"False Teaching Spreads Rapidly" (2 Timothy 2:17a)

 

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/20/2025 8:55 AM

 

My Worship Time                                                         Focus:  “False Teaching Spreads Rapidly”

 

Bible Reading & Meditation                                                 Reference:  2 Timothy 2:17a

 

            Message of the verse:  “and their talk will spread like gangrene.”

 

            Let us look again at verse 16 before I make comments on 17a.  “16 But avoid worldly and empty chatter, for it will lead to further ungodliness, 17 and their talk will spread like gangrene.

 

            MacArthur writes “Not only that, but false doctrine propagated by the talk of false teachers will spread its infection like gangrene.  Gangrene transliterates gangraina, the Greek word from which it is derived.  In the ancient world, the term was used of cancer as well as gangrene, both of which diseases spread rapidly and are deadly.  Even in modern warfare, gangrene is one of the worst dangers in battlefield injuries.  If not treated promptly and carefully, it can quickly lead to amputation or death.  False religion and satanic lies spread faster than the truth, because the sinful human heart is more receptive to them.

 

            “Religious deceptions are so infectious, malicious, and insidious that they are to be handled only with protective mask and gloves, as it were.  Using another figure, Jude says that those who are in grave spiritual danger should be snatched ‘out of the fire’ (Jude  23) like a hot ember.  It was in a similar figurative way that the high priest Joshua, who had become corrupted like the rest of the priesthood, was divinely retrieved and spared, like ‘a brand plucked from the fire’ (Zech. 3:2).

 

             ‘The whole world lies in the power of the evil one’ John says in his first letter (1 John 5:19).  Earlier in that epistle he says we are not to ‘love the world, the love of the world, nor the things in the world,’ because ‘if anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in Him.  For all that is in the world, the sust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world’ (1 John  2:15-16).  James likewise warns, ‘Do you know that friendship with the world makes himself an enemy with God’ (James 4:4).  The world is the partner with demons in developing and spreading the epidemic of deadly spiritual gangrene.

 

            “It is because false teachers are of the world and serve the prince of this world that they are so dangerous.  And rapidly growing tehnology has helped worldliness and every other form of ungodliness to also grow more rapidly, esposing more people to more evil teaching than those who lived even a few generations ago could have imagined.  Consequently, Christians today have more reason than ever to ‘test the spirits to see whether they are from God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world’ (1 John 4:1).  ‘They are from the world; therefore they speak as from the world, and the world listens to them” (v. 5).  Christians therefore have no excuse even for listening to them, much less buying into their ungodly beliefs and ways.”

2/20/2025 9:20 AM