1 Timothy 1:11

Note

Paul has left Timothy in Ephesus to stop certain men from teaching a different doctrine. Having said whom the law is for, he names the measure by which all such teaching is judged: the gospel that was entrusted to him.

Some at Ephesus had turned to myths and endless genealogies. "They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not understand what they are saying" (1 Timothy 1:7). Paul agrees that the law is good if it is used legitimately, but says it is made not for the righteous but for the lawless, and he ends a long list of sins with "anyone else who is averse to sound teaching" (1 Timothy 1:10). This verse completes that sentence: sound teaching is teaching that agrees with the gospel. Then Paul tells his own story. He was "a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a violent man" (1 Timothy 1:13), and he was shown mercy, living proof of the saying "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners" (1 Timothy 1:15).

euangelion (εὐαγγέλιον) is the object of the preposition κατά, "according to": the gospel is the standard against which teaching is measured. Two genitives follow. "Of the glory" (τῆς δόξης) says what the gospel is about; "of the blessed God" says whose glory it is. The last words, ὃ ἐπιστεύθην ἐγώ, "with which I was entrusted, I", put an emphatic "I" at the end of the sentence. The very man who had blasphemed was given this gospel to carry.

The KJV, followed by the BSB, makes the first genitive an adjective, "the glorious gospel". The LSV keeps it as a noun: "the good news of the glory of the blessed God". Both are fair, but the literal form shows more of what Paul says. The gospel does not merely have a glorious air; its subject is God's glory, as in "the gospel of the glory of Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:4). And "blessed" here is makarios (μακάριος), the word of the Beatitudes, "Blessed are the poor in spirit" (Matthew 5:3), not eulogētos (εὐλογητός), the "blessed" that means praised. In the New Testament makarios is used of God only here and at 1 Timothy 6:15. It speaks of God's own fullness of joy: the gospel comes from a God who lacks nothing.

Wesley comments that this glorious gospel, far from making the law void, establishes it, as Paul says in Romans 3:31 Wesley. Matthew Henry writes that "The design of the gospel is answered, when sinners, through repentance towards God and faith in Jesus Christ, are brought to exercise Christian love" Matthew Henry.

The verse calls the gospel the news of God's glory, and the first example it gives of that glory is mercy shown to a man who called himself the worst of sinners. Paul says that in him Christ gave "an example to those who would believe in Him for eternal life" (1 Timothy 1:16), and that includes anyone who thinks they have gone too far.