There Will Be Terrible Times In The Last Days

By long tradition this passage sits inside the last letter we have from Paul, written to Timothy, a younger man he had taught for years and loved like a son in the faith. The tone of the whole letter is that of someone setting his affairs in order. He speaks of his own death with an odd calm and keeps pressing Timothy to hold his ground, to keep teaching, and not to be ashamed.

That setting changes how these verses land. Paul is not a frightened man predicting collapse. He is a worn one telling someone he trusts what to expect after he is gone. So when he says grievous times will come, he says it the way you might warn someone you love before they set out on a hard road. The aim is not to scare but to prepare. I find that takes some of the doom out of the words. This is care from a man near the end, not a forecast made for the thrill of it. Read like that, the list stops being a weapon and becomes a kind of warning hand on the shoulder.

Read it slowly and you notice it is not a tidy list. It is a heap. Paul stacks one description on another, and the rush is part of the point: this is what a heart looks like when it pours out unchecked. The first word in the Greek, philautos, means a lover of self, and it sets the key for everything after it, a heart bent back on itself.

Three loves hold the whole thing together. It opens with lovers of self and lovers of money, and near the end stand lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. That is the frame hiding in plain sight. The trouble is not mainly cruel behaviour; it is misplaced love. Every cold and grasping thing on the list grows from love aimed at the wrong place. What I almost always miss is the small word at the very end. After describing all these people, Paul writes, turn away from these, also. With that one word he stops talking about them and quietly turns to me. Do not only diagnose this; do not become it.

Of everything Paul names, the last description is the one that should make a churchgoer go quiet. He pictures people holding a form of godliness while having denied its power. The other faults are at least honest about what they are. This one wears the right clothes. It knows the hymns and the manners and the words, and underneath the engine has stopped.

I notice this in myself before I notice it in anyone else, and that is the hard part. It is possible to keep every outward habit of faith while the love slowly drains away, until what is left is a shell that still rattles when you shake it. Paul is not pointing at the world out there. He is naming a danger that grows inside religious people in particular, which is why this passage has teeth for anyone who has spent years in a pew. The shape can outlive the life. And the cure is never more shape. It is asking God to put the power back into something that has gone through the motions for too long.

Paul is not inventing a new fear. Jesus warned that in hard days love itself would grow cold (Matthew 24:12), and that is exactly what Paul describes here: not louder evil, but colder hearts. The opposite of that cold is the warm, living fruit that the Spirit grows, the qualities Paul names elsewhere in Galatians 5:22-23.

There is a longer thread too. A form of faith without its power is precisely what Jesus met in the most religious people of his time, the ones who looked right and had hard hearts. He did not answer their coldness by matching it. He went to a cross for the very people who had lost their warmth. The power Paul says these people have denied is, in the end, the power of the resurrection at work in ordinary lives. So the answer to a dead form is not gritted teeth and a bigger effort. It is a living Christ, who can thaw a heart that has gone cold, mine included, when I have no idea how to warm it myself.

The practical instruction is tiny: turn away from these, also. For a long time I read that as a call to fight the culture and to be angry at how bad things were getting. I no longer think that is what Paul means. He is not asking Timothy to fix the age. He is asking him not to catch the disease.

In ordinary life that is unglamorous work. It is noticing the day I have started loving comfort more than people. It is catching the moment my faith turns into performance, all the right words at church and a hard edge once I am home. When I feel the cold creeping in, what helps me is not a grander effort but an honest, short prayer: keep my heart soft, because I cannot soften it on my own. Some weeks the whole of obedience is being genuinely kind to one person who did not earn it. That is small, and it is usually exactly what I am being asked to manage, and no more.

• Where in me is there a form of godliness, the right shape, while the warmth and the power have quietly leaked away?
• Of Paul’s three loves (self, money, pleasure), which one currently competes hardest with my love for God, if I am honest about it?
• Have I slipped into being angry at how bad things are getting, when Paul simply asks me to turn away and live differently?
• Who is one person I could be genuinely warm towards this week, with no agenda attached?

If today feels heavy and cold, you might sit with a few more passages on a softened heart over on our bible verses for how you feel page, or read on in 2 Timothy.