God’s Word for You
2 Timothy 1:12 Until that Day
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Friday, June 5, 2026
12 and this is why I am suffering these things. But I am not ashamed, for I know the one whom I have believed, and I am sure that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that Day.
Paul was a minister of Christ, herald, apostle, and teacher, and so naturally he would suffer on account of the Gospel. But that didn’t mean he would give up his work, nor even be ashamed of what he did. And he wouldn’t let his suffering bring him shame even for his misery in prison. As one of our preachers has said:
“Paul suffered a great deal because of the gospel: beatings, imprisonment, shipwrecks, and ridicule. Finally he died for preaching Jesus as the Savior of sinners. Now Paul could have escaped all this by just not proclaiming the Gospel anymore, but he wasn’t about to do that. He knew there was no other way to salvation than through faith in Jesus, so he wasn’t about to stop proclaiming the good news. Paul loved his Savior. And he loved the Gospel which had made that Savior known to him personally. So he preached it everywhere. He writes in one of his letters, ‘I didn’t know anything among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified for the sins of the world’ (1 Corinthians 2:2). From the day Jesus called him to the day of his death Paul’s chief concern in life was the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
There was also the sense of comparing one’s own suffering for Paul and the sufferings of Christ. What Christ went through was infinitely more terrible, more unbearable, more painful, and finally on an infinitely greater scale than anything any of Christ’s workers and martyrs endures for him and for the Gospel. For who would Paul be dying for? For Christ. Who did Christ die for? For Paul, and for the sins of the whole world besides. But it is the first part of the answer that resonates the clearest and loudest and dearest. I will give my life for Christ because Christ gave his life for me, and for my mother and father, and for my dear wife, and for my brother and sister, and my sons and my daughter-in-law, and for all of the rest of the people in our world that I love so dearly.
Christ our Lord is the one we have believed. We have believed all of the things he said and continues to say through the Word, and we have believed in all his work, his atoning sacrifice for our sins, that has made us right with God and one with God once again. What was lost and ruined in the Garden was restored and mended on the cross.
Paul says that Christ also guards “what I have entrusted to him.” This word, paratheken (παραϑήκην), is a “deposit” (Latin, depositum), a precious item that is priceless. In just two verses this word (“the good deposit”) is going to be used for the content of the Gospel, which is the correct and pure doctrine of the Christian Church, deposited by Christ with Paul and with the other Apostles and passed down to other ministers such as Timothy (see also 1 Timothy 6:20). But here, this is a deposit left by Paul in the Lord’s hands, and this has to be the well-being of Paul’s eternal soul. As the 18th century Lutheran preacher Bengel put it so well: “Paul, with death immediately before him, had two deposits, one to be committed to the Lord, and another to Timothy.”
The deposit of Paul’s soul was in the Lord’s hands—indeed, still is in the Lord’s hands—until “that Day.” It is a comfort for us to know about the coming resurrection to life so that we can despise all of the adversities of this life, even death itself while we confess the truth, and so that we may keep a lofty spirit, skipping along the mountaintops on the day of the Lord and stepping over clouds that threaten to blot out the horizon, for we have no fear of that day in the least. We look forward to it more than a child to a birthday, more than an engaged couple to their wedding day, more than a good nurse to the day when her suffering patient is finally healed and cured and steps back out into the sunlight or under the canopy of soft green boughs in a forest. “For this article of the resurrection is a brilliant mirror. It so blunts the hearts of those who fix their gaze on it that they become blind, so to speak, to the perils and punishments of this life. It is comforting also for our neighbor so that we may ease their grief over the death of friends. Athanasius said, ‘The remembrance of the resurrection is a joy to mankind in regard to the victory over death.’”
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.