The study text for this “Introduction” is available at the highlighted link on the upper level page or also here:
1 Timothy 4:1-10
This text is contained on pages 2-8 in the referenced pdf.
In this abbreviated commentary, let us begin at pages 6 and 7 with the shown highlighted texts, namely:
- “on the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness,” or more literally, “but discipline yourself for godliness.” (vs. 7)
- “godliness is profitable for all things,” or more literally, “godliness is beneficial for all” (vs. 8), where “all” in Greek is conformed by the context, which here would be “all purposes” and / or “all time / contexts” and / or “all of us under the discipline of seeking godliness”
- “for it is for this we labor and strive, because we have fixed our hope on the living God,” or more literally, “for toward this we labor even strive as hope-fixed on Living God” (vs. 10)
Godliness
“Godliness” is a loaded term in our culture, suggesting some kind of super hero example of Christian perfection. But that is the wrong idea.
Here’s how the Strong’s number reference, can help us. The number shown below the word is “2150.” Because it’s from the Greek NT it needs to be preceded by the letter “G” so as not to be confused with some correspondingly identified word from the Hebrew OT. Using “G2150” we can do an internet search and find wonderful things about the word. To do such as search one can use the terms any of “Strong’s G2150,” “strongs g2150,” or even “g2150” (which may yield some strange hits like a 1957 Chevy carburetor).
Doing any of these searches will yield websites such as Blue Letter Bible, Study Bible, Bible Info, Bible Hub, Bible Tools, etc.. They each contain about the same information though with different formatting and certain different resources. For illustration, we’ll reference the Bible Hub results here. Below are various portions of the resulting page for BibleHub.com:
Strong’s G2150 from Bible Hub
Strong’s Concordance eusebeia: piety
Original Word: εὐσέβεια, ας, ἡ
Part of Speech: Noun, Feminine
Transliteration: eusebeia
Phonetic Spelling: (yoo-seb’-i-ah)
Definition: piety
Usage: piety (towards God), godliness, devotion, godliness.
2150 eusébeia (from 2095 /eú “well” and 4576 /sébomai, “venerate, pay homage”) – properly, someone’s inner response to the things of God which shows itself in godly piety (reverence). 2150 /eusébeia (“godly heart-response”) naturally expresses itself in reverence for God, i.e. what He calls sacred (worthy of veneration).
εὐσέβεια, εὐσεβείας, ἡ (εὐσεβής), reverence, respect; in the Bible everywhere piety toward God, godliness: Acts 3:12; 1 Timothy 2:2; 1 Timothy 4:7, 8; 1 Timothy 6:5f, 11; 2 Timothy 3:5; 2 Peter 1:3, 6f; ἡ κατ’ εὐσέβειαν διδασκαλία, the doctrine that promotes godliness, 1 Timothy 6:3 (see κατά, II. 3 d.); ἡ ἀλήθεια ἡκατ’ εὐσέβειαν, the truth that leads to godliness, Titus 1:1; τό μυστήριον τῆςεὐσεβείας, the mystery which is held by godliness and nourishes it, 1 Timothy 3:16; in plural, aims and acts of godliness, 2 Peter 3:11; cf. Pfieiderer, Paulinism., p. 477f (English translation, ii. 209f). (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Xenophon, Plato, and following; often in Josephus; the Sept. Proverbs 1:7; Proverbs 13:11; Isaiah 11:2; Wis. 10:12; often in 4 Macc.; πρός τόν Θεόν, Josephus, Antiquities 18, 5, 2; (περίτό θεῖον) contra Apion 1, 22, 2; εἰς Θεούς καί γονεας, Plato, rep. 10, p. 615 c.) (Cf. Schmidt, chapter 181.)
…Returning now to the pdf, to p. 8, I have given a short definition of “godliness:” “To revere, worship, be devout, feel awe.” In the past the word “piety” would have been used in an English translation. The idea behind “godliness” is humility, “Fear of the Lord” (a recurring Biblical expression), thankfulness, praise for God’s Goodness, Grace, Mercy, etc.. What’s crucial to realize right here at the outset is this life pursuit is not about us becoming something fantastic, notable in the eyes of men or of God Himself. It is about the pursuit of grasping and honoring God’s wonder as fully and completely as we are capable of doing so stuck for the time being here in time and within our own fallen natures, which never leave us. So, “godliness” is about our orientation toward what we treasure, deem significant / worthy. It should reflect back onto us in some way, as said Spurgeon: “Turning of the mind upward is half the battle. We cannot expect it to reflect that toward which it does not turn.”
On The Living God
In vs. 10, we see the reference to “it” and “this” as continuing on the subject of the pursuit of “godliness” (which was also present in vs. 8). But we have the important contextual phrase: “on the Living God.”
It is easy to pass this by, but it would lead to a huge mis-reading of the entire passage. There are two things about this important phrase: the word “Living” and the form of the phrase being in the dative case.
Living?
The Bible has many words and phrases that describe God: holy, loving, just, etc. The list is long because God is many things as we humans can best grasp such infinities and eternalities using one-by-one terms. Here we have the word “living” which is not one we usually think about with respect to God because, of course, He Exists, He is not “dead” (though, famously, some, and today an increasing number, overtly say so, contending that there was no ‘there’ there [god] and it has required modern man with his scientific wonders and ‘genius’ to achieve such realization).
Yet, even among many who do claim the reality of God’s Existence there is a serious error, namely Deism. Briefly, Deism is the claim that God was a one-time Creator / Initiator, something like the source of the energy that began The Big Bang some 13.8 billion years in a form of the most massive cue ball / pool table ‘shot’ imaginable and has been watching what ‘the hell’ has happened since, which includes all manner disasters with a little sprinkling of ‘good’ here and there. However, in such framework, God is “There” but He ain’t “Here:” He is a kind of isolated Being just watching, probably in great helpless sorrow, as this mess of a world just keeps spinning along, in a sorrowfully evil way that He never would have chosen. Deism gets ‘off the hook’ for the presence of evil and suffering, and it permits science and self-sovereignty to become predominant.
But, Deism is false. It does not reflect the Bible’s revelation of God Who (in the words of the late Francis Schaeffer) “Is There” (meaning in our Space-Time). The word “Living” here in our vs. 10 is a clear refutation of Deism, though the complete discussion of such is beyond our scope here.
The key point is that the discipline context of this passage is under the hand and power of God Himself, Who works all things after the Counsel of His own Will.
The Dative Phrase “Living God”
Meaningful language requires a substantial tool kit. One important category of tools comes under the heading of “cases.” It is helpful now to look at p. 16 of the attached pdf with the heading “Greek Morphology Codes.”
The left-most column shows to important boxes titled “Parts of Speech” and “Cases” as used in the Koine Greek NT. Nouns and verbs are the most important of the parts of speech as they are in English: we need to know who or what is doing or being something for any intelligent communication to occur; the who or what is the noun, the doing or being is the verb. (English, like Koine Greek, is primarily a S-V-O language, meaning we expect sentences to be structured (as the norm) with a Subject then a Verb then an Object, John Hit the Ball.)
A participle is a special case of a verb in that it transforms a word that would otherwise be a ‘regular’ verb so that it can be used to describe a noun or a verb, that is as an adjective or adverb. The CODE below the words “Living God” in vs. 10 reveals that “Living” is a participle, which is also evident from a simple reading of the English translation, namely that “Living” is a word derived from a verb, “to live,” but here used with a different ending (-ing) so we know from our high school English classes that it is describing the next word, God.
But, more importantly, both the words Living and God are in the Koine dative case. Looking again at p. 16 of the pdf, we see there are six “Cases” in the Koine Greek. Out interest now is the dative case. On the upper right of this p. 16 is a brief summary of what such case does in communicating meaning. Briefly, there are three main types of datives in the Koine Greek: (1) Indirect Object, (2) Locative, and (3) Instrumental.
The first use of the dative is very familiar in English: John hit the ball to Jane. The ball is the direct object, and Jane is the indirect object. In English we just recognize Jane here as the indirect object by the overall structure of the sentence and the preposition to before Jane. In Koine Greek the same kind of use of datives occurs: Paul writes a letter to Timothy; the letter is the direct object and Timothy in the dative case is the indirect object.
What is significant about dative cases in Koine Greek is the other two uses, locative and instrumental. Locative datives are pretty simple. They tell us about the location or the time or both. Paul was teaching in Antioch; Antioch would be in the dative case, calling our attention to the idea of Paul’s location.
The instrumental dative is the most interesting, and significant. It’s use calls our intention to the cause, or agency (i.e., instrument), or perhaps the sphere of influence / control by which something is subject. As noted on p. 16, the most interesting, and rarely considered verse of 1 John 5:19 gives us a powerful example of an instrumental dative:
We know that we are children of God and that the whole world [literally: the kosmos] is [literally] in The Evil [One].
1 John 5:19, my own translation, where the phrase “in the Evil” is in the dative case, and is an important example of an instrumental dative.
What is the significance of the above dative phrase in the Evil [One]? The Bible is telling us either that it’s the location of the kosmos (the world system) or, more likely, that the kosmos is under the agency / control of the Enemy himself, however it may or may not appear to be to our human perceptions.
Returning now to our vs. 12, we are being told that God is not only Living but is the agency / control / instrument on which our hope is fixed. In the Bible hope is not some unfounded expectation, some strong wish or aspiration or imagined possibility. Hope is founded on an objective reality, here The Living God.
More on the Dative Case
The dative case is so important that it is worth giving this more thought, and clarity. Think of the following question and answer. You ask a married couple: “How did you meet?” They answer: “In high school.” In English, and Koine Greek, their answer would be a dative phrase.
Thinking now of the three Koine datives, what might their answer have meant? One meaning could simply be the trivial use of the dative as an indirect object: their meeting was the direct object, and it happened to happen somewhere and sometime but neither of which was any significance.
Another possibility is that such dative is a locative example, meaning the answer is stressing about either the timing (that they were in their early or mid-teens in age) or location (a particular building in a particular town, if the context makes such reference clear) or both.
A third possibility, and this is usually the more interesting and relevant, is that this is an instrumental dative, namely that this couple was brought together in some way through the agency / structure / instrument of high school. This would call on us to think about the randomness of being assigned to nearby seats in classes, the same home room, of by choosing the same electives, joining the same after school activity, and so forth. A locative dative conveys the idea that they didn’t just ‘meet,’ they were brought together by an agency / instrument / sphere, namely high school. We have all had that experience where high school was the agency by which we made lifelong friends, and even marriage partners, because we were brought together through some structure to which we were submitted at the time.
We can think of many other instrument / agency examples. “I couldn’t come to your wedding because I was in the hospital.” The significance of in the hospital is not the location or time, but that I was under its control, imprisoned as it were. Or we could have the dative phrase example be in prison (!) or in the army or in lockdown studying for final exams, etc.
Another way to think of dative cases is how we have conversations with new people we meet. We tend to ask three categories of questions: (1) your name and family origin, (2) where you are from, and tactfully what era are you from, and (3) what do you do for a job / career and other interests.
The first category of questions are essentially examples of indirect object datives. We know the other person exists in a line of being that we call family: they had parents, grandparents, great grandparents and so forth going back in time. So in a sense they exist as a kind of ‘indirect object’ of procreation. Asking them this family history question helps us see where they fit in terms of their family line.
The second category of questions helps us pin down where they came from and when they were wherever they were. So if someone says they were born in Atlanta, we might ask if they went to high school there, and then follow up with some other questions that might pin down the years they were in high school as a polite way of finding out their age, and era of life.
But finally, and usually of most relevance and interest, we try to learn about what they’re up to. What do they do, exactly? What skills have they developed, what are their jobs? What do they do outside of their jobs that reflect their other passions of life? These kind of deeper questions get to the core of a person as they ask what instrumentalities are they part of (company or organization they work with or for) and in what aspects are they themselves a causal instrument (what are they up to doing).
Think of making an application to attend a particular college, or creating a resume or other document to support a job search. We necessarily have to address each of these kinds of datives: who are we (our context), something about our locative history and current situation (where did I come from, in space and time, and where am I right now), and most importantly what have I done and what can I do and care about (my personal instrumental dative).
In all the Bible texts in the attached pdf I have highlighted by magenta colored boxes the dative case phrases or words. (You can check this our for yourself by examine the CODES below each word; look for the designation letter “D” in the CODE) following the recipe on p. 16. I would encourage you for each one of the dative examples in all the Bible texts to consider these three possible kinds of datives, and in particular whether such dative is an instrumental example, as is clearly the case with The Living God of vs. 10. (In the Koine, for reasons outside the scope of this discussion, sometimes the dative phrase begins with a preposition, and sometimes not).
Titus 2:11-14
MORE TO COME
Colossians 2:6-10
MORE TO COME