Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do. 1 Timothy 1:4
The enemy utilises a variety of means to destabilise and fracture Christ’s church. His more overt attacks upon the truth appear in the form of false doctrines such as a triune god or Sunday sacredness. Yet the serpent – who was more subtle than any beast of the field – often takes a less direct approach to great success.
In Paul’s day, men of the circumcision were ever putting forth ‘fables and endless genealogies’. These ‘fables’ or ‘myths’ were termed ‘Jewish fables’ in Paul’s letter to Titus (Titus 1:14). We are well aware that the Greeks had a pantheon of false gods and demigods which had various myths surrounding them. But we gather from Paul that the apostate Jews had also invented legends surrounding their God and His servants during the centuries of their apostasy and affiliation with heathenism.
Paul does not mention any of these myths by name, but he does say that the effect of these silly Jewish stories was that they ‘minister questions rather than godly edifying’. Rather than grounding and settling new converts, Paul observed that these fanciful tales called into question pillar truths of the apostolic faith. As described in Paul’s letter to Titus, these Jewish fables served to ‘turn men from the truth’.
In our modern age, the fables warned of by Paul abound. As did the Medici library, the Vatican vaults no doubt contain a rich treasury of tantalising myths kept in store as ‘learning against learning’ for the day when God sheds light on the world. For example, the revival of knowledge on ancient Hebrew cosmology is being counteracted by ancient Jewish fables about angels procreating with human women. These fables – no doubt believed by many Jews of old, such as Josephus – call into question pillar truths of Scripture. Gateway fables such as this open the door to a world of confusion found in ‘lost books’. As Satan tempted Eve by the idea that God had hidden certain knowledge from her, so tempts he us.
The Bible may contain obscure and mysterious utterances that we fail to find explicit explanations for, but it is a design of the enemy to carry us away by providing ‘answers’ to perceived gaps in the Biblical narrative. Satan is well pleased when we are chasing after his phantoms and quarrelling over his spurious inventions. We have an inexhaustible resource in the Bible. Its grand truths we have but barely scratched the surface of. May its boundless resource be our all-absorbing interest.
Christopher Sparks