What Does 2 Timothy 4:18 Mean?

(18) **And the Lord shall deliver me from every evil work . . .**—Many commentators have explained these words as the expression of St. Paul’s confidence that the Lord not only had, in the late trial, strengthened His servant, and given him courage to endure, but that He would watch over him in the future which still lay before him, and would preserve him from every danger of faint-heartedness, from every risk of doing dishonour to his Master; but such an interpretation seems foreign to the *spirit* in which St. Paul was writing to Timothy. In the whole Epistle there is not one note of fear—nothing which should lead us to suspect that the martyr Apostle was fearful for himself. It reads—does this last letter of the great Gentile teacher—in many places like a triumphant song of death. It, therefore, appears unnatural to introduce into the closing words of the Epistle the thought of the Lord’s help in the event of the Apostle’s losing heart. Far better is it to supply after “every evil work” the words “*of the enemies,” *and to understand the deliverance which the Lord will accomplish for him, not as a deliverance from any shrinking or timidity unworthy of an apostle of the Lord, not even as a deliverance from the martyr-death, which he knew lay before him, *but that through this very death, *the Lord Jesus would deliver him from all weariness and toil, and would bring him safe into His heavenly kingdom. (See Psalm 23:4.) St. Paul before (Philippians 1:23 had expressed a longing to come to Christ through death. He then bursts into an ascription of praise to that Lord Jesus Christ whom he had loved so long and so well, and who, in all his troubles and perplexities, had never left him friendless. For a similar ascription of glory to the Second Person of the ever blessed Trinity, see Hebrews 13:21. (Comp. also Romans 9:5.)