Christian, you are a runner in a race. The race you are running is the most important race you will ever run. You have everything to lose if you quit, but everything and more if you finish. Therefore, run to win. Run together to the end. Keep your eyes on the prize and run with confidence. Run without any burdens and discard entanglements. Finally, look to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of your faith.

One of the many lessons I learned from my cross-country ski coach was to keep my head up and look ahead when skiing, particularly when skiing up a steep hill. Going up a sharp incline is hard work, and it is natural to look down when you are tired. The problem, however, is that looking down leads you to focus on the pain and impedes your forward movement. By looking up and ahead, you are in a better mental and physical position to drive yourself forward up the hill.
In a similar fashion, when we run the Christian race, we need to look up and ahead to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith (Heb. 12:2). By encouraging us to look to Jesus, the author of Hebrews is not saying that we should merely think of Jesus, but that we ought to grasp the practical significance of who Jesus is and what he has done.
Specifically, what should we think about when we think about Jesus? When we look to Jesus, what should we see?
Our Trailblazer
First, we should see our trailblazer. The author of Hebrews says that Jesus is the founder of our faith. The word “founder,” which is also used in Hebrews 2:10, may be translated as “pioneer.” The context in Hebrews strongly suggests the idea of a pioneer, who lays down a path for others to follow. In some of the cross-country ski races I attended, the racetrack had not been set by the morning of the race. This might have happened because of a lack of equipment or because of a heavy snowfall the night before. In such situations, it would be a serious handicap to race at the front because you would have to blaze the trail yourself, which would require a lot more effort. To make the race fair, two or three non-racing skiers would ski the course early in the morning to lay the track for everyone else to follow. They would be the trail blazers.
Similarly, Jesus is our trail blazer who has paved the way to God for us.
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We cannot rank the divine persons; they are distinct from each other but not divided from each other. They are not three parts that add up to a single godhead. John Calvin understood the name God to be “the one simple essence, comprehending three persons.” In our chaos we can come to a God in whom, as the Athanasian Creed puts it, “the divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.” Such as the one is, so are the three. “None in this Trinity is before or after, none is greater or smaller” (arts. 6, 7, 25). We can trust one God in three equal, co-eternal persons.

One of the best questions we can ask is also the most challenging: “What is God?”[1] As the Church has searched Scripture for answers it has consistently used a surprising word to describe the divine Being: simplicity. God is simple—not in the sense of “easily understood” but as “being free from division into parts, and therefore from compositeness.”[2] God is one (Deut. 6:4); He is both unique and indivisible.
The word simplicity, like trinity, is not found in the Bible, but reformed confessions affirm that the doctrine is biblical. The Lutheran Augsburg Confession states that “there is one Divine Essence…which is God: eternal, without body, without parts” (art. 1). Dutch Reformed believers confess the same thing: “There is a single and simple spiritual being, whom we call God” (Belgic Confession, art. 1). In the Church of England divine simplicity is taught in the Thirty-nine Articles, “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions” (art. 1). The Westminster Assembly—which convened to modify these articles but then chose to replace them—retained the exact language of Anglicanism (Westminster Shorter Catechism 2.1), as did English Baptists (London Baptist Confession, 2.1). These confessions draw on the testimony of church fathers like Augustine, medieval theologians like Aquinas, and reformers like Calvin, Melanchthon, and Zwingli.
Divine simplicity is firmly embedded in the reformed confessional tradition. If we understand simplicity, we may come to join the doctors of the church in treasuring this doctrine.
What Is Divine Simplicity?
When God revealed Himself to Moses at the burning bush He identified Himself as being—the “I am” (Ex. 3:14). Unlike everyone else, He is not from somewhere or the fruit of ancestors. He is not even a species within a genus. Instead, He is the God who is, “the ultimate principle and …category of all things.”[3] Herman Bavinck wrote, “God is the real, the true being, the fullness of being, the sum total of all reality and perfection, the totality of being, from which all other being owes its existence.”[4] God is truly “all and in all” (Col. 3:11). Drawing from texts like these, divine simplicity maintains that in God there is “no composition, no contradiction, no tension, no process.”[5]
No Composition
God is not a sum of parts, as we are, made up of body and soul, atoms and neurons, past, present, and future. God’s attributes do not add up to what He is. As a child I wore out a book that described a little boy’s attributes—quickness, loudness, bravery—that made him who he was. Here is the climax of the book: “Put it all together and you’ve got me!” That’s true for us. It is untrue for God. Each of God’s attributes is identical with Himself and His other perfections because each is infinite.
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My writing of this article is, at least in part, to help encourage mature and godly women within Christendom to effectively work so that this passage is no longer blasphemed and so that the Kingdom of Christ grows in ways that please the Father. But I am also writing because I want everyone in Christ’s Church to see how vital these seven commands are to Him. He did not threaten mild divine annoyance, quenching of the Spirit, or even heresy if these commands were not obeyed and joyfully taught.

A TIME FOR A BIT OF BREVITY AND FRANKNESS
As I near my fortieth birthday and watch the collapse of the American empire, I am resolved to speak plainly about what the Bible says. No tricks. No gimmicks. No apologies. Just plain and honest truth from the Word of God frankly delivered.
I am resolved towards this because it is in such short supply these days. If honesty and truth were our nitrogen and oxygen, this entire country would be left suffocating. This is because the Church abandoned her post a long time ago. Pastors traded in their pulpits and posts for skinny jeans, pop psychology, and man buns. Being relevant has become more important than righteousness. The approval of carnal men has become more captivating than the approval of God. And, instead of heralding the unvarnished Word in a world bereft of truth, many have adopted a slimy sort of worm-tonguedness known as “winsomeness” that prefers to keep feelings intact while souls barrel on towards hell.
That kind of charade has run its course and has been found lacking. What the Church and society at large need are not more marble-mouthed, weak-kneed, spineless, jellyfish pastors who are more afraid of offending the congregation than they are of offending God. We need men with chests. Men who will wrestle with the text, pour over it with fear and trembling, and humbly declare it as the Father’s God-breathed revelation for a world lost in heresy and sin.
We need this today because God is good, and the Word He authored is also good. We may not always like what it says; in the same way, a child does not always like the taste of medicine, but what goes down bitter will produce something sweet.
That is certainly true of today’s passage, which not only communicates substantial hard-to-swallow-truth but also chafes and irritates the soul of the modern man worse than a week-long diaper rash without a tube of Bordeaux’s butt paste. What we will see, however, is that these texts are not only true but good for us, so that anyone who ignores what they are teaching does so at their great peril.
With that, let us dive into our text.
THE TEXT
The older women likewise, that they be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things— 4 that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, 5 to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed. – Titus 2:3-5 NKJV
A WORD ABOUT “BLASPHEMY”
According to Paul, the Word of God can be blasphemed, which is a word on the level of damnable cursing. In the Old Testament, when a fella or Felicia blasphemed God, they were immediately put to death by the community since blasphemy was not only considered a social poison but also an affront to the awesome holiness of God (See Leviticus 24:16).
When you blaspheme, you are violently cursing the name of God. You are shaking a middle finger at the heavens. You are looking out to your sovereign Lord with demonic disdain and malevolent boldness, saying: “may you be damned.” And in your hubris, you deserve to die. You deserve to die because, in your madness, you believed it possible to ascend the heights with Satan, asserting your stupid and unlearned opinion over and above the Most High. And if the most glorious and beautiful angel ever created will be decisively cast into the lake of fire for his act of pride, how much more will a worm like you? Like the smallest ant cursing the most prominent man, you deserve to be pressed into the ground, stoned by the mobs, buried beneath a crushing weight of earth because you believed you could bring an infinite, Holy, matchlessly pure, and maximal in all splendor and glory, God, (yeah that God) down to your pitiful and senseless level, putting him securely under your wretched feet. Death would be too good for a fool speaking this way to the Almighty.
Similarly, let us contemplate the fate awaiting the one who deliberately or even ignorantly blasphemes the Word of God. The Word is His divine revelation, representing all He loves and everything He has ordained for us to know. Indeed, to assail the Bible is to wage an assault on the very nature of God Himself. How so?
First, the Bible is the sacred repository of God’s divine revelation, carrying within its pages the timeless wisdom, divine truths, and majestic narratives inspired by the Creator Himself. Its words, divinely breathed, resound with the authority and essence of the Almighty.
When one launches an attack on the Bible, they seek to undermine the very foundation of God’s self-disclosure to humanity. They cast doubt upon the authenticity, reliability, and divine inspiration of the Scriptures. In doing so, they are questioning God’s character and integrity, for He is the ultimate author behind the written Word.
Second, Paul uses a common phrase for the “Word of God” that is often used to describe Jesus Christ (See John 1:1). With this in view, blaspheming the word not only communicates cursings towards the Bible but also toward God’s Son, the Word made flesh (John 1:14).
Wouldn’t you think that the same God who fiercely prohibits blasphemy of His holy name also responds with unbridled fury when His sacred Word is slandered so grievously? Wouldn’t a sin like that provoke his Holy ire? Could He ignore such dastardly crimes when He is a just and righteous God? Of course not!
If it were not for Christ’s pleasures and mercy, this passage would hang over nearly every pulpit in America as a death sentence on the man (or woman – God forbid) who does not teach such things. What do I mean? In this passage, there are seven truths that older women are to teach younger women, so they do not blaspheme the Word of God. This means not teaching these truths to younger women, or teaching younger women to live in opposition to them, would amount to nothing less than the charge of blasphemy.
And, perhaps you are wondering, why is God so intense about His designs for womanhood? Why does He call it blasphemy if an older woman does not teach a younger woman, or if a younger woman does not love her husband and submit to his leadership? Why is that in a very exceptional category of sin? And the answer of course is that God loves womanhood. He loves His design so tremendously, that to tamper with it, would be to blaspheme His Word and His vision.
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