Whoa! This verse is something else, isn’t it? Paul does
something that would have landed him in court today. He named names: Hymenaeus
and Alexander. These two men had sailed straight into the rocks. Their faith was
shipwrecked because they had rejected it. It is very likely that these men were
the ones responsible for the fables and genealogies mentioned before. These
guys were not just wasting time; they were leading people astray. But Paul had
a solution: “I delivered them to Satan.” Wow! Now you may have wanted to tell
someone to go to the devil before, but this is way beyond that. Paul said, “I
personally delivered them.”
Don’t take this literally. He didn’t load them onto donkeys
and drive them there. Nor did he kill them. How did he do it? Church
discipline. This is the same apostle who wrote to the church in Thessalonica
telling them to discipline the troublemakers there. Remember what he said? Do
not keep company with them. Isolate them from the church so that they will be
taken out of the protective fellowship of the church. The purpose of this is so
that they will recognize their sin and return to the true faith. He said the
same thing in 1 Corinthians 5. He commanded the church to deliver a sexually
immoral man to Satan “for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be
saved.” Paul’s indication is that in doing this, physical illness may be
involved as well as guilt and shame. Too often, we ignore this fact that God
can use physical ailments to discipline His people. Paul said that was the
issue in 1 Corinthians 11 when the church was not approaching the Lord’s Supper
in the right spirit – many were asleep, he said. That is code for dead. I
listened to a pastor recently tell a story about a member of his church who
shook his finger in the face of one of the church’s ministers “telling him off.”
The next week, he cut that very finger off with a saw. Coincidence? Probably
not!
Let me pause here a second and remind you of something that
I say over and over again to people who are going through difficult times. Not
all difficulties and illnesses are God disciplining His people. We get sick and
have rough situations confront us often because we live in a sin-filled world.
We are a fallen people. However, sometimes God uses these things to discipline
us. Hebrews 12:6 tells us that God disciplines those He loves, and when He
does, He lets us know that He is disciplining us. What good is it for a parent
to spank a child or put them in time out and not tell them the reason? That
would just be mean. So if you begin to sense that your difficulties are God’s
discipline, ask Him. He will tell you.
For Hymenaeus and Alexander, the goal is that they would
learn not to blaspheme God. They needed to stop insulting God through words and
deeds. I often talk about people playing games with God. By that I mean several
things: pretending to be something they are not; saying one thing and doing
another; refusing to take seriously the calling God has placed on our lives. We
have to learn that God means business, and we must be about His business. What
is that business? Saving sinners. How are we going to do that? By proclaiming
the good news of salvation to the lost. When is that going to happen? When
Christians are being taught the Word of God seriously, take its message to
heart, and begin to make disciples.
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