1 Be quite sure that there will be difficult times in the last days.
2 People will become selfish, lovers of money, boastful, conceited, gossips, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy.
3 They will be unable to love and to forgive; they will be slanderers, without self-control, cruel, enemies of good,
4 traitors, shame less, full of pride, more in love with pleasure than with God.
5 They will keep the appearance of piety, while rejecting its demands. Keep away from such people.
6 Of the same kind are those who enter houses and captivate weak wo men, full of sins, swayed by all kinds of passion,
7 who are always learning but never grasping knowledge of the truth.
8 These people of corrupt mind and false faith oppose the truth just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses.
9 Yet they may not go very far, for their folly will be clear to all, as in the case of those two.
10 You, instead, have close ly followed my teaching, my way of life, my projects, faith, patience, love, endurance,
11 persecutions and sufferings. You know what hap pened to me at Antioch, Ico nium and Lystra. How many trials I had to bear! Yet the Lord res cued me from them all.
12 All who want to serve God in Christ Jesus will be persecuted,
13 while evil persons and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.
14 As for you, continue with what you have learned and what has been entrusted to you, knowing from whom you received it.
15 Besides, you have known the Scriptures from child hood; they will give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
16 All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, refuting error, for correcting and training in Christian life.
17 Through Scripture the man of God is made expert and thoroughly equipped for every good work.
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Comments 2 Letter to Timothy, Chapter 3
• 3.1 In the last days (v. 1): see 1 Tim 4:1. Even the presence of evil in the Church should not surprise us.
The paragraph 14-17 gives us in a few words a full message on biblical meditation: the Scriptures will give you wisdom (v. 15). Biblical medi tation is the best means of making faith mature (15-17). When these lines were written Scripture was essentially the Old Testament, but already the Church possessed and considered as Scripture several Gospels and some of Paul’s letters.
Just before the mention of Scripture we read: Continue with what you have learned – knowing from whom you received it. “Tradition” means precisely what we receive from our elders. The reading of the Bible is inseparable from the “Tradition of the Apostles,” which is the “Tradition of the Church,” and it is a way of understanding the Bible, just as Jesus immediately after his resurrection opened to his apostles a new way of reading salvation history. This tradition is the second support of faith.
All Scripture is inspired by God (v. 16) and there we look for a message from God to his people rather than an occasion for personal speculation. The same Spirit that directs the Church has equally inspired the biblical authors.
For many years, we spoke of the ”inspiration” of the Bible, not so much to encourage the reading of it in the family or community, but to affirm the fact of it being without error. It was also because some people saw contradictions between Bible and science. These problems have partly disappeared. Each book is as the human authors wrote it, reflecting their culture and their limitations (before the coming of Christ, faith had not attained full maturity; be fore rational science, people could not express themselves according to scientific views). The entire book is also from God and every text is part of a definitive message. It is there we find the truth of God, and not in the exactitude of details and literary form, which we ne ces sarily must adapt to our modern language.
Above all we must remember that the Word of God is the normal nourishment of faith. It is not only useful for teaching: Bible reading has the value of a sacrament for the faithful. No preaching, no catechism even though “biblical” can replace the frequent meditative reading of the word of God for the development of faith.