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God's Orthodontists



 

Do you know the difference between a dentist and an orthodontist? If you are like me, you don’t. According to WebMD, “An orthodontist is a dentist trained to diagnose, prevent, and treat teeth and jaw irregularities. They correct existing conditions and are trained to identify problems that may develop in the future.” They use devices such as braces, retainers, and bands and correct issues such as overbites, crooked or crowded teeth, and jaw misalignment. 

 

If you are like me, you did not go to dental school, but you may have been called to be an orthodontist. In his letter to a pastor named Titus, Paul told him, “This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you (1:5).”

 

That phrase “put…into order” is a pair of Greek prepositions attached to the word orthoō, which means “to make straight.” Orthoō, as you might have guessed, gives us our word orthodontist. Just as an orthodontist corrects crooked teeth, Paul wanted Titus to correct crooked theology. 

 

Nowhere in this short letter does Paul say precisely what the heresy in Crete was, but that only means we can broadly apply this concept. Whatever the heresy, it needs to be corrected. 

 

Titus was a pastor, and Paul specifically wanted him to establish godly elders all over Crete in order to combat this crooked theology. But that does not mean this is only the job of pastors/elders. All who are mature in the faith should have the desire to put into order that which is crooked. We should have a love for the purity of God’s word, and a fire to combat its misinterpretation and misapplication wherever we see it. 

 

I often hear people criticize Christians for being argumentative, but we have a lot of heresy to combat. We need to do it the right way, of course. Much of what I see on Facebook is the opposite of doing it the right way. I wouldn’t want a combative orthodontist to beat me down in order to correct my jawline, and neither should we seek to correct the world through harsh words and insults. 

 

So in love, let us become God’s orthodontists, applying braces and retainers to a crooked world and its crooked theology. 

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