1 ① Be quite sure that there will be difficult times in the last days. 2People will become selfish, lovers of money, boastful, conceited, gossips, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy. 3They will be unable to love and to forgive; they will be slanderers, without self-control, cruel, enemies of good, 4traitors, shameless, full of pride, more in love with pleasure than with God. 5They will keep the appearance of piety, while rejecting its demands. Keep away from such people.
6Of the same kind are those who enter houses and captivate weak women, full of sins, swayed by all kinds of passion, 7who are always learning but never grasping knowledge of the truth. 8These people of corrupt mind and false faith oppose the truth just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses. 9Yet they may not go very far, for their folly will be clear to all, as in the case of those two.
10You, instead, have closely followed my teaching, my way of life, my projects, faith, patience, love, endurance, 11persecutions and sufferings. You know what happened to me at Antioch, Iconium and Lystra. How many trials I had to bear! Yet the Lord rescued me from them all. 12All who want to serve God in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, 13while evil persons and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.
14As for you, continue with what you have learned and what has been entrusted to you, knowing from whom you received it. 15Besides, you have known the Scriptures from childhood; they will give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, refuting error, for correcting and training in Christian life. 17Through Scripture the man of God is made expert and thoroughly equipped for every good work.
- 2 Tim 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 meditation 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; before 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 necessarily 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.
