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.

Look again at the names and notice how ordinary most of them are. Ungrateful. Unforgiving. Disobedient to parents. Without natural affection. Without self-control. These are not the crimes of monsters. They are the small failures of love in ordinary homes and friendships, the sort that never make the news. Paul is not sketching a horror film. He is describing a street much like mine, where gratitude wears thin and people quietly stop keeping the promises that once held a family together.

That is part of why it lands so hard. The warning is aimed at the respectable, not only at the obviously bad. The evil hardest to notice is the kind that looks like a busy, mostly decent life, one I could be living without ever feeling like a villain.

If the disease is love pointed at the wrong things, the cure is not to feel less. Paul never tells Timothy to want nothing or to go cold. The people in the list are not short on passion. They love hard, only they love self and money and pleasure ahead of God. So the answer is to put the first love back where it belongs.

Love God above all, and the lesser loves need not be killed off, only set in their right place beneath it. Money becomes a tool again rather than a master, and pleasure a gift rather than a god. Whenever my own love for God goes quiet, I find that something smaller quietly climbs onto the throne. Turning away from this list is, in the end, mostly turning back towards the One I was made to love most.

I have sat through this passage preached as proof that the country is going to the dogs. A crime figure, a headline about some scandal, then Paul’s heap of eighteen words, then a satisfied nod. See. Must be nearly the end. What I never once heard was the preacher put himself anywhere in the list, and that is the tell, because boastful, arrogant and conceited are sitting right there on Paul’s page, and a man using this list to prove how far everyone else has fallen has just walked straight into it.

That sermon leans hard on the phrase “last days”, as though Paul had a countdown in view, one bad decade just before the finish. I cannot prove he did not mean that. But when Peter stood up at Pentecost he said the Spirit was being poured out in the last days (Acts 2:17), and he meant that morning, not a far-off era, and many readers take Paul the same way: the whole stretch between Christ’s coming and his return. If that reading is right, Timothy was not being told to watch the news. He was being told to watch the room he taught in. So am I.

Preach the list on its own and it hangs in the air, an inventory of faults with nowhere to land. Read four verses further and Paul has not changed the subject. He describes men working their way into people’s homes and gaining a hold over women already loaded down with sin, people forever learning and never arriving at the truth, and he sets them beside Jannes and Jambres, who once opposed Moses (2 Timothy 3:6 to 9). Same disease. It just has a face now, and an address.

That is the spine I would follow in a talk. Here is what a hollowed-out heart looks like, and here, immediately, is what it does the moment somebody gives it a following. It charms its way into a kitchen. It picks the tired and the lonely, never the confident. Timothy was not handed a catalogue of sins to tut over from a safe distance. He was warned that a man fitting this description was probably already working a room he knew, and that turning away would mean saying so out loud, to a face, which costs a great deal more than disapproving of the age in general.

I would read this in a members’ meeting about a leader who worries people, when a church needs the nerve to ask the hard question instead of assuming the best and hoping. I would read it slowly in a service of confession, no commentary afterwards, and let people find their own name in it rather than someone else’s. It sits well before communion, when the room has already turned inward.

I would not read it at a funeral. Grief does not need eighteen human failures laid over it, however true they are. I would not open an outreach evening with it either, because a stranger who has wandered in off the street should hear that they are loved before they hear the ways they fall short. And I would think hard before sending it to a friend who is struggling. From outside it reads like a diagnosis, and the last thing a person barely holding on needs is to be told which word on the list is theirs.

By verse ten Paul has stopped describing other people and started describing himself: his teaching, his conduct, his purpose, his faith, his patience, his love, his steadfastness, and he reminds Timothy that Timothy watched every bit of it up close. Then comes the famous part of the chapter, the part everyone can quote. Keep going in what you learned. Remember who you learned it from. Remember you have known the sacred writings since you were small, and that all of scripture is God-breathed and useful (2 Timothy 3:14 to 16).

For years I read the eighteen faults and “turn away from these” as the sum of Paul’s advice, as though the cure for a curdled heart were willpower pointed in the opposite direction. It isn’t, and I think the mistake cost me a decade. What Paul actually hands Timothy is a person to keep watching, chains and failures and all, and a book to keep reading. That is a much smaller prescription than “try harder”. It is also a much stranger one, because it means the cure works at the speed of a friendship rather than the speed of a decision.

And Paul had already named the first people who did that for Timothy. A grandmother, Lois. A mother, Eunice (2 Timothy 1:5). Not a theologian between them. Two women handing on a faith they were visibly living, years before Timothy was old enough to argue about any of it. So the chapter’s real answer to a hollowed-out religion is not a sharper argument. It is that unglamorous chain: somebody who meant it, passing it to somebody younger, slowly, in the kitchen, while the terrible times carry on outside.

There is a reader for whom two words here do not describe a curdled heart at all. Unforgiving. Without natural affection. Someone who has finally stopped answering calls from a parent who spent thirty years hurting them. Hand them this verse without care and you have just told them they are evidence of the last days getting worse.

I do not believe that is what Paul means, and I would rather say so plainly than let the verse do that damage unchallenged. The unforgiveness in this list sits shoulder to shoulder with fierce, with traitors, with headstrong. It is the hardness of someone who will not release a grip, not the exhaustion of someone who has finally let go of a rope that was burning their hands. And the natural affection Paul mourns going missing is not, in a house like that, the child’s failure to manufacture it. It is far more often the parent’s failure to have ever offered it safely in the first place.

I will not tidy this up further than it deserves, because the honest position is uncomfortable. Paul does not stop to add the exception, and I cannot pretend he wrote one. What I can say is who he has in view: people who grind others down, not people who have stopped letting themselves be ground. If you left, and you still lie awake wondering whether you are the unforgiving one Paul had in mind, the very fact that the question keeps you up at night is fairly good evidence it is not you.

A few verses on from the list comes a pair of sentences I find harder to sit with than any of the eighteen faults. Everyone who wants to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, and evil men and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived (2 Timothy 3:12 to 13). Not hold on, it will pass. Not wait for the tide to turn. Paul tells Timothy to expect the slope to keep going down, and to expect that living rightly halfway down it will cost him something rather than buy him an exemption.

More nights than I want to admit, I have wanted somebody to tell me these particular terrible times are nearly finished. That we are close to the turn. Paul will not say it, and I have stopped waiting for him to.

Here is what stopped me resenting him for it. Paul is not withholding a comfort he is quietly enjoying himself. Read to the end of the letter and he says his own departure has come, that he is already being poured out, and that at his first defence nobody stood with him and everyone deserted him (2 Timothy 4:6, 4:16). He is not getting his turn either. Tradition says he never walked out of that custody, and whether or not you trust the tradition, the letter reads like a man who does not expect to. So the person telling Timothy the age will not improve is a man writing from inside the part of it that did not improve for him. That is not a slogan. It is a man refusing to promise his friend something he is not being given himself, which is a rarer kind of love than the one I keep asking for.

Wedged between unforgiving and without self-control sits a word most readers skim straight past: slanderers. In Greek it is diaboloi, plural of diabolos, the very word the New Testament uses elsewhere for the devil himself. I want to be careful here, because it does not mean every gossip has turned satanic. The word simply means one who throws accusations, one who slanders. But once you have seen the overlap you cannot quite unsee it.

The accuser’s defining work in scripture is exactly that: throwing charges. Revelation names him the accuser of our brothers, the one who accuses them before God day and night (Revelation 12:10). So when Paul tucks slanderers in among the ordinary, unremarkable-sounding faults, he has quietly put something with a very old pedigree next to unthankful and headstrong, and left it there without comment.

What it costs me is this. Every time I pass on a story I have not checked, every time I let a rumour do the job my own courage should have done to somebody’s face, I am reaching for the oldest tool in the drawer. And slander almost never announces itself. It arrives dressed as concern, as a prayer request, as “I just think you should know”. Every one of those disguises worked on me for years, and if I am honest a couple of them still would.

The first time I read disobedient to parents I heard a teenager rolling their eyes and slamming a bedroom door. That is a comfortable and thoroughly modern way to hear it. In the world Timothy served there was no pension, no council-run care home, no state safety net for the old. You were cared for in your last years by the children you had raised, and by nobody else. So a child who broke that duty was not being cheeky. They were pulling out the load-bearing wall of the only welfare system their parents would ever have.

I am not guessing at how seriously Paul took this, because he had already spelled it out to the same young man in the earlier letter. Children and grandchildren, he said, should learn first to show godliness towards their own family and to repay their parents, since that is what pleases God (1 Timothy 5:4). Then, a few lines later, the sentence that still makes me flinch: anyone who does not provide for his own household has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever (1 Timothy 5:8).

Denied. The same verb that closes our passage, where people hold a form of godliness and deny its power. Paul is not being rhetorical. In his world you could stand in the meeting, say the creed correctly, and leave your own mother to go hungry three streets away, and Paul’s verdict on that man was not “needs to work on his priorities”. It was that he had denied the thing he claimed. Which is why disobedient to parents is sitting in this list at all, and why it reads to me now less like a complaint about manners and more like a warning of quiet collapse in the only safety net most families had.

• 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.