Scripture Notes: Fight the Good Fight (1 Timothy 6)

“[A]im at righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life...” (1 Tim 6:11-12). St. Paul offers Timothy and us some practical yet deeply spiritual advice in these two verses. 

He begins with a goal. The verb translated here as “aim” carries overtones of haste, running, pressing on, moving rapidly and decisively, striving for, seeking after, and intense pursuit. And what do we pursue? First, righteousness, in Greek dikaiosunē, being right with God. We cannot attain to this righteousness on our own, though, so part of aiming toward righteousness involves opening ourselves to God’s grace, accepting it, and cooperating with it. 

We are also to pursue godliness, eusebia, piety, respect and devotion to God; in other words, we recognize that God is God and we are not and live accordingly. We press on to faith and love, too, seeking to grow in our trust and fidelity toward God and in our love of God and other people. The word for love here agapē, and it indicates a self-giving kind of love, a kind of love that pours itself out and, in doing so, enters into divine love. 

We must seek steadfastness, hupomenē, patience, endurance, perseverance, holding the course when everything seems to be falling apart. And then there is gentleness, praupathia, meekness, which is not weakness but rather strength under control. None of these come from within us. They are gifts from God, but we have to cooperate with them and strive to live them. Our choices and our efforts are important, are critical.

In fact, Paul continues, we have to fight the good fight of the faith. Both the verb “fight” and the noun “fight” come from a Greek root that gives us our English word “agony.” The Christian life is not a proverbial walk in the park; it’s a struggle, a fight, every day, against the fallen world, against temptations, against our own fallen natures. In the midst of it all, we have to reach out and take hold of eternal life. The verb here is epilambanomai, and it can mean to grasp or catch or take hold of something to make it one’s own or even to pounce on something. It is a vivid, active word that tells us that we cannot just sit back and wait for eternal life to come to us. Eternal life is a gift, but we have to strive for it, to grasp it, and to make it our own all with the help of God’s grace.

Scripture Notes: Count It All Joy (James 1)

“Count it all joy, my brethren, when you meet with various trials” (James 1:2). Joy? In the midst of trials? In the midst of suffering? When things aren’t going well? When everything is falling apart? When we can’t see a way out? We’re supposed to count it all joy? 

James responds with a rousing “Yes!” These trials have a purpose, he explains. They test our faith, and it is only in this testing, this challenge, that faith grows and becomes strong and steadfast. When our faith is tested, we have to examine it more carefully. We have to reflect on what we believe and why we believe it. We have to turn to God and pray for an increase in faith. When we do this, our faith can grow in ways that it may not have but for the trials. 

Further, James continues, that testing produces steadfastness, patience, endurance, perseverance. We learn how to keep going even when we think we can’t. And that steadfastness, that holding on in the midst of trials, leads us to a sort of perfection. The Greek word is telios, and here it likely means a kind of maturity, a full development. We reach our proper end. We become complete, whole, intact. We grow into the people God wants us to be, lacking in nothing that He wants us to have.

All of this comes through trial, through testing, through suffering, for God brings great good out of things that seem to us to be not good at all. God is working in a way we can’t see. No wonder, then, that James invites us to joy even in the middle of of trials, testing, and suffering because we can trust that God will use them to our greatest and best effect to shape us into the people He wants us to be.

Scripture Notes: The Riches of His Grace (Ephesians 1)

In the opening paragraphs of his Letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul praises God and proclaims the great blessings that He has showered upon us in Christ. God has “blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,” Paul marvels (Eph 1:3). He has chosen us and made us “holy and blameless before Him” (Eph 1:4). He has made us His own children in Jesus Christ, sons and daughters in the Son, heirs to a glorious inheritance of life and love. 

Indeed, Jesus has redeemed us by His own blood, giving His life on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins. God has made known to us His will, His plan to unite all things in Christ, everything in Heaven and on earth, all together, all in Him.  

For all his eloquence, Paul can hardly take it in. We, too, should be left breathless if we stop to think about what God has done for us, and all “according to the riches of His grace, which He lavished upon us” (Eph 1:7). God is not bound to do anything for us. He created us, but we fell into sin and continue to fall into sin. Yet He has never stopped loving us, not even a little, and He constantly draws us back to Him through His grace, 

What is grace? The Catechism defines it as “favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to His call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life” (#1996). Grace, the Catechism continues, is actually “a participation in the life of God”(#1997). And God, Paul asserts, lavishes grace upon us. God wants us to share in His very life, so He gives us grace to do that (sanctifying grace), and He helps us with actual graces at every step of the way that we may know Him, love Him, and obey Him, that we may conform our lives and ourselves to Him. May we cooperate with every bit of God’s lavish grace and be truly thankful for these riches.

Scripture Notes: Qualified (2 Cor 3)

In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul sets forth the basis for his ministry to the Corinthian Church. He and his fellow workers can have confidence, he says, but not in themselves, rather “through Christ toward God” (2 Cor 3:4). The Greek word for “confidence” is πεποίθησις, and it refers to a state of certainty, a trust, a reliance, and an assurance about the outcome. In Christ, Paul can be certain that God’s will for him and for his ministry will be accomplished.  

But this is not Paul’s doing. He explains, “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our sufficiency is from God, who has qualified us to be ministers of a new covenant” (2 Cor 3:5-6). The words translated as “sufficient,” “sufficiency,” and “has qualified” all come from words with the same Greek root. The adjective “sufficient” translates the Greek ἱκανός, which could also be glossed as “fit,” “appropriate,” “competent,” “qualified,” or “able.” Paul knows that, on his own, he is none of these things. None of us are. 

Rather, our sufficiency, our ἱκανότης, our state of being qualified for something, our “fitness” or “capability,” comes from God. He gives Paul and us the grace to do His will and to carry out the mission He has set for us. God is the One Who has qualified us for ministry. The verb here is ἱκανόω, to cause someone to be adequate and sufficient for something, to qualify someone for something, to make something doable for someone, perhaps even to empower or authorize someone to act. 

God has done this for Paul and his fellow missionaries, making them able to be ministers of a new covenant, a covenant that fulfills all the previous covenants God has made with His people, a covenant mediated by Jesus Christ, a covenant designed to expand God’s family to the whole world. We, too, have received our qualification from God for our own role in this ministry. Will we accept it and allow Him to act through us to bring His life to the world?

Scripture Notes: The Song of Moses, Part 5 (Deuteronomy 32)

God has allowed His unfaithful people to experience the consequences of sin, to feel the curses of the covenant they have broken. But He will not leave them in that state. When they have fallen all the way to the bottom, when their “power” is no more, when they have realized that they can do nothing for themselves, then “the Lord will vindicate His people and have compassion on His servants” (Deut 32:36). He will ask them where those “gods” they wanted to serve have gone to, and He will make them see that He is God and He alone. There are no others.

At that point, God will punish the enemies of His people. He allowed them to triumph only for a time. He has used them as a tool to teach His people a critical lesson. But He will not let injustice stand. He will now act on behalf of His people to avenge them and restore them and show them His love. 

Moses ends his prophetic song with an invitation to the nations to look upon and even praise the people of God and to understand how God works with, through, and in them. After all, God’s covenant family has the special task of telling the rest of the world all about God.

Scripture Notes: The Song of Moses, Part 4 (Deuteronomy 32)

God is angry at His covenant people for their infidelity. In turning to other “gods,” they have essentially told Him that He is not good enough, that He is not doing what they want, so they will find someone else who will.  God’s anger becomes like a fire, but we must remember that God is not throwing a tantrum. He is not angry like we humans get angry. His anger is a recognition of and response to human sin and especially to what that sin does to His beloved children. It ruins them. It breaks their relationship with Him.

So God declares that He will give His people a reality check. They will see the consequences of sin in all their horror. He will allow them to experience the covenant curses that they have brought down upon their own heads when they broke the covenant. Hunger, heat, pestilence, beasts, venom, the sword, all of these will fall upon Israel because of their disobedience. They have made it clear that they do not want God and His care, so God will make it clear exactly what they are choosing instead. They will even be scattered in exile because they have spurned God’s gift of the Promised Land, in which they were to have a home fit for perfect worship of God alone. 

It is not a pretty picture, and we might wonder why God would bring such terrors upon His people. Quite simply, God knows that this is the only way to wake them up. “For they are a nation void of counsel, and there is no understanding in them” (Deut 32:28). They cannot and will not see what is right in front of them. They refuse to discern the truth and live by it. So they will suffer the consequences. 

Scripture Notes: The Song of Moses, Part 3 (Deuteronomy 32)

Moses’ reminiscences continue as he sings of the people’s response to God’s loving care. God has given His covenant family everything they need. He has shielded them and supported them and blessed them. But what do they do in return? They get fat and thick and sleek, and they start to kick, actually turning away from God and His will. They even scoff at “the Rock” of their salvation (Deut 32:15). 

In fact, the people of Israel did do all of this. God gave them manna in the desert, for instance. At first, they were grateful and marveled at this new food, but later they called this delicious bread of angels (which actually conformed to each person’s taste) wretched food and claimed they were thoroughly sick of it. They wanted to go back to Egypt where they had plenty of fish and vegetables. They were tired of wandering in the desert, even though they were led by God at every step, and they were ready to go right back into slavery.

What is more, the people began to worship other “gods,” Moses says. Perhaps they thought they could get a better deal. Maybe they wanted to hedge their bets; if God would not give them what they wanted, maybe someone else would. They worshiped the golden calf. They “sacrificed to demons which were no gods” (Deut 32:17). They started worshiping anything but God, forgetting their Creator to bow down to a creature. 

Needless to say, God was not pleased. Moses offers a vivid depiction of His reaction to His people’s infidelity (using, of course, human concepts as an analogy, for God allows us to grasp at understanding His infinity in this way). God, Moses says, spurned the people and hid His face from this “perverse generation” (Deut 32:20). He was jealous for them and provoked by their idols. God’s jealous is not the same as human jealousy. God wants only what is best for His people, and when they turn their backs on that “best” and choose something else, He is roused to zeal (again analogously) because of His great love. God also had a plan to bring His people back to the right path.