What Does 2 Timothy 3:13 Mean?

(13) **But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse.**—This verse is closely connected with the following (2Timothy 3:14), to which, indeed, it serves as an introduction. 2Timothy 3:14 takes up again the exhortation to Timothy begun in 2Timothy 3:10 : “But thou hast fully known my doctrine,” &c. 2Timothy 3:14 takes up the thought: “Continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them.” Here, in 2Timothy 3:13, these evil men and seducers (or better, perhaps, *deceivers*) are spoken of as advancing towards the worse. History has borne witness to the accuracy of these prophetic words. The false teachers known to St. Paul and Timothy developed into the leaders of the various wild and speculative Gnostic sects, whose connection with Christianity consisted alone in the name; and each succeeding age has witnessed *a development* in opposition to the truth as it is in Jesus. In this allusion to the gradual development of hostility to the truth it will hardly be out of place to instance the eighteenth Christian century, when opposition to the teaching of Jesus had reached such a pitch that, with the approval or even the applause of thousands, the most brilliant writer in Europe wrote of Christ and His religion in the well-known words, “Ecrasez l’infame!” while it was reserved for our own century—the nineteenth—to witness the rare, though we believe ephemeral popularity, among so-called Christian peoples of a work which, with honeyed phrases, and in romantic, graceful language, paints the Redeemer of man in the strange and apparently contradictory characters of a loving enthusiast and of a conscious impostor!