Paul does go on to speak of a number of areas in which we are to be faithful. One is in correctly handling the mysteries of God, which is the Gospel, mentioned in verse 1. When Paul speaks of mysteries here, he is not speaking of mysteries in the same sense as the Greek mysteries. The Greeks had these religions that were called “mysteries” because the things that the worshipers did and believed were hidden from everybody else. You had to be initiated before you learned them. He is not talking about mysteries in that sense. Rather, he is talking about that which the mind of man would never have imagined if left to itself, but which God has revealed in the Gospel. That is the mystery or the secret things of God.
Paul says that if you are going to be faithful, one way in which you have to be faithful is with those mysteries. Do not play around with the Gospel. Do not be cute. Do not try to reinterpret it in some way because you think it might make Christian truth a little more palatable to your generation. Be faithful and deliver that in the same way it was delivered to you. Paul even uses those words in 1 Corinthians 15 when he is talking about the resurrection. He said that he delivered unto them the same thing that he himself received. He then spells out the Gospel, talking about how Jesus was buried, and died, and rose again on the third day, and how there were many witnesses. That is the Gospel, the secret things of God, and he did not change it.
Another thing he talks about is waiting for God to bring the blessing. When Jesus comes, He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness. You have to be willing to let God work at His own speed in His own time, as He is most certainly going to do. From our end, we get restless. We say, “Well, He’s not moving fast enough. Why does God move so slowly?” But God works on His timetable, not ours. And faithfulness is part of allowing God to work how and when He chooses.
In verses 6 and 7, we also learn that faithfulness is not going beyond what is written. What is Paul talking about when he says that? Where is this written? Why, for him it was in the pages of the Old Testament. For us it is both the Old and New Testaments. Paul is instructing us not to go beyond what God says. We need to hear that because we are so inclined to break that admonition. We read it, and say, “Yes, but it’s so dull.” Or we say, “Yes, but it’s so irrelevant. That’s not where people are today. People don’t want to know about the ministry. People don’t want to know about the Bible. People don’t want to know about faithfulness. They want you to speak to them where they’re at.”
The answer to that, of course, is that the Gospel is relevant. It does speak to people where they are. If you start with where you think people are and you change the Word of God in order to get there, you have lost it all. Paul is speaking a profound word to our time when he says, “Do not go beyond what is written.”
There is another way we go beyond what is written. We read the Bible, and we come to a great principle, for example, church discipline, since that is what Paul is going to talk about in the very next chapter. There must be discipline in the church, and so we get an idea how that should be done. We say that as we search the Scripture, it should be exercised through the authorities in the church. So then, those authorities begin to carry out church discipline, and they might do it very well. But then they can get carried away with themselves. They conclude, “Discipline is such a good thing. Let’s really be careful to discipline people and help them live as they should.”
