Three Men Who Cannot See the End

Paul is in a Roman prison writing his last letter. He knows it. Four chapters later he will say the time of his departure is at hand. And what he wants his son in the faith to have, with the little ink he has left, is three pictures.

A soldier. An athlete. A farmer.

The sermon you have heard on this text says the soldier means discipline, the athlete means rules, and the farmer means patience. That is not wrong, exactly. It is just thin, and it misses what actually binds the three together, which is the thing Timothy most needed and the thing Paul spends the rest of the paragraph answering.

Look at them again and ask a different question. Not what does each one do, but what does each one not have yet.

The Gap

The soldier fights a war he will not see won today. He takes orders from a commander whose whole strategy he cannot see, in a campaign whose outcome will be decided somewhere he is not standing. He does not get to know. He obeys and endures hardness in the dark.

The athlete trains ten months for one afternoon. That is not a figure of speech. Competitors at the ancient games swore an oath before the statue of Zeus that they had trained the full ten months, and the word Paul uses for striving lawfully, nomimōs, covers the training regimen and not merely the conduct of the contest. Ten months of diet and drill and sweat for a garland he does not hold, may never hold, and cannot see from where he is standing.

The farmer works the hardest of the three and waits the longest. He breaks ground in one season and eats in another. Between the plowing and the bread there is nothing to look at but dirt. Paul says the husbandman that laboureth must be first partaker of the fruits, and the word carries the order: the labor comes first, and the eating comes after, and there is no arrangement in which a man gets the harvest before he does the work.

There it is. Three men, one condition. Every one of them is laboring in the gap between the work and the reward, and not one of them can see the end from where he stands.

That is not an illustration of the Christian life. That is a diagnosis of it.

And it was precisely Timothy's problem. A young man, timid by temperament, watching his mentor rot in a cell, pastoring a church under pressure, and wondering whether any of it was landing. Paul does not tell him to try harder. Paul tells him what he is: a man working in the gap. Then he says, in verse 7, consider what I say, which is Paul's way of saying stop and actually think about this, because the answer is coming in the next sentence.

The Answer Is a Man

Remember that Jesus Christ of the seed of David was raised from the dead according to my gospel.

Read that as the reply to the problem the three pictures just raised, because that is what it is. If the difficulty is that we labor without seeing the end, then the answer is not a principle or a promise in the abstract. The answer is a Man who already went through the gap and came out the other side, in a body, in history, in front of witnesses.

He is the soldier who obeyed a commander whose plan He alone fully saw, and endured hardness unto death. He is the athlete who ran lawfully, without a single infraction, and was crowned with glory and honour. He is the farmer who went into the ground as a corn of wheat and came up bearing much fruit. Every one of the three pictures is fulfilled in one Person, and He is standing on the far side of the gap holding the harvest.

And notice what Paul calls Him. Of the seed of David. The word is sperma, the same word that carries the whole covenant from the garden forward, the promised Seed of Genesis 3:15 running down through Abraham and David to this Man. Paul is not decorating the sentence. He is telling a discouraged pastor that the risen Christ is the terminus of every promise God ever made, the Heir to whom the whole inheritance was deeded. The crown the athlete strains toward is not a hope. It is already on a head.

So when you labor without seeing, you are not gambling. You are following a Man down a road He has already walked to the end.

The Word Is Not Bound

Then Paul does something I find almost unbearably good.

Wherein I suffer trouble, as an evil doer, even unto bonds; but the word of God is not bound.

He is chained. He says so plainly, and he says he is chained like a criminal, which is the added humiliation of it. And then in the same breath, without transition: but the word of God is not.

Look at what he is refusing to conclude. The obvious inference from his chains is that the work has stopped, that the mission is suffering because its missionary is immobilized. Paul denies it flatly. They can bind Paul. They cannot bind the word. The gospel does not travel on his legs. It travels on God's own faithfulness, and it will keep going into houses and provinces and centuries he will never see.

That should reach anyone who has ever felt sidelined. Illness, obscurity, a season where you cannot do what you used to do, a ministry that shrank, a body that quit on you. The chains are real. Paul does not pretend otherwise. But the word is not bound, and God has never once been dependent on your capacity to carry it.

Your Hardship Has a Harvest in Other People

Then verse 10, which I think is one of the most under-preached sentences in the Pastorals.

Therefore I endure all things for the elect's sakes, that they may also obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.

Read the logic slowly, because it will not fit inside a determinist system. Paul endures so that the elect may obtain salvation. If election meant that a fixed list of individuals were already certain to be saved regardless of anything anyone did, Paul's suffering would add exactly nothing, and he would know it. He does not talk that way. He talks like a man whose endurance is a link in a chain that actually reaches people.

Which is what election has always meant in this book. A people chosen in Christ, gathered through real means, entered by real faith. The elect are those who are in Him, and God has appointed that men and women come into Him through preaching and suffering and faithfulness like Paul's, like Timothy's, like yours. Your endurance is not decorative. It is the means by which somebody else obtains what is in Christ Jesus.

That is the farmer's principle applied to souls. You labor in one season. Somebody eats in another. Often you will not see who.

The Saying That Breaks Its Own Pattern

Now the crescendo, and it is the part of this passage I would want read at my funeral.

It is a faithful saying: For if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him: if we suffer, we shall also reign with him: if we deny him, he also will deny us: if we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.

Four conditions. Watch the shape of them.

If we be dead with him, we shall also live with him. Our action, His matching response.

If we suffer, we shall also reign with him. Our action, His matching response.

If we deny him, he also will deny us. Our action, His matching response. Sobering, and Paul does not soften it. A settled, decisive repudiation of Christ meets a settled response. The word is arneomai, and it is the word for what Peter did in the courtyard and what an apostate does in the open.

And then the fourth line arrives and the pattern breaks.

You expect the symmetry to hold. You expect: if we are faithless, He will be faithless to us. That is what the previous three have trained you to expect. It is not what Paul writes. He writes if we believe not, yet he abideth faithful, and then he tells you exactly why the symmetry could not hold: he cannot deny himself.

That is the hinge of the whole passage. Your faithlessness cannot produce a matching faithlessness in God, because His faithfulness is not a response to your performance. It is an expression of His own nature. For God to become unfaithful to what He has promised in Christ, He would have to stop being God. That is the one thing omnipotence cannot do.

I want to be straight that faithful men have read verse 13 two ways, and both readings are grounded in the same fact. Some take it as warning: God stays true to His character, which includes His warnings, so the threat of verse 12 stands. Some take it as comfort: our lapses of faith do not unmake His faithfulness to us. I think the structure settles it. Paul has just given the warning in verse 12 in its own clause, and then deliberately declined to give a fourth warning where the pattern demanded one. He breaks his own parallelism to say something different, and the reason he gives is not about our conduct at all. It is about who God is.

So both are true, and they are true because of the same immovable thing. If a man finally and settledly denies Christ, God's unchangeable character is exactly why that warning is not a bluff. And if a believer's faith goes thin, if it wavers in a hospital corridor at two in the morning, if it stumbles and gets up limping, God's unchangeable character is exactly why that man is still held. Your security was never sitting on the quality of your grip. You are hidden in Him, and for God to lose you He would have to deny Himself.

Now Stand Up

So here is the exhortation, and I mean it as one.

You are a soldier who cannot see the war. You are an athlete in month seven of ten. You are a farmer looking at dirt. That is not a sign that something has gone wrong in your Christian life. That is the ordinary condition of everyone who has ever served God in this world, and Paul is telling you it is normal, and he is telling you it ends.

Stop measuring the work by what you can see today. The farmer who digs up the seed every morning to check on it will starve. Some of what you are doing will not come up in your lifetime. Say the true thing to your children anyway. Keep the marriage anyway. Keep showing up to the small church anyway. Keep telling that one man about Christ anyway. The word is not bound, and God has never wasted the endurance of one of His people.

And remember the Man. Not a principle, a Man. Jesus Christ, of the seed of David, raised from the dead. He is the proof that the gap closes, because He is standing on the other side of it. Every promise God ever made is deeded to Him, and if you are in Him it is all yours, not because you performed well enough to deserve a share but because you are inside the One who owns it.

That is the God who has been coming after you since the garden. He came looking for two people hiding in the trees. He came to a mountain with a ram in the thicket. He came in the flesh and He came to a cross and He came out of a tomb, and He has never once been the one who quit. He is not going to start with you.

If you are tired, He knows. If your faith is thin right now, He knows that too, and here is the word for you: he abideth faithful, he cannot deny himself. You are held by something steadier than your own grip.

And if you are reading this and have never come to Him at all, understand that everything I have written assumes a door that is still standing open. The labor, the crown, the harvest, all of it belongs to those who are in Christ, and the way in has never been performance. It has always been the same six words at the end of the Book: whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.

Come in. Then take your place in the field with the rest of us, and work like a man who knows how the story ends. Because you do.

Darren ReinhardtAuthor of Whosoever Will · whosoeverwill.bible