1 Timothy 3:16 Commentary and Bible Study

That mystery, that mainspring, the greatest secret of all in the New Testament is the secret of godliness. ‘Godliness’ translates a Greek term which means reverence towards God and real communion with him. Without any argument, says Paul, the secret of access to God is great, and here it is spelled out. ‘God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.’ If you understand those things, if you keep them always in your mind, if every day you depend upon them and love them and praise him for them, that is the key to reverence for God, and the key to having righteousness formed in you. Because it means Christ is living in your mind and in your heart, and you are living in him. With that vital union, you cannot easily sin. Your conscience will be tender. You will readily and gladly put to death the sinful thoughts and words which come up. You will be conscientious day by day, so that you feel badly and feel ashamed every time you sin, because the biggest thing in your heart is to please him. ‘God was manifest in the flesh.’ Amazing words! God in Christ was revealed, manifest in the flesh. Flesh in the New Testament usually means sinful human nature, but he didn't have a sinful human nature. He was Christ, second person of the Godhead, pure and spotless. How can he be revealed in the flesh, sinful human nature? Although he was sinless and spotless, he was pleased to be born into human flesh under the curse, the judgment of God. The human race fell in the Garden of Eden. It disobeyed God, and fell from its first higher state. It is now under the judgment of God. The principle of death has come in. First of all, the death of the body, slowly taking place, every breath we breathe, and then everlasting punishment and death for sin. We are condemned people, cut off from God. The soul is rendered dormant, lifeless, not functioning. Christ, though he remains spotless and holy, came into the realm where the curse operates, into the place that was under judgment, into the place of suffering. He even wore a body subject to the curse. He knew aging from infancy to his thirties, and then was crucified on the cross. He knew tiredness. His body knew cell death; his body was sensitive to pain and suffering. When He was impaled on Calvary's cross, and the Father, as the poet says, veiled his face and poured out upon him the eternal punishment due to his people, he took a degree of pain and suffering – not only in his body, but in his innermost pure and holy soul – beyond measurement. It was more than the total sum of suffering in all the world. This is so hard to take in. That the Creator of all things, the Holy One, willingly, out of love, entered into the cursed world in order to be our Redeemer and Saviour, and take us out of the curse. Once you see God revealed in the flesh, you understand there is no love like that. Of course, we want to live for Him. When you consider what he has done for us, the lengths he would go to save us, we want to honour him and please him. We can't be at peace when we sin against him, because his love means so much to us. ‘Justified in the Spirit, maintained his perfect righteousness. All the time he was on earth, he never succumbed to the pressures and the temptations and the ungodliness, never returned spite with spite, insult with insult. How We know he was perfectly righteous, because the Spirit bore witness to him, and so he was enabled as the God-man to do mighty miracles, thousands of them everywhere, even raising the dead. The Spirit appeared to him as witnessed by John the Baptist. He was justified in the Spirit, proven to be the perfect righteous one, who would offer himself on behalf of all his people and take our punishment for us. ‘Seen of angels.’ When was that? At the resurrection. He was seen of angels at his birth and nativity, too, and on other occasions, but this refers chiefly to the resurrection. Christ demonstrated visibly to his people by his resurrection that he had wholly succeeded in bearing away our sin and his sacrifice was accepted by the Father. He had power over death and could just assume life once again. What a kind encouragement for us! Who else did angels worship? Who else did angels minister to, as God? We don’t only have his word for it; he demonstrated it in the resurrection. ‘Preached unto the Gentiles’, made known to all. When was Christ preach to the Gentiles? Think of all the Old Testament prophecies. Isaiah says, ‘So shall he sprinkle many nations.’ When God comes down, when Messiah comes, it will be the age of the Gentiles; and the whole world will be reached. Think of his great proclamation, ‘Other sheep I have, not of this fold’ – the Gentiles must be saved. He did it himself during his earthly life. Think of his healing of the centurion’s servant; and he says of that Gentile, ‘I have not seen such faith, no, not in Israel’. Think of his tender speech to the Syro-Phoenician woman, to the centurion whose son was healed, and to the Greeks who came to him. Remember his influence on the centurion at the cross, ‘Certainly, surely, this was a righteous man’. Supremely he was preached in the great commission as the risen Lord, when he summoned his disciples to go into all the world and they obeyed. ‘Believed on in the world’, the disciples and those through whom the church was formed, his first believers. There were 120 disciples associated with the upper room, just before the day of Pentecost. There were 500 on a mountain in Galilee that saw the risen Lord a little later, even before the great outpouring on Pentecost; and then thousands began to come in. There were unknown numbers of disciples; hundreds, maybe thousands, in Galilee and Judea, around the towns and villages. These were people whose lives were changed. So many of the disciples proved their conversion by their martyrdoms and their lifelong witness. ‘Received up into glory’ – another public act. The ascension of Christ was witnessed by so many in order to confirm to us absolutely that he was the King of glory. All these things constitute the impetus and the power which makes us holy, because we value these things. In instructing Timothy how to conduct himself in the forming and reformation, if necessary, and shaping of the church, Paul says, ‘Start here.’ ‘Start with the highest possible view of what the church is; who its designer was; who is it sustainer; who has fashioned it as it ought to be. Consider what is the faith that is to be declared in it: God has entered in and brought salvation to lost men and women.