Grace and salvation in the present age.

Titus 2.11-15.

In Titus, Paul presents the Cretan apostle with instructions about how to choose Christian elders in the island’s churches—the mature folks who are gonna assume leadership roles, and guide the next generation to follow Jesus. It’s mainly about what sort of character these people are to have. They’re meant to be fruitful people—not necessarily talented people, educated people, or attractive people. Plenty of pagans put such people in leadership, and look where it gets ’em.

For that matter, plenty of Christians do it too, and this is why whenever pagans think of Christian bishops and pastors, they regularly think of cultish autocrats who charm their way into getting followers and money, but lack any good character. They think of nationalists, white supremacists, sexists who preach toxic masculinity instead of love, homophobes who preach persecution instead of love. They don’t think of people who follow Jesus, and love everyone like Jesus does; they think of hypocrites. And y’know, if we put people into Christian leadership despite anything Paul taught Timothy and Titus, these pagans aren’t wrong. Pagans may not know Jesus, but they like him—so they should like his followers when we’re trying to be like Jesus.

And when we have leaders who are serious about being like Jesus, and we have people who are serious about being like Jesus, we get a healthy church kinda like Paul described in today’s passage.

Titus 2.11-15 KWL

11 For God’s grace is now obvious:

Salvation to all people!

12 Educating us into renouncing impiety and worldly desires;

we should live soberly, fairly, and godly in the present age,

13 patiently awaiting “the blessed hope,”

the appearance of the glory

of our great God and savior, Christ Jesus.

14 He gives himself for us

so he might redeem us from all lawlessness,

and might purify his own unique people,

who are eager for good works.

15 Speak these things.

Encourage and rebuke, with all authority.

No one is allowed to dismiss you.

We get people who preach that God wants to save everybody. Everybody. EVERYBODY. He’s not only interested in the elect; he’s not only trying to save Jews and—whoops!—gentiles somehow got included. He intentionally wants everybody. He created everybody; he wants everybody.

And he wants everybody as-is. “Cleaning up” first implies it’s “cleaning up” which saved us; it’s not. In whatever state you’re in, repent and come to Jesus. Just bear in mind once you come to Jesus, he’s not gonna leave us as-is. The Holy Spirit’s gonna try to grow fruit in us. We’re expected to change for the better. But that comes later. In the meanwhile: As you are. As-is.

And the Spirit will educate us into being like Jesus. Tt 2.12 Ditching impiety, our natural tendency to not give a rip about what God thinks, but only what we think; we gotta live a new lifestyle which submits to God’s opinion about everything. Ditching worldly desires, our natural tendency to get comfortable, please our taste buds, get stoned, entertain ourselves, feel self-righteous, and do all of it at the expense of other people—while, paradoxically, seeking their approval. Nope; the Spirit encourages us to be sober, fair, and godly. We’re meant to become good people—not just by self-righteous Christian standards, but by everyone’s standards. Woe to you when only Christians think you’re a good guy, but everybody else thinks you’re a dick… ’cause yeah, you’re a dick.

How elders must encourage fellow Christians to behave.

Titus 2.1-10.

Throughout ancient literature, sages would put together a list of rules for how every person’s meant to fulfill their role in a family. Husbands act like this, wives act like that. Sons do this, daughters do that. Male slaves do this, female slaves do that. Scholars call them household codes. We find a few of them in the bible too. Like today’s passage.

The list in Titus likewise includes slaves, because slavery was legal in the Roman Empire. But God forbade people from treating slaves like animals instead of people, and Greco-Romans generally shared that attitude about their slaves: They’d become slaves because they lost a war, or were dirt poor and sold themselves (or were sold by family members) into it, or they were criminals and slavery was the punishment. American slavery was entirely different, regularly ignored scripture (as Americans do, ’cause we love to imagine we’re exceptions to the rules), and was rightly abolished. But if we were to port these household codes into the present day, the instructions to slaves would sorta apply to household employees—housekeepers, groundskeepers, nannies, maids, butlers, contractors. With the obvious caveat that employees can quit or be fired. Slaves didn’t have those freedoms.

Popular American culture has their own household codes. Most of ’em have to do with authoritarian men trying to establish their own little despotic patriarchies—they want their wives and children to submit to them, instead of mutually loving one another as is taught in the scriptures. A lot of toxic masculinity is mixed into today’s household codes, as men try to insist “only real men” behave certain ways. (And men who reject these ideas somehow aren’t real men. Yet this doesn’t mean they get to identify as women!) There’s a lot of sexism, vulgarity, and inconsistency in the way they teach it. It’s all very fleshly and graceless. Denounce it wherever you see it, and stick with the bible.

Titus 2.1-10 KWL

1 Speak out, Titus, about whatever comes up,

with healthy teaching.

2 Elders ought to be in their right minds.

Well respected. Self-controlled.

They should have healthy faith,

healthy love, healthy consistency.

3 Women elders likewise with devout behavior.

Not backstabbing.

Not enslaved to heavy drinking.

Teachers of good things,

4 so they might train the new Christians

to love their men, to love their children.

5 Self-disciplined. Clean.

Good at running a household.

Submitting to their own men,

so God’s word won’t be slandered.

6 Teenagers likewise:

Help them in self-discipline.

7 In everything present yourself,

as an example of good works.

In teaching, integrity and honesty,

8 a healthy, irrefutable word,

so those from the opposition might respect it,

having nothing evil to say about us.

9 Slaves are to obey their own wardens

in every acceptable way.

Not to argue.

10 Not to embezzle.

Instead demonstrate all good faith

so God our Savior’s teaching will decorate everything.

Now y’notice Paul’s list began with instructions to Titus about the sort of traits we oughta see in as church elders. The men are to behave thisaway; the women are to behave thataway. But then, in 2.4, as Paul’s explaining what the women elders oughta be teaching the newbies… it mutates into a household code. Verse 5 arguably applies to either the elders or the newbies; I would say both. Verses 6-8 are obviously about Christian teenagers; verses 9-10 are obviously about Christian slaves.

So yeah, this passage didn’t begin as a household code. But it became one. Because every Christian oughta become an elder. All of us should aspire to Christian maturity. Therefore every man and woman should become an elder in our churches, and contribute to its leadership and upkeep.

Slavery: How God mitigated and abolished it.

Back in bible times, people had slaves. Slavery was legal.

This is a weird and troubling idea for a lot of Christians. In the United States, slavery is illegal, and we consider it immoral. So it’s troubling to read about slavery in the bible as if it’s normal or okay.

Especially considering our history with slavery. We fought a whole war over it, y’know. Many southerners are in denial about that, and claim the War Between the States was really about states’ rights and local sovereignty… but history doesn’t bear ’em out at all. Confederate politicians and generals proudly declared they were fighting to retain their peculiar institution of slavery—because unlike southerners today, they didn’t consider slavery to be immoral. Hey, it’s in the bible!

Thing is, American slavery wasn’t at all like biblical slavery. What Americans practiced was chattel slavery, in which slaves were considered cattle—a word which evolved from chattel. What the folks in the bible practiced, for the most part, was penal slavery, in which people were enslaved because they broke the law, got themselves deep into debt, or lost a war. What Americans did was try to find excuses to claim what we were doing, was what they had done—then claim the bible permitted, even endorsed, their behavior. They pretended there was no huge difference.

But there was, and Americans were in fact guilty of violating a biblical command:

Exodus 21.16 KWL

“Anyone who steals a man and sells him, anyone found with the victim in their hands:

They’re dead. Put them to death.”

Slave traders, slave buyers, slave owners, their descendants, and every northerner who looked the other way and permitted the southerners to do their thing: All of them were complicit in the divinely-condemned capital crime of kidnapping. As Abraham Lincoln speculated time and again, our Civil War was likely God’s judgment upon us. Southerners who pretend the war wasn’t about slavery and racism, who claim it was really about heritage and self-governance and a noble lost cause: Their pride and willful blindness is just risking more judgment upon them and their people.

Because chattel slavery is kidnapping. It’s entirely immoral. God said so. Had American slaveowners properly interpreted their bibles, they’d discover every last one of them deserved to die. The Civil War is still the bloodiest, deadliest war in American history—and we got off light.

So yeah, keep in mind American slavery isn’t at all what the bible’s depicted. It’s far closer to what we do with our prisons—’cause convicts aren’t free either, and sentenced to various forms of forced labor. Well, in bible times they didn’t have anything close to our prison system. How did convicts serve their time after they committed a crime? Slavery.