Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Timothy · About this commentary
Fight the Good Fight
1 Timothy 6:11-16
11 But you, man of God, flee these things, and follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance, and gentleness. · WEB
The charge to Timothy ends in a description of God, and one clause of it settles where immortality belongs.
Verse 11 turns with an emphatic but you, setting Timothy against the men just described, and gives two verbs in opposite directions: flee these things, pursue those. Six qualities follow, and the last two — perseverance and gentleness — are the ones a man handling a congregational quarrel will need most.
Verse 12 supplies the athletic image the letter used earlier 1 Timothy 4:7 and adds a second imperative: take hold of the eternal life to which you were called. The life is given and is also to be grasped, and the letter sees no tension.
Verse 13 raises the solemnity again, invoking God who gives life to all things and Christ Jesus who testified before Pontius Pilate — a specific, dateable moment offered as the model of a good confession.
Then verses 15 and 16, a doxology that turns out to be the most consequential passage in the letter for what it says about human nature.
God alone has immortality. The word occurs three times in Scripture, and the other two settle its force: the mortal puts on immortality, and does so at the resurrection when the trumpet sounds 1 Corinthians 15:53–54. It is therefore something conferred at a stated moment, not something possessed by nature.
So the letter's alone is exact. Immortality is God's own, and what believers receive is a gift with a date on it. The description continues — unapproachable light, unseen and unseeable — and every clause is about a distance only God can close.
settled What this mark means