Lecture 27: The Deacons' Question, Philemon, and the Sermon to the Hebrews

The lecture, section by section

1. The women of First Timothy 3

   Between the deacon qualifications of verses 8 to 10 and 12 to 13 stands verse 11: women, likewise, must be dignified, not malicious gossips, but temperate, faithful in all things. Who are they? The historic majority read deaconesses, a third order beside elders and deacons; Knight and Mounce, in today's two leading Greek commentaries, read deacons' wives, answering the obvious objection, why the deacons' wives and not the elders', by the deacons' more visible household ministry. Essex takes a fourth path: these are women deacons, women within the one deaconate, given qualifications matched to feminine vulnerabilities their culture knew well, so that the serving body under the elders includes men and women together. On any sound reading, one thing is fixed: there are no independent boards; deacons and deaconesses alike serve under the elders' direction, and a woman deacon need not be married to anyone in office.

2. Households, submission, and service

   The classroom questions turn practical. A serving woman remains under her husband's authority, and wisdom asks his blessing on her ministry; Essex recounts unbelieving husbands gladly consenting because conversion made their wives more conscientious at home, exactly the evangelistic dynamic of 1 Peter 3. The asymmetry is real: a husband seeks his wife's counsel in wisdom, but he is not biblically required to obtain her permission to serve, while her service comes under his headship. And a sober observation from decades of ministry: most churches have more women qualified to serve than men, a fact every pastor will navigate.

3. The Savior of all men

   First Timothy 4:10: we have fixed our hope on the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of believers. Universalism, the simplest surface grammar, is excluded by the whole of Scripture. Some take the saving word physically, God the preserver of all people, the reading toward which MacArthur leans; but the word-group in the pastorals is consistently soteriological, so the serious options divide the sense: Savior in desire, from 2:4, who desires all men to be saved; Savior potentially, whom only believers experience, so Fee, Towner, and Earle; Knight's, Savior of all men, that is, believers; and the reading Essex leans to: Savior of all kinds of men, against teachers drawing lines between Jew and Gentile, with believers the ones in whom that salvation actually lands. One of the non-universalist readings is right; the choice is genuinely difficult, and the commentaries argue it well.

4. Children who believe

   Titus 1:6 requires of the elder, children who believe, not accused of dissipation or rebellion. Is that believing children, children of the faith, the surface grammar, held with question marks by Mounce and Fee, or faithful children, defined by the following clause: children under the father's roof who respond faithfully to his authority, neither wasteful nor rebellious? Essex leans to the second: nowhere else in Scripture is a father held responsible for the salvation of his child, which God alone gives, while Scripture everywhere holds him responsible for his household's order. The question will not stay academic: every pastor will one day face the elder whose teenager has not believed, and must have decided beforehand what the text requires. Whichever reading one adopts, settle the exegesis first, then the application.

5. Using the pastorals rightly

   The standing caution: Timothy and Titus carried Paul's delegated authority, which no modern pastor holds, so the letters are not addressed to today's pastor as if by name. But exegeted like every other letter, they yield principles for leadership, order, and teaching that remain vital to the church, and the balanced preacher mines them without flattening the distance.

6. Philemon: a public letter about a private matter

   The last Pauline letter goes to Philemon, and Apphia, and Archippus, and the church in your house: grace to you all. From verse 4 through 22a every you is singular, Philemon alone, then the plural returns: through your prayers, all of you, I hope to be given to you, and the closing grace is with you all. A private matter, handled in public, because Paul knows what kind of man Philemon is and wants the church to witness how such things are handled among partners. And Philemon is a partner: beloved fellow worker, one whose love has refreshed the hearts of the saints, named alongside Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke as Paul's fellow workers; Paul, naming himself prisoner four times, reminds him that partnership in the gospel carries costs.

7. Onesimus, and the appeal

   Between them stands Onesimus: Philemon's runaway slave, converted under Paul in his imprisonment, now so useful that Paul wished to keep him, and under Roman law wholly at his master's mercy, with Paul himself legally exposed for harboring him. Paul sets his authority down deliberately: though I have enough confidence in Christ to order you to do what is proper, yet for love's sake I rather appeal to you; and the appeal lands at verse 17: if then you regard me a partner, accept him as you would me. Not merely forgive him; not merely receive a new brother: accept him no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother, a partner in the gospel ministry, as if Paul himself stood at the door. Emancipation is never demanded; it is entrusted to the confidence of verse 21, knowing that you will do even more than what I say, with the guest room to be readied through the church's prayers. The purpose: Paul appealed to Philemon to accept his newly converted slave as a brother in Christ and partner in the gospel. Essex preaches it in one message, for its big idea outruns its parts: God calls believers to more than forgiving a brother; he calls them to embrace the forgiven as fellow servants, which is far harder.

8. Hebrews: the question of the author

   Hebrews opens with no salutation, no named writer, and the church has debated Pauline authorship since the third century. One exclusion is certain: not Timothy, who is named in the third person at 13:23, our brother Timothy has been released, with the writer hoping to come with him. Beyond that, the profile fits a member of the Pauline circle: someone who had stood beside Paul in the synagogues, reasoning from the Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ, could preach this way without being Paul, and the letter's un-Pauline opening tells against the apostle's own hand, though Essex holds the conclusion loosely and professes he will feel no shame if the handshake in glory proves otherwise. The letter is anonymous; its authority never rested on recovering the name.

9. The readers, and where they were

   The audience is Jewish and Christian. God spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets, the fathers of Israel, not of the Gentiles; the Son gives help to the seed of Abraham; and the hearers are holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling, whose first command in the book is, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession, and of whom the preacher is convinced of better things, things that accompany salvation. Their location hangs on one clause, those from Italy greet you: either written from Italy or to Italy, and since epistolary greetings flow from the writer's companions to the recipients, the natural sense is Italians abroad greeting their home assembly, hence a letter to Rome, the destination most contemporary commentators favor, with Jewish Christians in Palestine the standing alternative.

10. The occasion: two persecutions

    Hebrews 10 remembers former days: after being enlightened, you endured a great conflict of sufferings, made a public spectacle, sharing with prisoners, accepting joyfully the seizure of your property. On the Roman destination that is the Claudius crisis of AD 49, when the Jewish believers were expelled with the synagogues and lost everything, an ordeal with no exit. Now, in the late sixties, the Neronian persecution burns, and this time there is an exit: Nero hunted Christians, not Jews as Jews, so a Jewish believer could shelter from the flames by stepping back into Judaism, keeping property and life at the price of the confession. That temptation, safety in the synagogue, is the crisis the whole sermon answers, and it dates the letter near AD 67 to 68, whether addressed to Rome or, on the alternative, from Rome to Palestine's pressured believers.

11. A sermon in the mail

    The writer names his own genre at 13:22: bear with this word of exhortation, the very phrase the synagogue rulers used in Acts 13 when they invited Paul, after the reading of Scripture, to preach. Hebrews is a homily: Scripture read, explained, applied, and pressed home, and the preacher's voice keeps surfacing, concerning which we are speaking, we have much to say, since you have become dull of hearing. The whole sermon runs its course and then, uniquely, closes with an epistolary ending, greetings, requests for prayer, grace be with you all, which certifies what every letter's ending certifies: a definite people, a definite occasion, a definite purpose. Hebrews is a sermon mailed to a congregation its preacher could not reach in person.

12. Themes, and the purpose

    No New Testament book leans harder on the Old: whole blocks are quoted, including the longest Old Testament quotation in the New, Jeremiah 31 on the new covenant in Hebrews 8, quoted again in chapter 10; with Matthew, Romans, and Revelation, Hebrews is one of the four great books that cannot be understood without the Old Testament. Its God is the living God, the Creator, the Judge, a consuming fire. Its Christ is the incomparable Son, God's last word after the prophets, and the great high priest, a note struck as early as chapter 2 and expounded from chapter 7. Its keyword is better: a better name than the angels, a better hope, a better covenant enacted on better promises, better sacrifices, a better possession, something better than the old saints received. Its faith is persevering faith, we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul, paraded in the witnesses of chapter 11. And its method balances five solemn warnings with constant encouragement. The purpose gathers it all: Jewish Christians considering safety in Judaism were instructed and exhorted to press on to steadfastness, endurance, and maturity by looking to Jesus, the Son of God and great high priest, for why go back to the merely good when God has given the better?

1. Paul had the authority to command Philemon and chose to appeal for love's sake. When is it wiser to appeal than to insist, and what does that choice cost and accomplish in a church or a family?

2. Accepting Onesimus as a partner went beyond forgiving him. Where is the line in your own experience between forgiving someone and welcoming them back into shared work, and what makes the second step harder?

3. The readers of Hebrews were tempted to trade the confession for safety. What modern shelters tempt believers to quiet their confession, and how does the letter's argument, the better covenant and the great high priest, answer that temptation?