires. It seems to her that something’s wrong, she says. He goes out into the parking lot, and the tire has a great big bulge in the sidewall.

“I don’t get paid until Friday,” she says, “and I have to pay rent out of that. Do you think it can wait until I get paid again in two weeks?”

No, it cannot. Now suppose as they’re talking about how she really shouldn’t delay replacing the tire, another fellow walks over and also takes a look. He agrees with the first guy that the tire should be replaced immediately.

Now suppose that one of these guys has $30,000 in the bank and no pressing need for it, while the other has $700 to his name, and his own rent payment looming at the end of the week. Which one of these guys is going to help this lady pay for tires?

You’d be tempted to say that of course the first guy will do it, but if you’ve been around people a little, you know better than to be so sure. We’ve all known people with tens of thousands of dollars who didn’t think they could afford to part with ten bucks, and we’ve all known people with only a few hundred who would buy you lunch if you looked hungry. Generosity does not depend only on some objective measure of what you can afford. Generosity depends on what you believe you can afford.

The guy with a few hundred bucks to his name, who goes and buys the lady’s tires? He believes that God has been good to him. He believes that God has given him everything he has, and everything he has is therefore at God’s disposal. He believes that God put him here to help take care of the tires, and that God knows the rent is due at the end of the week, and He will take care of it. He knows himself to be living in the lap of God’s largesse; why would he struggle to share? “You can’t outgive God!” he’ll say. Or “I shovel it out, and God shovels it in, and He’s got the bigger shovel.”

I’ve known a bunch of guys like that over the years; had occasion to be one now and again. Let me tell ya: it’s a lot of fun giving God’s money to people who need it! You maybe feel a little dumb come Friday afternoon and you’re still not sure how the rent gets paid, but you know what? I’ve seen God come through over and over and over again. (Standard disclaimer: It’s possible to overdo giving just like it’s possible to overdo anything else. I’m not saying you should just be a moron with your money; I’m saying you should be generally wise, and also know that at any given moment, God might call you to do something that looks really foolish. He gets to do that; everything you have is His. When He does, know that He’s got your back, and He’s good for it.)

To return to the observation I began this post with, it’s not just money. I digressed into money because money is easy to talk about, but you can be generous (or not) with any resource you have. It might be your time, your effort, your expertise. It might be a little space on your web server, or a little space in your garage for someone to store a couple boxes. It might be a late-night run out to the airport to pick up an old friend’s stranded kid, and another run back out there in the morning to get the kid on the next flight out. It might be your sympathy. It might mean showing grace to someone who–this being the meaning of grace–doesn’t deserve a bit of it.

In any of these cases, the key to generosity is the belief that you can afford it, and that, in turn, depends on your gratitude for what God has given you. This is particularly the case with showing sympathy, moral grace.

People who feel a need to signal virtue, people whose virtue is brittle, shallow, only skin-deep, can’t afford to be generous. It would endanger their fragile bona fides. They need to be hard on others, critical, scathing even, lest somebody begin to wonder if they themselves are somehow soft on that particular sin. When you’re about the impossible task of establishing your own righteousness, there’s no audience too small or occasion too petty.

Go thou, and do un-likewise. But this is not something you’re likely to be able to fake, or to muscle through as a raw exercise in self-control. You should be a deep and genuine conduit of God’s grace, and that means you need to become grateful for God’s grace to you. So begin to meditate on God’s grace to you. If you need a place to start, you could do worse than Ephesians 2:1-10. Let’s get about it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols