Will Vaus

Today in our journey along Route 66 we come to Paul’s Letter to Titus. Author Over the last two Sundays we have talked about the authorship of the Pastoral Epistles: 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. Were these letters written by Paul? Bible commentator Tom Wright has answered that question this way, Everybody in the early church seems to have taken it for granted that they [the Pastoral Epistles] were [written by Paul]. But in the last two hundred years many writers have pointed out several ways in which the letters sound and feel significantly different to the main letters (Romans, Galatians, and so on) which we know to have come from Paul himself. [1] So, what is the answer? Well, there are actually a few possibilities… There is still a strong argument for Paul having written the Pastoral Epistles, plain and simple. After all, as Tom Wright also says, there are some very personal details in these letters that would be strange for anyone else to have made up. Furthermore, the undoubted auth...

Perhaps my favorite verse in this letter is 2:13, “…while we wait for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” When I was a teenager, I spent time in Christian circles that emphasized the Second Coming of Christ. I certainly had the expectation that Jesus might return at any time. And that was good. I think in some Christian circles we have lost much of this emphasis on the hope of the Second Coming—and that is a great loss. Of course, this doctrine can be emphasized in the wrong way. One wrong way of thinking about it is to try to figure out the day and the time of Christ’s return. Even Jesus said he did not know the day or the time. Another wrong emphasis, I think, is the application of some segments of Scripture to the “end times” that perhaps had no such meaning for their first readers. A third problem comes when we focus on waiting for the Second Coming and don’t do anything else. Perhaps very few Christians are in ...