(Deuteronomy 13:1-5; 1 Timothy 4:1-6)

One of the enduring myths of modern times is the idea that lemmings have a suicidal streak. Apparently, we have Disney to thank for this, at least in part. During the shooting of their 1958 nature film White Wilderness, the crew purchased a few dozen lemmings, shot footage of them from a number of different angles to make them look like a large herd, then drove them off a cliff in order to show them “hurling themselves into the sea.” It apparently convinced a lot of people—after all, would Disney lie to you?—but it just isn’t so; the real reason for mass lemming extinctions is quite different. You see, in the absence of sufficient predators to keep their numbers in check, lemmings tend to breed out of control and literally eat themselves out of house and home; when there’s no more food, they pack up and move, migrating en masse, looking for a new place with enough to eat. The problem is that lemmings don’t see very far, so if they come to a cliff, or a lake, or the ocean, then yes, they keep right on going and end up dead; but their deaths are accidental, not the result of some long-tailed death wish.

The upside of this myth, at least for lemmings, is that at least we’ve heard of them. If I asked you to name another animal that lives on the Arctic tundra, how many of you could? Granted, it’s not that lemmings themselves are all that interesting, it’s their symbolic value; but the symbol is powerful enough that it doesn’t much matter that the actual animal is really rather nondescript. When we hear “lemming” we don’t think “tundra rat,” we think of someone who’s easily led, who follows the crowd wherever they go; we have an image of an individual who lacks the foresight to see trouble coming, or the insight to ask where their leader is going. We think, in other words, of the kind of person who would blindly follow someone right over the edge of a cliff and not even think twice until they were halfway to the bottom.

Now, there are those who will tell you that lemmings are in the majority, that most people are mindless followers; they might even be right, though I’ve noticed that people who say that tend to be pretty arrogant about their own independence. In the last analysis, though, I think the real lesson to be learned from the lemming is that leadership matters, because the direction in which you go matters. Indeed, that’s even truer for us than it is for lemmings: unlike the rodents, we know there are obstacles out there, we have some idea what they are, and we can plan for them. The downside, obviously, is that our knowledge isn’t perfect—we make mistakes, and though we know problems are out there, we don’t know when we’ll meet them; but though our knowledge isn’t sufficient to guide us, God’s is. He knows perfectly what we need, what’s best for us, and what difficulties and struggles we face, and will face; if we want to get where we need to go, he is the leader we need to follow, and his are the instructions we need to obey.

To that end, God has raised up his church, and raised up leaders for his church, so that we aren’t trying to follow him alone—we travel through life together, with others to catch us and correct us when we wander from the path, and people in our midst who have been given special gifts and a particular responsibility to help us on the way. Together, we have the responsibility and the calling, as we talked about last week, to invite others to join us, to teach them where we’re going, and why, and how we’re getting there together—how to live along the way. We’ve been given a great and wonderful truth—that God became a human being, that he lived and died and rose again on this earth, for us sinners and for our salvation—and we’ve been given a goal and purpose to our life’s journey; we need to live together in such a way that people see that truth, feel that purpose, and are inspired by that goal.

The problem is, it’s a lot easier to wander off the path than it is to stay on it, because there are a lot more wrong directions than right ones. There are folks out there who believe that all professed attempts to seek God are equally valid; there are those who will tell you that it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you’re sincere (and as long as your beliefs don’t lead you to do something they find offensive). Unfortunately, it just isn’t so. If you think driving over to 15 and turning north out of town is going to get you to Indianapolis, I don’t know what to tell you. You may be completely sincere in your belief, but it doesn’t change the fact that something’s wrong with your map. What we believe matters, because it shapes how we live, the choices we make and the turns we take; and so what we’re taught matters, because it shapes what we believe.

That’s why James writes, “Let not many of you seek to be teachers, knowing that we who teach will be judged far more strictly,” because those who teach things that aren’t true don’t just hurt themselves, they hurt all those who listen to them; it’s why God uses such strong words in Deuteronomy against false prophets in Israel; and it’s why Paul speaks so sternly about the false teachers in Ephesus. There are two points in this passage that are particularly worth noting, I think. First, Paul says that those who follow these false teachers have “renounced the faith.” This is why he’s so concerned about this situation, because it’s not just a matter of people having a few things wrong. We’re not just talking, let’s say, the difference between Presbyterians and Baptists. My Baptist colleagues and I have our disagreements, and I might point out that I think they’re mistaken not to baptize infants, but I’d never call them false teachers just because I believe they’re a little off on one thing or another. The lies of Timothy’s opponents in Ephesus, with their skewed understanding of God’s law and their strange little myths and behavior codes, went right to the heart of the gospel; their version of Christianity was far enough off that to believe it was to trade in the true faith for another faith. Their picture of God was so far off the mark that they were no longer really worshiping God at all, but instead another god of their own invention. Their map was too inaccurate to get them where they were trying to go; it could only lead them astray.

This is an important thing for us to understand: it matters when we believe things that aren’t true because they skew our view of reality. We don’t need to understand everything perfectly—which is a good thing because none of us does—but as we keep choosing to believe things which aren’t true, at some point, what we think is so far off the truth that it has major spiritual consequences. At some point, the content of our faith is so warped and twisted by falsehood that it just isn’t true faith anymore, because our understanding of God no longer bears any meaningful resemblance to who he really is. The false teachers in Ephesus had done such damage there that some in the church had reached that point, and passed it, and so Paul says of them that they have renounced the faith. Now, he isn’t surprised by this; in point of fact, as he alludes to here, he predicted this in his farewell sermon, back in Acts 20. The church has a great and glorious mission, but there will always be those who turn their back on it to pursue something else instead; it was no surprise to Paul, and it shouldn’t be to Timothy, either.

The other point to note is just how strongly Paul speaks against the false teachers. In Acts 20, he refers to them as “ravening wolves”; here he calls their teachings demonic and the product of deceitful spirits, and accuses them of hypocrisy and falsehood. “Liars” may not be quite the right translation there—the word only means one who speaks that which is untrue, not necessarily one who does so deliberately; Paul’s emphasis at this point is not so much that they’re intentionally lying to people as that they are agents of the lie, that they are serving lying, demonic spirits. That’s the point of verse 2, which says that their consciences have been seared with a hot iron. We’ve noted that their consciences are so badly burned that they no longer function, but the way in which they’ve been burned is also important: literally, the Greek says that their consciences have been branded, like cows. They have Satan’s brand on their souls, and their consciences now belong to him, not to God; they are no longer servants of the truth, because they have become slaves of the lie. Whether they realize it or not, they are Satan’s agents in the church in Ephesus as he works to bring that congregation down from within.

It’s worth noting here the two examples Paul gives in this passage of their false teaching: they forbade their followers to marry, and they reinstituted some version of the Old Testament food laws. These were both things Paul had dealt with in other churches before, and the whole idea that following God meant refusing to eat certain things was a point of particular annoyance to him; as he told the Colossians, to make that mistake is to trade in Christian freedom for a renewed slavery to this world, which itself is in slavery to sin. Here, he makes the further point that everything created by God is good; as long as we give him thanks for it and use it as he intended, there is no reason for us to reject anything that God has made, because it’s all good. We might need to refrain from some of it for our own sake, as the alcoholic needs to keep away from alcohol, or the diabetic needs to avoid sugar; but that’s about us, not about God.

Now, mark this: the Devil was at work in Ephesus, through these false teachers, to get people in the church to deprive themselves of good things. That might seem like a strange thing to say, when so many people’s idea of Christian living is “thou shalt not do anything fun”—but it’s the truth. Despite what some might think, God is the one who created pleasure, and he’s the one who wants you to live a really good life; Satan, by contrast, might use pleasure to get you hooked, but his ultimate goal is to deprive you of everything worth having. Just look at drug addiction—the real pleasure, the real fun, is all in the beginning; after a while, all that’s left is desperation, craving and need.

That’s the pattern of sin, and the pattern Satan wants to get people into—the minimum pleasure necessary for the maximum slavery; and whatever they might think themselves to be doing, even if they proclaim themselves agents of liberation, that’s ultimately the end that all the false teachers of this world serve. By contrast, and we see it here in Paul, the Christian faith calls us back to see the true goodness of God, and the true goodness of all that he made, through the deception and confusion of all this world’s counterfeit versions. To use Paul’s examples here, he calls us to see the true goodness of marriage through the counterfeits of free love, hooking up, and whatever else this world can spin out there, and to see the true goodness of food through all the ways we misuse that. Our issues with food are rather different from those of Paul’s day, but no less significant for all that. The key here is that this is our Father’s world, which he created good, despite all the ways we misuse and abuse it; when we treat it as anything less than his good creation—whether by rejecting it or by worshiping it—we harm ourselves, we dishonor God, and we distort his truth. But though there are many who would try to trick us into doing so in order to lead us astray—and though we need to learn to recognize them when they show up—we have this assurance: this is indeed God’s world, and however strong evil may sometimes seem, he is still the ruler, and the one in control.

(Jeremiah 10:6-16; 1 Timothy 3:14-16)

A lot of people will tell you that Christianity is all about following a set of rules—the only thing that matters is that you do x and don’t do y. That’s always been a popular view. After all, if Christianity is just about measuring up to particular standards of behavior—whether it’s the “we don’t smoke, we don’t chew, we don’t go with those who do” variety, or the “be nice to everybody” variety, or whatever—then it’s easy to tell who’s a Christian and who isn’t; and perhaps even more importantly, it’s easy to look at yourself and tell how you’re doing. The nice thing about a fence, after all, is that you always know which side of it you’re on. Or perhaps I should say, one nice thing about a fence; the other nice thing is that you know exactly how far you can go before you’ve crossed it. The fence tells you what you can get away with, as much as what you can’t.

I suspect that was part of the appeal to the folks in Ephesus who were following the false teachers there; we know that the false teachers were quite strict in some ways, but it seems likely that they were quite loose in others, such that things like infidelity and drunkenness were becoming problems among the leadership of the congregation. More than that, I suspect it’s a lot of the appeal for people who have followed false teachers like that down through the ages, right up to our present day. As I’ve said before, the longer I do this, the more convinced I become that we really don’t want grace, and we don’t want to live by grace. We may say we do, and we may sing about it, but at some level, we’d rather live by some form of law. After all, if you ask the law, “How many times do I have to forgive somebody before I can give them the punishment they have coming,” the law will tell you, “Three times,” or “seven times,” or whatever; it will give you a standard you have a chance to live up to. If you ask Jesus the same question, he’s going to say, “Seventy times seven”—which is to say, once you lose count, you’re just getting started. Law gives you a limit to what you have to do; grace is like the Energizer bunny—it just keeps going, and going, and going, long after we want to quit.

The fact of the matter is, whatever version of the law we come up with, whatever standard of behavior we set, if it’s our idea and our standard, we’re going to start defining it as something we can meet, something we can live up to in our own strength; we inevitably make it far too small a thing. It sounds all very well to say, for instance, “Christianity isn’t about believing certain things, it’s about living a life of love”; but how do we know what love is? How do we know what it means to live a life of love? The classical Christian answer is to say that we know what love is because God is love, and because he has revealed himself to us in his word—in his living Word who is his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, and in the words of Scripture, which his Spirit inspired to show us the living Word. Our understanding of love is grounded in the truth of Scripture, which shows us the truth of who God is, and thus what love is; we take our definition of love from these pages. If we set this aside, or say that those truths don’t matter, then we’re left to define love for ourselves, according to our own preferences, prejudices, and preconceived ideas; we get to decide for ourselves what’s appropriate and act accordingly, and then pat ourselves on the back for being such good Christians, without ever even asking ourselves what God wants us to do, let alone submitting ourselves to his will.

In the end, that leaves us in the same place as the false teachers who were giving Timothy such fits in Ephesus: elevating our own desires over the demands of the gospel. In this letter, as we’ve seen, Paul shows a fair bit of concern for what we might call “community standards”; some of the women in the church were offending the community with their dress, some of the leaders of the church were scandalizing the community with their behavior, so Paul tells them that what they’re doing is inappropriate. Why? Because the church needs to conform to the standards of the community? No, but because what they’re doing is hindering the preaching of the good news of Jesus Christ. If people are scandalized by the gospel itself, if they’re offended by the call to holiness—as many were then, and are now, and will be in every age until Jesus returns—that’s one thing; but if anything else gets in the way of the preaching of the gospel, then we need to set it aside, no matter what it might be.

We saw this in chapter 2, but Paul makes it explicit here. As he writes, he hopes to come to Ephesus soon to make these points to the church in person, but in case he can’t, he’s sending this letter—why? Because people in the church have forgotten what sort of behavior and what sort of lifestyle are appropriate for a member of the household of God. Any parent expects certain things out of their kids, and God is no different with us, but people in Ephesus have lost sight of this fact. As a consequence, their behavior is casting God’s name into disrepute. The church in Ephesus, like every congregation everywhere, is called to be a pillar and a bulwark of the truth, and they’re falling down on the job, betraying that truth by their behavior. Paul wants them to understand that they have a responsibility to fulfill, and they’d better start taking it seriously.

As every congregation needs to do, including us. We are part of God’s temple on earth—God makes his home on earth in us by his Spirit who lives in us—and that gives us a profound responsibility indeed. The mission of the church is to be a pillar to uphold the truth, and a bulwark to protect and defend it—to speak the truth to a world that too often doesn’t want to hear it, to proclaim and uphold the truth by our words and by our actions, to defend it against those who would rather attack it (and us) than listen. If at any time our behavior undermines or weakens the church, then we are threatening that mission, and we must stop. That’s why Paul rebukes men in the church for their anger and disputes, which were wrecking their prayers and disrupting their worship; that’s why he calls women in the church to restrain their use of their Christian freedom, since their behavior, too, was becoming disruptive. That’s why he rules out leaders who lacked the maturity to lead, because such leaders were drawing the church away from its mission and damaging its reputation in the community, undercutting its credibility in proclaiming the truth. Everything else had to be, and must be, secondary to the mission.

And if that mission was, and is, to uphold and defend the truth, then what truth is that? Some of us would probably start giving a list of details, but Paul goes right to the heart of the matter. “The mystery of godliness is great,” he says—which doesn’t, by the way, mean that it’s very mysterious; indeed, this is a mystery, something hidden from human sight, which has now been revealed. What has been revealed is very great—it’s something no human mind could ever have conceived, or would ever have predicted. That mystery is Jesus Christ—God revealed in human flesh, and the plan of God revealed in human history; and that truth is the truth we uphold and defend, that God was born as a human child. As the British poet John Betjeman put it, “And is it true,/This most tremendous tale of all,/Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,/A Baby in an ox’s stall?/The Maker of the stars and sea/Become a Child on earth for me? . . . No love that in a family dwells,/No carolling in frosty air,/Nor all the steeple-shaking bells/Can with this single Truth compare—/That God was man in Palestine/And lives today in Bread and Wine.”

That is the truth of which the church is a pillar and a bulwark—it is the truth which has been entrusted to us to proclaim to the nations, to preach in season and out of season, in every word we speak and every step we take; not that Jesus was a good man, or a kind man, or a great teacher, or a loving person, but that he was God in the flesh come into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. It is the truth that when we look at him we see God, and that in him we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. And it is indeed a truth with which nothing else can compare, and one which is well worth giving our lives for; there is simply nothing we can do which is more important than to let people know that God became a human being, with human skin, human bone, a human mind and a human heart, for them, because he loves them, and to help them grow into a full understanding of what that means for them and their lives.

We’ve heard this so often that familiarity dulls the message, but stop and think about it and you’ll realize what a staggering thing it is: the God of all worlds and all ages, the God who created everything that is and who holds the universe in the palm of his hand, the God who holds all that was, and is, and is to come as a thought in his mind and who keeps it all going by his will, humbled himself to step down into the small space of one human body, living one messy human life, suffering one very messy human death—for us; and then he turned that defeat into the ultimate victory by rising from the dead, in his own power—for us. And then he ascended into heaven—for us—and did he send his angels to trumpet the news across the sky, so that everyone would believe? Did he write a message in the stars and blind the world with his glory? Did the voice that spoke the world into being announce his victory with a deafening thunder that would drive people to their knees? No; he rose from the dead, he returned to heaven, and he left that job—for us. In his great plan for this world, he left us to carry out that part, so that this wouldn’t all just be something God did to us—so that we would have something we could do; and while nothing prevents him from working directly, he lets us do it most of the time, leaving us with the responsibility to tell the world what he has done.

This is our job to do—not in our own strength, to be sure, for he enables and empowers us by his Spirit; but in our own lives, and by our own words and actions, to tell the world that God loved them in this way, and this much, that he sent his only Son into this world, so that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but shall have eternal life. This is our job to do, and our song of praise to sing—with our words, with our voices, with our whole lives—for all the world to hear; it is ours, in the fullness of our hearts, to sing our great Redeemer’s praise, and to sing through all the earth the honors of his name. May our hearts be so full of praise that as we sing, we can only wish that we had a thousand tongues, a thousand voices, to sing his praise that much more.