Titus 1:5 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Titus 1:5

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Paul left Titus in Crete. They had evidently been there together: the apostle Paul with Titus, and possibly others, had been to Crete. There was already some sort of the church there, we may suppose, because Cretans had been there on the day of Pentecost, and they had heard the wonderful works of God, that it perhaps dated from that time. They took back and planted in Crete, Christian worship. The apostle Paul had also been preaching there with Titus, and others, one assumes, but then he had hurried on. To keep to his program and continue his journeys he had pressed on, but he knew there was more to be done, and he had left Titus behind. Titus had already been sent at least twice, if not three times, to Corinth and elsewhere. In due course, probably his last assignment at the end of his earthly pilgrimage was to be sent as a missionary to Dalmatia, equivalent to what until recently was Yugoslavia. That is in 2 Timothy. ‘For this cause left I thee in Crete, that thou should set in order’ – order in the churches, and particularly, ‘the things that are wanting’, the things that have been left not yet done. Paul had preached the gospel. People had come to Christ. They had taught them the essential doctrines, but they didn’t manage to accomplish the ordering of the churches, showing them how they should behave, how they should be ordered, and how those who are longer in the faith and reliable should be set aside as elders and office bearers. ‘And ordain elders in every city, as I had appointed thee.’ That is very interesting, and we can too easily rush over it. In every city, town or community. We don't know how big these towns were in Crete, but there were a number of communities there, and they must each have an elder or elders, because each one must be an autonomous, individual local church with its elders responsible directly to God. That is what we have taught us throughout the pastorals, and the New Testament, and even in the book of Revelation: that the churches that were set up by Christ were all to be autonomous churches with their own government. There were never supposed to be any such things as denominations at all. Is Titus to ordain these elders? What is meant by the word ordain? Well it simply means to establish or set down, in each town, the elders of that church. The apostle Paul had already given instructions on this and an appointment to Titus – ‘as I had appointed thee.’ But now he refreshes his memory and sets it down in a letter, and he immediately proceeds to the appointment of elders. In the letter to Titus he doesn't deal with deacons. He does in 1 and 2 Timothy, but not in Titus. So initially they must have the elders; the deacons can come afterwards.

Application

There is an old illustration about the Reformation, and concerning the Episcopal Churches, the Church of England and others, and it runs something like this: at the time of the Reformation it was as though the Reformers found a tremendous, very ornate, elaborate cathedral, and there it was with its soaring arches, its long naves, its stained-glass windows, and its stonework and statues and images of Mary and others. When they got into that great ornate cathedral – this is just an illustration – they tore everything out, and they removed all the images; they took away the altar with its ascending steps and brought it down into the body of the cathedral to turn it into a simple communion table. They set up a pulpit from which would come the word of God; that would be central to them. But, says the illustration, that is as far as they got initially at the time of the Reformation. They took out all the Roman myths, and the nonsense of Catholicism and its traditions – which added to the Bible and completely subverted the Bible – and they put in the word of God and the gospel. But they never thought of pulling down the cathedral itself. So the building, the shell, remained. That stayed in place. And the illustration means this: yes, we thank God for the Reformers, because under God, they did a tremendous work. They changed the teaching; they brought back the gospel; that is what matters. They did all that, but they didn't do very much about church government and the ordering of the church. They left the ornate cathedral untouched; the reform of that came later. This is something of an oversimplification and exaggeration. We often say, the Church of England, for example, is half reformed, or it was in those days. Of course it has grown even worse since the Reformation and gone downhill in so many respects. But at the time of the Reformation, the gospel came in, and the truth, and simplicity. And yet the three pillars of the Reformation were never entirely accomplished because of the death of Edward VI and the coming to the throne of Mary. The structure of its government was not much changed, so in the Church of England you have got hierarchical government. You have got curates and priests, vicars and rectors. Then you have got to deans and deacons, and archdeacons and bishops, and eventually the archbishop. It is all hierarchical. You don't find that here in the Bible. I am leaving you behind, says Paul to Titus, to give each community its own elders. There will be no controlling central influence, central funding: nothing like that. It will be simple autonomous churches. Sometimes people say, ‘Well, surely that's not very secure. What is going to happen? These are small churches in each community. Some may be larger, but they are independent. Isn’t that a fragile arrangement? The amazing thing is it the most stable arrangement of all. It is denominations that collapse doctrinally in no time at all. Satan finds it easy to pollute a denomination. He just pollutes the top and then he has got the whole thing.

There is a fine illustration provided of this by the persecuted Russian Christians up until 1990. In 1990 we had a visit from one of the leading pastors, and he brought with him one of the printing machines that they used, made out of washing machine parts, and they had at that time 18 secret underground presses with small machines in different regions, and nobody knew where they all were. Every now and then the authorities would find one and arrest the printers and send them to prison for 5 to 8 years in terrible circumstances. But they never brought that printing programme – printing the word of God and booklets and tracts and so on – to a close, because they were all independent printing units. They didn't even know about each other, working in hidden places and forests. It is rather like that with churches. God wonderfully preserves independent churches. Denominations all collapse and bring down all the churches with it. But if an independent church should go rotten, and take on board false doctrine, and enfeebled itself – no gospel, people no longer converted, facing a period of liberalism – eventually, what happens to it? It self-destructs, and it is gone. A denomination has a power structure and a financial structure. It keeps itself alive somehow for centuries very often in false doctrine and rottenness. In the Bible, you get autonomous churches in communities with their own elders, directly accountable to God and responsive to the word. And that is found here, as in all the pastorals, as throughout the New Testament.

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Titus 1:5 Commentary and Bible Study