2 Timothy 3

Godlessness in the "Last Days" (v. 1-9)
Paul points out there will be godlessness in the "last days".  He then provides a litany of bad things about people at this time.

Personally, I do not think that Paul is referring to some sort of event immediately preceding the end of the world or apocalypse.  First, the litany of bad things in the "last days" seem to apply to every single generation of humanity (sex, greed, love of money, etc...).  In fact, it would highly apply to the Roman culture of the day.

Second, "Last Days" as we saw in Acts 2:17, refers to anything after the Holy Spirit initially fell at Pentecost.  Granted, this meaning of "Last Days" bootstraps in an interpretation of the Apostle Peter who is interpreting Joel 2:28-32.

Is Paul using Peter's definition of "Last Days?".  I think it is fair to assume so.  The phrase "Last Days" is very unique to the Bible and we can presume that Paul knows about what happened at Pentecost and Peter's understanding of it.


A few other things that stand out to me in this chapter:

Timothy studied the Scriptures from his "infancy" (v.  15).  It is unclear whether this means his literal childhood or a spiritual immaturity.

Scripture is "God-breathed".  (v. 16). Here, Scripture is talking about Scripture and it is "God-breathed".  I interpret this to mean "inspired".  This does not necessarily mean "literal" or "historical".

So, we consider that Scripture is "inspired" and look back at some of the major areas where people disagree with the Bible's historicity (Creation, Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark, when Daniel wrote, etc...), we can consider these at the very least as "God-breathed".