In the Apostle Paul’s continuation of his theme to his young protégé, he adds in 1st Timothy 2 that there is one God and one mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus. Simple enough, clear enough, not much needed for this Christianity to be clarified. Or, is there? Well, there shouldn’t be, but there is. There shouldn’t be because words mean something. There is because some are always looking for a way around the words when they refuse to take them at face value. Yet, we are persuaded that face value is precisely the way the Bible is intended to be taken. Of course, there is figurative language and poetic license found throughout Scripture, but, in the vast majority of instances, it simply says what it means and means what it says. For the Bible to be a book which seeks to disclose information, it must be intelligible. We may be sure the Holy Spirit, who inspired the Bible with such great clarity and frequency, addressed the issues that are most important in understandable terms. Such is the case in 1st Timothy 2. Jesus Christ, who is the Mediator between man and God, is the One and Only Mediator to the exclusion of any other would-be mediators. He was a Man, a Mediator, and a Ransom.
As a man, He was able to die. That’s why He came. As a Mediator, He was the “go-between”. The basis on which He mediated was via His own death which served as the payment for the sins of the world. The “world” we believe to be synonymous with the “all” in verse 5. “All” means everybody, none excluded. “All” is all in 2:5, and “all” is all in 2:6. Christ, in His ransom-paying debt to divine justice, was responsible for redeeming as much of humanity as Adam ruined in his sin and rebellion. And, how many were they? The entirety of the human race. No one escaped Adam’s imposition of death, and no one was omitted from Christ’s sacrificial death for their redemption. Adam alone was the singular individual through which the world was plunged into ruination, and Christ alone, referred to as the “last Adam” , was the singular individual through which the fallen world was redeemed.
Adam, the federal head of humanity, was held responsible, and it is thusly referred to as Adam’s transgression, in Romans 5. This is also why Christ alone is the only Mediator between God and man. God did not provide a half dozen Saviors from which we could choose as the one most appealing to us. Second Timothy is merely another of several unmistakable references that insist upon the exclusivity of salvation through Jesus Christ and Christ alone. After all, such exclusivity was never the Christian idea. It was God’s idea. Jesus Christ was sent by God the Father to be the One and Only Savior of the world.
CC 10 -14
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