Witness in the Word · Module 6 — The Report from the Wall
Class 24 – Perilous Times, and Men As They Shall Be
Source: Watchman, What of the Night?, Chapter Eight
This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.
— 2 Timothy 3:1-5
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A man can read this list the wrong way and come away worse than he went in.
I want to say that before we read a word of it, because this is the passage in all of Scripture most easily turned into a weapon a man uses on everyone but himself. It is a long list of ugly things, and the temptation the moment you read it is to start assigning the items — this one to that neighbor, that one to those people, this whole cluster to the age in general — until you have built a gallery of everyone else's faces and hung it on the wall and stepped back, satisfied, having somehow read a list of nineteen sins without finding yourself anywhere in it.
Paul saw that coming. That is why he ends the list the way he does, with a turn that swings the whole thing around and points it inward, at the religious man reading it. We will get to that turn, and it is the reason the chapter exists. But hold it in front of you the entire time we walk the list, so that you are never able to read a single item as though it belonged only to someone else. The apostle did not write this to arm you against the age. He wrote it to warn you about what the age is quietly doing to you.
Here is where he wrote it from, and it deepens the whole thing.
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A Letter From a Condemned Man
Paul wrote these words near the very end of his life, in a Roman prison, in what is almost certainly the last letter he ever sent. He was writing to Timothy, a younger man he loved like a son and was leaving behind. This is not a man theorizing about bad times from a comfortable distance. This is an old man in a cell, who has spent himself entirely and is about to be executed for it, telling the son he is leaving what the road ahead will be like.
That is the voice to hear in this passage — not a scold cataloguing the sins of a generation he despises, but a father describing the dangerous country his son will have to live in after he is gone. There is grief in it, not glee. And a man who reads Paul's list with any glee in his own heart has already missed the first item on it.
This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.
Weigh the word perilous. It is a strong word, and English softens it. The same word appears one other memorable place in the New Testament, where it describes two men so violent and dangerous that no one could travel that road at all. It does not mean merely hard or difficult. It means dangerous — fierce, savage, hard to deal with the way a wild animal is hard to deal with. Paul is not telling Timothy the last days will be inconvenient. He is telling him they will be dangerous — dangerous to a man's soul, hard on his faith, a country a man can be hurt in.
And then he tells him why. The times are dangerous because of what men become. The peril is not in the circumstances. It is in the people. For men shall be — and then the list.
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The List Begins and Ends in Love
Before we walk the items, see the two posts the whole list hangs between, because they tell you what the list actually is.
It begins here: lovers of their own selves. The very first thing Paul names is a love — love turned inward, a man curved in on himself, treating himself as the thing to be served.
And near the end it arrives here: lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God. The next-to-last thing named is also a love — love pointed at pleasure, with God set behind it in the line.
Look at what brackets the list. Love of self at the front. Love of pleasure at the back. God displaced at both ends. Everything ugly in between — the pride, the ingratitude, the treachery, the fierceness — hangs suspended between two loves aimed the wrong direction. This is not a random pile of vices. It is a diagnosis of what a man becomes when love curves inward, toward self and toward pleasure, and away from God.
And that should sound familiar, because it is the same disease we met in the last chapter, one stage further along. There, love waxed cold — cooled, drained of warmth. Here, that same love has not merely cooled; it has turned and found a new object, itself. A fire that goes cold does not stay empty. The affection a man was made to point at God and neighbor does not evaporate when it cools toward them; it turns, and lands on the nearest available thing, which is always himself. Cold love is the first stage. Self-love is the second. This chapter is the seventh chapter's mark, grown up.
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Walking the List Without a Gallery
Now the items themselves — and I will not turn them into a gallery of other men's faces. I will let them do what a list like this is meant to do, which is to be walked slowly enough that a man finds himself somewhere in it.
Covetous — wanting what is not yours, never at rest in what you have. Boasters and proud — a man impressed with himself and needing you to be impressed too. Blasphemers — speaking against God, treating the holy as common. Disobedient to parents — the overturning of the first authority a child ever knows, which is the seedbed of overturning every authority after it. Unthankful — and stop there a moment, because it is a small word for a large thing. To be unthankful is to receive everything and acknowledge nothing, to take a life full of gifts and feel owed rather than grateful. It sits early in the list because it is early in the disease; a man stops giving thanks long before he does anything dramatic.
Unholy. Without natural affection — and this one should arrest you, because it names the failure of the loves that are supposed to be automatic, the affection between parent and child, the bonds a man should not have to be taught. Paul says even those will fail. Trucebreakers — men whose word and agreements mean nothing. False accusers — the word is the one from which we get slanderer, men who wound with the tongue. Incontinent — without self-control, unable to say no to themselves. Fierce — savage, without gentleness. Despisers of those that are good — and mark this one, for it is a turn: not merely being bad, but hating the good, holding goodness itself in contempt, sneering at the very thing a man ought to admire.
Traitors. Heady — reckless, rash, acting without thought. Highminded — swollen, puffed up, thinking of oneself above what is true. And then the second post: lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God.
I have walked it quickly on purpose, because the danger in a list like this is to slow down over the sins that belong to other people and speed past the ones that belong to you. Do the opposite. The items on this list that made you think of someone else — pass over those; they are not your business here. The one or two that made you go quiet, that landed a little too near — those are the ones Paul wrote the list to show you. A man reads this passage rightly only if it finds him in it somewhere. If it found only your neighbors, you read it wrong, and you should read it again.
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The Turn That Points Home
Now the sentence the whole chapter has been walking toward, and the reason this mark is aimed at the church and not at the world.
Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.
Everything before this could be read as a description of the pagan, the man with no faith, the world outside the walls. This cannot. This is a portrait of a religious man. Paul takes his whole list of the perilous men of the last days and, at the end, tells you where to find them — and it is not out in the godless world. It is among people who have a form of godliness.
A form is a shape, an outline, an appearance. A form of godliness is the outward frame of devotion — the attendance, the vocabulary, the correct positions, the visible motions of a life that looks like it belongs to God. And Paul says these men have all of that, the entire shape of it, but denying the power thereof. The shape is there. The power is gone. It is a fire's outline drawn in cold ash — the form of a flame with no heat in it, everything a fire looks like and nothing a fire does.
Understand what he is saying, because it is severe and it is meant to be. The men of the perilous last days are not, in the end, only the obvious pagans. They are church men. They are people who hold the form — who have the whole religious shape intact — and who have quietly let the power drain out of it, until what remains is godliness as a costume, worn over a heart that is a lover of itself and of pleasure and not, any longer, of God. The list did not describe the world and then stop. It described men who look like believers.
That is why this mark belongs to you and to me and not to the people out there. A form of godliness is not something a godless man has; he has no form to keep. It is something only a religious man can have — and lose the power of without losing the form, which is exactly why it is so hard to detect from the inside. Nothing looks different. The shape is all still there. A man can keep the form for years after the power has gone, and never miss it, because the form is what other people see and the power is what only God and the man himself would ever know was gone.
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From Such Turn Away
There is one command in the whole passage, and it is the watchman's limit, exactly as we have seen it before.
From such turn away.
Not destroy such. Not rule over such, not drive them out, not appoint yourself their judge. Turn away. The command is about your own feet and your own heart — do not walk with them, do not be shaped by them, do not let the form-without-power become the water you stand in until its current is carrying you too. It is a command to guard yourself, not to govern them, and it keeps this chapter inside the office the whole book has been describing. The watchman warns. He turns his own feet from the danger. He does not seize the danger by the throat.
And the door is here too, held open inside the mark. For the whole point of naming the form emptied of its power is that the power can be there. Paul is not describing a shape that must stay cold. He is warning a shape that has gone cold, so that a man will go and find the power again — the actual force of God in a life, the thing the form was only ever meant to contain. The mark is a warning to a hollow devotion, given in time, so that it need not stay hollow.
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The Second Sign, Read Rightly
So the second mark, at its true size. The last days would be dangerous, Paul told his son from a cell — dangerous because of what men become, and what they become is a long descent that begins in love turned inward and ends in a godliness that keeps its shape after its heart has stopped.
Read softly, this mark becomes a comfortable tour of other people's sins. Read too sharply, it becomes a snarl about how wicked everyone has gotten. Read truly, it is a mirror handed to a religious man, that walks him down a list until he finds himself on it, and then turns at the very end and shows him the most dangerous man of the last days — not the pagan in the street, but the believer who kept the form and lost the fire.
Go and check the shape you keep. See whether the power is still in it. And if it has gone, do not merely keep polishing the form — go back for the power, which is the one thing the form was made to hold.
Here is the third mark.
For Reflection
Read: 2 Timothy 3:1–5
1. The chapter warns against reading this list of "perilous times" as only describing other people. Which mark on Paul’s list is honestly, uncomfortably, true of you?
2. "Having a form of godliness but denying its power" — where might you be keeping the form without the power?
3. What would it look like to "go back for the power" this week rather than just polishing the form?
This Week: Identify one specific area of "form without power" in your own life and take one concrete step to restore the power, not just the appearance.