Eternal Life - Titus 1:1-2

I’m back baby! It was quicker and much better than I had anticipated and I’m super grateful for that. Tender mercies, fo’ sho’. As we go into the book of Titus, there are some similarities in the situations of Titus and Timothy. Like Timothy in Ephesus, Titus was asked by Paul to preside over the growing church in Crete. And Paul considered both Timothy and Titus to be his “own son after the common faith.” He felt fatherly affection and responsibility for these two boys and he asked them to take on difficult tasks. If I had to do it all over again, I wish I would have gone through the books of the Bible from Romans to Revelation and gone in chronological order while following the book of Acts as a timeline guide. The reason why I think this would have been so much better is exhibited here in the book of Titus. While 1 Timothy and now Titus were written while Paul was still free after his first Roman imprisonment, 2 Timothy was the last epistle that Paul wrote and has a completely different tone to it. I just think it would have been better to compare Titus to 1 Timothy instead of doing both and then going back both chronologically and emotionally for Paul. The IM gives us background on Titus, saying, “Titus was born of Greek parents and had been converted by Paul himself… Titus was personally entrusted to bring greater unity to the branches in Corinth (see 2 Corinthians 7:5-15). Paul wrote to Titus to strengthen him in his assignment to lead and care for the branch of the Church in Crete in spite of opposition.” This is the same Titus who was with Paul for many of his missionary journeys and who’s presence sparked debate at the Jerusalem council because many church leaders wanted Titus to be circumcised before he could be considered a Christian. The island of Crete is in the Mediterranean and from what I can gather was heavily populated (being called the Land of a Hundred Cities) and with extreme landscape (the mountains running up the middle of the island approach 8,000 ft. high). It is also described as the “wild west” of its time, full of people who were the “do-it-yourself” types, which makes sense with the landscape being what it was. It was this place that Paul sent Titus to, in order to complete the set up that Paul had begun earlier. 1:1-2 - Paul begins this epistle introducing himself as “a servant of God, and an apostle of Jesus Christ.” This is where a seemingly small remark becomes quite thought provoking. About the purpose of his commitment to Christ, Paul says, “In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began.” Now if we read this, we might ask ourselves, “is this saying that eternal life was promised to all before we even came to earth? Doesn’t that fly in the face of the teaching that not everyone will receive eternal life?” I guess it depends on how we define “eternal life.” Maybe instead of it reading like “God said everyone gets eternal life no matter what,” we should read it as saying, “God promised everyone eternal life, if they want it.” This is something that I can get behind because if we truly want eternal life, then we will do what it takes to get there, and we know that God has already deemed us worthy of eternal life, it’s us who has to decide to take on that kind of commitment to Him. The article on this chapter from gospeldoctrine.com says, “we must conclude that gospel covenants have existed from the beginning and that anyone who has accepted the gospel at any time has had a covenant relationship with God.” Anyone who has been born has already accepted the gospel in the pre-mortal world which means that every single person that has even been created on this planet is in a covenant relationship with God. It’s kind of mind-bending to think about because of the great inequality that we experience here. There are those who are wealthy beyond reason and then there are those who don’t even have safe drinking water. To think about the wide range of morality among people and consider that they both have made promises to God, it just is interesting to think about the importance of people and what really matters.