1 Timothy 4:3

forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by them that believe and know the truth.

Forbidding to marry ... This heads the list of characteristics of the great apostasy that shall seduce and mislead the church of God; and one may only be astounded at the fanciful interpretations of this that one finds in commentaries. Note some of these:

False teachers were to arise in Timothy's day, and shortly thereafter who would teach that God did not create matter because matter is evil ... The command to abstain from meats and marriage is based upon the supposed evil of matter.[9]

(This is an indication) of the impious doctrine of some of the great Gnostic schools ... probably in those early days creeping into the churches. The Jewish sects of the Essenes and the Therapeutae had already taught abstinence from marriage was meritorious.[10]

A hundred other instances could be cited in which there seems to be a total blindness to the one overwhelming, universal fulfillment of this very prophecy, namely, that found in the apostate church herself, which there is no need to name, because every child on five continents already knows it.

To mention the Therapeutae (as in Spence, above), offers little that is tangile ... We may safely say that no sect that bore this name ever existed.[11]

It is only among the more recent commentators that the phenomenal blindness to the historical fulfillment of the apostasy is observed; and therefore we are doubly thankful for comments like the following:

The whole monastic system that developed, together with all the lying teachings from which it arose, appeared soon enough. It still flourishes in Rome and in all the rest of the false ascetism.[12]

T. Croskery gave the following historical progression of the development of the heresy of forbidding Christians to marry:

This notion may already have influenced opinion in the Corinthian church (1 Corinthians 7); it developed in less than a century into Gnostic contempt for marriage; it entered patristic theology in the form of an exaggerated veneration for virginity; it developed in the Latin and Greek churches into the celibacy of the clergy and of religious orders; it was a tendency wholly opposed to Scripture teaching which allows "marriage is honorable in all" (Hebrews 13:2); it forbade marriage to church rulers and ministers, despite the fact of Old Testament priests and New Testament elders having been required to be "husbands of one wife." Apostles were permitted to take their wives with them on mission tours (1 Corinthians 9:5).[13]

Wesley explained the meaning here thus:

Forbidding priests, monks and nuns to marry, and commanding all men to abstain from such and such meats on such and such days.[14]

There is also the universal prohibition against marriage during Lent, a ban that denies marriage during a specified period to hundreds of millions throughout the earth. Yes, Paul's prophesy was fulfilled in the most comprehensive and extensive dimensions imaginable.

Commanding to abstain from meats ... This is partially treated under the preceding verse. Paul's condemnation of such doctrine has in view the fact that Jesus Christ made "all meats clean" (Mark 7:19; Acts 10:13-16).

Them that believe and know the truth ... Once again the order of trust, then knowledge, appears in the New Testament, as in "We have believed and know that thou art the Holy One of God" (John 6:69). The knowledge that amounts to an absolute certainty is experiential in that it follows, but does not precede, belief.

[9] Ronald A. Ward, op. cit., p. 78.

[10] H. D. M. Spence, Ellicott's Bible Commentary, Vol. VIII (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1970), p. 196.

[11] R. C. H. Lenski, op. cit., p. 622.

[12] Ibid., p. 623.

[13] T. Croskery, The Pulpit Commentary, Vol. 21,1Tim. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1950), p. 75.

[14] John Wesley, One Volume New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1972), in loco.