awaiting the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ;
Paul has just told servants, wives, young men and older believers how to live. Now he anchors all of it in something they are watching for. The verse sets the Christian between two great moments: one already past, one still ahead. It raises two questions. What are we waiting for, and who is the Person named here?
Verse 13 leans on the verse before it. Grace has already shown itself; the glory has not. One writer sets the whole passage in that gap, and calls it the place where real Christianity shows itself.
So there are two appearings: grace has appeared, and the glory of our blessed Lord will appear. Between these two appearings, those who have been brought into the possession of grace are to display true and practical Christianity. Without doubt the appearing of grace began when our Lord became man. It was seen in the whole of His life... it was declared at the cross... and it has continued ever since in the preaching of the good news.
In the original, one article covers both the hope and the appearing of the glory. So commentators treat them as joined but not identical. The first satisfies the heart. The second clears the world of evil.
The one article covering the two objects links them together. It does not make them identical. It joins them here on purpose, to give one combined outlook. "The blessed hope" is the only thing that can satisfy the heart. It means being in the presence of Christ on high, changed at His coming into His likeness, and with Him for ever. "The appearing of the" divine "glory" belongs with it, and follows at the right time. It is the display of divine power, and our renewed souls cannot help longing for it, for it shuts out all moral and physical evil and every crafty work of Satan.
The second of the two is not good news for everyone.
"That blessed hope" is the coming of the Lord Jesus for His saints, and so it is unmixed blessing. "The appearing of the glory of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ" is His later showing to all the world in power and great glory. To many this will be blessing; to many others solemn judgment.
Commentators differ on how far apart the two are. Some read "our blessed hope" as Christ coming for His people, separate from His public appearing. Others reply that this coming is not the theme of the letters to Timothy and Titus, where the appearing is the goal. Even so, they allow that a hint of it may lie in the phrase.
The wording of the phrase carries the weight of who is coming.
The words "our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ" are arranged in the original so that they may, and beyond question do, refer to the same Person. It is not God and, separately, the Saviour Jesus Christ. The One who will appear in glory is our great God as well as our Saviour Jesus Christ. What a display of the dignity of His person — yes, of His Deity! And what a glorious event we are waiting for!
Kelly explains why the title "great God" stands here. It keeps us from ever forgetting what He is in Himself. He emptied Himself to become a servant and went down to the death of the cross.
A hope is not decoration. What a person looks at shapes what a person becomes.
The object before us is what forms our character. The Christian's object is the Lord in glory... The essential thing for the salvation of the soul is certainly Christ and His work for us, received by faith. But if a believer lacks the true hope, then even with that, the gap left can never be repaired.
This hope reaches ordinary working lives. One writer pictures a rough man from Crete after grace has changed him.
Here is a man from Crete who has been converted. This wild beast of a man is fully tamed. He now plods on serving his master in a sober, upright and godly way. But suppose he had nothing to look forward to! Life might then look very drab to him. Grace teaches him to lift up his eyes and look for the glory that is coming... That glory will be the fulfilment of all the hopes grace has awakened.
- Grace appeared. The first appearing is behind us — seen in Christ's life, declared at the cross, still preached today.
- Grace teaches. Once we receive it, grace trains us to live in a sober, upright and godly way.
- Grace waits. It fixes one object before us: Christ Himself, the blessed hope, and the glory that follows.
- Grace names Him. The One we wait for is our great God and our Saviour — one Person, not two.
- Grace forms us. What we look for is what we become. Life with nothing ahead turns drab. The coming glory tames and steadies the most unlikely man.
who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all lawlessness, and purify to himself a peculiar people, zealous for good works.
Titus 2:14 closes a passage about how grace trains believers to live. It roots that training in one act: the Saviour who is coming in glory is the One who gave Himself for us. The verse then names what that gift was for — freedom from lawlessness, a people who belong to Him, and lives eager for good.
Before the verse says anything about our conduct, it says what Christ gave. William Kelly draws out how far that gift reaches, and why it leaves no ground for boasting:
We have no claim and no merit. We stand by nothing and for nothing but the Saviour. He did not give this or that only, nor even all the other precious things which He alone could give. He gave what is beyond all price: "Who gave Himself for us." God the Father had His own blessed part in that priceless gift. He knew all, and He gave Him and sent Him.
That gift is presented here as the engine of a holy life, not merely as a fact to believe:
How touching is the motive to holiness which is presented in the closing verse of our passage! ... Here we have the end of redemption in the practical walk of the believer in this world. But what can equal the motive that is presented in the declaration, "Who gave himself for us"?
Older translations say "iniquity" here. The sense is lawlessness: living by your own will. Edward Dennett points to a side of Christ's death that is easy to miss:
This side of the death of Christ is well worth noticing. The point here is not that He bore our sins in His own body on the tree, though He certainly did that on the cross. The point is that He would redeem us from all "lawlessness," from all self-pleasing and doing our own will. He would also have us for Himself: a cleansed people, His own possession, marked out by zeal for good works, going about doing good, just as He Himself did.
Redemption here is not release into independence. It is a transfer:
Redemption from all iniquity includes the wilful, unrestrained state we are in by nature. This is worth noticing, because it makes the contrast even sharper. He redeemed us from lawlessness to bring us under the blessed yoke of the Lord Jesus, and to purify us for Himself.
Older translations call us "a peculiar people." The history of that word shows what it means:
The Hebrew word means "to surround on all sides," and so "to gather together, set apart, reserve, make one's own." Used of property, it means the private treasure a person has gained and holds as his own, as opposed to what he shares with others... The word "peculiar" comes from the Latin peculium, which carries much the same force. It was used of the private purse a member of a household could build up and keep for himself, apart from what had to go to the good of the family as a whole.
Being His own has nothing to do with being odd:
Let us take care to make this real in our hearts. His grace wants a people for His own possession — not people who are peculiar in words or manner, habit or feeling, but people He can have and delight in as His own. How wonderful that He should care to have us at all, or make so much of such a possession!
The verse does not stop at cleansing. It ends with energy directed outward:
It is not enough to be set free from doing evil. We are to be keen in chasing what is good, and not only in theory but in practice. We are not only to do good works, but to do them with zeal... Once a liar, an evil wild beast, a lazy glutton; now redeemed from lawlessness, purified before God, full of zeal for good works. What a transformation!
Zeal is not the same as constant busyness:
There is no greater trap today than excessive activity, in which the soul often loses all communion, and so all power. Even so, we should never be careless about works that are according to the mind of God.
Because He gave Himself, He holds a claim on us that nobody else can match:
In this way He has established a claim on us — a claim of love — that we should live for His pleasure... No one has such a claim on us as Christ. As someone has asked, "Who in this world, the nearest or dearest, ever gave himself for you?" Living for His pleasure will set us free from all lawlessness.
- The gift — He gave not something He owned but Himself. That leaves no room for our merit or boasting.
- The freedom — He redeems us from lawlessness itself: self-pleasing and doing our own will, not only from the penalty of sins.
- The exchange — Freedom from our own will means coming under the yoke of the Lord Jesus — a blessed yoke, not a burden.
- The possession — "Peculiar" means privately treasured. He keeps us for Himself and delights in us. It never meant odd manners or speech.
- The proof — Cleansing is only half. He looks for eager, practical good — real zeal, but never busyness that costs us communion with Him.