.jpeg)
This week we will be looking at Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. Let’s begin by reading 2 Corinthians 1:1-11…
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother,
To the church of God in Corinth, together with all his holy people throughout Achaia:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.
We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us again. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, as you help us by your prayers. Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gracious favor granted us in answer to the prayers of many.
AUTHOR
In many ways Paul’s second letter to the Church at Corinth is like the opening of many a first century letter. First century letters opened with a salutation that identified the sender or senders of the letter and offered a greeting to the recipient or recipients of the letter. Paul begins by introducing himself. He calls himself an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God.
It seems that the Corinthian Christians, or at least some of them, were questioning Paul’s apostleship. The word “apostle” means a “sent one”. I believe we are all sent by God to share the good news of Jesus Christ with others. But Paul was an apostle in a special sense—in that he claimed to be a witness of the resurrected Jesus just like Jesus’ first twelve disciples. Acts 9 tells how Paul met Jesus in a vision on the road to Damascus and was commissioned by Jesus to carry the Gospel to the Gentiles. Paul is keen throughout the Corinthian correspondence to emphasize his authority as an apostle in the fullest sense of the word.
Paul also mentions Timothy as a co-sender, though not an author, of this letter. He calls Timothy a brother in Christ. We hear about Timothy for the first time in Acts 16. Timothy was a resident of Lystra in Asia Minor. This is the place where, after Paul’s first visit, he was stoned by his fellow Jews and left for dead outside the city. But the Lord raised him up, and Paul displayed the courage to walk back into the same city where his persecutors were resident. We do not know for certain, but it is possible that Timothy witnessed this as a young man and that the example and the preaching of Paul is what led him to faith. It seems likely that Paul was the one who introduced Timothy to Christ because on several occasions Paul refers to Timothy as his son in the faith. (See 1 Corinthians 4:17; Philippians 2:22; 1 Timothy 1:2,18; 2 Timothy 1:2.)
DATE
We learn from Acts 18 that Paul first visited Corinth in either 51 or 52 of the first century, while Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the region encompassing the southern part of Greece. As we saw in the last chapter, Gallio was rather a famous figure in the first century, being the brother of the philosopher Seneca who was the tutor of Emperor Nero. So, we know exactly when Gallio was proconsul of Achaia and therefore we also know approximately when Paul visited Corinth for the first time.
Many scholars today think that, most likely, what we have in 2 Corinthians, is a collection of Paul’s letters to Corinth all woven together. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians may have been lost, or else, as some scholars think, that first letter may be preserved in 2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1. If this is correct, then the letter designated in the Bible as “1 Corinthians” may be Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth.
What we call “1 Corinthians” may have been written as early as 54 CE. And “2 Corinthians”, or at least chapters 1 through 9, may have been written as early as 55 CE.
THEMES
The themes of this letter are many and diverse, but all of them relate to the ongoing situation in Corinth. Apparently, the Corinthian church had been infiltrated by false teachers who were challenging both Paul’s personal integrity and his authority as an apostle. Because Paul had announced a change in his itinerary, with the result that he would now pay the Corinthians one long visit instead of two short visits, Paul’s adversaries were asserting that Paul’s word was not to be trusted. The adversaries suggested that Paul was not a genuine apostle and that he was putting into his own pocket the money he had collected for the poverty-stricken believers in Jerusalem.
In response to these charges, Paul asks the Corinthians to consider that his personal life in their midst was always honorable and that his life-transforming message of salvation through Jesus Christ was true. He urges the Corinthians to prepare for his impending visit by completing the collection they had started in the previous year and by dealing with the troublemakers in their midst. Paul warns that he means what he writes.
STRUCTURE
While there are many sub-topics and sub-sections within 2 Corinthians, the letter basically divides into three major sections…
- Paul’s Explanation of His Conduct and Apostolic Ministry (1-7)
- The Collection for the Christians at Jerusalem (8-9)
- Paul’s Vindication of His Apostolic Authority (10-13)
KEY CONCEPT—COMFORT
The key concept, or key word, that I would like to focus on from 2 Corinthians is the word “comfort”. Forms of the word “comfort” appear ten times in five verses in this opening passage of thanksgiving from 2 Corinthians. The verb form of this word is used eighteen times in this letter, and the noun form is used eleven times. The Greek word for “comfort” is an important one in the New Testament. Perhaps you wondered why Paul does not mention the Holy Spirit in his opening greeting of this letter. Why does he mention the Father and the Son but not the Holy Spirit? I think Paul does mention the Holy Spirit, but he is sneaky about it.
The noun, Paraclete, is the word that Jesus used to describe the Holy Spirit in the Gospel of John. Paul uses forms of the same word here. The word literally means “to come alongside” but is often translated as “comfort”. This suggests that we should picture God, through the Holy Spirit, coming alongside of us, putting his arm around us, and giving us comfort, giving us courage.
Paul says that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the God of all comfort. He is the Father of compassions, plural. All true comfort, whatever its secondary source may be, finds its ultimate source in God. Furthermore, God does not show us compassion merely once or twice, but repeatedly, continually.
Troubles
Still, you might ask, why do we need comfort? The answer is obvious to anyone who has lived long enough. It is because we suffer in this life. There were ten words for suffering in ancient Greek. Paul uses five of them in this passage, and the main word he uses is translated as troubles. We need comfort from God because we face troubles in this life. The word in Greek is θλίψει. It literally means pressure. Have you ever felt pressure in life?
When I was in college I worked part-time for my father’s nonprofit organization, Youth Development, Inc. Among other things, I led a small, Christian, big brother, and big sister ministry. And then my father asked me to get involved in a new ministry he was starting, a nationwide runaway hotline. As the low man on the totem pole, my job was to take calls on the hotline after office hours. It was no big deal at the beginning. We were only receiving a few calls per month. But then the ministry mushroomed to the point where we were having thousands of calls per month. I was regularly awakened in the middle of the night to answer calls on the hotline and help young people get to shelters or, in some cases, return home. Before long, my schoolwork was suffering because of my night-time job. And then, one of my volunteers in the big brother ministry committed suicide.
Talk about stress! I was feeling it. In the end, I dropped out of school for that quarter. I simply could not complete my course work. I took time off to recuperate. And part of the way that I experienced restoration that summer was through getting up early every morning to read the Bible and to pray. I firmly believe that such a practice is part of God’s antidote to stress in our modern world.
Fortunately, when I returned to school in the fall, and spoke to the dean, and explained what kind of work I had been doing, the dean offered to expunge the previous quarter of failing grades from my record. And regarding the hotline, I helped to train a group of twenty-five employees and volunteers who took over the job I had been doing. I learned a lot of lessons from that experience that have stood me in good stead for the rest of my life and ministry.
I tell you that story to give you an example of pressure. Θλίψει can mean physical pressure, but it can also mean psychological or emotional pressure, what we sometimes call “stress”. And here is the good news: Paul says that our heavenly Father and the Lord Jesus Christ comfort us in all our troubles, all our pressures. Whatever trouble, whatever pressure, whatever stress you are going through right now, God wants to comfort you in the middle of it all through Jesus.
You might well wonder: what does God’s comfort produce when applied to our troubles? I know what we all want when we are in trouble, when we are under pressure, when we are experiencing pain and suffering of whatever kind. We want the trouble, we want the pressure, we want the pain, we want the suffering… to go away! God does not promise that he will always take away our troubles, our pressures, our pains, our sufferings. And we are in good company, because God didn’t take away Jesus’ trouble, pressure, pain, or suffering.
Endurance
But what does God do? God, through the application of comfort to our troubles produces endurance. Here again is a wonderful Greek word. It is the word ὑπομονῇ. I love what William Barclay says about this beautiful little word…
The answer to this suffering lies in endurance. The Greek word for this endurance is hupomone. The keynote of hupomone is not grim, bleak acceptance of trouble but triumph. It describes the spirit which can not only accept suffering but triumph over it. Someone once said to a sufferer, “Suffering colours life, doesn’t it?” The sufferer replied, “Yes, but I propose to choose the colour.” As the silver comes purer from the fire, so the Christian can emerge finer and stronger from hard days. The Christian is the athlete of God whose spiritual muscles become stronger from the discipline of difficulties.
You may rightfully ask, “How does that work?” It works only through Jesus Christ, the one who has already been to the cross for us. Paul says, “For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.” It was Paul’s conviction that every Christian is a little copy of Christ, and that as little copies of Christ we all share in Christ’s personality. C. S. Lewis called it “the Christ life”.
If you have put your faith in Jesus Christ, if you are trusting in him for forgiveness of your sin, and if you have invited him to live in your life, then he is doing just that. He is literally living his life in you and through you. And that means at least two things, according to Paul. It means that we share in the sufferings of Christ, but we also share in his comfort. George Macdonald said, “The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferingsmight be like His.”
God does not promise to take away our suffering in this life. But he does promise to make our sufferings like those of Jesus Christ. In Romans 8 Paul says…
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.
Comfort Others
Comfort applied to our troubles produces endurance. But that is not the end of the process. Comfort applied to our troubles produces endurance which in turn enables us to comfort others.
Paul says that God “comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.”
That is part of the end goal, that we might share with others the comfort we have received from God. The bottom line is this: only those who have suffered in this life are able to comfort others in this world. Jesus identified with us in our suffering. That’s why he can comfort us. And so too, it is as we have experienced suffering, and received God’s comfort, those two experiences give us something to pass on to others.
In his book, The Wounded Healer, Henri Nouwen basically says that there are three types of people in this world:
1. There are the wounded.
2. There are the walking wounded.
3. And then there are the wounded healers.
Everybody gets wounded in this life. Everyone experiences trouble, stress, suffering, wounding, sooner or later. Some people never seem to recover from their wounding.
Others recover in a way. They learn to cope somehow. They become the walking wounded. You may not see any visible scars on them. They are walking around. But deep down they are still scarred for life.
But then there is the possibility through Jesus of becoming a wounded healer. To become a wounded healer, one must experience the comfort of Christ, and then share it with others.
The Experience of Paul
Now, it would be easy to get irritated with Paul, to treat him like some sugary sweet Pollyanna, if it wasn’t for the fact that Paul spoke from experience. He himself went through tremendous suffering. He talks about his suffering in 2 Corinthians 1:9. We don’t know what these troubles were that Paul went through in Asia Minor. He may be referring to the riot in Ephesus in Acts 19. Or he may be talking about an imprisonment he experienced in Ephesus. Or he may be talking about some serious health problem that he had. Whatever it was, it was bad. Paul says that he and his companions in the Gospel work were under great pressure (there is that word again) far beyond their ability to endure.
Do you get that? Paul is saying that in and of himself he did not have the ability to endure. Paul was not a stoic. He was not saying, “Oh this endurance stuff is just a matter of mind over matter.” No way! Whatever he went through in Asia pushed him, pressed him, beyond his ability to endure. So much so that he despaired of life itself. In other words, he wanted that to be the end. He wanted to die. And in fact, he thought he was going to die. But he didn’t. God delivered him and taught him through that whole experience to rely not on himself but on God who raises the dead.
If our God is the God of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, if our God is the God who raises the dead, then nothing, I mean nothing, need ever defeat us again. Paul says that God delivered him and that he trusts him, he has full, confident hope, that God will continue to deliver him in the future.
How did Paul think God would deliver him? Paul believed it would happen through the prayers of God’s people. Trouble, pressure, pain, suffering, give us tremendous opportunity to pray for one another. And as we pray for one another, our hearts are knit together in Christ. And then as we see answers to our prayers, our thanksgiving overflows to the glory of God.
Our God is the God of all comfort. And when his comfort is applied to our troubles it produces endurance which in turn enables us to comfort others. God’s comfort is the best prescription to deal with stress, in the first century, in the twenty-first century, and always…
Comments