Perilous Times

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What we see now

Paul gave a list much like this one for the pagan world of his own day (Romans 1:29-31), and he expected Timothy to meet such people in the church (2 Timothy 3:5-6). Every age has had them. What many believers notice now is the scale, and the change in what is praised: traits a culture once called vices are now sold as virtues.

Some of the marks can even be measured. In 2023 the United States Surgeon General declared loneliness and isolation an epidemic, reporting that about half of American adults experience loneliness: a world "without natural affection" in an age of constant connection. In 2021 Gallup reported that membership of a church, synagogue or mosque had fallen below half of Americans for the first time in its eight decades of asking, to 47%, from 70% in 1999. And in 2013 the word of the year chosen by Oxford Dictionaries was "selfie".

None of this sets a date, and none of it should make us proud. The list in 2 Timothy 3 describes the human heart without God, which is why it reads like the headlines and, on an honest day, like our own hearts too.

From such turn away: how to stand

Paul's instruction is short: "from such turn away" (2 Timothy 3:5). He does not tell Timothy to rage at the culture or to despair of it. He tells him to keep his distance from the pattern, and to keep going in what he had learned: "But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of" (2 Timothy 3:14), because "All scripture is given by inspiration of God" (2 Timothy 3:16).

In the parable of the ten virgins, all ten carried lamps, and only five had oil (Matthew 25:1-13). A form of godliness is a lamp without oil. The answer to each mark on the list is the life of the Spirit, kept day by day.