Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book
This is a short letter. Three chapters, forty-six verses, and you can read the whole of it aloud in about a quarter of an hour. Do not let the size of it fool you. Paul and Titus had worked together on Crete, preaching from town to town across a long island, and small congregations had sprung up in their wake. Then Paul had to move on before the work was finished. So he left Titus behind, the way a builder leaves a trusted foreman on a site where the walls are standing and the roof is not yet on. Paul says so plainly in the fifth verse: the reason he left Titus in Crete was that he would set in order what was unfinished and appoint elders in every town. That single sentence is the occasion of the whole letter. Everything that follows is Paul putting into Titus’s hands what a young, scattered, leaderless set of congregations most needed, and doing it quickly, because the ship is waiting and the winter is coming. There were men on that island teaching for money and unsettling whole households. There were converts out of a culture with no memory of the God of Israel and no habits of holiness to draw on. There were households where masters and slaves, husbands and wives, older and younger, all sat down together in the same room to hear the Word read, and every one of them had to learn what the gospel looked like in an ordinary week. So Paul writes about elders, about false teachers, about how the older and younger of both sexes are to live, about how believers are to behave toward the civil authorities and toward outsiders, and about how to handle a man who will not stop quarreling. And under all of it he lays two great slabs of gospel, one in chapter two and one in chapter three, and both of them say the same thing: what God has done in grace is what makes a people good.
As you read, hold this: Left on a hard island to finish an unfinished work, Titus is told that the grace of God which appeared to save us is the same grace that trains us, so that sound doctrine and good works are never rivals but one life.
The name and what it means
The word that governs this letter is χάρις (charis), pronounced KHAH-riss (Strong’s G5485), and it means favour, kindness shown to someone who has no claim on it, a gift given freely and never earned. In ordinary Greek it was a warm and rather elegant word. It could mean gracefulness, the loveliness of a thing; it could mean a favour done for a friend; it could mean the thanks you owe for a favour received. It moved in the world of gift and gratitude, and there was no debt in it anywhere. That is the word the apostles seized on to describe what God has done in Jesus Christ, and Paul lays it down at both ends of this letter like a foundation stone at each corner. Grace to you, he says at the beginning. Grace be with all of you, he says at the end. And in the middle he tells us what grace has actually done.
Now here is the thing worth sitting with, because it is the hinge of the whole letter. In Titus 2:11-14 Paul says three things about grace in a single breath. Grace appeared, and the word he uses is the one you would use for the sun coming up over the sea or a light breaking on people who were lost in the dark. Grace brought salvation to everyone, which is to say it did the saving; we did not. And then, in the very next clause, grace instructs us. The Greek verb there (paideuousa) is the word for what you do with a child you are raising: you teach, you correct, you form, you take a small untrained creature and you train it up into someone who can stand. Grace does that. Grace is not only the pardon at the door; grace is the teacher inside the house.
Sit with that, because we so often set the two against each other. We are afraid that if we speak too warmly of grace, people will go slack, and so we hedge grace round with warnings. Or we are so glad of grace that we will not let anyone say a word about how we live. Paul does neither. He says grace saved us, freely, when there was nothing in us to commend us, and he says that the same grace is even now teaching us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions and to live sensible, upright, godly lives while we wait for our great God and Savior to appear again. In Titus, grace is not the opposite of effort. Grace is the teacher of it. Grace appears, and then grace instructs. Praise God that He did not save us and leave us where He found us.
The world of the book
Crete is a long island, about a hundred and sixty miles of it, lying across the southern mouth of the Aegean like a breakwater. It was old country. The Minoan palaces were already ancient ruins in Paul’s day, and the island had a reputation that went back centuries: a hundred cities, so Homer said, and men who could fight, sail, and lie. That last item was proverbial. The Greeks had actually coined a verb from the island’s name, and it meant to lie, to cheat, to play someone false. When Paul quotes one of their own prophets to the effect that Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons, he is not inventing a slur. He is picking up a saying that Cretans themselves had heard all their lives, and he uses it not to sneer but to explain why the correction on that island had to be sharp. He calls it a true testimony. Then, having said it, he tells Titus to rebuke them sharply so that they may be sound in the faith, which is the whole point. He is not writing off a people. He is trying to make them healthy.
The churches themselves were young and scattered. Not one great congregation in a capital city, but believers in town after town along the coast and up in the hill villages, with no settled leadership, no elders yet appointed, and no long habit of the faith to steady them. Into a gap like that the wrong sort of teacher walks easily, and some had. Paul says the trouble came especially from those of the circumcision, men pressing Jewish requirements on Gentile believers and filling the air with myths and endless genealogies, the kind of speculative religious talk that sounds deep and produces nothing. There was money in it, too. Paul says they were teaching things they ought not to teach for the sake of dishonest gain, and that they were upsetting whole households. Note that word: households. In a town with no church building, the household was the congregation. Ruin a household and you have ruined a church.
And you must understand what a household meant in the Greco-Roman world, or half of chapter two will pass you by. A household was not a private nuclear family behind a closed door. It was an economic unit and a social one: the head of the house, his wife, their children, often relatives, and the slaves who did the work of the place, everyone under one roof and under one man’s authority, and all of it visible to the neighbours. The honour of a household was public property. People knew whether your wife was respected, whether your young men were reckless, whether your slaves stole from the storeroom or could be trusted with the keys. Which means that for these Cretan believers, how they behaved at home was the most visible sermon they ever preached. That is exactly why Paul, three times in chapter two, ties conduct to the reputation of the message: so that the word of God will not be discredited, so that anyone who opposes us will have nothing bad to say, so that in every respect the teaching about God our Savior is adorned, made attractive, the way a setting shows off a jewel. He is not moralizing. He is telling a rough, gossiping island that the gospel will be read off the lives of the people who believe it.
One more thing, about the man holding this letter. Titus was a Greek, uncircumcised, and Paul had once taken him up to Jerusalem as a living test case. The question on the table was whether Gentiles had to become Jews in order to be saved, and Paul brought Titus into the room and refused to let anyone lay a knife to him. He was not compelled to be circumcised. That is not a footnote; that is a man whose own body had been the proof that we are saved by grace and not by law-keeping. Later, when the church at Corinth was at its most painful, it was Titus whom Paul sent, and it was Titus’s return with good news that lifted Paul out of despair, and Titus again who went back to handle the collection for the poor. So this is Paul’s trusted troubleshooter, a man sent where things are hardest. Crete was that kind of assignment.
The shape of the book
- The charge, the elders, and the Cretan problem (chapter 1). Paul opens with a greeting unusually weighted with doctrine (God who does not lie promised eternal life before time began), then gives Titus his commission: set in order what was left unfinished, and appoint elders in every town. There follows the list of what such a man must be, in his home first and then in his character and his grip on the faithful word, so that he can both teach sound doctrine and refute those who contradict it. Then the other half of the assignment, the men on the island who are upsetting households for money, and the sharp rebuke that is meant to make people healthy rather than to destroy them.
- Sound doctrine in every household, and the grace that trains us (chapter 2). Titus is to teach what accords with sound doctrine, and Paul goes person by person through a household: older men, older women (who are to teach what is good and train the younger women), young women, young men, and slaves, each with a short and pointed word. Then, having asked all of this, Paul tells us where the strength for it comes from, in the great sentence about the grace of God appearing, saving, training, and setting us waiting for the blessed hope, purified as a people of His own who are eager to do good.
- Gentleness toward all, the washing of rebirth, and the quarrels to walk away from (chapter 3). Believers are to be submissive to rulers, ready for every good work, slandering no one, gentle and considerate toward everyone, and Paul’s reason is that we ourselves were once foolish and enslaved, until the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared and He saved us, not by our righteous deeds but according to His mercy. So Titus is to insist on these things, that those who have believed will devote themselves to good works, and to steer clear of foolish controversies and genealogies and quarrels about the law, warning a divisive man once, then twice, and then having nothing more to do with him.
The one thread to carry
Carry this through the three chapters and you will not lose your way: what God has done in grace produces a people who are eager to do good. Never turn that around. The good works are never the ground on which God receives us; they are the fruit that grows because He has received us, and the evidence that something real happened. Paul is at pains to say both halves in the same passage, so that no one can pull them apart.
"For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to everyone. It instructs us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live sensible, upright, and godly lives in the present age, as we await the blessed hope and glorious appearance of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ. He gave Himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds." Titus 2:11–14 (BSB)
Look at the order there, because the order is everything. Grace appeared. Grace brought salvation. Grace instructs. He gave Himself. He redeemed. He purified for Himself a people. Every active verb belongs to God and to His Son, and the zeal for good deeds comes at the end, as the result. A people zealous for good works is not what buys the redemption; it is what the redemption was for. He gave Himself in order to have such a people. If that does not make you love Him, read it again slowly.
And then Paul says it a second time in chapter three, even more plainly, because he has just finished asking Cretan believers to be gentle and peaceable and considerate toward the very neighbours who slandered them, and he knows perfectly well that a demand like that will crush anyone who thinks he is earning something by it.
"But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not by the righteous deeds we had done, but according to His mercy, through the washing of new birth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. This is the Spirit He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by His grace, we would become heirs with the hope of eternal life." Titus 3:4–7 (BSB)
Not by the righteous deeds we had done. There it is, in a letter more concerned with good behaviour than almost any other in the New Testament, and Paul is the one who says it. He saved us according to His mercy. He washed us and made us new by His Spirit, and He poured that Spirit out abundantly, not in a trickle. He justified us by His grace, and He made us heirs, which is a word for people who inherit because of who their Father is and not because of what they have accomplished. That standing is not on loan and it is not on probation. It is a gift, and the God who does not lie made the promise before time began.
So read this little letter with both hands open. In one hand, hold the doctrine: God our Savior, Christ who gave Himself, mercy, washing, renewal, justification, inheritance, and the blessed hope of His glorious appearing. In the other hand, hold the ordinary week: honest work, a household running in peace, a tongue that slanders nobody, gentleness toward difficult people, a quarrel you decline to enter, and small acts of usefulness in your town so that nobody goes without. Titus will not let you drop either one. Learn the Word, let grace teach you as well as save you, and give thanks.