The Foremost of Sinners
12 I thank him who enabled me, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he counted me faithful, appointing me to service, 13 although I used to be a blasphemer, a persecutor, and insolent. However, I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbelief. 14 The grace of our Lord abounded exceedingly with faith and love which is in Christ Jesus. 15 The saying is faithful and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief. 16 However, for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first, Jesus Christ might display all his patience for an example of those who were going to believe in him for eternal life. 17 Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, to God who alone is wise, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.
The writer interrupts his own instructions to state his case, and the tense he uses of himself is the present.
The list of offenders in the previous verses is followed immediately by the writer putting himself among them, and the paragraph reads as something that broke in rather than something planned.
Verse 13 names three things he was: a blasphemer, a persecutor, and insolent — the last a word for aggression that enjoys itself. He offers one mitigation and is careful about how much it carries: he acted ignorantly, in unbelief. It explains the mercy; it does not excuse the acts.
Verse 15 introduces the first of this letter's three faithful sayings, a formula found only in these three letters 1 Timothy 3:1 1 Timothy 4:9 2 Timothy 2:11 Titus 3:8. It marks a sentence already known and already accepted: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.
Then the clause that gives the block its title, and the tense is the point. Not of whom I was chief, but of whom I am. He is describing himself at the moment of writing, decades after his conversion and in a letter full of instructions to others. Nothing in the passage treats that as false modesty.
Verse 16 turns it into an argument: he obtained mercy as an example, so that anyone afterward may see the range. Verse 17 answers with the letter's first doxology, and its terms — eternal, immortal, invisible — anticipate the description at the letter's close 1 Timothy 6:16.
settled What this mark means