Empty Talk and What It Costs

Paul has just described the kind of man he wants leading. Now he says what that man is for, and it turns out there is a live problem on the island. Many are rebellious, he says, and full of empty talk and deception, and he singles out those of the circumcision in particular.

Paul stacks the words up. Rebellious, empty talk, deception. Empty is the one that is easy to read past, and it says something the others do not: deception says the teaching is false, and empty says there is nothing inside it worth arguing with. Then verse 11 says what it costs. Whole households are being undermined, one family at a time, and it is being done for dishonorable gain. Somebody is making money out of taking homes apart.

Then Paul quotes a line the Cretans would have recognized as their own. He attributes it to a man he calls one of their own prophets, which matters, because it means the charge is coming from inside the island rather than from a visiting apostle.

As one of their own prophets has said, "Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons."

That is a hard sentence to read at a table. The verse itself says whose line it is, which is one of their own prophets, so the charge is quoted from inside the island rather than thrown at it from outside. What he does next is stranger than the quotation itself. He says the testimony is true, and then tells Titus to rebuke them sternly, and then gives the reason for the rebuke, which is that they will be sound in the faith and will stop paying attention to myths and to the commands of men who have turned away from the truth.

The purpose sits right there in the verse, and somebody who wanted these people humiliated would have stopped one clause earlier. Paul wants them healthy. A stern rebuke aimed at making a person sound is a different thing from a stern rebuke aimed at putting them down, even when the words are the same.

To the pure, all things are pure; but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure.

The teachers causing the trouble were busy sorting the world into clean and unclean. Paul tells Titus that the sorting says more about the sorter than about the things being sorted. A person can look at good bread, good work and a good marriage and find something wrong with all three, and the trouble in that case is not in the bread.

The last verse is the one that stays with you. They profess to know God, Paul writes, but by their actions they deny him. Profess and deny, in one sentence, about the same people. Their mouths say one thing and their lives say another, and Paul treats the life as the honest answer. That is this whole letter in miniature. What a person believes shows up in how a household runs, or it was never believed.