Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Timothy · About this commentary
Grievous Times Will Come
2 Timothy 3:1-5
1 But know this: that in the last days, grievous times will come. · WEB
Nineteen faults are listed, and the list begins and ends with misplaced love.
In the last days, grievous times will come. The word for grievous describes something hard to bear or dangerous — used elsewhere in Scripture only of two violent men Matthew 8:28.
Then the catalogue, and its shape matters more than its length. It opens with lovers of self and lovers of money, and closes with lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. Four compounds of love bracket the whole list, so what is described is not an absence of love but its misdirection. Every other fault named sits inside that frame.
Between the brackets the faults are mostly social: boastful, arrogant, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unforgiving, slanderers, fierce, traitors, headstrong. Almost none are private vices. They are the ways a person becomes intolerable to live near.
Verse 5 supplies the sting. Holding a form of godliness but having denied its power. The religion is retained — the shape of it is explicitly granted — while the thing that would change any item on the list has been let go. And the instruction is brief: turn away from these.
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