Christian hope is not a virtue that originates with us. We don’t muster it up. Hope in us begins with the solid, sure, unfailing promises of the never-lying God. Christian hope begins with God and what he says. Then, hope in us swells to receive and trust and look to what God says is coming for us in Christ.

We are living in times when cynicism is not only acceptable, but in some places, it is expected. It is mainstream, even admired. By cynicism, I mean the general disinclination to trust others, especially purported authorities, or the inclination to believe the worst in others and of the world altogether. And it increasingly is the air we breathe.

This mood of cynicism didn’t appear out of nowhere. It is the result of secularism, the pretense that there is no God, or at least that he is off limits in public discourse and polite company. Secularism offers no firm hope, and soon produces cynicism, and cynicism begins to pick at the basic pillars and long-standing givens of human life and civilization, one after another.

End to Our Cynicism

So secularism breeds cynicism. And cynicism does not breed productive action. Cynicism breeds laziness. It did on the island of Crete in Titus’s day, and it does in our day. And this morning we turn for the first time to Paul’s letter to Titus, which he writes to counter the unbelief, and laziness, of Crete and its false teachers.

Paul writes with a countercultural message — just as countercultural today as it was then: Hope. Genuine hope, objective hope, hope that effects productive lives. In verse 2, he mentions the “hope of eternal life.” Then later, in 3:7, he uses the exact same phrase, “hope of eternal life.” And once more, at the heart of the letter, he refers to “our blessed hope” (2:13).

What cynicism gets right is that we are indeed living in a fallen world. Our world is not what it was in the beginning. Our race sinned. Sin entered in and remains. We are born into sin. And if there is no God, then there is indeed a lot to be cynical and hopeless about.

But this is precisely where we as Christians say, We hear you on your doctrine of sin (even if you don’t call it that). We believe that this world is messed up in many ways, and that there’s a lot to be critical of. And we believe that the story doesn’t end there. We believe in redemption. We believe in change. We believe in grace. We believe in Jesus. We have hope — genuine hope. We reject cynicism. We have hope.

How God Saves His Own

One reason that hope is so important in this letter is that the opposition Titus is facing is not hopeful, and not fruitful. The problem people in Crete do a lot of talking, and not a lot of practical good. They are “empty talkers and deceivers” (1:10) who “must be silenced” (1:11). And they are not just “liars” but “lazy” (1:12). “They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are . . . unfit for any good work” (1:16).

Verses 10–14, says one commentator, “give a portrait of lack of restraint, laziness, and opportunism, markers of either no work ethic or a diabolical one” (Yarbrough, Letters to Timothy and Titus, 39). We may not be so removed from first-century Crete as we would like to think.

In these next six weeks, until the Sunday before Christmas, we’ll be here together in these three short chapters in Titus. And as we’ll see this morning in the first four verses, this letter meets us where we are in 2020 in some surprising ways. Titus is a tract for our times, and a good fit for these six weeks leading up to Christmas.

Verses 1–4 we might call “the prelude,” and Paul packs more into these opening verses than he does anywhere else in his letters, save Romans. The whole letter is here in microcosm, and with it, a big-picture, clear, insightful summary of the Christian life, and how God saves his people, from eternity to eternity. So we get a taste of the whole letter, even as our focus is on verses 1–4. We will move with Paul from the distant past, to the recent past, to the present, to the near future, and to the distant future. So, let’s begin in the distant past.

1. The Father chose (in the distant past) a people to save.

Verses 1–2:

Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness, in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began.

We have two references to what we might call the distant past. Verse 2 mentions God the Father promising “before the ages began,” and verse 1 refers to his people as “God’s elect.” Elect means chosen. God chose his people. Their choosing him, though real and important, is not ultimate. His choosing of his people is decisive.

Seven times in the Gospels, Jesus refers to God’s people as his “elect” (Matthew 24:22, 24, 31; Mark 13:20, 22, 27; Luke 18:7). Paul does the same elsewhere (Romans 8:33; 11:7), as we saw in 2 Timothy 2:10: “I endure everything for the sake of the elect.” In Colossians 3:12, Paul refers to Christians as “God’s chosen ones,” just as Peter says to the church, “You are a chosen race” (1 Peter 2:9). In Romans 9:11, Paul explains “God’s purpose of election,” that it is foundationally his choice that constitutes his people, not ours — real and essential as our choice, or embrace, or faith in him is.

When did God’s choice happen? Paul says in Ephesians 1:4, “[God] chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world.” That is the distant past. As Titus 1:2 says, “before the ages began” — or literally, “before times eternal.” He promised — what? Eternal life. To whom? His elect.

What did this require? The end of verse 3 calls him “God our Savior.” He chose his people to save them from this age of sin and cynicism and fruitlessness. Twice in Titus, God the Father is said to be Savior (here and 2:10). And there are four other mentions of “Savior” as well, which leads to the next point.

So our story begins “before times eternal,” in the distant past. God chose a people, his elect. He appointed them to be saved, to be their Savior. But not God the Father alone.

2. The Son came (in the recent past) to save his people.

Now look at verses 3–4:

And at the proper time [God] manifested in his word through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by the command of God our Savior; To Titus, my true child in a common faith: Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior.

So we have “God our Savior” in verse 3, and we have “Christ Jesus our Savior” in verse 4. The Father and Son work together, and yet are distinct. Both are rightly called “Savior.” Father and Son work together in saving their people, but Father is not Son, and Son is not Father. The Father chose his people. And the Son became man, and lived in our world, and died in our place to save God’s people.

Titus 2:11–14, right at the heart of the letter, makes explicit what is implicit here:

• The Son came: “The grace of God has appeared” (2:11).
• And the Son gave himself for us, to secure us as his people: “Our great God and Savior Jesus Christ . . . gave himself for us to redeem us . . . and to purify for himself a people for his own possession” (2:13–14).

And Paul says that Christ came — the Father sent his Son — not a moment too early, or too late: “at the proper time” — literally, “in his own time.” Which is a priceless word for us in a world like ours, with sin and disappointments and loss and tragedy and sickness and pandemics. He does it in his own time, not ours. And God never gets the timing wrong. Like Gandalf, and far better, “He always arrives precisely when he means to.” From Christ’s first coming, to his second, and to our lives, God always works “at the proper time”:

• 1 Timothy 2:5–6, at Christ’s first coming: “There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time.”
• 1 Timothy 6:14–15, on Christ’s second coming: “the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he will display at the proper time.”

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