Charles Ellicott Commentary 2 Timothy 3:13

"But evil men and impostors shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived." — 2 Timothy 3:13 (ASV)

But evil men and seducers will grow worse and worse.—This verse is closely connected with the following (2 Timothy 3:14), to which it indeed serves as an introduction.

2 Timothy 3:14 takes up again the exhortation to Timothy begun in 2 Timothy 3:10: But you have fully known my doctrine, etc. That verse also takes up the thought: Continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them.

Here, in 2 Timothy 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 only 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 cite as an example the eighteenth Christian century. At that time, 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!” It was then reserved for our own century—the nineteenth—to witness the rare, though we believe ephemeral, popularity among so-called Christian peoples of a work. This work, 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!