2 Timothy 3:1-9
A Form of Godliness
1But understand this: In the last days terrible times will come.
2For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy,
3unloving, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, without love of good,
4traitorous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God,
5having a form of godliness but denying its power. Turn away from such as these!
6They are the kind who worm their way into households and captivate vulnerable women who are weighed down with sins and led astray by various passions,
7who are always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.
8Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these men oppose the truth. They are depraved in mind and disqualified from the faith.
9But they will not advance much further. For just like Jannes and Jambres, their folly will be plain to everyone.
Berean Standard Bible
Paul warns Timothy about the last days, and the warning arrives as a list of what people will be like. It runs for three verses without stopping for breath, and it is meant to be tiring to hear. What surprises most people is how ordinary the items are. Boastful, ungrateful, unforgiving, without self-control: nobody is arrested for any of those, and every one of them can be practiced at a kitchen table for years without a neighbor ever noticing.
The list opens with men who love themselves and ends with men who love pleasure more than they love God, so the whole run of it sits between two loves pointed the wrong way. The list is framed by two disordered loves, and the conduct between them, the abuse and the slander and the treachery, grows out of the wanting.
lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power.
The last item turns the warning around. A form of godliness is the look of the thing without the thing itself: the vocabulary, the attendance, the willingness to be counted. Paul is not pointing out of the window at the pagans in the street. He is describing religious people, and the instruction attached is to turn away rather than to go and win an argument.
Then he says how they work, and he is oddly specific about it. They do not hold public debates. They get into households, and once they are inside, verse 6 says they captivate vulnerable women who are already weighed down with sins and led astray by various passions.
who are always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth
The people he describes there are not idle. They have been busy. Being kept in motion is not the same as being taken somewhere, and study that never lands leaves a person no closer to the truth than when they began.
Two names come next, Jannes and Jambres, dropped in with no introduction, as men who opposed Moses. Exodus tells the story of the Egyptian magicians and does not give their names. Paul assumes Timothy already knows who he means, and puts the men troubling the church now in the same job.
But they will not advance much further.
The magicians kept pace with Moses for a while, and then they could not. Paul gives the counterfeit a range. It travels a certain distance under its own power, and after that its folly is plain to everybody, and Timothy is not asked to be the one who brings that day forward.
How We Know
Paul names two men that the account he is pointing at does not name.
Exodus 7:11 has Pharaoh summoning the wise men and sorcerers, and the magicians of Egypt doing the same thing by their secret arts. Exodus 7:22 repeats it. The chapter gives no names for them.
2 Timothy 3:8 calls them Jannes and Jambres, and does it without explanation, as though Timothy already knows the reference.
So Paul is drawing on something his first readers shared and Exodus does not supply. A Jewish text outside the Bible carries part of the same tradition: the Damascus Document names Jannes and calls the other man his brother, without giving the second name.
That is as far as the evidence goes, and this note will not go further. It tells us what Paul assumed his reader already knew. It does not tell us where the second name came from.
- Damascus Document (CD) 5:18-19, among the Dead Sea Scrolls, public translation at sefaria.org. Exodus 7:11 and 7:22 name neither magician.
Questions
1 Think of a time somebody talked you into something you later regretted. Were you at your strongest that week, or somewhere near your weakest?
AnswerMost of us were tired, or lonely, or wanting an answer badly enough to take a poor one. Paul says these men worm their way into households and captivate vulnerable women already weighed down with sins and led astray by various passions. He does not say they planned it that way.
2 Much of Paul's list would never reach a courtroom. What kind of list does that make it?
AnswerA list framed by two loves. It opens with men who love themselves and closes with men who love pleasure more than God, and what sits between grows out of that. It opens with men who love themselves and closes with men who love pleasure more than God. Boastful, ungrateful, unforgiving, without self-control: those happen at a kitchen table, not in a courtroom.
3 What does a form of godliness with the power denied look like from the outside?
AnswerLike the real thing. The words, the attendance, the willingness to be counted, with nothing behind any of it. Paul is describing people inside the church rather than people outside it, which is what makes them hard to spot.
4 Paul says these men will not advance much further. What does he mean, and what does he not ask Timothy to do?
AnswerThe counterfeit has a range. Like the magicians who kept pace with Moses for a while and then could not, it goes a certain distance and then its folly becomes plain to everyone. Timothy is told to turn away from them. He is not told to go and expose them.
What This Means for Us
They will not advance much further. Paul says so in verse 9, and it is the only reassurance in a passage that is otherwise unrelieved. The counterfeit has a range, their folly will become plain, and none of that depends on Timothy exposing them.
That matters, because the instruction attached to these men is to turn away from them rather than to go and win. Paul is not asking a young pastor to police his own congregation. He is telling him what is true about the counterfeit and then telling him where to stand.
So the question for this house is who has real access to us on a bad week, and it can be asked without any panic in it. What comes with them either has power in it or does not, and the passage says the second kind does not last.
Prayer
Father, we can learn about you endlessly and never arrive, and we can keep up the appearance of a faith we are not actually living. Save us from the form without the power. Guard this home, and give us discernment about who we let near it. Amen.