For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine. — Timothy must bear in mind that things in the Church of Christ on earth will not change for the better. The great drag-net of the Church, in its wide sweep, would keep drawing into its meshes something of every kind. Errors now just apparent, he must remember, would attain more formidable dimensions. The thirst for novelties in doctrine, the desire for a teaching which, while offering peace to a troubled conscience, would yet allow the old self-indulgent life to go on as before, would increase. In full view of this development of error, in sure expectation of a future full of anxious care, Timothy and his brother teachers must indeed be wakeful, watchful, and earnest in their preaching and ministrations. And the thought that more and ever more of the so-called Christians would dislike the preaching of the “sound doctrine,” as taught by the Apostle, the very knowledge of this growing unpopularity, must serve as an incentive to greater labour, more interest, and more loving activity on the part of Timothy and his companions.
But after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers. — “Their own lusts:” this expression gives us some insight into the reason which led to this future apostasy of so many, concerning which St. Paul warned Timothy. “Their own lusts,” which, at all risks, they would gratify, would serve to alienate them from that severe and strictly moral school of Apostolic teaching, in which the sternest morality was bound up with purity of doctrine, to which school St. Paul’s pupils — men like Timothy and the presbyters of Ephesus — belonged. These worldly ones to whom St. Paul referred, reluctant to part with the hope Christianity taught, and unwilling to live the life which St. Paul and Timothy insisted upon as necessary to be lived by all those who would share in that glorious hope, sought out for themselves more indulgent teachers, who would flatter and gratify their hearers with novelties in doctrine, and would, at the same time, lay comparatively little stress on the pure and saintly life.