The person who tries to muddy the waters and has this craving to turn everything into questions and strifes so that the plain commands of God are obscured; out of such a person's activity comes the following things. ‘Envy’, not necessarily envy of the person you're arguing with or envy of other people. This is envy of the world. As soon as you can muddy the waters of the Scripture, and all the plain commands of the New Testament to stand aside from this world, to live for the Lord and not for nest feathering; as soon as you muddy the standards, you give yourself liberty to envy worldly things. After all, it's not forbidden anymore. Out of all this wrangling, Christian people will become envious of worldly standards, and they will want to imitate worldly homes and have all the expensive things and have all the pleasures and have all the liberty and relaxation and leisure. Out of the obscuring and confusing of the plain words of God, surrounding them with debate and endless argument, will come a freedom for Christian people to envy worldly ways. This is a fruit of the taking away of the authority of the word of God and its plain commands.
There will come not only envy, there will come ‘strife’ to get away from the challenge of the truth. ‘Railings’, the Greek actually has blasphemies, though railings is quite a good translation, because it is blasphemy not only against God, abuse of God, but abuse of people also. From this muddying of the waters comes much blasphemy because people say, ‘Oh, I think the text means this, not that.’ They make themselves God. They bully the Scriptures, and they stand over the Scriptures. They make themselves superior to the Scriptures. ‘I say it means this’, but who am I to say it means this or that? I'm supposed to come to the Scriptures humbly, ready to submit to what it plainly says. But no, that doesn't suit me, so I stand over it. I'm superior to the Scriptures. ‘I don't accept that interpretation. Oh, I think this is more likely.’ That is blasphemous because Scripture is God's word and we can't stand over it in our pride, pushing it about into the mould that we want it. So out of this muddying of the waters and this debate technique for getting out of the plain commands of God comes much blasphemy and much abuse also of the conservative teachers, the people who teach the old ways. These people who want to muddy the waters: they will always hurl abuse at those who teach the old ways.
‘Evil surmising’ or suspicions or conjectures probably is more likely. I like the authorised version, surmising in that sense, because it fits the context. What is happening is the people who are giving themselves liberty and freedom to turn the Scripture into anything they like do from their own private thoughts, surmise and assume and create all kinds of opinions than they feel free to do so.
‘Perverse disputings’, corrupt disputings. Their minds are corrupted; they don't want to obey. They are ‘destitute of the truth’, which is an interesting term. It means literally that they've had the truth stolen from them. They may have had it at one stage. I'm not saying that people could lose their salvation, but these are people who may have had a standing, but for the moment it's been stolen from them. The truth has been stolen out of their minds by their worldliness and their attempt to twist the Scripture so as to let them off the hook, so that it has no force and no authority for them. It is such a serious matter.
‘Supposing that gain is godliness.’ This is really the climax of the passage. They have managed to turn godliness into the opposite of what it really is. It should be a means of overcoming the world, and it should include victory over the sin of covetousness. These teachers have turned it into the opposite of that. This love of gain is nothing other than idolatry that worships the material things of this world, and substitutes them for the love of God. All this is apparent in the refusal of some to submit to apostolic teaching that slaves should be in submission to their earthly masters, while the institution continues to exist. For them, what comes first is not the testimony of the gospel, but personal advantage.
Timothy must turn away from them. There will be an initial effort to convince them of their error, but if they only wrangle with words and refuse to recognise the truth, then the time will come when any further effort to persuade them is pointless. Either God will deal with them or else they will perish in their error.
They are people of corrupt minds. What greater harm can a man or woman do than to corrupt their own minds? The mind is the highest faculty in man. It is that with which we take hold of the words of God. If the mind is corrupted, the word of God is beyond our reach, and can do us no good. A person of corrupt mind, which literally means rotting mind, must be seen as an unconverted person. If somebody is promoting this kind of thing they are destitute of the truth. Their position is very serious, for they have come near to the truth at some time, but instead of grasping the gospel in its simplicity, they are distorted it. Yes, there are those who are genuinely converted, who drift into error and make a great mistake, but the teachers and the promoters of this false Christianity are people who are described here as having corrupt minds and destitute of the truth.
You cannot have the truth of God and put self first, and teach people to do so. If you have found the Lord, you have begun to focus on spiritual things. Spiritual salvation matters much more than bodily benefits. This is what you seek, this is what you appreciate, this is to your taste, and what you promote and preach and spread.
This is an example of where the Authorised Version reads differently to the modern versions. Most of the modern translators have looked at this passage and they have a different word order. The translators have concluded, you cannot say gain is godliness. What the apostle means to say is these people suppose that godliness is a route to gain; it is a gain generating scheme: that by pretending to be godly, even though really they are not, there will be certain advantages for them. Understood as the Authorised Version renders it, it is saying something even stronger: that godliness is not merely route to gain, as if feigning godliness and pretending you are a child of God is going to lead to gain; gain is itself evidence of godliness. This certainly the view taken by the Prosperity Gospel teachers. They tell people, ‘If you exercise a little faith in God and you give him a little money, he will give you two or three times as much in return, and your gain will prove God is pleased with you. Gain is therefore the measure of godliness, the sign of it, the reward of it. We do what we do for gain. Why am I going to trust the Lord? Because he's going to give me something.’ Some people actually think that.