Second Timothy chapter 4. While you’re turning there, let me say what a privilege it is to be with you. Thank you for the warm welcome to not only First Pres but to this presbytery event. It is a delight for me and my wife to be here and a special privilege for me to open up God’s Word. We’re looking at 2 Timothy 4 and we’re considering it under this heading – “A Doctrine to Die By.” As you have seen in the program, we’ve coordinated this evening around the five solas of the Reformation and I love that the preaching of God’s Word is in the Solas Christas portion, because Christ is the center of all true preaching and is the power of all true preaching. But even so, the doctrine that we are considering in 2 Timothy 4 is the fifth sola of this evening, Soli Deo Gloria, which you will see as we read this passage becomes Paul’s theme near the end there of the text. So we are going to pick up our reading in verse 6 to get some context of where Paul is at in this letter. So we’ll start reading in verse 6, but our consideration for the sermon will be primarily verses 9 through 18. Would you please now pray with me as we ask the Lord to bless the reading and the preaching of His Word.
Almighty God, we come to You now and we ask for You to send Your Holy Spirit to be with us that the very same Spirit who inspired these words would illuminate our hearts and our minds tonight to receive them, to embrace them, to live by them. We have acknowledged that it is Your Word alone which is the only rule to direct us in how we might glorify and enjoy You and that forever. And so we ask that You would lead us in this way. Since You have caused all holy Scripture to be written for our learning, would You grant us now to hear them, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them that we would embrace and ever hold fast to the blessed hope of everlasting life which You have given to us in our Savior, Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever, world without end, amen.
Do give your careful attention now to God’s Word as it comes to us from 2 Timothy chapter 4, beginning in verse 6:
“For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.
Do your best to come to me soon. For Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia. Luke alone is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me for ministry. Tychicus I have sent to Ephesus. When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments. Alexander the coppersmith did me great harm; the Lord will repay him according to his deeds. Beware of him yourself, for he strongly opposed our message. At my first defense no one came to stand by me, but all deserted me. May it not be charged against them! But the Lord stood by me and strengthened me, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. So I was rescued from the lion’s mouth. The Lord will rescue me from every evil deed and bring me safely into his heavenly kingdom. To him be the glory forever and ever. Amen.”
Well there is perhaps no other figure in the New Testament who would appear to be larger than life itself than the apostle Paul. And this evening we are eavesdropping on some of his last words, certainly the final words that we have that are recorded in Scripture from the apostle Paul. And you’ll note that far from appearing larger than life, Paul actually seems to be very small indeed. It’s a little jarring, this picture of Paul that we’re given here, than the Paul that we are used to. I mean this is the man who preached the Gospel faithfully for over thirty years, a man who planted over a dozen churches, a man who wrote the deepest theology and the sweetest prose, some of which we heard even moments ago in Romans chapter 3 for example. This is a man who was elevated to the third heavens, a man who survived the thirty-nine lashes five times, a man who survived shipwreck, a man who raised Eutychus from the dead, a man whose handkerchief could heal the sick, a man who committed himself to the Gospel. As we’re told in Romans 15, “by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God.” This is Paul. Many supernatural things attended his ministry to be sure, but he himself was not superhuman. If there was any doubt, 2 Timothy 4 confirms it. Indeed, one wonders if there is a sadder scene, a more pitiful scene in all of the New Testament, Calvary aside, than the close of 2 Timothy. Paul is incarcerated. He’s uncomfortable. He’s alone. He’s cold.
His situation foreshadows the final moments of another minister nearly 1,500 years later. The English reformer, William Tyndale. On nights like tonight, we often think of heroes of the faith like Luther and Calvin and John Knox. I wanted to share with you two stories this evening that I’m reminded of when I think about 2 Timothy 4. The first is this story of the martyrdom of William Tyndale, which happened in 1536. You’ll recall, perhaps, that William Tyndale is famous for translating for the first time the Bible into the English language. In fact, we have Tyndale to thank not only for that but for the invention of a whole host of words that he brought into the English language by his creativity and imagination. We have him to thank for words like, “passover, scapegoat, atonement, beautiful, seashore, busybody,” and even “dunce.” And this is of course why he was martyred. Not “dunce” but because he sought to give the people the Word of God in a language they could understand, defying the Roman church in that way. In fact, there was quite a large list of charges that led to his execution. Let me read the first three charges against William Tyndale.
First, he had maintained that faith alone justifies. Second, he maintained that to believe in the forgiveness of sins and to embrace the mercy offered in the Gospel was enough for salvation. Third, he asserted that human tradition cannot bind the conscience. A true reformer indeed. But before Tyndale felt the blistering flames of the stake, he first experienced the drafty, cold, dark of a dungeon cell. The last piece of writing that we have from Tyndale, the letter from that prison to the governor of the town which he was being held, and this is what he writes:
“I beseech your lordship even by the Lord Jesus, that if I am to pass the winter here, to urge upon the lord commissary, to send me for my goods in his keeping a warmer cap. For I suffer greatly from cold in the head which is aggravated in this prison vault. A warmer coat also, for that which I have is very thin. My overcoat is worn out, my shirts also are worn out. He has a woolen shirt of mine if he would please send it. I have also with him leggings of a heavier cloth for overwear. I also ask for leave to use a lamp in the evening, for it is tiresome to sit alone in the dark. But above all, I beg and entreat your clemency earnestly to allow me the use of my Hebrew Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew lexicon, and that I might employ my time with that study.”
Tyndale and Paul. Cold and in need of warmth. Bored and in need of books. John Stott says, “To admit this is not unspiritual but it’s human. Man is never for one moment denaturalized by grace. We must not then deny our humanity or frailty or pretend that we are made of anything other than dust.” And so in this way, our text tonight shrinks Paul down to size for us.
But it does something else for us as well. As Paul prepares to depart this life, as he recedes into the shadow of death, as he becomes smaller, his God becomes bigger. Verse 18, “The Lord will rescue me from every evil deed and bring me safely into His heavenly kingdom. To Him be the glory forever and ever. Amen.” Paul is glorifying God in his final moments. And what does it mean to glorify God? It means to magnify God, to make God big. God is already all glorious in Himself, but to glorify Him means as image bearers we are to make Him seem glorious. As His image bearers we can make Him seem glorious; we can also make Him seem less than glorious. Our call, though, is to magnify God in our speech, in our conduct, to make God as big as we can.
And tonight, I would like to ask you, “How big is your God?” Or rather, “How big do you make your God?” Is He everything to you? When people think of you, would they say, “God is everything to you”? Is He everything to you even when you have nothing, as the apostle Paul seemingly had nothing in his final days? To what extent do you let the glory of God emanate from your life? Is it the defining mark of who you are? And really what I want to pose to you this evening, at the risk of sounding morbid is, “Is it the defining mark of your death? Will it be the defining mark of your death?” The glory of God.
Well let’s think about that together as we consider Paul’s death. As we do that, as we look at these verses, three themes emerge in these, Paul’s final words to Timothy. The first theme is that of desertion. Desertion. Notice as you scan over again verses 9 through 16 in particular how Paul is emphasizing how utterly solitary he is. He is left by his friends, he is hated by his enemies, he is oppressed by his government. He reflects on how far removed he is from friends and fellowship. Yes, in verse 11 he knows that Luke, his faithful physician and friend, is there by his side, but apart from that all his fellow companions and ministry partners are gone, some for legitimate reasons. We have Crescens and Titus and Tychicus. They’ve gone for mission and ministry. But not Demas. Not Demas. Demas, who is mentioned honorably in Colossians, mentioned honorably in Philemon as a fellow worker alongside Paul, is now said to have given up on the message and the mission and ministry. Why? What are we told? Verse 10, because “he is in love with this present world.”
We know Demases, don’t we – people who at one time were partners, coworkers, fellow soldiers in the fight of faith who have given up on it because they fell in love with the world. Even this Sunday, today, back in Kalamazoo, Michigan, we had to do some scrambling because the gentleman who was to provide pulpit supply for my congregation just a few weeks ago was found out to be having an affair with a woman in his church and now has been deposed and is no longer in ministry. One of my close friends was one of his closest friends, and over the last few weeks I have been walking with my friend through what can only be described as grief. Paul is grieving here. Paul is grieving. Once a fellow worker, fallen away, because he has fallen in love with the world. The thing with Demases is that their love affair with the world is not only damning to their soul but it damages ours as well. That’s what Paul’s feeling. He’s hurting. He’s lonely.
And so we understand verse 9 then, don’t we? “Do your best to come to me soon, please. And bring Mark with you.” Paul knows the end is approaching, that’s clear in verses 6 through 8, and he just wants to see his dear friends one final time before he exits this world for eternity. Again, Paul is not superhuman. And if it wasn’t bad enough to be lonely, he also asks for a cloak to keep him warm. Look at verse 21. We didn’t read that, but right at the end of the letter he says, “Come before winter.” Alone and cold.
This is what marks the death of Paul, but perhaps the most depressing aspect of his deathly situation is what you find in verse 16. Would you look there? We see that Paul reflects back on what he calls his first offense. That’s likely the first step in various stages of hearings that would have led to his current imprisonment. By the way, that’s nothing new for Paul. He’s used to this kind of thing. He’s endured numerous court trials for preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. So wrongly accused, wrongly imprisoned, wrongly tried. This is the pattern for Paul. He’s used to these things. But what does he say is different about this particular instance? What’s different about this trial? He says, “No one came to stand by me, but all deserted me.” Desertion. No one to help Paul, seemingly not even Luke. As one commentator puts it, “Among all the Christians in Rome, there was not one who would stand at his side either in court to speak on his behalf or to advise him in the conduct of his case or even to support him by a demonstration of sympathy.” Deserted.
And yet, it’s in this utter desertion and impending death that Paul then moves to speak of deliverance. Our second theme in this passage. The theme of deliverance. Because what does he say immediately after verse 16? “No one stood by me, all deserted me,” and then we have verse 17, “but the Lord stood by me and strengthened me.” And so as Paul stood in front of that tribunal, all alone, seemingly all alone with no one to come to his defense, to come to his cause, Paul says that he knew that he really wasn’t all alone. Jesus was there. “Friends may fail me, foes assail me, He my Savior sticks by me.” This is the delivering Lord that we have that Paul is speaking about. When everything seemed dark and doomed for death, there’s a deliverance.
Paul speaks of this deliverance in two specific ways. If you’re looking with me at the ESV, you’ll see the word “rescue” is used there. Two different rescues are mentioned. There’s one in verse 17 and there’s one in verse 18. The first rescue, the first deliverance, is mentioned at the end of verse 17. Through the support of Christ at his trial, Paul says that he was enabled, he was strengthened to witness to the Gospel. Even in this ordeal he was able to fully proclaim, he says, the good news. And in this way he was rescued from the lion’s mouth. How can he say he was rescued? I mean, he lost his case after all. There he is, sitting in a prison cell. He’s about to be put to death. He wasn’t rescued from anything, was he? Well according to Paul, he was. In Paul’s mind he was, because to be strengthened by the presence of Christ to preach the Gospel even in the face of fear is a rescue. He was rescued from fear. He was rescued from the devil. The devil did not get his way. The forces of evil did not get their way. Sin did not win out in Paul’s trial, not ultimately. He might not have received the verdict that he wanted to, but he was not silent. He was able to preach boldly. We could say that his mouth was bigger than that so-called lion’s mouth. And this, to Paul, is a deliverance.
Friends, perhaps you’ve felt something like the pressure that Paul has experienced. What comfort is there for us when we feel like we are all alone, when we feel like we are abandoned, when we feel like we are being attacked? What is our help? A strengthening Savior at your side. There is a demonstration of the character of Christ for us here. This is what Jesus does. This is the kind of Savior that He is. You want to know what Jesus is like? Look at what Paul is saying about Him. He is one who doesn’t leave. When the going gets tough, He doesn’t get going, He gets close. And should we be surprised that this is what Jesus does when He Himself said, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
And it’s not just that. It’s not just that Jesus is with us to sympathize with us and to support us, although He certainly does that, but it’s more than that. It’s that He’s the one who brings us through the trials that we’re in. So He’s not just sympathizing with us in the trial, He supports us by bringing us through the trial. He brings us through the loneliness, through the abandonment, through the attack. You know, as the armies of Egypt are hard on your tail, Jesus doesn’t say, “Wow, this is hard. This is difficult. Yeah, this is scary stuff. I’m here if you need me.” No, what Jesus does is He parts the Red Sea and He pulls you through to safety on the other side. He is a rescuing, delivering Savior.
And there’s a second kind of deliverance that’s mentioned here. The first rescue is to be brought through a trial, an ordeal. The second rescue is actually to be brought through death itself. We see that in verse 18. Once again it is puzzling. Paul has lost the trial, and yet he says he was delivered. And here, Paul is about to die and yet he says he will be delivered. “The Lord will rescue me from every evil deed and bring me safely into His heavenly kingdom.” How can he say this? He’s about to die. How can he say this? He says it because he knows, and you need to know this as well tonight, that the real death he needs saving from isn’t the kind of death that can come from an executioner. The real death that Paul needs saving from is the death due for sin. That is your greatest problem – sin and the consequences of sin. And Paul is saying, as he is about to close his eyes on this world, “I will be brought through that death, that curse. In fact, I will be brought safely into the kingdom of God. I will be rescued from the wages of sin.”
Paul is ending his epistle the way he began it. Would you look at the very first verse of 2 Timothy? Notice how Paul begins. “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, according to the promise of the life that is in Christ Jesus.” No sin, no Satan can threaten this promise of eternal life. “He will rescue me from every evil deed. No power of hell, no scheme of man could ever pluck me from His hand when I belong to a God who promised me life!” That’s the rescue that Paul is speaking of here. That’s the deliverance. Paul has a delivering Savior who will bring him safely into heaven. Do you? Do you? You see, Paul has this certainty in the face of death that he will actually continue to live. Isn’t that an amazing thing? As he faces certain death there is one other thing he is certain of. He is actually going to live, and that, forever. Do you have that certainty?
What confidence could any of us have that we will not be deserted, that we won’t be abandoned, but rather we will be delivered in that moment of death? Friends, our confidence is in the fact that our Savior Jesus Christ, our substitute, could not say what Paul says in this passage because Jesus, in His moment of trial, in His great ordeal, was not only deserted by His friends but also deserted by His God. “My God, My God, why have You deserted Me? Why have You forsaken Me? Why are You not here right now when I need You?” Why? For you and for me. Friends, Jesus Christ was abandoned at the cross so that we would never be abandoned in our moment of death. God’s promise to you as He deserts His Son on the cross is to be closer to you in death than you could ever imagine. And as He steps away from His Son, He is actually stepping near you. In fact, He is stepping closer to you in Christ, the very one He abandoned. It’s as though He sends His Son to you and Jesus is saying, “I know what it’s like to go through it alone. I know what it’s like to be abandoned at the end. I know what it’s like to be deserted in death and I don’t want anyone to ever have to go through that. So I’m here, with you, all the way to the end and through the end.” Jesus never leaves His own. A delivering Savior.
And what kind of response does this deliverance from death deserve? Well it deserves doxology, doesn’t it? That’s our final consideration this evening. The final theme. These verses. This is what Paul does as he recounts how his friends have deserted him, he thinks how Jesus has delivered him, and so then he praises God and lifts up his voice in doxology, in verse 18, “To Him be the glory forever and ever amen.” Soli Deo Gloria, Paul proclaims. Alone. Abandoned. And yet, even though he shivers in the cold, dark prison cell, as one who goes to death falsely accused, Paul says, “Glory be to God.” Actually he doesn’t say that, he says, “Glory be to God forever. Glory be to God forever and ever. Amen.” Period. Full stop. What a testimony we have here. What a powerful statement. And yet it’s the only one that makes sense. A delivering Savior deserves a doxology, even in death, especially in death.
Now, since I am a reformed, presbyterian minister living in the 21st century, I have a lot of what we could call reformed swag. I have a pint glass that has Westminster Confession Question and Answer 1 on it! I have the newly released Banner of Truth bowtie to go with my Banner of Truth necktie! I have a John Owen mug, a Spurgeon tumbler, and especially RTS socks! I also have shirts that have the five solas on them. In fact, I have several! It’s just a cool thing to do, okay? But here’s the challenge for me and here’s the challenge for all of us. We cannot expect to wave Soli Deo Gloria as our slogan, as our banner, as our rallying cry, or put it on our bumpers or to put it on our shirts or to post it on our Facebooks if we are not ready to have it on our dying lips. The way you glorify God in life is by glorifying Him in your death.
And then you may rightly ask, “How do I do that? How do I glorify God in death? Do I need to have a rousing deathbed speech? Do my final words need to testify to the glories of the Gospel or some profound statement that expresses my trust in God and my courage in the face of this terrifying moment? We have plenty of such statements from our forefathers in the faith, moving stories about their final words. The second generation reformer, Samuel Rutherford, was honed in on glory. His last words, “Glory, glory dwellest in Emmanuel’s land.” Or the Scot, Robert Bruce, on his deathbed, his family read to him Romans chapter 8 and he responded, “Children, God be with you. I breakfasted with you this morning. I sup with our Lord this evening. I die believing these words.” Or there’s John Owen, who days before his death received word that his massive tome, “The Glory of Christ,” was finally going to the printer. This is what he said, “I am glad to hear it, but oh, the long wished for day has come at last in which I shall see that glory in another manner than I ever have done or is capable of doing in this world.” Moving testimonies.
Is that what it means to glorify God in death? These men certainly glorified God in their death. Is that what you need? Do you need to have a speech like this, some remark like this? Well what about my grandfather, Don Wybel? One of the strongest Christians I ever knew who died at the age of 91 just a few years ago. He was a faithful husband for over sixty years. He raised four children in the fear of the Lord. He sacrificed for a daughter with special needs. He was a committed prayer warrior. He was a leader in his church. He was an evangelist. He would evangelize his friends and his coworkers and his relatives. He had a remarkable capacity for memorizing Scripture. Even weeks before his death, he was reciting from memory a great number of the psalms and he did it so clearly that his neighbor across the hall in the nursing home thought he was reading them. What about Pappy? When he passed away, all of his children and grandchildren were able to be with him in that moment, some of us through Zoom, and there was this moment where we asked, “Is there anything we can do for you, Pappy? Is there anything that you need?” And his answer ended up being his final words. “Is there anything you need?” “Ice cream.” It was the most heartwarming and heartbreaking moment. He loved ice cream. And he died a few hours later. But he glorified God in death just as much as a Rutherford, a Bruce or an Owen. Why? Because he died in Christ.
This is how we die well. We die trusting in Jesus. This is how we glorify God in death. At that moment when it matters most, we give everything over to our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. God is most glorified in us when He snatches victory from the jaws of defeat, when He makes inert Satan’s most powerful weapon – “Death, where is thy victory? Grave, where is thy sting?” For the Christian, when we die, Satan loses, God wins, God is glorified! Our catechism teaches us that “the souls of believers are, at their death, made perfect in holiness and immediately pass into glory.” God is glorified in that moment. Might we be afraid? Sure. Might we not have the most eloquent way of expressing our faith? Sure. Might we be thinking about ice cream? Sure. But if we enter the next world holding the hand of Jesus Christ and trusting Him even with our uncertainties and our fears, we are making big the name of God.
And this one thing that brings God glory is also the one thing that brings us the greatest comfort, isn’t it? Because when death comes, all your money is going to be meaningless. That’s not going to do you any good. All your charity and your church attendance will be a cold comfort. The one thing that will bring you security is the same thing that brings God glory – clinging to Christ. And I imagine that we will discover, like Paul, that it is at our dying moments that we become smallest and yet God becomes biggest. Because all pretense is stripped away. There’s no more opportunity for me to try to prove myself or to earn anything. I’m completely helpless and I must do at long last the thing I’ve needed to do all along – rest in Jesus Christ. And oh to face that final foe with the confidence that we have been given the surest victory through Christ and to know at that moment that after a life of sinning against God, of disappointing God, of rebelling against God, to know at that moment that He still wants me to live with Him forever, how could I do anything but glorify Him in that moment? When we think about what the Lord has prepared for us, that eternal weight of glory, it will truly, friends, make the sufferings that we have faced fade to nothing.
Well that was the case for Guido De Bres, a lesser known reformer. I mentioned there were two stories that I think of when I read this passage. Guido De Bres was born five years after Luther nailed his 95 theses and he became a protestant pastor and theologian in the Netherlands where the protestant faith was strictly forbidden by Philip II, the king of Spain. De Bres’ greatest contribution to the church was a document known as “The Belgic Confession,” and many churches still use it as their confession of faith today, much like we use The Westminster Confession of Faith. And his life came to a very similar end as that of the apostle. When he was arrested, he spent his final days in a dark prison cell. It was called “the black hole.” Because of the fate that he professed, he was sentenced to die. And in a farewell letter to his wife, this is what he writes about the condition of his imprisonment. “I am held in a very strong prison, very bleak, obscure and dark. The air is poor and it stinks. On my feet and hands I have irons big and heavy. They are a continual hell, hollowing my limbs up to my poor bones.” But then listen to this, the very next line. “But for all of that, my God does not take away His promises, consoling my heart, giving me very much contentment. Our Lord permits me on the one hand to feel my weakness and my smallness, that I am but a small vessel on the earth, very fragile, to the end that He would humble me so that all the glory of the victory may go to Him.” Soli Deo Gloria, right? He says, “I am happy, my heart is light, and it lacks nothing in my afflictions. For I have found by experience that God will never leave those who have trusted in Him. I would never have thought God would have been so kind to such a poor creature as I. I feel the faithfulness of my Lord Jesus Christ.”
You note the similarities. Both Paul and De Bres have this calm, this serenity. They’re even able to rejoice because they know God has not abandoned them, has not deserted them in death. De Bres says he feels the faithfulness of Jesus. That’s what Paul says. “Even the Lord stood by me. I feel His faithfulness.” And he gives God the glory for – what does he call it? “A victory.” There he is about to be killed – he’s killed twelve days after this. He’s about to be killed and he says, “I have been given victory.” Christian, for you that’s exactly what death is. That’s exactly what death is. It’s not a victory we win; it’s a victory God wins for us. Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. He gives us the victory so that we will give Him the glory.
So let us do that, not only in our life, but even in our dying day. Let’s pray.
Our Father, we thank You for Your Word to us. We thank You that You never, never abandon those who have put their trust in You. We thank You that You are so kind to poor creatures like us. And so help us to feel the faithfulness of our Savior Jesus Christ. And help us to take every darkness, every desertion, every difficulty that we face in life and to see the deliverance that Christ has won and is winning and will win for us, and may we give Him all doxology, all praise, for He alone is worthy. We ask this in His name, amen.