Verse of the day · September 3
What does "rightly dividing the word of truth" mean in 2 Timothy 2:15?
Interpreters once had a method they called a sharp knife that cuts and divides the Scriptures.
Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
2 Timothy 2:15
Timothy has a congregation under his charge, and Paul, having encouraged him to suffer, turns to directing him in his work. That work is not to tell people what they never knew before, but to put them in mind of what they do know. The first order in it is about other people: charge them before the Lord that they strive not about words to no profit. Men disposed to strive commonly strive about matters of very small moment, and the damage runs past the argument: hearers are subverted, drawn away from the great things of God, and truth is often in danger of being lost in the heats that follow.
Then the address turns on the man himself — thyself, as distinguished from those he was told to charge. What is asked of him is earnestness: be diligent, give diligence. Approved, JFB say, means tested by trial, the opposite of reprobate. The trial is not men's, John Gill writes: not unto men, as pleasing them, since those who study to please men are not the servants of Christ, but unto God, with all fidelity and uprightness. What Paul calls him next is a workman, and the ministry of the word is a work no man is sufficient for without the grace of God. Workmen unskilful, or unfaithful, or lazy have need to be ashamed; those who mind their business and keep to their work need not. And their work, Matthew Henry answers, is rightly to divide the word of truth. The term rendered rightly dividing occurs nowhere else in the New Testament: it means, properly, to cut straight.
The commonest picture for that cut comes from the altar, where the priests took such care in dividing the victim down the spine that half the spinal marrow lay on each side of the backbone. Adam Clarke reports that as the view now commonly taken, and then says probably nothing was much farther from the apostle's thoughts; the scrupulous dividing does not appear to have been an original ordinance among the Jews, and the stress laid on it came later. For Albert Barnes the allusion may instead be to a steward making proper distribution to each one under his care, as his office and their necessities require. He records what others have supposed — the sacrifice cut into its proper parts, the Scribes dividing the law into sections, a carver handing food to guests at a feast — and comes back to the same place: the idea seems to be that the minister makes a proper distribution of that word, adapting his instructions to the circumstances and wants of his hearers.
To divide the word is not merely to divide the text into its proper parts, though care should be taken that this be done aright. Gill rather thinks Paul set the phrase against a wrong way of dividing that his own countrymen used: taking a letter out of one word and adding it to another, and moving words about, so that what went before goes behind. The name they had for that, in the handbook he cites, was a sharp knife that cuts and divides the Scriptures. It is not rightly to divide, in his verdict, but to mangle and tear in pieces the word of truth. The Geneva Notes gloss rightly dividing the word of truth by what it rules out: adding nothing to it, deleting nothing, neither mangling it nor rending it apart — but marking diligently what the hearers are able to bear, and what is fit to edifying.
What a straight cut leaves behind is a portion. The work is not to invent a new gospel but rightly to divide the gospel committed to his trust: terror to those to whom terror belongs, comfort to whom comfort, and to every one his portion in due season. Clarke's portions run milk to babes, strong meat to the full grown, reproof to the irregular and careless: finding out the necessities of his hearers, and preaching so as to meet them. Gill takes the metaphor from masters and governors of families, who cut up the food and distribute it to each according to their age and appetite, dividing to every one what is proper for him and keeping back nothing profitable.
The next hindrance Paul names is error, and two of the men spreading it get named before the chapter is out. Hymenaeus and Philetus had not denied the resurrection, but taught that it was past already, putting a corrupt interpretation on a true doctrine and dashing one truth of Christ in pieces against another. By that the faith of some was overthrown. Timothy is handed the same true doctrine, and a household to feed out of it. The straightness of the cut is judged where the portions land: one apiece, in due season, and each one fitted to the case of the person it goes to.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, Adam Clarke, the Geneva Bible notes and Albert Barnes.
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