Useful, and What Is Not

Titus 3:3-7 has just described being saved by mercy rather than by anything we managed to do. Verse 8 tells Titus what to do with that, and it is not what people expect somebody to do with a message about mercy.

This saying is trustworthy. And I want you to emphasize these things, so that those who have believed God will take care to devote themselves to good deeds.

The things Titus is told to emphasize are the mercy and the washing and the Spirit poured out and the inheritance, all of it from Titus 3:3-7. The result Paul expects from emphasizing mercy is not a relaxed church. He expects people who take care to devote themselves to good deeds, and both of those phrases have effort inside them. Grace preached hard produces work, and Paul saw no tension there at all.

Then he sets two words against each other, and everything after this turns on them. The things he has just described are excellent and profitable for the people. The things he lists next are pointless and worthless.

But avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, arguments, and quarrels about the law, because these things are pointless and worthless.

The test verse 9 applies is usefulness. It calls these disputes foolish, pointless and worthless, which is a judgment about what they produce rather than about whether anybody in them is correct, and a person can be right about something and still be wasting everybody's evening with it.

Four kinds of trouble get named: foolish controversies, genealogies, arguments, and quarrels about the law. Verse 8 has just said what is excellent and profitable, which is people devoting themselves to good deeds, and verse 9 sets these four against that as pointless and worthless.

The last instruction sounds severe until you count what is in it. A divisive man is to be rejected after a first and a second admonition, and Paul says the reason is that such a man is corrupt and sinful and self-condemned. So he gets warned, and then he gets warned again, and only then. This is not a man who disagrees about something. It is a man whose habit is the dividing itself, and the word self-condemned puts the verdict where it belongs, because nobody has to build a case against him. His own conduct has already done it.

Hold the two halves of this passage side by side and the letter has made its argument. The teaching that produces good deeds is what to emphasize. The talk that produces only more talk is what to avoid, however clever it happens to be.