Let us begin this lesson by doing some more
reading from the Barclay Commentary at the point we
left in our study of verse three.
But, as the early Church saw it, the responsibility
of the office-bearer did not begin and end in the
church. He had two other spheres of responsibility,
and if he failed in them he was bound also to fail
in the church.
(1) His first sphere of duty was his own home. If a
man did not know how to rule his own household, how
could he engage upon the task of ruling the
congregation of the church (1 Timothy 3:5)? A man
who had not succeeded in making a Christian home
could hardly be expected to succeed in making a
Christian congregation. A man who had not instructed
his own family could hardly be the right man to
instruct the family of the church.
Quoted verse:
1 Timothy 3:5
(For if a man know not how to rule his own house,
how shall he take care of the church of God?)
(2) The second sphere of responsibility was the
world. He must be ‘well thought of by outsiders’ (1
Timothy 3:7). He must be a man who has gained the
respect of others in the day-to-day business of
life. Nothing has hurt the Church more than the
sight of people who are active in it but whose
business and social life contradicts the faith which
they claim and the principles which they teach. The
Christian office-bearer must first of all be a good
person.
Quoted verse:
1 Timothy 3:7
Moreover he must have a good report of them which
are without; lest he fall into reproach and the
snare of the devil.
THE CHARACTER OF THE CHRISTIAN LEADER
1 Timothy 3:1–7
We have just seen that the Christian leader must be
someone who has won the respect of all. In this
passage, there is a great series of words and
phrases describing the character of the Christian
leader; and it will be worth while to look at each
in turn. Before we do that, it will be interesting
to set beside them two famous descriptions by great
Greek thinkers of the good leader’s character.
Diogenes Laertius (7:116–26)
hands down to us the Stoic description. He must be
married; he must be without pride; he must be
abstemious (ăb-stē'mē-əs),
[eating and drinking in
moderation]; and he must combine prudence of mind
with excellence of outward behaviour. A writer
called Onosander gives us the other. He must be
prudent, self-controlled, sober, frugal,
hard-working, intelligent, without love of money,
neither young nor old, if possible the father of a
family, able to speak competently, and of good
reputation. It is interesting to see how these
descriptions and the Christian descriptions
coincide.
The Christian leader must be a man against whom no
criticism can be made (anepile¯ptos).
Anepile¯ptos is used of a position which is not open
to attack, of a life which is not open to censure,
of an art or technique which is so perfect that no
fault can be found with it, of an agreement which
cannot be broken. The Christian leader must not only
be free from such faults as can be attacked by
definite charges; he must be of such fine character
as to be even beyond criticism. The Douai–Rheims
version of the New Testament produced in 1582
translates this Greek word by the very unusual
English word irreprehensible, unable to be found
fault with. The Greeks themselves defined the word
as meaning ‘affording nothing of which an adversary
can take hold’. Here is the ideal of perfection. We
will not be able fully to achieve it; but the fact
remains that the Christian leader must seek to offer
to the world a life of such purity that he leaves no
loophole even for criticism of himself.
The Christian leader must have been married only
once. The Greek literally means that he must be ‘the
husband of one wife’. Some take this to mean that
the Christian leader must be a married man – and it
is possible that the phrase could mean that. It is
certainly true that a married man can be a recipient
of confidences and a bringer of help in a way that a
single man cannot be, and that he can bring a
special understanding and sympathy to many
situations. A few scholars take it to mean that the
Christian leader cannot marry a second time, even
after his wife’s death. In support, they quote
Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 7. But, in its
context here, we can be quite certain that the
phrase means that the Christian leader must be a
loyal husband, preserving marriage in all its
purity. In later days, the Apostolic Canons laid it
down: ‘He who is involved in two marriages, after
his baptism, or he who has taken a concubine, cannot
be an episkopos, a bishop.’
We may well ask why it should be necessary to lay
down what seems obvious – but we must understand the
state of the world in which this was written. It has
been said, and with much truth, that the only
totally new virtue which Christianity brought into
this world was chastity. In many ways, the ancient
world was in a state of moral chaos. That was true
even of the Jewish world. Astonishing as it may
seem, certain Jews still practiced polygamy. In the
Dialogue with Trypho, in which Justin Martyr
discusses Christianity with a Jew, it is said that
‘it is possible for a Jew even now to have four or
five wives’ (Dialogue with
Trypho, 134). The Jewish historian
Josephus can write: ‘By ancestral custom a man can
live with more than one wife’ (Antiquities
of the Jews, 17:1:2).
Quite apart from these unusual cases, divorce was
tragically easy in the Jewish world. The Jews had
the highest ideals of marriage. They said that a man
must surrender his life rather than commit murder,
idolatry or adultery. They had the belief that
marriages are made in heaven. In the story of the
marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, it is said: ‘The
thing comes from the Lord’ (Genesis 24:50). This was
taken to mean that the marriage was arranged by God.
So it is said in Proverbs 19:14: ‘A prudent wife is
from the Lord.’ In the story of Tobit, the angel
says to Tobit: ‘Do not be afraid, for she was set
apart for you before the world was made’ (Tobit
6:17). The Rabbis said: ‘God sits in
heaven arranging marriages.’ ‘Forty days before the
child is formed, a heavenly voice proclaims its
mate.’
Quoted verses:
Genesis 24:50
Then Laban and Bethuel answered and said, The thing
proceedeth from the LORD: we cannot speak unto thee
bad or good.
Proverbs 19:14
House and riches are the inheritance of fathers: and
a prudent wife is from the LORD.
For all that, the Jewish law allowed divorce.
Marriage was indeed the ideal; but divorce was
permitted. Marriage was ‘inviolable (ĭn-vī'ə-lə-bəl) but not
indissoluble’ (ĭn'dĭ-sŏl'yə-bəl). The Jews held that once the marriage
ideal had been shattered by cruelty or infidelity or
incompatibility, it was far better to allow a
divorce and to permit the two to make a fresh start.
The great tragedy was that the wife had no rights
whatsoever. The Jewish historian Josephus says:
‘With us it is lawful for a husband to dissolve a
marriage, but a wife, if she departs from her
husband, cannot marry another, unless her former
husband put her away’ (Antiquities
of the Jews, 15:8:7). In a case of
divorce by consent, in the time of the New
Testament, all that was required was two witnesses
and no court case at all. A husband could send his
wife away for any reason; at the most, a wife could
petition the court to urge her husband to write her
a bill of divorce, but it could not force him even
to do that.
Faced with that situation, things reached a point
where ‘women refused to contract marriages, and men
grew grey and celibate’. A brake was put upon this
process by legislation introduced by Simon ben
Shetah. A Jewish wife always brought her husband a
dowry which was called Kethubah. Simon decreed that
a man had unrestricted use of the Kethubah, as long
as he remained married to his wife, but on divorce
he was absolutely liable to repay it, even if he had
‘to sell his hair’ to do so. This slowed down the
rate of divorce; but the Jewish system was always
impaired by the fact that a wife had no rights.
In the Gentile world, things were infinitely worse.
There, too, according to Roman law, a wife had no
rights. Cato, the Roman statesman, said: ‘If you
were to take your wife in adultery, you could kill
her with impunity, without any court judgment; but
if you were involved in adultery, she would not dare
to lift a finger against you, for it is unlawful.’
Things grew so bad, and marriage became so
unattractive, that in 131 BC a well-known Roman
called Metellus Macedonicus made a statement which
the Emperor Augustus was afterwards to quote: ‘If we
could do without wives, we would be rid of that
nuisance. But since nature has decreed that we can
neither live comfortably with them, nor live at all
without them, we must look rather to our permanent
interests than to passing pleasure.’
Even the Roman poets saw the dreadfulness of the
situation. ‘Ages rich in sin’, wrote Horace, ‘were
the first to taint marriage and family life. From
this source the evil has overflowed.’ ‘Sooner will
the seas be dried up,’ said Propertius, ‘and the
stars be reft from heaven, than our women reformed.’
Ovid wrote his famous, or infamous, book The Art of
Love, and never from beginning to end mentions
married love. He wrote cynically: ‘These women alone
are pure who are unsolicited, and a man who is angry
at his wife’s love affair is nothing but a rustic
boor.’ Seneca declared: ‘Anyone whose affairs have
not become notorious, and who does not pay a married
woman a yearly fee, is despised by women as a mere
lover of girls; in fact husbands are got as a mere
decoy for lovers.’ ‘Only the ugly’, he said, ‘are
loyal.’ ‘A woman who is content to have only two
followers is a paragon of virtue.’ Tacitus commended
the supposedly barbarian German tribes for ‘not
laughing at evil, and not making seduction the
spirit of the age’. When a marriage took place, the
home to which the couple were going was decorated
with green bay leaves. Juvenal said that there were
those who entered on divorce before the bays of
welcome had faded. In 19 BC, a man named Quintus
Lucretius Vespillo erected a tablet to his wife
which said: ‘Seldom do marriages last until death
undivorced, but ours continued happily for forty-one
years.’ The happy marriage was the astonishing
exception.
Ovid and Pliny each had three wives; Caesar and
Antony had four; Sulla and Pompey had five; Herod
had nine; Cicero’s daughter Tullia had three
husbands. The Emperor Nero was the third husband of
Poppaea and the fifth husband of Statilla Messalina.
It was not for nothing that the Pastorals laid it
down that a Christian leader must be the husband of
one wife. In a world where even the highest
positions and places in society were awash with
immorality, the Christian Church had to demonstrate
the chastity, the stability and the sanctity of the
Christian home. ~Barclay
Commentary
Now to the commentaries...
One that ruleth well his own
house - This implies that a minister of the
gospel would be, and ought to be, a married man. It
is everywhere in the New Testament supposed that he
would be a man who could be an example in all the
relations of life. The position which he occupies in
the church has a strong resemblance to the relation
which a father sustains to his household; and a
qualification to govern a family well, would be an
evidence of a qualification to preside properly in
the church. It is probable that, in the early
Christian church, ministers were not infrequently
taken from those of mature life, and who were, at
the time, at the head of families; and, of course,
such would be men who had had an opportunity of
showing that they had this qualification for the
office. Though, however, this cannot be insisted on
now as a “previous” qualification for the office,
yet it is still true that, if he has a family, it is
a necessary qualification, and that a man in the
ministry “should be” one who governs his own house
well. A want of this will always be a hindrance to
extensive usefulness.
Having his children in
subjection with all gravity - This does not
mean that his “children” should evince (show
or manifest) gravity,
whatever may be true on that point; but it refers
“to the father.” He should be a grave or serious man
in his family; a man free from levity of character,
and from frivolity and fickleness, in his
conversation with his children. It does not mean
that he should be severe, stern, morose (gloomy) - which are
traits that are often mistaken for gravity, and
which are as inconsistent with the proper spirit of
a father as frivolity of manner - but that he should
be a serious and sober-minded man. He should
maintain proper “dignity” (semnotēs);
he should maintain self-respect, and his deportment
should be such as to inspire others with respect for
him. ~Barnes Notes
Let us look at the Adam Clarke commentary
The fourteenth qualification of a Christian bishop
is, that he ruleth well his own house; one who
properly presides over and governs his own family.
One who has the command, of his own house, not by
sternness, severity, and tyranny, but with all
gravity; governing his household by rule, every one
knowing his own place, and each doing his own work,
and each work having the proper time assigned for
its beginning and end. This is a maxim of common
sense; no family can be prosperous that is not under
subjection, and no person can govern a family but
the head of it, the husband, who is, both by nature
and the appointment of God, the head or governor of
his own house. See the note on Ephesians 5:22.
~Adam Clarke
Quoted verse:
Ephesians 5:22
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as
unto the Lord.
Wives, submit
yourselves unto your own husbands -
As the Lord, viz. Christ, is the head or
governor of the Church, and the head of the
man, so is the man the head or governor of
the woman. This is God’s ordinance, and
should not be transgressed. The husband
should not be a tyrant, and the wife should
not be the governor. Old Francis Quarles, in
his homely rhymes, alluding to the
superstitious notion, that the crowing of a
hen bodes ill luck to the family, has said:
-
“Ill thrives the hapless family that shows
A cock that’s silent, and a hen that crows:
I know not which live most unnatural lives,
Obeying husbands or commanding wives.”
As unto the Lord
- The word Church seems to be necessarily
understood here; that is: Act under the
authority of your husbands, as the Church
acts under the authority of Christ. As the
Church submits to the Lord, so let wives
submit to their husbands.
~Adam Clarke |
Now the John Gill:
One that ruleth well his own house - His family,
wife, children, and servants; and is not to be
understood of his body, and of keeping of that
under, and of preserving it chaste and temperate, as
appears from what follows:
having his children in subjection with all gravity -
keeping a good decorum in his family; obliging his
children to observe his orders, and especially the
rules of God's word; and not as Eli, who did not use
his authority, or lay his commands upon his sons,
nor restrain them from evil, or severely reprove
them for their sins, but neglected them, and was too
mild and gentle with them; but like Abraham, who not
only taught, but commanded his children and his
household, to keep the way of the Lord; Genesis
18:19 and so should those act who are in such an
office as is here treated of; and should not only
rule well in their families, preside over them, go
before them, and set an example to them, and keep
their children in obedience and subjection; but this
should be "with all gravity": not only in the master
of the family, but in the children; who as their
father is, or should be, should be brought up in,
and used to gravity in words and in dress; and in
the whole of their deportment and conversation. This
may he observed against the Papists, who forbid
marriage to the ministers of the Gospel.
~John Gill
Quoted verse
Genesis 18:19
For I know him, that he will command his children
and his household after him, and they shall keep the
way of the LORD, to do justice and judgment; that
the LORD may bring upon Abraham that which he hath
spoken of him.
Now to the Treasury of Scriptural Knowledge.
One that ruleth well his own
house, having his children in subjection
1 Timothy 3:12
Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling
their children and their own houses well.
Genesis 18:19
For I know him, that he will command his children
and his household after him, and they shall keep the
way of the LORD, to do justice and judgment; that
the LORD may bring upon Abraham that which he hath
spoken of him.
Joshua 24:15
And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD,
choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the
gods which your fathers served that were on the
other side of the flood, or the gods of the
Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and
my house, we will serve the LORD.
Psalm 101:2-8
2 I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way. O
when wilt thou come unto me? I will walk within my
house with a perfect heart.
3 I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I
hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not
cleave to me.
4 A froward heart shall depart from me: I will not
know a wicked person.
5 Whoso privily slandereth his neighbour, him will I
cut off: him that hath an high look and a proud
heart will not I suffer.
6 Mine eyes shall be upon the faithful of the land,
that they may dwell with me: he that walketh in a
perfect way, he shall serve me.
7 He that worketh deceit shall not dwell within my
house: he that telleth lies shall not tarry in my
sight.
8 I will early destroy all the wicked of the land;
that I may cut off all wicked doers from the city of
the LORD.
Acts 10:2
A devout man, and one that feared God with all his
house, which gave much alms to the people, and
prayed to God alway.
Titus 1:6
If any be blameless, the husband of one wife, having
faithful children not accused of riot or unruly.
with all gravity;
Philippians 4:8
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true,
whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are
just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things
are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if
there be any virtue, and if there be any praise,
think on these things.
Titus 2:2
That the aged men be sober, grave, temperate, sound
in faith, in charity, in patience.
Titus 2:7
In all things shewing thyself a pattern of good
works: in doctrine shewing uncorruptness, gravity,
sincerity, |