Therefore seeing we have this ministry, even as we obtained mercy, we don’t faint. But we have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully, but by the manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God. Even if our Good News is veiled, it is veiled in those who are dying, in whom the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that the light of the Good News of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not dawn on them. For we don’t preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake, seeing it is God who said, “Light will shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
But we have this treasure in clay vessels, that the exceeding greatness of the power may be of God, and not from ourselves. We are pressed on every side, yet not crushed; perplexed, yet not to despair; pursued, yet not forsaken; struck down, yet not destroyed; always carrying in the body the putting to death of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.
John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 1. Having this ministry. He now returns to a…
1. Having this ministry. He now returns to a commendation of himself personally, from which he had digressed into a general discussion, in reference to the dignity of the gospel. As, therefore, he has been treating of the nature of the gospel, so he now shows how faithful and upright a minister of it he is. He has previously shown, what is the true gospel of Christ. He now shows what he preaches to be such. “Having,” says he, “this ministry” — that ministry, the excellence of which he had extolled in terms so magnificent, and the power and usefulness of which he had so abundantly shown forth. Hence, in order that he may not seem to extol himself too much, he premises that it was not by his own efforts, or by his own merits, that he had reached such a pinnacle of honor, but had been led forward by the mercy of God exclusively. Now there was more implied in making the mercy of God the reason of his Apostleship, than if he had attributed it to the grace of God. We faint not that is, we are not deficient in our duty, so as not to discharge it with fidelity.
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10 Now he plainly witnesseth that both he and his…
Now he plainly witnesseth that both he and his fellows (through the mercy of God) do their vocation and duty uprightly and sincerely, neglecting all dangers.
Though we are broken in pieces with miseries and calamities, yet we yield not.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv1–10 1 Therefore seeing we have this ministry, as we…
1 Therefore seeing we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not;
Ver. 1. As we have received mercy] Since we have so freely been called to the ministry of mere mercy, we show forth therein all sedulity and sincerity. When I was born, said that French king, thousand others were born besides myself. Now what have I done to God more than they, that I should be a king, and not they Tamerlane having overcome Bajazet, asked him whether ever he had given God thanks for making him so great an emperor; who confessed ingenuously he never thought of it. To whom Tamerlane replied, that it was no wonder so ungrateful a man should be made a spectacle of misery. For you, saith he, being blind of one eye, and I lame of a leg, was there any worth in us why God should set us over two such great empires of Turks and Tartars? (Leunclav. Annal. Turc.) So may ministers say, What are we that God should call us to so high an office? &c.
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We faint not] We droop not, we flag not, ουκ εκκακουμεν, we hang not the wing, though hardly handled. For, Praedicare nihil aliud est quam derivare in se furorem totius mundi, as Luther said.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv1–10 It is the opinion of Beza, that the traducers…
It is the opinion of Beza, that the traducers of this great apostle took advantage from his great trials and afflictions, by reason of them, to conclude him no such man as he was by some represented; and that the apostle upon that takes advantage to magnify his office. God (saith he) having intrusted us with so glorious a ministration, as I have proved that of the gospel to be, according to the measure and proportion of gifts and graces which God hath bestowed upon us, or by reason of that infinite grace and mercy which God hath showed us, in calling us to so honourable a station and office, though we meet with many adversaries, many afflictions, many difficulties, yet we bear up and sink not under them, nor faint in our spirits because of them.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
William Burkitt 1703 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 That is, seeing we have such a glorious ministry…
That is, seeing we have such a glorious ministry far more excelling than that of Moses, mentioned in the conclusion of the foregoing chapter, as we have received mercy or special favours from God in committing it to us, so we faint not under the difficulties and pressures to which it doth expose us. Having received mercy, we faint not; but have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty; (all fornication and uncleanness, all ambition and covetousness, which the false apostles allowed themselves in:) not walking in guile or craftiness; nor handling the word of God deceitfully, as they do; but by manifestation of the truth, commending ourselves to every man’s conscience, as persons acting in the sight of God.
Learn hence, 1. That the ministry of the gospel is a very glorious ministry, far excelling the Mosaic dispensation.
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2. That it is a special favour from God to be judged faithful, and put into this ministry.
3. That no troubles, or trials, no difficulties, dangers, or distresses, should cause any of the faithful servants of God to faint, who have received mercy or favour from God to be put into the ministry: Seeing we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not.
Observe next, How the apostle, having vindicated and extolled his ministry, does in the second verse declare and assert his fidelity in the discharge of his ministry: Not handling the word of God deceitfully, but commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.
Hence learn, That the apostles delivered the gospel, in all things necessary to be known, believed, and practised, with great plainness and sufficient perspicuity; otherwise they could not be said to manifest the truth to every man’s conscience.
William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain On vv1, 8 The apostle had, in the foregoing chapter, been magnifying…
The apostle had, in the foregoing chapter, been magnifying his office, upon the consideration of the excellency or glory of that gospel about which he did officiate; and now in this chapter his design is to vindicate their ministry from the accusation of false teachers, who charged them as deceitful workers, or endeavoured to prejudice the minds of the people against them on account of their sufferings. He tells them, therefore, how they believed, and how they showed their value for their office as ministers of the gospel. They were not puffed up with pride, but spurred on to great diligence: "Seeing we have this ministry, are so much distinguished and dignified, we do not take state upon ourselves, nor indulge in idleness, but are excited to the better performance of our duty."
I. Two things in general we have an account of: - Their constancy and sincerity in their work and labour, concerning which observe, 1. Their constancy and perseverance in their work are declared: "We faint not (Co2 4:1) under the difficulty of our work, nor do we desist from our labour." And this their stedfastness was owing to the mercy of God. From the same mercy and grace from which they received the apostleship (Rom 1:5), they received strength to persevere in the work of that office. Note, As it is great mercy and grace to be called to be saints, and especially to be counted faithful, and be put into the ministry (Ti1 1:12), so it is owing to the mercy and grace of God if we continue faithful and persevere in our work with diligence. The best men in the world would faint in their work, and under their burdens, if they did not receive mercy from God. By the grace of God I am what I am, said this great apostle in his former epistle to these Corinthians, Co1 15:10. And that mercy which has helped us out, and helped us on, hitherto, we may rely upon to help us even to the end. 2. Their sincerity in their work is avouched (Co2 4:2) in several expressions: We have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty. The things of dishonesty are hidden things, that will not bear the light; and those who practise them are, or should be, ashamed of them, especially when they are known. Such things the apostle did not allow of, but did renounce and avoid with indignation: Not walking in craftiness, or in disguise, acting with art and cunning, but in great simplicity, and with open freedom. They had no base and wicked designs covered with fair and specious pretences of something that was good. Nor did they in their preaching handle the word of God deceitfully; but, as he said before, they used great plainness of speech, and did not make their ministry serve a turn, or truckle to base designs. They had not cheated the people with falsehood instead of truth. Some think the apostle alludes to the deceit which treacherous gamesters use, or that of hucksters in the market, who mix bad wares with good. The apostles acted not like such persons, but they manifested the truth to every man's conscience, declaring nothing but what in their own conscience they believed to be true, and what might serve for the conviction of their consciences who heard them, who were to judge for themselves, and to give an account for themselves. And all this they did as in the sight of God, desirous thus to commend themselves to God, and to the consciences of men, by their undisguised sincerity. Note, A stedfast adherence to the truths of the gospel will commend ministers and people; and sincerity or uprightness will preserve a man's reputation, and the good opinion of wise and good men concerning him.
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II. An objection is obviated, which might be thus formed: "If it be thus, how then does it come to pass, that the gospel is hid, and proves ineffectual, as to some who hear it?" To which the apostle answers, by showing that this was not the fault of the gospel, nor of the preachers thereof. But the true reasons of this are, 1. Those are lost souls to whom the gospel is hid, or is ineffectual, Co2 4:3. Christ came to save that which was lost (Mat 17:11), and the gospel of Christ is sent to save such; and, if this do not find and save them, they are lost for ever; they must never expect any thing else to save them, for there is no other method or means of salvation. The hiding of the gospel therefore from souls is both an evidence and cause of their ruin. 2. The god of this world hath blinded their minds, Co2 4:4. They are under the influence and power of the devil, who is here called the god of this world, and elsewhere the prince of this world, because of the great interest he has in this world, the homage that is paid to him by multitudes in this world, and the great sway that, by divine permission, he bears in the world, and in the hearts of his subjects, or rather slaves. And as he is the prince of darkness, and ruler of the darkness of this world, so he darkens the understandings of men, and increases their prejudices, and supports his interest by keeping them in the dark, blinding their minds with ignorance, and error, and prejudices, that they should not behold the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God. Observe, (1.) Christ's design by his gospel is to make a glorious discovery of God to the minds of men. Thus, as the image of God, he demonstrates the power and wisdom of God, and the grace and mercy of God for their salvation. But, (2.) The design of the devil is to keep men in ignorance; and, when he cannot keep the light of the gospel out of the world, he makes it his great business to keep it out of the hearts of men.
III. A proof of their integrity is given, Co2 4:5. They made it their business to preach Christ, and not themselves: We preach not ourselves. Self was not the matter nor the end of the apostles' preaching: they did not give their own notions and private opinions, nor their passions and prejudices, for the word and will of God; nor did they seek themselves, to advance their own secular interest or glory. But they preached Christ Jesus the Lord; and thus it did become them and behove them to do, as being Christ's servants. Their business was to make their Master known to the world as the Messiah, or the Christ of God, and as Jesus, the only Saviour of men, and as the rightful Lord, and to advance his honour and glory. Note, All the lines of Christian doctrine centre in Christ; and in preaching Christ we preach all we should preach. "As to ourselves," says the apostle, "we preach, or declare, that we are your servants for Jesus' sake." This was no compliment, but a real profession of a readiness to do good to their souls, and to promote their spiritual and eternal interest, and that for Jesus' sake; not for their own sake or their own advantage, but for Christ's sake, that they might imitate his great example, and advance his glory. Note, Ministers should not be of proud spirits, lording it over God's heritage, who are servants to the souls of men: yet, at the same time, they must avoid the meanness of spirit implied in becoming the servants of the humours or the lusts of men; if they should thus seek to please men, they would not be the servants of Christ, Gal 1:10. And there was good reason, 1. Why they should preach Christ. For by gospel light we have the knowledge of the glory of God, which shines in the face of Jesus Christ, Co2 4:6. And the light of this Sun of righteousness is more glorious than that light which God commanded to shine out of darkness. It is a pleasant thing for the eye to behold the sun in the firmament; but it is more pleasant and profitable when the gospel shines in the heart. Note, As light was the first-born of the first creation, so it is in the new creation: the illumination of the Spirit is his first work upon the soul. The grace of God created such a light in the soul that those who were sometimes darkness are made light in the Lord, Eph 5:8. 2. Why they should not preach themselves: because they were but earthen vessels, things of little or no worth or value. Here seems to be an allusion to the lamps which Gideon's soldiers carried in earthen pitchers, Jdg 7:16. The treasure of gospel light and grace is put into earthen vessels. The ministers of the gospel are weak and frail creatures, and subject to like passions and infirmities as other men; they are mortal, and soon broken in pieces. And God has so ordered it that the weaker the vessels are the stronger his power may appear to be, that the treasure itself should be valued the more. Note, There is an excellency of power in the gospel of Christ, to enlighten the mind, to convince the conscience, to convert the soul, and to rejoice the heart; but all this power is from God the author, and not from men, who are but instruments, so that God in all things must be glorified.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv1–10 Therefore seeing we have this ministry,.... The apostle having…
Therefore seeing we have this ministry,.... The apostle having largely insisted on the difference between the law and the Gospel, the ministration of the one and of the other, proceeds to give an account of his own conduct, and that of his fellow apostles and ministers: "we", says he, "faint not"; under all the reproaches cast upon us, persecutions raised against us, and tribulations that attend us; we do not sink in our spirits, or give out from the ministry; we go on cheerfully in our work, in the thee of all opposition, encouraged by the consideration of the excellency of the ministry, which they had from the Lord, were put into, and continued in; which was so valuable in itself, and so useful in its effects; being the ministration of the Spirit and of righteousness, having in it such an excelling glory to the law, and attended with so much light and liberty: to which he adds the consideration of the mercy of God they were partakers of,
as we have received mercy; which may refer either to the grace and mercy of God, which they had received in conversion; a sense of which abiding upon them, so influenced their minds, to hold forth the riches of abounding grace and mercy to poor sinners in the Gospel, that nothing could deter them from it; or to the grace, favour, and good will of God, in making, supporting, and continuing them as ministers of the word; all which, they were sensible, was owing not to men, but God; not to their merit, but to his mercy; not to their worthiness, parts, learning, &c. but to his free gift, favour, and grace, by which only they were what they were, as preachers of the Gospel.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 Therefore having this ministry - Spoken of, chap. iii,…
Therefore having this ministry - Spoken of, chap. iii, 6. As we have received mercy - Have been mercifully supported in all our trials. We faint not - We desist not in any degree from our glorious enterprise.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv1–10 St. Paul shows the integrity with which he had…
CHAPTER IV.
St. Paul shows the integrity with which he had preached the
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Gospel of Christ, 1, 2.
And that, if it was unprofitable to any who had heard it, it
was because their unbelieving hearts were blinded, 3, 4.
How he preached, and how he was qualified for the work, 5-7.
The troubles and difficulties he met with in his labours, and
the hope and consolations by which he was supported, 8-15.
And the prospect he had of eternal blessedness, 16-18.
NOTES ON CHAP. IV.
Verse 1. Seeing we have this ministry] The Gospel, of which he gave that noble account which we read in the preceding chapter.
We faint not] We meet with many tribulations, but are supported in and through all by the grace of the Gospel. Instead of ουκ εκκακουμεν, we faint not, ουκ εγκακουμεν, we act not wickedly, is the reading of ADFG, and some others. Wakefield thinks it the genuine reading; it certainly makes a very good sense with what goes before and what follows. If we follow this reading the whole verse may be read thus: Wherefore, as we have obtained mercy, or been graciously intrusted, ηλεηθημην, with this ministry, we do not act wickedly, but have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, &c.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 5, 7, 8 2Co 4:1-2. Therefore, seeing we have this ministry —…
2Co 4:1-2. Therefore, seeing we have this ministry — Spoken of from 2Co 4:6-11 of the preceding chapter, with which this is closely connected; a ministry so superior to that wherewith Moses was intrusted; as we have received mercy — To be accounted faithful; as God has in mercy accepted us as his servants, and supported us in our work; we faint not — Under any of those sufferings which we are called to endure; nor desist, in any degree, from our glorious enterprise. But have renounced — Or set at open defiance; the hidden things of dishonesty — Or of shame, as της αισχυνης properly signifies; all things which men need to hide or be ashamed of; not walking in craftiness — Using no disguise, subtlety, or guile; nor handling the word of God deceitfully — Not privily corrupting the pure truth of God by any additions of our own, or alterations, or by attempting to accommodate it to the taste of our hearers. But, by manifestation of the genuine and unsophisticated truth, commending ourselves to every man’s conscience — Appealing to the consciences of sinners for the truth and importance of our doctrine; or acting in such a manner as all men, in their consciences, if rightly informed, must approve of; in the sight of God — Whose eye we know is upon us, observing the secrets of our hearts, and therefore we desire, by the most perfect integrity and uprightness, to approve ourselves to him. The apostle does not mean that they actually recommended themselves to the conscience of every man, so that they had the approbation of every man; but that they behaved in such a manner as ought to have convinced every man of their honesty and fidelity in their preaching, and in the exercise of every other branch of their ministry.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv1–10 Therefore - Διὰ τοῦτο Dia touto. On account of…
Therefore - Διὰ τοῦτο Dia touto. On account of this. That is, because the light of the gospel is so clear; because it reveals so glorious truths, and all obscurity is taken away, and we are permitted to behold as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, 2Co 3:18. Since the glories of the gospel dispensation are so great, and its effects on the heart are so transforming and purifying. The object is, to show the “effect” of being entrusted with such a ministry, on the character of his preaching.
Seeing we have this ministry - The gospel ministry, so much more glorious than that of Moses 2Co 3:6; which is the ministry by which the Holy Spirit acts on the hearts of people 2Co 3:8; which is the ministry of that system by which people are justified 2Co 3:9; and which is the ministry of a system so pure and unclouded, 2Co 3:9-11, 2Co 3:18.
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As we have received mercy - Tyndale renders this: “even as mercy is sure in us.” The idea is, that it was by the mere mercy and favor of God, that he had been entrusted with the ministry, and the object of Paul is doubtless to prevent the “appearance” of arrogance and self-confidence by stating that it was to be traced entirely to God that he was put into the ministry. He doubtless had his eye on the fact that he had been a persecutor and blasphemer; and that it was by the mere favor of God that he had been converted and entrusted with the ministry, 1Ti 1:13. Nothing will more effectually humble a minister, and prevent his assuming any arrogant and self-confident airs, than to look over his past life; especially if his life was one of blasphemy, vice, or infidelity; and to remember that it is by the mere mercy of God that he is entrusted with the high office of an ambassador of Jesus Christ. Paul never forgot to trace his hope, his appointment to the ministerial office, and his success, to the mere grace of God.
We faint not - This is one of the effects of being entrusted with such a ministry. The word used here (ἐκκακοῦμεν ekkakoumen) means, properly, to turn out a coward; to lose one’s courage; then to be fainthearted, to faint, to despond, in view of trial, difficulty, etc. - Robinson. Here it means, that by the mercy of God, he was not disheartened by the difficulties which he met; his faith and zeal did not flag; he was enabled to be faithful, and laborious, and his courage always kept up, and his mind was filled with cheerfulness; see note on 2Co 2:14. He was deterred by no difficulties; embarrassed by no opposition; driven from his purpose by no persecution; and his strength did not fail under any trials. The consciousness of being entrusted with “such” a ministry animated him; and the mercy and grace of God sustained him.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10 The apostle, having in the last chapter shewn the…
The apostle, having in the last chapter shewn the excellence of his ministry above that of the law, proceeds to inform them of his own labours, &c. in order to destroy the credit which the false teachers had acquired amongst the Corinthians, and to caution them against any attempts that these teachers might make to destroy what had caused St. Paul so much trouble to effect. But he still refers all to God. As for these false teachers, what Churches had they founded? what persecutions have they endured? (Calmet)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
John Nelson Darby 1862 · Public Domain On v1 2 Corinthians Chapter 4
2 Corinthians Chapter 4
Having received this ministry of righteousness and of the Spirit, the foundation of which was Christ glorified beheld with open face, he not only used great boldness of speech, but his zeal was not abated, nor his faith enfeebled by difficulties. Moreover, with the courage which through grace was imparted to him by this doctrine, he held back nothing, weakened nothing of this glory; he did not corrupt the doctrine; he manifested it in all the purity and brightness in which he had received it. It was the word of God; such as he had received it, so they received it from him, the unaltered word of God; the apostle thus approving himself, commending himself to every man’s conscience in the sight of God. All could not say this. The glory of the Lord Jesus was set forth by Paul’s preaching in all the clearness and brightness of its revelation to himself. If, therefore, the good news which he proclaimed was hidden, it was not as in the case of Moses; not only was the glory of the Lord fully revealed with open face in Christ, it was also manifested without a veil in the pure preaching of the apostle. This is the link established between the glory accomplished in the Person of Christ, as the result of the work of redemption, and the ministry which, by the power of the Holy Ghost acting in the instrument chosen of the Lord, proclaimed this glory to the world, and made men responsible for the reception of the truth-responsible for submission to this glorious Christ, who announced Himself in grace from heaven, as having established righteousness for the sinner, and as inviting him to come freely and enjoy the love and the blessing of God.
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Now there was no other means of coming to God. To set up any other would be to put aside and declare imperfect and insufficient that which Christ had done, and that which Christ was, and to produce something better than He. But this was not possible: for that which he announced was the manifestation of the glory of God in the Person of the Son, in connection with the revelation of perfect love, and of the making good perfect and divine righteousness; so that the pure light was the happy abode of those who by this means entered into it. There could not be anything more, unless there was something more than God in the fulness of His grace and of His perfection. If then this revelation was hidden, it was in the case of those who were lost, whose minds were blinded by the god of this world, lest the light of the good news of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine into their hearts.
This is translated “glorious gospel.” But we have seen that the fact of Christ’s being in glory, the glory of God being seen in His face, was the special subject of the preceding chapter. To that the apostle here alludes as characterising the gospel which he preached. It was the proof of the sin Christ had borne being utterly put away, of victory over death, of the introduction of man into the presence of God in glory according to God’s eternal counsels of love. It was withal the full display of the divine glory in man according to grace, which the Holy Ghost takes to shew to us in order to form us after the same likeness. It was the glorious ministration of righteousness, and of the Spirit, which opened the free way for man to God, even into the holiest, in entire liberty.
When Christ was thus proclaimed, there was either the joyful acceptance of the good news, submission of heart to the gospel, or else the blinding of Satan. For Paul did not preach himself (which others did not fail to do) but Jesus Christ the Lord, and himself their servant for Jesus’ sake. Because in fact (and this is another important principle) the shining forth of this gospel of the glory of Christ is the work of God’s power-of the same God who, by His word alone, caused the light instantaneously to shine out of the midst of darkness. He had shone into the apostle’s heart to give forth the light of the knowledge of His own glory in the face of Jesus Christ. The gospel shone forth by a divine operation similar to that which had, in the beginning, caused the light to shine out of darkness by a single word. The heart of the apostle was the vessel, the lamp, in which this light had been kindled to shine in the midst of the world before the eyes of men. It was the revelation of the glory which shone in the Person of Christ by the power of the Spirit of God in the heart of the apostle, in order that this glory should shine out in the gospel before the world. It was the power of God which wrought in it, in the same manner as when light was caused by the word “Let there be light! and there was light.” But the treasure of this revelation of the glory was deposited, in earthen vessels, in order that power which wrought in it should be of God alone, and not that of the instruments. In all, the weakness of the instrument shewed itself in the trying circumstances which God, for this very purpose (among others), made the testimony pass through. Nevertheless the power of God was manifested in it so much the more evidently, from the vessel’s shewing its weakness in the difficulties that beset its path. The testimony was rendered, the work was done, the result was produced, even when man broke down and found himself without resource in presence of the opposition raised up against truth.
Afflicted by the tribulation, this was the vessel’s part; not straitened, for God was with the vessel. Without means of escape, that was the vessel; yet not without resource, for God was with it. Persecuted, that was the vessel; not forsaken, for God was with it. Cast down, that was the vessel; but not destroyed, for God was with it. Always bearing about in his body the dying [3] of the Lord Jesus (made like Him, in that the man as such was reduced to nothing), in order that the life of Jesus, which death could not touch, which has triumphed over death, should be manifested in his body, mortal as it was. The more the natural man was annihilated, the more was it evident that a power was there which was not of man. This was the principle, but it was morally realised in the heart by faith. As the Lord’s servant, Paul realised in his heart the death of all that was human life, in order that the power might be purely of God through Jesus risen. But besides this, God made him realise these things by the circumstances through which he had to pass; for, as living in this world, he was always delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, in order that the life of Jesus might be manifested in his mortal flesh. Thus death wrought in the apostle; what was merely of man, of nature and natural life, disappeared, in order that life in Christ, developing itself in him on the part of God and by His power, should work in the Corinthians by his means. What a ministry! A thorough trial of the human heart, a glorious calling, for a man to be thus assimilated to Christ, to be the vessel of the power of His pure life, and by means of an entire self-renunciation, even that of life itself, to be morally like unto Jesus. What a position by grace! What a conformity to Christ! And yet in a way in which it passed through man’s heart to reach man’s heart (which indeed is of the essence of Christianity itself), not surely by man’s strength, but God’s made good in man’s weakness.
226 Therefore it was that the apostle could use the language of the Spirit of Christ in the Psalms, “I believed, and therefore have I spoken.” That is to say, ‘At whatever cost, in spite of everything, of all the danger, all the opposition, I have spoken for God, I have borne my testimony. I have had confidence enough in God to bear testimony to Him and to His truth, whatever the consequences might be, even if I had died in doing it.’ That is, the apostle said, ‘I have acted as Christ Himself did, because I know that He who raised up Jesus would do the same for me, and would present me, together with you, before His face in that same glory in which Christ is now in heaven, and for my testimony to which, I have suffered death like Him.’ We must clearly distinguish here between Christ’s sufferings for righteousness and for His work of love, and His sufferings for sin. The former it is our privilege to share with Him; in the latter He is alone.
The apostle said, “will present me with you,” for, he adds, according to the heart and mind of Christ towards His own, “all things are for your sakes, that the abundant grace might, through the thanksgiving of many, redound to the glory of God.” And therefore it was that he did not allow himself to be discouraged; but on the contrary, if the outward man perished, the inward man was renewed day by day. For the light affliction, which was but for a moment (for such he esteemed it in view of the glory-it was but the temporary affliction of this poor dying body), worked out for him an eternal weight of glory which was beyond all the most exalted expression of human thought or language. And this renewing took place; and he was not disheartened come whatmight, in that he looked not at the things that are seen, which are temporal, but at the things that are not seen, which are eternal. Thus the power of the divine life, with all its consequences, was developed in his soul by faith. He knew the result of everything on God’s part.
It was not only that there were things invisible and glorious. Christians had their part in them. We know, the apostle says in their name, that if this earthly house (passing away as it is) were destroyed-and it had very nearly been the case with himself-we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Precious certainty! He knew it. Christians know it as a part of their faith. We know [4] -a certainty which caused this glory, which he knew to be his, to be a real and practical hope in the heart by the power of the Holy Ghost-a reality present by faith. He saw this glory as that which belonged to him, with which he was to be invested. And therefore also he groaned in his tabernacle, not (as so many do) because the desires of his flesh could not be fulfilled; and because satisfaction of heart cannot be found for man, even when those desires are fulfilled; nor because he was uncertain whether he was accepted, and the glory his or not; but because the body was a hindrance, tending to depress the divine life, to deprive him of the full enjoyment of that glory which the new life saw and desired, and which Paul saw and admired as his own. It was a burden, this earthly human nature; it was no distress to him that he could not satisfy its desires; his distress was to find himself still in this mortal nature, because he saw something better.
Not however that he desired to be unclothed, for he saw in Christ glorified a power of life capable of swallowing up and annihilating every trace of mortality; for the fact that Christ was on high in the glory was the result of this power, and at the same time the manifestation of the heavenly portion that belonged to them that were His. Therefore the apostle desired, not to be unclothed but clothed upon, and that that which was mortal in him should be absorbed by life, that the mortality that characterised his earthly human nature should disappear before the power of life which he saw in Jesus, and which was his life. That power was such that there was no need to die. And this was not a hope which had no other foundation than the desire awakened by a view of the glory might produce: God had formed Christians for this very thing. He who was a Christian was formed for this, and not for anything else. It was God Himself who had formed him for this-this glory, in which Christ, the last Adam, was at the right hand of God. Precious assurance! Happy confidence in the grace and the mighty work of God! Ineffable joy to be able to attribute all to God Himself, to be thus certified of His love, to glorify Him as the God of love-our Benefactor, to know that it was His work, and that we rest upon a finished work-the work of God. It is not here resting upon a work done for us; but the blessed consciousness that God has wrought us for this: we are His workmanship.
Nevertheless something else was necessary to our enjoying this, since we are not yet glorified in fact; and God has given it-the earnest of the Spirit.
Thus, we have the glory before us, we are wrought for it by God Himself, and we have the earnest of the Spirit till we are there, and know that Christ has so entirely overcome death that, if the time were come, we should be transformed into glory without dying at all. Mortality would be swallowed up of life. This is our portion through grace in the last Adam, through the power of life in which Christ was raised.
But next the apostle will treat of the effect as to the natural portion of the first fallen man, death and judgment; for the testimony here is very complete.
Footnotes for 2 Corinthians Chapter 4
3: Or rather, “putting to death.”
4: This “we know” is in fact a technical expression for the portion of Christians, known to them as such. “We know that the law is spiritual,” “we know that the Son of God is come,” and so on.
John Nelson Darby — Synopsis of the Books of the Bible: the New Testament (c. 1857–1862) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures 1864 · Public Domain On vv1, 7 1Therefore, seeing we have this ministry, as we have…
VIII.—GLORY OF THE APOSTOLIC MINISTRY, WHOSE DUTIES WERE OPENLY AND HONESTLY PERFORMED, NOTWITHSTANDING THE INJURIOUS INFLUENCE OF ITS ENEMIES
2Co_4:1-6
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1Therefore, seeing we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not1; 2But [we] have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty [shame, τῆς αἰσχὐνης, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully [falsifying (δολοῦντες) the word of God]; but by manifestation of the truth, commending2 ourselves to every 3man’s conscience [conscience of men] in the sight of God. But if [and even if] our Gospel be hid [veiled, κεκαλυμμένον it is hid [veiled] to them that are lost [perishing]: 4In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious Gospel [gospel of the glory] of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine3 unto them [should shine forth]. 5For we preach not ourselves, but 6Christ Jesus [as] the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake. For [that same] God, who commanded the light to shine4 out of darkness, [said out of darkness light should shine] hath shined in our hearts, to give the light [in order to the shining forth, πρὸς φωτισμὸν] of the knowledge of the glory of God5 in the face of Jesus [om. Jesus]6 Christ.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
2Co_4:1-2. [Paul “now resumes the thread of the general argument, which he had twice before taken up (2Co_3:4; 2Co_3:12); but with the difference that from the confidence which he possesses in the greatness of his task, he now draws a new conclusion; not ‘we use great plainness of speech,’ as in 2Co_3:12, but ‘we faint not;’ a conclusion which, as it is more directly an answer to the original question, ‘who is sufficient for these things?’ in 2Co_2:16, so is it the basis of the ensuing chapters 2Co_4:7; 2Co_5:10. But with one of the inversions peculiar to this Epistle, he has hardly entered on this new topic before he drops it again. The charge of insincerity which had occasioned the digression in 2Co_3:1-18, still lingers in his recollection, and accordingly he turns round upon it, as if to give it one parting blow before he finally dismisses it from his mind. Hence 2Co_4:2-6 are still closely connected with 2Co_3:1-18, while the new subject begun in this first verse is not resumed till 2Co_4:7, where it is expanded in all its parts, so that the true apodosis or close of the sentence commenced here does not occur till 2Co_4:16, where the same words are repeated: for this cause we faint not.” Stanley]. Returning from his digression respecting the hardening of the Jews, he now resumes his account (2Co_3:12; 2Co_3:15) of that course of action which he was now pursuing, and which he thought suitable to the glory of the evangelical ministry (and to the Apostolic office).—Therefore having, through the mercy of God, received this ministration, we faint not.—What he means by διὰ τοῦτο is more distinctly expressed in what follows: having received this ministration. This ministration (διακονία) he had spoken of as a ministration of the Spirit (2Co_3:8), of righteousness (2Co_4:9), that which remaineth (2Co_4:11), and that which produced the results described in 2Co_3:18. Διὰ τοῦτο therefore finds its original reference as far back as 2Co_3:7. The boasting (καύχησις) which seems implied in this, is reduced immediately to a glorying in the Lord, and made to involve an actual humiliation of himself, when he adds the words, as we have received mercy; implying that he had been personally unworthy of such a ministry, and owed it entirely to Divine grace that he had been called and ordained to it (comp. 1Co_7:25; 1Co_15:9-10; 1Ti_1:12-16; Gal_1:15-16). The course of conduct which he had suggested in 2Co_3:12, and which was suitable to a ministry thus graciously bestowed upon him, he describes first negatively: οὐκ ἐκκακοῦμεν we are not faint-hearted or cowardly. The reading ἐγκακοῦμεν would have substantially the same significance. [The former word can hardly have in this place a strictly moral signification (κακός, bad, wicked) as Rückert contends it should have, contrary to its usage and the connection; but it seems to signify here that the consciousness of such a high calling would not allow him to turn out bad, to prove recreant, or to act inconsistent with it (Luk_18:1; Gal_6:9). Osiander notices that the word has two distinct meanings: the one to slacken or flag, and the other to be discouraged or dispirited. The former agrees very well with the explanation in the next clause; but perhaps the latter agrees equally well, since the discouragement is evidently one which springs from an anxiety about difficulties and opponents, and so leads to deceit and an adulteration of the word of truth. The etymology of the word also confirms this meaning, since the word κακός signifies bad not only in a moral sense, but especially with respect to war. Accordingly the Greek expositors and the more modern strict philologists (Billroth, Meyer, de Wette), embrace both meanings in the rendering: segnescere, to become slow and dull. The connection with the subsequent negative may be regarded as a litotes in which he modestly expresses a high degree of courage by denying the contrary. Thus Theodoret (and Chrysostom, see below): Οὗ δὴ χάριν, φησὶ; φέρομεν γεννάιως τὰπροσπίπτοντα λυπηρά “On which account, he says, we endure what befalls us with a noble spirit.” ̓Εγκακοῦμεν signifies the opposite of παῤῥησιάζω i. e. to shrink from plainness of speech or action (Alford), to behave in a cowardly manner]. The positive contrast to what is here claimed, is not dulness or indolence in the performance of his duties (and above all, Rückert’s interpretation, which makes it involve something generally and morally base, is entirely inadmissible, or at least not proven), but from what we find is repelled in 2Co_4:2, we are led to believe that it is discouragement or faint-heartedness under difficulties. Chrysostom: We are so far from being without heart, that we are rather full of joy, and bold in speaking and in labors].—But we have renounced the secret things of shame (2Co_4:2).—These secret or hidden things of shame (τὰ κρυπτὰ τῆς αἰσχύνης) were either, in accordance with the original meaning of αἰσχύνη a feeling of shame, or that sense of honor which hides its own shame, and will not let that come to the light which may cause dishonor (Meyer after Chrysostom); or better and more in accordance with predominant usage in the New Testament (Php_3:19; Heb_12:2; Jud_1:19; Rev_3:18; Luk_14:9), a dishonor, the concealment of a disgrace, i. e. of a dishonor done; or, still better (inasmuch as the emphasis lies upon τὰ κρυπτὰ) disgraceful secrets, hidden things which would produce or bring dishonor if they were known (comp. Rom_1:26).
There is no need of supposing that the Apostle had his eye directly as yet upon particular acts, such as plots, intrigues, suppressions or perversions of the truth, or even obscenas voluptates; but he probably alludes simply to those general matters which are mentioned in the participial sentence, those secret things which would infallibly cause shame if they were brought to the light. Neander: “those disgraceful and secret arts of carnal wisdom which had been falsely attributed to him.” ̓Απειπάμεθα is an ἅπαξ λεγόμενον so far as it relates to the New Testament. [On the reflexive force of the middle voice, implying that “the act belonged to the inner mental world of the agent rather than the actual world without.” See Jelf’s Gram. § 363, 6; and Winer, Id. § 39, 3, and on the aorist, “as denoting what is done at all times alike, and is habitual,” see Bloomfield]. The word by no means implies that he had acted in this manner at an earlier period of his life, but it simply means that he declined or refused such things (ἱποῤῥίπτεσθαι, παραιτεῖσθαι).—Not walking in craftiness, nor adulterating the word of God.—(Comp. 2Co_1:12; 2Co_10:2). He refers here to his own official course, but he unquestionably alludes very significantly to a very different kind of conduct in his more sordid opponents. Πανουργία here rendered craftiness [from πᾶς and ἕργω] (1Co_3:19), signifies adroitness, dexterity; but it is used generally in a bad sense to signify a cunning craftiness, a shrewd use of those intrigues and schemes by which a man makes a way for himself and acquires and maintains influence [“a πανοῦργος is one who can do every thing and is willing to do any thing to accomplish his ends.” Hodge]. A second point in which his conduct differed from that of his opponents, was, that he did not adulterate the word of God (μηδὲ δολοῦντες τὸν λόγοντοῦ θεοῦ), a kind of dealing essentially the same as the καπηλεύειν repudiated in 2Co_2:17. Men were in the habit of saying: a man adulterates his wine (δολοῦν τὸν οἷνον). In contrast with such deceit, he says of himself and his companions:—but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience.—The truth here spoken of is the word of God, the Gospel in its unadulterated purity; and the way in which he had preached it was the reverse of such adulterations of the word of God. Συνιστάναι ἑαυτόν signifies to gain confidence and esteem in this regular way, as opposed to the self-commendation imputed to him by his opponents (2Co_3:1). The way he pursued was directed to every man’s conscience (πρὸς πᾶσαν συνείδησιν ἀνθρώπων; comp. Rom_2:9 : ἐπὶ πᾶσην ψυχὴν ἀνθρώπου). In this way of interpretation, συνείδησις becomes more prominent. The word is used to signify that mental power which makes us conscious of, and certifies to us those thoughts and emotions which pass through our minds, shows us what is truth and duty, and enforces its assertions and claims only on the ground that every thing it approves must be true and right, and that our spirit and motives must be conformed to our conceptions of truth and duty (Beck, Bibl. Seelenl., p. 75; comp, 73 and 77). The Apostle intended to say, therefore, that the way in which he preached was such that every man’s conscience approved of him, and hence that all who attended to the verdicts of conscience, and were not led by corrupt inclinations to reject such decisions, would be obliged to confess that his conduct sprung from a true and honest heart. Such an explanation seems to us more conformed to the context than that of Osiander, who defines the συνείδησις here to be the “essential organ for the recognition of truth, and which must assent to the Gospel as the truth and power of God, because it corresponds to man’s necessities and is effectual to awaken and tranquilize his moral nature.” The phrase: in the sight of God (ἐνώπιον τοῦ θεοῦ comp. 2Co_2:17; 2Co_7:12) is not a solemn oath, but simply implies that the assertion he had made respecting his commendation of himself to every man’s conscience, was eminently pure, inasmuch as he made it under a full sense of God’s presence to hear him. Neander: “There is indeed a moral intelligence in every man to which we may appeal as to the impression he receives from us; and yet as every thing human is fallacious, Paul made his final appeal to God himself as the infallible witness of his upright motives and his honest deportment.” [It was not the truth directly which the Apostle says he and his associates commended to the συνείδ. but ἑαυτοὺς themselves, their whole persons, conduct and preaching and this by means of the ἀληθεία which they preached. By recognizing the truth and the honesty of the preaching, men were obliged to commend them. Συνέιδ then is more than “consciousness,” for it recognized the morality and truth of things not only in ourselves, but in others. (See note on 2Co_1:12). The only condition of the recognition was that truth and its relations should be correctly apprehended, i. e., that each case should be truly presented at the bar of conscience. (See Serm. of Chalmers and J. Howe on this passage). Πᾶσαν συνέιδ. ἀνθ. is every conscience of man, the universal, or the public conscience. Chrysostom: “not only to believers, but to unbelievers, are we manifested, since we are presented before all, that every thing belonging to us may be scrutinized according to their pleasure.” Nor was it merely “to every good conscience (Grotius), for the Apostle expressly implies that it was even to them that are lost?”].
2Co_4:3-6. The Apostle now meets (2Co_4:3) the objection, that what he had just said would hardly harmonize with the fact that his preaching was not successful with a large portion of his hearers, and was not recognized and received by some as the truth. He does not deny this, and he now recurs to the figure of the covering (2Co_3:14).—But if our Gospel be veiled, it is veiled to them that are perishing (2Co_4:3).—He concedes no contradiction in this to what he was saying, since those who failed of receiving him were among those who were perishing on account of their blindness by Satan. There was no defect in the requisite clearness of his preaching, but only in the mental perceptions of his hearers (2Co_4:3-4). The fact objected against him is made emphatic by putting ἕστιν at the very head of the major proposition (the protasis). “Our Gospel” has here the same signification as the manifestation of the truth (2Co_4:2). The word ἡμῶν tells us who were engaged in proclaiming the Gospel, as in Rom_2:16; Rom_16:25; 1Th_1:5; 2Th_2:14; and it is equivalent to the Gospel which I preached (ὅ εὐηγγελισάμην) in 1Co_15:1 (comp. Gal_1:11). In the conclusion the emphasis should rest upon ἐν τοῖς ἀπολλυμένοις (among them who are perishing), and hence these words are placed at the beginning. Comp. 3:25; 1Co_1:18. [’Απολλυμένοις does not necessarily mean the finally lost, those who deserve to be lost (Grotius), but those who are perishing (Alford), those who were then lost. In Mat_10:6; Mat_15:24; Mat_18:11; and Luk_15:4; Luk_15:6; Luk_15:24; Luk_15:32, the lost were such as were at that time lost to the Church, to God and to goodness, but might afterwards in some cases be recovered. Henry: “The hiding of the Gospel was both an evidence and a cause of their ruin, and if the Gospel did not find and save them, they were lost forever]. ̓Εν is equivalent neither to the dative, nor to in respect to, but to, with, coram; since the persons spoken of did not recognize the Gospel on account of inward darkness, a covering on their own hearts, it has the force of in; or, since the ἀπολλυμένοι expresses the sphere or the department within which the Gospel is veiled or not recognized, of, among (inter). Indeed, all these significations come to the same general result. The fact alluded to is still further developed when he goes back (2Co_4:4) to its original cause.—Among whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of the unbelieving (2Co_4:4),—i. e., the blinding of the mental perceptions (νοήματα) and the author of the blindness, the god of this world (θεὸςτοῦ αἰώνος τούτου). The blinding of the νοήματα implies that the mental perceptions of these persons had been impaired and so blinded that their understandings were deluded with sophistries until all original inclination to truth was gone (comp. Mat_6:22), and their minds (νοῦς) had no correct intellectual views (Beck, p. 53, 54). Τὰ νοήματα (comp. 2Co_3:14) may here very appropriately be translated, “the perceptive powers, the understanding.” The blinding is the work of the god of this world (ό θεὸς τοῦ αἰώνος τοῦτου), by which phrase is meant not the spirit of the age, or anything of that kind, but Satan (as in 2Co_2:11), the prince of this world (Jno. 12:31; 14:30). Similar expressions occur in Eph_2:2; Eph_4:12. Neander: “It was with a direct purpose that Paul gives Satan this appellation, for he intended to imply that the selfish principle, here represented by Satan, was to such men all that God should have been.” The word θεός in other places signifies the principle which absolutely determines things (comp. Php_3:19). Bengel: Grandis et horribilis descriptio Satanæ, grandi ejus, at horribili operi respondents. Quis alias putaret, illum posse in hominibus tantae luci officere? [Augustine tells us that nearly all ancient commentators were of the opinion that the word θεός was too exalted to be applied to any created being, and hence, that it must here have meant the Supreme Jehovah. Chrysostom, in opposition to Marcion and Manichees, says: “We assert of this passage that this is spoken neither of the devil nor of another creator (in distinction from the just and good), but of the God of the universe, and that it is to be read thus: God hath blinded the minds of the unbelievers of this world; for the world to come hath no unbelievers, but the present only. He blinds them, not by working unto this end (away with the thought)! but by suffering and allowing it.” As the Arians argued from this passage that a created being might be called God, even Augustine and others would not concede to them the natural construction of our passage; on which Calvin remarks: “we see how far the spirit of controversy can lead men in perverting Scripture.” Among moderns, Dr. Adam Clarke was of a similar opinion, and he refers to 1Ti_1:17, as a similar phrase, reminding us also that αἰῶν does not necessarily mean a wicked age or generation (Mat_12:32; Luk_20:34). Even on the common rendering, however, it is not implied that God had surrendered to Satan the rightful or actual sovereignty of any one age, but only that men have yielded him such a sovereignty. Archbishop Trench (Synn. 2d ser. p. 40) regrets that the difference between αἰών and κόσμος has not been preserved in the English version. He assigns to the former in all cases a reference to time, but in a secondary and ethical sense; he thinks it embraces all which exists in the world under the conditions of time, the course and current of this world’s affairs, often with an evil significance (Eph_2:2). It includes all that floating mass of thoughts, opinions, maxims, speculations, hopes, impulses, aims, at any time current in the world, which it is impossible to seize and accurately to define, but which constitute a most real and effective power, being the moral or immoral atmosphere which at every moment of our lives we inhale, again inevitably to exhale; what we often speak of as “the times,” attaching to the word an ethical signification; or still more to the point, “the age,” the spirit or genius of the age].” Comp. further upon this τοῦ αἰώνος τούτου what is said on 1Co_1:20; 1Co_2:6. The sphere in which this alienation from God takes place is one which originally was completely dependent (ethically) upon this power. But the expression has a peculiar sharpness in application to the Jews who thought they knew and appropriated to themselves the true God in some special sense, but who were here in their unbelief consigned with the heathen to this mock deity (the simia Dei of Tertullian), as if they belonged to his special department (comp. Jno. 8:44). Instead of ὧν τὰ νιήματα ἐτύφλωσεν (in whose minds) the Apostle writes: among these lost ones, Satan hath blinded the minds of them that believe not (ἐν ὀ͂ις ἐτύφλωσε τὰ νοήματα τῶν ἀπίστων). By them that believe not, we are not to understand those whose unbelief was the direct consequence of the blinding, as if the expression were εἰς τὸ εἷναι αὐτοὺς ἀπίστους. According to the analogy of other places, the word in this case would have been ἄπιστα (comp. 1Th_3:13; Php_3:2). We may remark also that such an idea does not accord with that which follows εἰς τὸ μὴ αὐγ. etc.). Nor is it precisely a designation of the cause of this blinding, as if the expression had been διὰ τὸ εἶναι αὐτοὺς ἀπίστους. Τῶν ἀπίστων implies a self-determination toward falsehood, and a turning away from the truth, the reason of which must be traced finally to a perverted will. In these words is brought forward another aspect of the case, viz., that in this blinding process Satan was not alone active and guilty, but that the subjects of it coöperated with him, and were guilty during the process and before it. (comp. Jno. 3:18; 2Th_2:10). [Dr. Hodge, while conceding that the doctrine is Scriptural, that unbelief provokes judicial blindness, contends that the connection here demands a different interpretation, inasmuch as Paul accounts for the hiding of the Gospel to them that are lost, by saying that Satan had blinded their minds. The blindness, therefore, precedes the unbelief, and is the cause of it]. The ἐν οἷς is perhaps equivalent to ὁτι ἐν τούτοις (for, because, etc.), and indicates either the object of the blinding, the persons who could be blinded (Satan’s great work, the blinding of the νοήμ. of unbelievers has to be carried on in the hearts of the lost, for such a work cannot be performed in the hearts of the saved ones, with respect to whom the Gospel is not veiled, Meyer); or, is equivalent to among whom, and so points out the sphere or department in which Satan thus acts. The meaning, however, would be essentially the same on both interpretations. There is no carelessness or tautology in this language. Paul means to give special prominence to the idea that Satan carries on such a work among those who are in απώλεια (perdition). The clause might be translated: in the department of lost souls, where the understandings of unbelievers are blinded by the god of this world.—In order that the shining light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, might not shine forth. (2Co_4:4 b.). Here we are informed what Satan’s design is in all this; but inasmuch as what he accomplished was the infliction of a Divine judgment (Jno. 12:40; 2Th_2:11-12), it may also be looked upon as an announcement of God’s purpose. According to the reading of the Rec. αὐγάσαι αὐτοῖς must be rendered: might not irradiate or shine upon them, etc. But αὐτοῖς is very feebly authenticated, and betrays evidence that it is only a gloss. In like manner the compound verbs διαυγάσαι and καταυγάσαι seem at first more appropriate: (to shine through, to beam upon), inasmuch as the simple verb appears never to have been used intransitively among the Greek authors. Others, therefore, take the simple form as equivalent to, to see (properly: to beam upon something with the eyes, to cast the light of the eyes upon an object, sometimes with an accusative and sometimes with πρὸς τι). But as we never meet with it in this sense except among the poets, the intransitive meaning (which is favored by the attempt to make it out by the insertion of the compound forms) is to be preferred, especially as it then gives a more suitable predicate to τὸν φωτίσμόν. The αὐτοίς, which we are sorry to be obliged to throw out, is nevertheless implied by the context. In the later Greek, and frequently in the Septuagint, φωτισμός has the sense of: the imparting of light, an enlightening, light (a translation of אור in Psa_27:1; Job 3. et al.), i.e., light when in movement and in communication. (Osiander). The words τῆς δόξης do not here express merely a quality of the Gospel itself (the glorious Gospel), but rather an attribute of Christ, and hence the object or substance of the Gospel (χριστοῦ). The glory of Christ is the same as the glory of God in the face of Christ (2Co_4:6), and the glory of the Lord (2Co_3:18). We are to understand it not exclusively of Christ in his glorified state, for the glory of the only Begotten Son of God is exhibited during his whole manifestation of Himself among men, full of grace and truth (Jno
2Co_1:14); and it was shed forth even in His earthly life, and especially in His death on the cross, which is set forth as the very essence of the Gospel (1Co_1:18). Hence Christ in His glory signifies what the Gospel sets forth as the entire revelation of God through Him in His various conditions. The whole salvation revealed in the Gospel depended on this state of humiliation, including His obedience unto death, and His subsequent exaltation (Php_2:6-11; Rom_5:10; Rom_4:25; Rom_8:34; Luk_24:26). Comp. Meyer, Osiander. This Christ, whose glory is revealed in the Gospel, is yet further said to be the image of God. On εἰκών comp. 1Co_11:7. [“The article is idiomatically omitted after ἕστιν.” Ellicott]. The same expression is used respecting Christ in Col_1:15 (from which some manuscripts have borrowed the adjective ἀοράτου), and Heb_1:3.7 We are not necessarily required by what is said in Php_2:6; Php_3:21; and Jno. 17:5, to refer this with Meyer exclusively to Christ in His exaltation for the glory of God beamed from Him even during His earthly life (Jno. 2:11; 14:9). Although Christ in His exaltedstate is more perfectly the image of God, yet this expression must be looked upon as a particular representation of Christ in every condition. To justify the Apostle’s language in calling his Gospel (2Co_4:3, τὸ εὐαγγ. ἡμῶν) a proclamation of the Divine glory, and to show how inappropriate were the insinuations referred to in 2Co_3:1, he now proceeds to say (2Co_4:5):—For we preach not ourselves but Christ Jesus the Lord.—From the context, we conclude that κυρίους ought to be understood after ἐαυτοὺς κηρύσσομεν, i. e., we do not preach ourselves as your lords (in contrast with δούλους ὑμῶν, your servants). Had he in his preaching set forth himself as a lord (κύριον), and made his authority, his power, and his lordship over them (2Co_1:24, comp. 2Co_11:20) his main object, instead of commending Christ in his glory as the only Lord over them, he would have adulterated God’s Word (2Co_4:2; 2Co_2:17). If we prefer not to supply κύριους, we may explain the sentence with Osiander thus: “The substance of our preaching is not our own light, or wisdom, or merits, and hence we do not commend ourselves, nor seek our own interests.” Both explanations come to the same thing in the end. Κύριον is here used in the sense of Lord, because in consequence of Christ’s redemption the Church belongs exclusively to Him (comp. Act_20:28). The positive side in relation to ἑαυτούς (ourselves) is expressed in the phrase—and ourselves your servants (δούλους ὑμῶν) for Jesus’ sake—where there is an allusion to a very different position which some opposing teachers had arrogated to themselves (2Co_11:20). He thus gives expression to the deep humility which he felt, and shows how entire was the surrender he had made of himself to his work; comp. 1Co_9:19. The phrase διὰ ̓ Ιησοῦν (through Jesus) gives us the reason he was willing to sustain this servile relation to them; it was because the love of Christ constrained him to be their servant. It is possible that he meant thus to say that it was by the authority of Jesus that, he had been invested with this official dignity (by, on account of); or we may even regard the expression as equivalent to beneficio Jesu (this blessing was due to Jesus). The first of these meanings suits our connection the best, and according to it the sense would be: that the Apostle gave himself to be their servant, for Jesus’ sake, and to retain possession of the property he had already won for the Lord, or to bring them to a better acquaintance and more intimate fellowship with Jesus. The reason assigned in 2Co_4:6 seems to point to this last interpretation, for it is there implied that this was the Divine purpose regarding him when he was first enlightened:—Because God who called forth the light to shine out of darkness—(2Co_4:6). It seems quite needless and arbitrary to make this refer back to 2Co_4:4, and regard 2Co_4:5 as a parenthesis. But perhaps we may more completely bring in the contents of 2Co_4:5 in another way. The reason that we preach Christ as our only Lord, and are willing to be your servants for Jesus’ sake, is, that God has enlightened us:—hath shined in our hearts for the shining forth of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.—[Our explanation of this verse will depend on the answer we give to the question, for what purpose the Apostle introduced it. If his object was to assign the reason for his being the servant of the Corinthians (2Co_4:5, b), then he intended to say here that God, who commanded, etc., had shined into his heart that he might diffuse it to others. But if his object was to give his reason for preaching Christ (2Co_4:5 a), it was because (ὄτι) God, who commanded; etc., had shined in men’s hearts (as our version has it) to give us the light, etc. On either interpretation the sense is good. The first accords with Gal_1:16, and is generally adopted. But surely the main idea of the passage is that Paul preached Christ, and the mention of his being a servant to the Corinthians was only incidental; the phrase “our hearts” (plural) can hardly mean here merely Paul’s own heart; and φωτισμός τῆς γνώσεως seems naturally to mean the objective light which came from Christ and would be obstructed by blindness. (Comp. Hodge and Billroth)]. There are also considerable difficulties in the grammatical structure of the sentence, especially on account of the ὂς before ἔλαμψεν. This is probably the reason that this relative has been left out in a number of manuscripts, though for external as well as internal reasons, it must be regarded as unquestionably genuine. The easiest way would seem to be to supply ἐστιν before ὁ εἰπών: q. d. it is God who commanded, etc., who shined, etc. And yet in this way, that which was designed to be merely a type of something higher becomes the principal object of the statement. Certainly the phrase: who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, should be looked upon as describing neither a mental illumination nor a breaking forth of the light of the Gospel from the obscurity of the law, but what took place in the first act of creation (Gen_1:3); and even then it must be taken in such a way that ἐκ will express not a special, but a causal relation.—The idea then expressed would be that he who was the Creator of physical light, and caused it to break forth out of darkness, is the same Being who has caused a light of a higher nature to rise in the heart of the Apostle. Or, if we take ἔλαμψεν, like λάμψαι in a preceding passage, and every where else in the New Testament, intransitively (for the transitive use of the word is confined to the poets, and even among them is infrequent), the idea will, be: He hath shined into our hearts (dwelling in us by His Spirit; comp. 1Co_3:16; 1Co_14:25; Jno. 14:23). There will then be no need either of an αν̓τός or of an ὅς, and the preceding ὁ εἰπὼνλάμψαι, which gives a transitive sense, will not stand in the way. That we may gain this sense, we must either supply an ἔστιν or an οὗτος ἔστιν before ὅς ἔλαμψεν: the God who commanded, etc., is the one who has shined, etc. (de Wette); or the ὅς ἕλαμψεν, etc., must be taken from this and repeated in the principal sentence before πρὸς φωτισμὸν, i.e., the God who commanded, etc., and who hath shined in our hearts, hath shined with the light, etc., (or: hath done this with the light, etc., supplying τοῦτο ἐποίησεν). But will not this, after all, be more difficult than to complete the sentence by supplying ἐστιν before ὅς ἕλαμψεν (is the one who hath shined)? The analogy of 2Co_3:13 would not perhaps be decisive in favor of this, since the completion of the sentence is much easier there. The easiest way would be, to take ὅς as equivalent to ὁ͂υτς or αὐτός: he has shined. But this is only a poetic, and particularly a Homeric usage, and only in special cases is ὅς ever met with as a demonstrative pronoun (comp. Passow s. v. ὅς 1). The logical objection, however, to the completion of the sentence by ἐστιν before ὅς ἕλαμψεν, viz., that this sentence would then have an emphasis which does not belong to it, inasmuch as the principal stress must be laid upon πρὸς φωτισμόν (Meyer), is not very convincing; for we must certainly lay an emphasis also upon the Divine agency which is here so solemnly introduced, and by means of which Paul had been directed to, and fitted for, the φωτισμός. This shining of God into his heart is the same thing which he describes in Gal_1:15-16, thus: it pleased God to discover (or reveal) His Son in me; for it is his own experience which he probably has uppermost in his mind. What he there says in plain words: that I might preach Him among the Gentiles (comp. Act_26:16-18), he here expresses by a figure of the light moving itself, thus: by the shining forth of the knowledge, etc. By these words he certainly intended to say that he was the medium through which such a knowledge was communicated to others. But may φωτισμός be regarded as meaning: to make light, to show, or intransitively to shine? The latter is the only meaning which accords with its use in 2Co_4:4, and the uniform usage, at least, of the Hellenistic writers.—The question may still be raised, whether in the face of Christ (ἐν προσώπῳ Χριστοῦ) ought to be connected immediately with πρὸςφωτισμόν or with τῆς δόξης (i. e., so as to mean the shining in the face of Christ, or the glory which was in the face of Christ)? In the first case, γνῶσις must be taken objectively (not as the subjective knowledge of the Apostle or the Apostolic teachers, but) as the knowledge of the glory of God, irradiated from the face of Christ, the image of God (2Co_4:4). The sense then would be: if any one converts others to Christ, he makes the knowledge of the Divine glory beam from the face of Jesus Christ (Meyer after Fritzsche). But this explanation of the γνῶσις (knowledge), as if it were entirely objective, is not indispensable, inasmuch as the words: the glory of God in the face of Christ, so naturally follow: who is the image of God (2Co_4:4), and so precisely correspond with these, that the article was not necessary before ἐν προσώπῳ, especially as the idea of the glory of God in the face (ἐν προσώπω, τοῦπροσώπου) in the Mosaic type (2Co_3:7) was yet present to the Apostle’s mind. The knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (love, power, wisdom) was therefore subjective to the mind of the Apostle by a Divine revelation to his heart (ἔλαμψεν ἐν ταῖς καρδίαις ἡμῶν), and then it shone around him so as to lead others to know Christ as their Lord, and to have fellowship also with Him. [“Christ is called the image of God in two respects: first (as in Col_1:15) with reference to the λόγος which is in him the perfect representation of God; and secondly with reference to that human manifestation in which the λόγος itself was revealed (comp. 2Co_3:18). We have in this place to think of the latter relation, although the other is included in the idea of the historical Christ. The glory of God is manifested in the absolute image which the historical Christ sets forth.” [Neander.]
DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL
The only persons who can so preach that the Divine glory in the Person and life of Christ, shall shine into the hearts of men, and cause them to recognize Him as their Redeemer and Lord, are those who have had their own hearts illuminated by that glory, and have mercifully been delivered from condemnation. But a personal experience of that, grace was never designed to be the limit of this revelation. When once the stream of Divine love has flowed into a single heart, from its very nature, it cannot be confined there, but it must struggle for communication. If I have myself been delivered from destruction, I shall long to commend the mercy which has saved me, to all who need the same experience. For the sake of Him who has saved me, and who has purchased those precious souls which are perishing around me, I shall strive to make men acquainted with Him in whom all fulness dwells, and who can satisfy all their wants. I shall cheerfully give myself to the work of winning souls to Him, and not esteem life itself too dear, if thereby I can bring them to salvation, or confirm them in its possession. In such circumstances the servant of Christ will have no room for preaching himself, that he may take the place of Christ by making His people dependent upon Him, and usurping a lordship over them. He will never wish to impose his opinions upon others, so as to impair the authority of God’s word; and he will never be guilty of those tricks and intrigues which gain esteem at the expense of those who have a better right to confidence and honor. He will have no heart for those hypocritical arts by which others seek to become all things to all men (1Co_9:19-23), and under the guise of disinterested benevolence, flatter men’s sinful passions, and accommodate themselves to the weak sides of their followers. Never will he think of evading by such arts the real difficulties of the Christian life, and shunning all earnest labor and self-denial in the pastoral work. Those who have a holy calling to bring their fellowmen to behold the Divine glory, and thus to transform them into Christ’s image, will rather encounter all cares, and reproaches, and afflictions with cheerfulness. They will renounce those impure motives which cannot bear the light, and they will so act and speak as to commend themselves to every man’s conscience. All things will be done as in the presence of that God who sees and judges the secrets of the heart.—And yet even when they are most faithful, their words may not get access to every heart. Some love darkness rather than light, and will, therefore, turn away from their testimony. Satan takes advantage of their aversion to truth, to bewitch them and to blind their understanding, so that the light of Christ, the image of God, cannot reach their hearts. God then gives them up to this blindness for their abuse of His testimony. As they would not yield to the attractions of grace, they are cast out of the sphere of gracious influences, and given up to those arts of the father of lies, for which they have such a predisposition. As they had no pleasure in the truth, and would not believe it, they become more and more unsusceptible to its influence, they willingly yield themselves to every kind of delusion, and fall into superstitions in which nothing but lies can be received (comp. 2Th_2:10-12).
[“The Gospel may be said to be hidden when it is never preached to a people at all, when it is not understood, when it does not take hold of the conscience, and when the heart doth not entertain or give reception to it. Hence this hiding may be either sinful or penal—sinful, when men hear the Gospel but will not set themselves to understand it, or will not receive conviction or a suitable impression from it; and penal, when God gives up such sinners to their chosen way. Such a hiding is a sad token that they are lost, for it is evident that they are not recovered and saved, and hence that they are in a state which both excludes what is necessary to their salvation, and includes what promotes their destruction. There can therefore be no hope that their state will be safe at last who live in the neglect of those methods which the Gospel prescribes for their salvation; and there can be no ground for them to fear that they shall be finally lost, who, with dependence on grace, are using these methods to their uttermost.” Condensed from Howe’s Six Sermons on the Hidden Gospel and Lost souls].
HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL
Starke:
2Co_4:1. The most faithful servant of Christ may become tired in his work but not of it. But he has only to strengthen himself in God and perform his part to the best of his ability. It is upon the end, upon the glorious crown that he should fix his eye.
2Co_4:2. Luther:—False Apostles sometimes make a fine show, but look within and they are full of filthiness (Mat_18:27 f.)!—Hedinger:—Many vain talkers cover up their pride, avarice, envy, malice and bitterness, under a pretence of good intentions, and by this very thing show that they are ashamed of their own dishonesty. They therefore paint it up in false colors, and they twist and pervert the word of God so as to please men and sanction their carnal objects (Tit_1:9 ff.; Php_2:21).
2Co_4:3. Alas! that even in the Church the glorious Gospel should be so covered up! How few have so truly turned to the Lord that the glory of the Gospel has dawned upon their spirits!—Luther:
2Co_4:4. The devil is this world’s prince and god, and therefore God in righteous judgment has given it up to serve and to be ruled by him.—Hedinger:—Dost thou feel, O man, no touch of God’s word? Know then that the enemy is covering up thine eyes and thy heart (Heb_3:13). In the voluntary blinding and hardening of the unbeliever’s heart, there is a concurrence of his own guilt and the malignity of Satan; for if he were not guilty Satan could do nothing. Above all things, then, beware of unbelief.—Spener:—Satan can hardly keep men from knowing God simply as God, for all nature proclaims that it has a Creator and a Governor. But the point on which he has a special desire to blind them is the knowledge of Christ the Son of God, and the work of salvation by Christ.
2Co_4:5. The sum of all true preaching is Jesus Christ. Everything must run into Him (Col_1:27).
2Co_4:6. The best eye can see nothing without light. “In Thy light, O God, shall we see light” (Psa_36:10).—If we would lead others to Christ, we must ourselves turn to Him, and receive the clear beams of faith into our own hearts. If we would know the mind of our heavenly Father, and specially how he feels toward men, we must direct our eyes to the face , (i.e., to the words and life) of Christ, for there we have the best expression of His heart (Jno. 14:9).
Berlenb. Bible:
2Co_4:1. It is a great mercy when God calls a man to such a work. We should not, therefore, make much account of what we have to endure in it.
2Co_4:2. Ministers should never attempt to draw the people by going around the cross and flattering them. God’s servants have no need of intrigues and impure arts.—God’s word is always the same, but it is very easy to add to it something of our own. It can be corrupted either by addition or by subtraction, especially when one has some evil design, and wishes to accommodate it to a corrupt world. The truth is our own best evidence, but it is effectual only when we coöperate with our consciences and open our hearts to it. The truth and we must meet face to face. No true minister will be without this test of himself: that when he merely manifests the truth, he can appeal to every man’s conscience. If he cannot do this, he can do nothing.
2Co_4:3. The Gospel is covered to those who spend their lives to no profit and seek for life in the enjoyments of the flesh and in the evil suggestions of a carnal reason.
2Co_4:4. The god of this world is sure to blind those who believe not and who will not listen candidly to God’s kind invitations. He will suggest to them: “If you choose that way you will never get along in the world.” Such a god they will serve, and we need not wonder that their thoughts and hearts should be so occupied that they can receive no light. Even if the light shines upon them and they feel it, they turn away from it. Though God may penetrate through every obstacle till he reaches the conscience, he never works absolutely, i.e., irresistibly, and the result is not, necessarily saving. Light may shine clearly and yet a man may not perceive it: 1, If the windows of his house are closed and all around him is darkened (false principles and erroneous views); 2, If his eyes (the windows of his body) are so closed that no light can enter them (misunderstandings and perversions of revealed truth). The first obstacle is removed when the armor of light is put on; and when with the help of a Stronger, the strongholds of reason are demolished. The other is removed without violating the established laws of moral and intellectual freedom, when the preventing grace of God destroys Satan’s work in the heart and prepares it to welcome and entertain the light of revealed truth. God therefore first makes an assault upon our wills. When the sun is admitted the darkness flies of course. God does not arbitrarily force us to receive the light, but we must receive it by a free faith. The only reason that many have no light, is, they love the world more than God. The spirit of the world holds possession of them. The arch-deceiver makes the poor soul think: “Surely it is not necessary to give up everything; we may retain this thing and that, and still be Christians; others do so, and are nevertheless very good people; God does not require us to be so very strict.” These are the lies which many admit with greater readiness than they do the truth and the glory of the Gospel. God is resisted by them as if He were an enemy, and was preparing to inflict on them some great calamity and injustice. When the love of self is the reigning principle in the heart, there can be no interest in the glory of Christ, and the image of the sinful Adam will be inscribed over the whole man.
2Co_4:5. Where shall we find those who preach nothing but Jesus Christ? We meet with many who are eager to obtain honor and personal comfort; but so absorbing is their interest in themselves, that they have very little time or heart to give to Christ.
2Co_4:6. God’s works are all in harmony. The illumination of a soul like that of the natural world is a Divine work, a new creation, and can be effected only by the fiat of the Almighty. Our hearts are at first in chaotic darkness, and the type of the process by which they become temples of God must be sought in what took place at the beginning. As the first day’s work was the separation of the light from the darkness, so the first work of grace in the heart is to give it light. We must allow Christ to break through the darkness of our hearts and discover it to us, or we shall never see the light. But the mere admission of the light is not enough; it must be received into the most secret recess of the heart. Then, when the light of a true knowledge is received, how clearly do we see our poverty, but how clearly also the wonders of grace! The darkness is past and the true light shines (1 Jno. 2:8). But this light of Jesus Christ must necessarily shine beyond ourselves. Others also will see it and be enkindled and won to Christ. One great object of the vocation wherewith we are called is to make us God’s witnesses.—God is to be known only as we look upon the face of the only begotten Son (Jno. 1:18). God never presents Himself to us in an absolute manner, but only through this face. Such is the old but sublime theology which was always so precious to His humble ones. There we may look upon God and our lives be preserved (Gen_32:30). But such a sight can often be gained only by a wrestling like Jacob’s, and with a painful discovery of our poverty. But no sooner is this sight gained than we are drawn toward God. We can bear to look upon the Deity Himself, even in His glory, when we behold Him in the face of a Mediator (Psa_89:16; Exo_29:10 f.; Exo_33:14).
Rieger, 2Co_4:1-2 :—The unjust treatment which the word of faith sometimes receives, and the unhappy results which sometimes follow its dispensation, are no reason why those who are called to preach it should renounce their hope or their enjoyment of it; nor should they thus be tempted to use means which are unsuitable to their work. Never should they keep back doctrines or precepts which belong to the mind of Christ, from a fear that they might injure His cause. Let them never show punctiliousness in matters which are known and judged of by their fellowmen, while they tolerate great imperfections in those which none but the eye of God can discern. Let them use no means to please men which would not be commended by God and approved of in the consciences of all who see them, and which would not tend to bring out the truth in still clearer terms.
2Co_4:3-4. The god of this world has a great variety of instruments conspiring together to promote his wicked purpose of covering up the Gospel from the eyes of men.—The unbelieving world is always inclined to throw out the suspicion that ministers are seeking only their private interests. But those who have accepted Jesus as their Lord, will cheerfully confide in His servants, and in the arrangements He has made respecting them.
2Co_4:6. In one of His first, acts God acquired a peculiar name: “He who called the light out of darkness.” That ancient name He still maintains by similar manifestations of His power on a larger or smaller scale; but especially by the revelation of His Son in the hearts of men through the Gospel. In the life of Christ we have concentrated as in a single person, and everything given which we need to reveal God to us, and to make us trust in Him as our Father. The Apostles have given us so complete and so credible a testimony of what they saw of Christ, that we may have from their preaching and writings the same impressions which they had from His personal presence. Truly blessed is every reader whose faith looks steadily and with an unveiled face upon Jesus!
Heubner, 2Co_4:1 :—Keep your eye upon the greatness and sanctity of your calling, and you will be in no danger of falling.
2Co_4:2. The only way for a preacher, is always to be open and honest.—God’s word should be preached in its purity as it was preached at first, with no recent improvements or disfigurements; for not only must it be a great sin, in the Lord’s sight, to present in His name what is not His, but we shall thus deprive His word of its real power.—Luther: Counterfeiters of money are burned, but falsifiers of God’s word are canonized.
2Co_4:3. Though the truth and power of the Gospel are hidden from the eyes of many, it is only to them that are lost, and because they would not believe.
2Co_4:4. A good or an evil spirit rules all men. Why it is by the one rather than by the other, must ever remain one of the mysteries of human freedom, for the result is not always according to the power of the outward influence. The corrupt mind may truly be said to be blinded, when the world is regarded as the only thing real or glorious, when the world’s vanities appear to be all that is substantial, and when the Gospel and Christ’s glories are counted as nothing. Christ, His glory, His love, His holiness, His power, His government, and His Divine excellence, are the substance of the Gospel. He is the image of God, so that as the Son is, the Father must be.
2Co_4:5. The Gospel has an enlightening power, for it is not a system of human inventions; and those who preach it are not founding systems of philosophy, nor leading off new sects or schools of religious belief; but they present Christ as the Master of every other master, and the only Rock of all wisdom, righteousness and salvation.
2Co_4:6. When Christ enlightens a soul, it is as great a miracle as the creation of a world. As the physical light enables us to discern God’s power and glory in the natural universe, so the light of faith enables us to recognize His glory in the spiritual universe.—The highest grace is that look of grace God gives us when we experience His grace.—Every thing which belongs to Christ’s manifestation to men, is a reflection of the Deity, What then was the lustre upon Moses’ face compared with the light in which God manifests Himself?
W. F. Besser, 2Co_4:2 :—An ingenuous deportment is the glory, and an artful concealment is the shame of a minister of Christ. Every man’s conscience recognizes with more or less distinctness what God commands or forbids; and hence when the Gospel is manifested to it, a ready witness there gives an affirmation to the truth; and when this affirmation is withheld, the conscience of the lover of lies feels the penal brand (1Ti_4:2). The consciousness of his guilt is indelibly fixed in his soul. The conscience of believers is good; it is polluted with no corruptions, and it is restrained by no fears; while that of unbelievers is vicious, defiled and burdened; it perpetually accuses them that are lost because they obey not the truth.
2Co_4:3. It may do us no harm to remain ignorant of some truths, but we are lost forever if we know not the Gospel.
2Co_4:4. The special work of the great Corrupter is to corrupt still more them that are lost. In this work, however, he is only God’s executioner. This blinding is nothing but a punishment for the sin of unbelief (Eph_2:2), for loving darkness so much that the light was necessarily hated (Joh_3:19-20), and for being so much devoted to earthly things, that all the blessings of heaven offered in the Gospel, are rejected with scorn. The blindness itself is effected by covering up the Gospel, by mystifying God’s clear word, by misconstruing the obvious meaning of what God has done, and by closing the eyes against the truth as it is dispensed in the Church.
2Co_4:6. The very central point of man’s nature, his heart’s treasure (Mat_12:35), has been darkened ever since he became a sinner; the Spirit of God, the light of his life has been put out. It is indeed true that the heart (where the conscience has its laboratory) is always aware to some extent, that its life and rest should be in God, but this light of conscience cannot give life; it is rather a deadly lightning (Rom_1:32) to those who have fallen from Divine fellowship. If in our hearts there ever springs up a spiritual light by which we recognize spiritual things, just as we behold the works of creation by the natural light, it must be by the act of that same God who in the beginning commanded the light to shine out of darkness (Psa_18:29). This work of the Almighty Creator, in which He irradiates man’s darkened heart, is just the counterpart of that work of this world’s god in which the mind of the unbeliever is blinded.
[“The Christian ministry: I. As a ministry of Light. It does not make the objects of faith; it only unveils or manifests them as they are. To live in sin is to live a false life—a life of lies—in which a man is untrue to his own nature. The Gospel does not make God our Father; it only reveals Him as He had ever been, is, and ever shall be; not a tyrant but a Father; not a chance or a necessary thing but a Person; and in the life of Christ the love of God has become intelligible to us. So it throws light on man’s nature; shows him with God-like aspirations and animal cravings; a glorious temple in ruins, to be re-built into a habitation of God through the Spirit. It throws light upon the grave and the things of that undiscovered land beyond. Hence our life is to be a perpetual manifestation of the Gospel, and a diffusion of the light of the Gospel; while the evil and worldly heart is ever hiding the truth. This light is the true evidence of Christianity. II. As a reflection, in word, and experience of the life of Christ.” F. W. Robertson, Lect. XL.].
Footnotes:
[1]2Co_4:1.—The Recep. has ἐκκακοῦμεν, but Lachmann and Tischendorf have ἐγκακοῦμεν. Meyer thinks the latter an emendation to make the text accord with general usage among all Greek writers, with the exception of some doubtful passages of the New Testament, and some writings of the Fathers. [A similar, though not quite the same variety of readings is found for the same word in Luk_18:1; Gal_6:9; Eph_3:13; and 2Th_3:13. Meyer thinks that ἐκκακ, was probably more used in oral speech in Paul’s time, though it appears in no Greek writer before him: and that Paul and Luke introduced it into ecclesiastical usage, where it sometimes occurs, but still less frequently than ἐγκακ. The Codd. A. B. D (1st Cor.) F. G. (the three last have it written ἐνκακ). Sinait. and some cursives favor ἐγκακ. but C. D. (3d Cor.) E. K. L. et al. with Chrys., Theodt., Damasc., et al. have ἐκκακ. Among the versions some of the old Ital. have non defecimus, and others with Tertul. and the Vulg. have non deficimus, still others with one copy of the Vulg. and Ambrosiast, have non deficiamus; August, has non infirmemur, the Gothic non fiamus segnes, the Syriac non est nobis tædium, Erasmus non degeneramus. Wycliffe and the Rhemish have we fail not; Tyndale and Geneva with our A. V. and Bib. Union, we faint not; and Cranmer, we go not out of kynde. The difference of meaning between the two readings is not very serious; for which see Exeg. notes]
[2][2Co_4:2.—The Rec. has συνιστῶντες with D. (3d Cor.), E. K. L. Chrys., Theodt., et al., A. and B. seem uncertain whether the reading should be -ῶντες or -άνοντες, but C. D. (1st Cor.) F. G. and Sinait. and three cursives, have συνιστάντες, which is edited by Lachm., Tisch. and Alford. Comp. 2Co_6:5; and 2Co_10:18].
[3]2Co_4:4.—Διαυγάσαι and καταυγάσαι are both glosses to define more precisely the simple verb. [The principal authorrity for the former is A., four cursives, and some copies of some Greek fathers of the Antiochian school: and for the latter, C. D. et al. The Recep. αύγάσαι is sustained by B. F. K. L. Sinait. and the best MSS. of the Greek Fathers]. The Recep, has αὐτοῖς after αὐγάσαι, but without much MSS. authority. It is evidently an interpolation.
[4]2Co_4:6.—Lachmann has λάμψει instead of λάμψαι, on the authority of A. B. [D. (1st Cor.) Sinait (1st Cor.) et al.] It is probably a suggestion from Gen_1:3. [Bloomfield, Meyer, Wordsworth, Tischendorf, agree with the Recep. and most of the versions and fathers in preferring λάμψαι, but Alford and Stanley agree with Kling in thinking this a quotation of the creative fiat. Some respectable MSS. omit ὅς].
[5]2Co_4:6.—Lachmann has αὑτοῦ in place of τοῦ θεοῦ. but the MSS. evidence for it is not satisfactory, and the internal evidence is against it, since no one could have been uncertain of the antecedent of αὐτοῦ, [and hence would have had no motive to put τοῦ θεοῦ in its place for an explanation. Its only uncial authorities are F. G. and the 1st Corr. of C. and D].
[6]2Co_4:6.—Ἰησοῦ before Χριστοῦ is not genuine. [And yet it is inserted before χριστοῦ by C. K. L. and Sinait., and after χριστοῦ by D. E. F. G., the Italic and Vulgate versions, and the Latin Fathers; A. B. and some Greek writers have only χριστοῦ].
[7][In Col_1:15, and Heb_1:3, the reference is to the λόγος, and hence ἀοράτου was appropriate. The word in the latter passage (χαράκτηρ) is different, but the idea is nearly the same. An image is more than a likeness (ὁμοίωσις, Trench, Synn. 1st Ser. p. 77): things may be alike, but not images of one another. An image must have a prototype after which it was drawn, and which it must more than resemble. Greg. Naz.: αν̓́τη γὰρ εἰκόνος φύσις, μίμημα εἶναι τοῦ ἀρχετύπον. The present ἔστιν signifies that the thing spoken of was always present].
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv2–10 renounced--literally, "bid farewell to."
renounced--literally, "bid farewell to."
of dishonesty--rather, "of shame." "I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ" (Rom 1:16). Shame would lead to hiding (Co2 4:3); whereas "we use great plainness of speech" (Co2 3:12); "by manifestation of the truth." Compare Co2 3:3, "manifestly declared." He refers to the disingenuous artifices of "many" teachers at Corinth (Co2 2:17; Co2 3:1; Co2 11:13-15).
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handling . . . deceitfully--so "corrupt" or adulterate "the word of God" (Co2 2:17; compare Th1 2:3-4).
commending--recommending ourselves: recurring to Co2 3:1.
to--to the verdict of.
every man's conscience-- (Co2 5:11). Not to men's carnal judgment, as those alluded to (Co2 3:1).
in the sight of God-- (Co2 2:17; Gal 1:10).
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 1. This ministry—The ministry of ever-increasing glory just described,…
1. This ministry—The ministry of ever-increasing glory just described, shed from the image of Christ as beaming from the gospel.
Faint not—We falter not from timidity before the sons of the letter, the Corinthian Jew-Christians, upon whose heart still rests the vail.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv1–10 Ch. 2Co_4:1-15. Entrusted with so glorious a mission, the…
Ch. 2Co_4:1-15. Entrusted with so glorious a mission, the Ministers of the Gospel shrink from neither danger nor difficulty
1. Therefore] The connection between this and what precedes is sufficiently obvious. Sustained by so great and glorious a mission, the Apostles of Christ are daunted by no trials.
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as we have received mercy] St Paul not only bears in mind the glory of his commission, but the mercy, of which he never fails to feel himself undeserving (1Co_15:9; Eph_3:8; 1Ti_1:12-16). Thus there is a double reason for not sinking under the burden of his ministry.
we faint not] It is to be noted that in both these Epistles the Apostle now uses the singular and now the plural. He uses the first when his vindication is distinctly personal to himself, the second when he speaks of Christian ministers in general. This is clear from the two passages (ch. 2Co_1:19 and 1Co_9:6) in which he defines who ‘we’ are. The genuine Apostles of Christ, he would say, do not lose heart when all does not go smoothly with them. Nay, the very fact that they have sufferings to undergo stamps them the more unmistakeably as followers of Christ.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv1–10 (1) Therefore seeing we have this ministry.—The ministry referred…
IV.
(1) Therefore seeing we have this ministry.—The ministry referred to is that of which such great things have just been said: the ministry of the new covenant, of the Spirit, of righteousness, of glory (2Co_3:6; 2Co_3:8-9). Two thoughts rise up in the Apostle’s mind in immediate association with this: (1) His own utter unworthiness of it, which finds expression in “as we have received mercy” (comp. 1Ti_1:12); and (2) the manifold trials and difficulties in the midst of which it had to be accomplished. The very fact that he has been called to such a work is, however, a source of strength. He cannot faint or show cowardice in discharging it.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv1–10 The glory of the gospel ministry (vers. 1-6), which…
The glory of the gospel ministry (vers. 1-6), which sustains the hearts of Christ"s ministers among all weaknesses and trials (vers. 7-15), especially by the faith in things unseen (vers. 16-18).
Ver. 1. Therefore. Because of the freedom and open vision of the gospel. As we have received mercy. Gratitude for a mercy so undeserved (1Ti_1:13) makes us fearless and vigorous in a ministry so glorious. (Act_20:23, Act_20:24) We faint not. The word implies the maintenance of a holy courage (1Co_16:13) and perseverance. (2Th_3:13) It occurs again in ver. 16, and in Gal_6:9; Eph_3:13.
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Vers. 1, 2.
The character and work of a true minister of Christ.
seeing we have this ministry," etc. These words present to us a true minister of Christ as he is in himself and in his labours, that is, his character and work.
I HIS CHARACTER. It is here suggested that his character is marked by three things.
1. Its strength. "Therefore seeing we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not." Having in mercy such a gospel as this to preach, we are not disheartened. "We faint not;" on the contrary, we are courageous. The character of every minister of Christ should be marked by strength strength of conviction, strength of principle.
2. Its purity. "But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty," or rather, of "shame." Every element and form of sin is a thing of "shame," a thing which makes the conscience blush. Falsehood, inchastity, meanness, selfishness, dishonesty, are all things for shame and disgust. A true minister has renounced all these things, he is thoroughly cleansed of them.
3. Its straightforwardness. "Not walking in craftiness." No attribute of character is more common, at the same time more morally ignoble and anti-Christian, than artfulness or stratagem. Ministers of religion are frequently charged with this "craftiness," and the charge is, alas! too often true. The craft of priests is notorious. Now, a true minister is free from this; he is a man of frankness, candour, transparent honesty.
II HIS WORK. How does he fulfil his mission? The answer is given here:
1. Negatively. "Not handling the Word of God deceitfully." It is thus handled when it is used to support a system, to advance a sect, to exhibit self, to gain a living and to win popularity. He is not a true minister who does this.
2. Positively. "By manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man"s conscience in the sight of God.
(1) He appeals to the conscience of humanity. "Every man"s conscience." Elsewhere Paul calls conscience the "inner man;" it is in truth the man of the man, his moral self. It is thus he addresses himself, not merely to the passion, or to the imagination, or to the intellect, but to that which underlies and permeates every spiritual faculty of man.
(2) He appeals to the conscience of humanity through the truth. "By manifestation of the truth." What is the "truth"? "The Word of God." And that word, not as literature, but as life, the life of Christ. He is the Truth." It is "truth as it is in Jesus," not in creeds or Churches that he addresses to the conscience.
(3) He appeals to the consciences of humanity, through the troth under the felt inspection of Almighty God. "In the sight of God." The man who preaches the truth under a consciousness of the Divine eye wilt be free from
(a) fear,
(b) affectation, and from
(c) dulness.
HOMILIES BY C. LIPSCOMB Vers. 1-6.
Glory of the apostolic ministry; how its duties were discharged.
It is still "this ministry." The question, "Who is sufficient for these things?" has been answered in part by a statement of his "sincerity" and "plainness of speech," and he now proceeds to Speak of his courage and steady zeal. "We faint not," allowing no difficulties or dangers to dishearten us. But what was the nature or spirit of this resolute energy? Energetic men, brave men, who are bent on their purpose, are not always choice or chary of the means employed to gain their ends. "Hidden things of dishonesty," plots, schemes concocted in secret, were renounced, nor did he in any way adulterate the gospel. Not only did he preach the Word, but he delivered it as received from the Lord Jesus. The mirror was kept clean and bright, so as to reflect the image. Of course, he contrasted himself with his opponents, who used intrigues to acquire influence. If certain men handled the Word of God deceitfully, he was not one of that number, for his single aim was; "by manifestation of the truth," to commend himself "to every man"s conscience in the sight of God." Divine truth, such as the gospel contained, was a manifestation, a showing of its real and intrinsic character, to the only faculty competent to receive it as a self-evidencing system; and that faculty was the conscience. Reason lies back of all our reasoning, and is greater and truer than our formal logic. Instinct antedates experience, and is the condition precedent to experience. And these instincts with their intuitions constitute their own evidence and form the basis of all knowledge. St. Paul argued that the spiritual doctrines of the gospel, if faithfully presented to the conscience, would be recognized and accepted by conscience as the truth of God. History is history; testimony is testimony; judgment is judgment; conscience is conscience; and he will not disparage any one of these to exalt another, but will keep each in its place according to the constitution of our nature. Yet the human mind, made in God"s image, must be master of its impressions, sovereign over its motives, lord of itself when most obedient to God; and, accordingly, it must have a conscience to witness "magisterially," as Bishop Butler puts it, for the authority of God. It was not to worldly taste and selfish intellect St. Paul appealed in preaching the gospel, nor to low and mercenary feelings of any kind, but to the conscience as the supreme sense of right in man. And was this all? Nay; they commended themselves, their persons, their private and public lives, their experience and conduct, to the consciences of others. Witness what we are, what we do, how we live, as well as what we preach, was St. Paul"s argument. No man enjoyed true appreciation and love more than he; but, most of all, he sought the testimony of their conscience that he was their servant for Christ"s sake, and was in no respect crafty and dishonest in his relations to the brethren. Private character and public character are, alas! too often disjoined, and not seldom are opposites; but St. Paul thought that gifts and graces should go together. What he professed as an apostle be would practise as a man, and in each respect he would commend himself to conscience. On no account would he have the confidence and regard of the Church except so far as he impressed this purest and safest kind of human judgment. And he did this most solemnly, "in the sight of God." Observe, then, it was not to their consciousness but conscience, to which his ministry, character, and life appealed. Nor was this limited to the Church. It was exhibited before all, believers and unbelievers, a savour of life, a savour of death. The manifestation of the truth would commend itself to every man"s conscience; and yet the general verdict of conscience would be accepted and acted on by some, while it would be opposed and disobeyed by many. But who were the rejecters? "If our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost" (who are now perishing), not finally lost, but at present unsaved, their day of grace not over, salvation yet possible. The state spoken of is one of mental blindness, which includes the want of spiritual perceptions and the darkness of the understanding. Conscience is instructed, but the intellect overpowers conscience. Conscience is on the side of truth; intellect on the side of the senses. Conscience entreats, warns, condemns, in the name of God; intellect is sophistical and imperious in behalf of the carnal man. And the intellect is thus alienated from its rational subordination to a ruling conscience by a usurper who is Satan, "the god of this world." Men have allowed him to assert sovereignty over them, have made him "a god," and have yielded to his wicked agency what belongs to the one God. They hays robbed God to give him power over their bodies and souls. Without this clear and vivid recognition of the personality, the activity, the prodigious energy of Satan, the theology of St. Paul would have no consistency, no logical coherence, no adaptiveness to the convicting and renewing work with which he associates it. With him, human depravity is not an abstract thing, an isolated thing, but part and parcel of a vast system of evil, an immense empire of untruth, deception, fraud, cruelty, of which Satan is head and front. Is unbelief powerful? Satan is behind it. Are the lusts and appetites of the flesh tyrannic? Satan is the tyrant. Are men blinded to their interest and well being? By him, "god of this world," are they blinded. One who estimates human depravity solely by what it is in itself will have a very different view of its actual character in experience and outworking from one who looks at it as an instrumentality in such hands as Satan"s. In the former case it is the man indulging in depravity for his own gratification he personally and individually and directly is its motive, impulse, and end; in the latter there is a kingdom and a despotic ruler, whose objects are furthered by widening his dominion and enhancing his sway. St. Paul is explicit. Satan is the blinder, and he is the blinder as "the god of this world." And he blinds the minds of men, "lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the Image of God, should shine unto them." Turn to the close of the previous chapter and read of the "open face," of the reflected "glory of the Lord," of the assimilating power of the "image," of its transforming wonder in changing "from glory to glory." And now take this awful contrast a fallen angel, a dethroned principality and power the "god" among his hierarchies, the "god" of a world where men are on probation for an immortality of good or evil, and thin "god" of darkness busy everywhere to hide the only light that reveals Christ as the Image of God. Here is this light in the history of Christ"s life, death, resurrection, exaltation. It is glorious. It is preached as a "glorious gospel;" it is preached by men. who have "renounced the hidden things of dishonesty," and who themselves, by their candour, integrity, purity, commend themselves to every man"s conscience under the eye of God, But Satan exerts all his skill and influence, controls myriad agencies, works continually and works so successfully that the minds of many are blinded by unbelief. Destroy belief and you destroy the soul. And this is the Satanic might of evil, the climax of all his influence, that the blindness with which he shrouds the soul is the blindness of unbelief. Can he think of "the glorious gospel of Christ" and not be humbled? "We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus" sake." And now the idea which has occupied so much of his attention the veiled face of Moses, the open vision of Christ, the image of the Father in him, the glory that excelleth, the ministry as a manifestation of glory, Christian growth as an expansion from one degree of resplendency to another till it reaches "the perfect day," and the contrasted blindness of unbelievers who are under Satan"s power, this idea, so suggestive, attains its final expression in the sixth verse. God had once said, "Let there be light, and there was light." It was the opening grandeur of creation; but was this all? This was to be the permanent symbol of God, the source and centre of more associations and suggestions than any other object in the material universe, a creative force to the imagination of metaphor, image, and illustration that cannot be measured. And, as such, St. Paul uses it when he says that "God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts." What fuller embodiment could the thought take than "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ"? "Light," "knowledge," "glory of God," "face of Jesus Christ, what a collocation of sublime ideas! L.
HOMILIES BY E. HURNDALL Vers. 1-6.
How men should preach.
I WITH FAITH. Many preach with despair and prepare the way for failure. We should reflect that the preaching of the gospel is the divinely appointed way for saving men. We are likely to have success if we lay hold of God when we seek to lay hold of men. Our own salvation furnishes abundant evidence of the Divine power to save. "God shined in our hearts" (ver. 6); "We obtained mercy" (ver. 1). What God has done for us he can do for others. And we have the Divine promise that the Word shall not return unto God void. "Light shall shine out of darkness" (ver. 6). We must seek a faith which will prevent us from fainting even when the outlook is darkest (ver. 1). If we have not faith, how can we expect our hearers to have it?
II WITH COURAGE. We must not faint because of foes. Many an assault upon strongholds has failed because of half-heartedness and cowardice. Preachers should be very bold and very brave. We have nothing to be ashamed of in our message. Shall the devil"s work be done more bravely than Christ"s? Shall the highest service on earth be marked by vacillation and timidity? "But that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life or by death". (Php_1:20) The Church would be more aggressive if she were more courageous. Preachers should have stout hearts as well as tender ones.
III WITH PERSEVERANCE. We must not faint because of difficulties. Discouragements are many, but persistency will bury them all. The preacher"s motto must be, "On! on! on!" He must spend and be spent in the service. After the manner ascribed to British soldiers, Christ"s soldiers must never know when they are worsted. "Line upon line, precept upon precept." Many things come to the preacher who can wait and work.
IV WITH GREAT HONESTY AND SINCERITY, "Not walking in craftiness" (ver. 2). The preacher who wants his hearers to walk in holy ways must not walk in devious ways himself. He must not be a trickster. Some seem willing to do anything to please; but the object of the ministry is not to please. Meat cut with a dirty knife is likely to become unsavoury, and the gospel administered with knavish arts will lose its beauty and power.
V WITH PURE DOCTRINE. "Not handling the Word of God deceitfully" (ver. 2). "Manifestation of the truth" (ver. 2). Christ gives us pure doctrine to preach, find woe unto us if we adulterate it! We must not season it to the tastes of the carnal, or keep back portions likely to offend influential sinners.
1. We preach in the sight of God. How, then, dare we tamper with histroth!
2. We are to commend ourselves to every man"s conscience. Nothing but preaching the truth will do this. We may commend ourselves to men"s fancies by preaching our own, and to their predilections by trimming doctrines according to their demands; but only by preaching pure doctrine shall we reach the consciences of men. Theological juggling may please men not a little; gospel doctrine will convict them. To our own Master we stand or fall. "Tis a poor thing to please men if we displease him. Let Luther"s caustic saying, "Counterfeits of money are burned, but falsifiers of God"s Word are canonized," be never so true, the preacher must adhere to the doctrine delivered to him, though he lose all earthly things by doing so. In a heterodox world nothing is so likely to be so popular as heterodoxy.
VI WITH PURITY OF LIFE. "We have renounced the hidden things of shame" (ver. 2). If we preach we should practise, Christianity is often weak because Christians are inconsistent. Men want to see the gospel as well as hear it. A preacher must live as well as talk. A man cannot preach without himself. There is always more in the pulpit than the sermon there is the man. We inevitably wonder what the gospel has done for the gospel preacher when he so earnestly recommends it to us. And life has a strange power of revealing itself in preaching. It peeps out. If the preacher has a Judas-life it will betray him sooner or later. But when the man speaks as well as his sermon, a mighty influence is exerted. The light must shine in our own hearts and lives (ver. 6).
VII WITH DISCERNMENT AS TO CAUSES OF NON-SUCCESS. The apostle teaches that those who reject the gospel when faithfully proclaimed are those whose minds are blinded by the god of this world (ver. 4). They have yielded themselves so utterly to evil influences that the gracious message of God through Christ fails to interest or arouse them. They are "perishing." Their rejection of the gospel says nought against the gospel or against the manner of its promulgation. The fault is not in it or in the preacher, but in themselves. It is well for a preacher to realize the possibility of such cases, so that undue discouragement may be avoided when they are met with.
VIII WITH HUMILITY AND SELF-SUBORDINATION.
1. Preachers are not to preach themselves (ver. 5). A man may very easilypreach himself even when he takes his text out of the Bible. There is not a little temptation sometimes to ministers to preach themselves. "Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.
2. Preachers are to be servants for Jesus" sake (ver. 5); servants of those towhom they preach. Not only servants of Christ, but servants of men your servants for Christ"s sake. The preacher who would win souls must sacrifice self. For acoustics it is well for the pulpit to be above the people, but not otherwise. He who would catch fish must not be seen.
IX WITH LOYALTY TO CHRIST. (Ver. 5.) Preachers must be true in all things to him from whom they have received their commission. They must believe in him, love him, follow him, preach him, live him, obey him, and in all things seek to glorify him. H.
HOMILIES BY R. TUCK Vers. 1, 2.
Full confidence in the power of the truth.
manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man"s conscience in the sight of God." The great work of the Christian ministry is to set forth before men the truth. But we are not to understand by that term all truth or any truth. Reference is precisely to that truth about God, and his relations with men, which had been partially revealed before, and was fully disclosed in Jesus Christ the Saviour. That special truth had been committed to the trust of the apostles. They were to proclaim it freely to men, as they had or could make opportunity. And they were to be sure that God would make that truth his power unto men"s salvation. Referring to the work of the modern ministry, it has been well said that we have not so much "to tell the truth as to make the truth tell." The apostle, in these verses, reminds us of some things that are necessary if we would efficiently set forth the gospel truth.
I PERSEVERANCE. "We faint not." There must be no shrinking back in face of difficulties, no losing heart because things will not go smoothly, no wearying in our well doing. St. Paul himself gave the noble example of what he enjoined. He did not count his life dear to him so that he might finish his course with joy. Succeed or fail, in strength or in weakness, he was "instant in season and out of season.
II SIMPLICITY. The faithful minister will absolutely refuse all merely sensational aids to his work. He will wholly separate himself from worldly and guileful schemes for accomplishing his ends. He will refuse in any way to "do evil that good may come." It had been made an accusation against the apostle that he had shown craftiness and guile in his dealings with the Churches. This charge he most vigorously rebutted, and was led to urge that guilelessness is essential to the faithful minister, whose conduct and motives may be searched through and through. Illustration may be taken from the ministry of the Lord Jesus. He resorted to no arts, or schemes, or tricks, either of speech or of conduct. His work was simple. It was the living of a life, the delivery of a message, a genuine effort to bless and save men.
III FAITH. In the witness which the truth ever makes, and the response to it which is always given by men"s consciences. We may preach with this confidence conscience will surely acknowledge the claim of God, and the guilt of sin, and the need of redemption. Men may indeed silence conscience and put away the truth, but we always have this assurance the best and deepest in every man responds, to our message.
IV THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF BEING UNDER GOD"S EYE. "In the sight of God." That Divine presence the minister realizes as the fulfilment of Christ"s words, "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." There is a hardness and coldness about the idea that we should work "as ever in the great Taskmaster"s eye." There is warmth, tender sympathy, and inspiration in the assurance that the spiritual "Man, Christ Jesus," is with us everywhere.
In conclusion, such points as these need careful treatment,
1. Is this confidence in the power of the truth justified by experience?
2. Does Christ"s truth ever really stand in peril?
3. If so, from what sources or in what directions does the peril Come?agencies and organizations and human moulds imperil it, and in every age men are raised up who can set Christ"s truth free from our human limitations and bondages. The true revival is the freeing of the truth to win its own good way. We can have no ground for glorying comparable to this Word of God is not bound. R.T.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10 Therefore seeing we have received this ministry.
2Co_4:1
Therefore seeing we have received this ministry.
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The apostolic ministry
Paul represents this
I. As a ministry of light (2Co_4:4-6).
1. Cf. Joh_1:5. Nothing could be more different than the minds of Paul and John, and yet both call revelation light. According to John, to live in sin was to live in darkness; according to Paul, it was to live in blindness. The gospel threw light--
(1) On God: light unknown before, even to the holiest. Out of Christ, our God is only a dreadful mystery.
(2) On man. Man, with godlike aspirations and animal cravings, asks, Am I a god or beast? The gospel answers, You are a glorious temple in ruins, to be rebuilt into a habitation of God.
(3) On the grave; for life and immortality were brought to light through the gospel. Until then immortality was but a mournful perhaps.
2. Note three practical deductions.
(1) Our life is to be a manifestation of the gospel. We do not tamper with the Word of God (verse 2). It is not concealed or darkened by us, for our very work is fearlessly to declare the truth, and to dread no consequences.
(2) Light is given to us that we may spread it (verses 5, 6). If God has illuminated us, then we are your servants, to give you this illumination. This Paul, who had himself been in darkness, felt vividly; and shall we refuse to feel it? Perhaps we who have been in the brightness of his revelation all our lives scarcely appreciate the necessity which he felt so strongly of communicating it.
(3) It is the evil heart which hides tim truth. Light shines on all who have not deadened the spiritual sense. Every one that is of the truth heareth Christs voice. The evidences of Christianity are Christianity. The evidence of the sun is its light. Men who find their all in the world (verse 4)--how can they, fevered by its business, excited by its pleasures, petrified by its maxims, see God in His purity, or comprehend the calm radiance of eternity?
II. As a reflection of the life of Christ.
1. In word. Cf. verses 2 and 13. We manifest the truth, commending ourselves to every mans conscience, because we speak in strong belief. Observe the difference between this and theological knowledge. It is not a ministers wisdom, but his conviction, which imparts itself to others. Nothing gives life but life. Real flame alone kindles other flame. We only half believe. In verse 5 Paul says he preaches Christ, and not himself. The minister is to preach, not the Christ of this sect or of that man, but Christ fully--Christ our hope, our pattern, our life.
2. In experience. It might be a matter of surprise that Gods truth should be conveyed through such feeble instruments--earthen vessels (verse 7). But this very circumstance, instead of proving that the gospel is not of God, proves that it is. For what was the life of these men but the life of Christ over again--a life victorious in defeat? (verse 8-11). In their sufferings the apostles represented the death of Christ, and in their incredible escapes His resurrection. Figuratively speaking, their escapes were as a resurrection. In different periods of the same life, in different ages of freedom or persecution--as we have known in the depressed Church of the Albigenses and the victorious Church of England--in different persons during the same age, the Cross and the Resurrection alternate and exist together. But in all there is progress--the decay of evil or the birth of good (verse 16). (F. W. Robertson, M. A.)
Paul, the model minister
I. His motives.
1. His sense of the glory of his office. Seeing we have this ministry. This arose out of iris conception of the glory of the gospel (Rom_11:13). With this view of his office the apostle always strove to rise to the level of its dignity (1Th_2:4),
2. His sense of his indebtedness to Divine mercy. As we have received mercy, we faint not. His whole being was penetrated with a sense of the munificence of God towards him. He never touches upon this theme but his words glow with extraordinary power.
3. The Divine cognition. In the sight of God (cf. 2Co_5:11). What an incentive to earnestness and honesty of purpose is this fact of Gods infinite eye being ever upon us! By these motives Paul was sustained, so that he fainted not. His sail was the exalted dignity of his office, his rudder his sense of the Divine eye ever upon him, his ballast the deep-felt gratitude of his heart for the mercy of God. Every Christian minister has need of the same motives--
(1) To stimulate industry and conscientiousness.
(2) To sustain in the face of apparent want of success.
(3) To inflame zeal in the face of want of appreciation.
(4) For support in face of the difficulties usually besetting ministerial work.
(5) To guard against any partial discharge of duties.
II. His method.
1. Negative. But have renounced, etc. In the discharge of the duties of his exalted office he totally repudiated all methods and practices of which he had reason to be ashamed. He entirely avoided tricks of the trade. By his emphatic repudiation he implies--
(1) That particular care should be shown by us to avoid degrading our office by resorting to unworthy tricks and dishonest craft for securing success.
(2) That peculiar care should be shown to avoid all tampering with Gods Word with a view to please men.
2. Positive. By manifestation of the truth. What does this involve?
(1) An honest, clear, naked statement of it. It is impossible to convey gospel truth in too naked a form. The painted window of the cathedral may be exquisitely beautiful, yet it dims the light, and clothes the surrounding objects with false though gorgeous hues. The window which does the greatest justice to the light is the one that transmits it in all its purity, without manipulation or distortion.
(2) A full statement of it in all its parts and bearings. It is only as it is thus presented in its completeness that it can prove a saving power upon mens hearts. Any one-sided presentation of it will certainly fail to attain that perfecting effect it is calculated to produce. Light consists of three primary colours--red, blue, and yellow. Not one, however, of these elements alone will produce vegetable growth in full perfection. Experiments have shown that yellow, while yielding the largest amount of light, prevents the germination of seed. Under the red the most heat is produced, but the plant is unhealthy. Beneath the blue the strongest chemical effect is produced, but under this influence the strength of the plant fails to keep pace with its growth. So a representation of the truth all doctrinal is like light all yellow; it has in it only illumination for the head. A representation of it all love is like light all red; ii has in it only warmth for the heart. A representation of it all ethics is like light all blue; it has but chemistry for the conscience.
(3) A manifestation in the life. The ministry must needs be illustrated by the life.
III. His power. Commending ourselves to every mans conscience--not to their prejudices, passions, or tastes. It was a power arising, not from the charm of office, but from the charm of truth, earnestness, and holiness. (A. J. Parry.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible 1887 · Public Domain On vv1, 7 Chapter 11
Chapter 11
THE GOSPEL DEFINED.- 2Co_4:1-6 (R.V)
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IN these verses Paul resumes for the last time the line of thought on which he had set out at 2Co_3:4, and again at 2Co_3:12. Twice he has allowed himself to be carried away into digressions, not less interesting than his argument; but now he proceeds without further interruption. His subject is the New Testament ministry, and his own conduct as a minister.
"Seeing we have this ministry," he writes, "even as we obtained mercy, we faint not." The whole tone of the passage is to be triumphant; above the common joy of the New Testament it rises, at the close (2Co_4:16 ff.), into a kind of solemn rapture; and it is characteristic of the Apostle that before he abandons himself to the swelling tide of exultation, he guards it all with the words, "even as we, obtained mercy." There was nothing so deep down in Pauls soul, nothing so constantly present to his thoughts, as this great experience. No flood of emotion, no pressure of trial, no necessity of conflict, ever drove him from his moorings here. The mercy of God underlay his whole being; it kept him humble even when he boasted; even when engaged in defending his character against false accusations-a peculiarly trying situation-it kept him truly Christian in spirit.
The words may be connected equally well, so far as either meaning or grammar is concerned, with what precedes, or with what follows. It was a signal proof of Gods mercy that He had entrusted Paul with the ministry of the Gospel; and it was only what we should expect, when one who had obtained such mercy turned out a good soldier of Jesus Christ, able to endure hardship and not faint. Those to whom little is forgiven, Jesus Himself tells us, love little; it is not in them for Jesus sake to bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. They faint easily, and are overborne by petty trials, because they have not in them that fountain of brave patience a deep abiding sense of what they owe to Christ, and can never, by any length or ardor of service, repay. It accuses us, not so much of human weakness, as of ingratitude, and insensibility to the mercy of God, when we faint in the exercise of our ministry.
"We faint not," says Paul; "we show no weakness. On the contrary, we have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the Word of God deceitfully." The contrast marked by αλλα is very instructive: it shows, in the things which Paul had renounced, whither weakness leads. It betrays men. It compels them to have recourse to arts which shame bids them conceal; they become diplomatists and strategists, rather than heralds; they manipulate their message; they adapt it to the spirit of the time, or the prejudices of their auditors; they make liberal use of the principle of accommodation. When these arts are looked at closely, they come to this: the minister has contrived to put something of his own between his hearers and the Gospel; the message has really not been declared. His intention, of course, with all this artifice, is to recommend himself to men; but the method is radically vicious. The Apostle shows us a more excellent way. "We have renounced," he says, "all these weak ingenuities; and by manifestation of the truth commend ourselves to every mans conscience in the sight of God."
This is probably the simplest and most complete directory for the preaching of the Gospel. The preacher is to make the truth manifest. It is implied in what has just been said, that one great hindrance to its manifestation may easily be its treatment by the preacher himself. If he wishes to do anything else at the same time, the manifestation will not take effect. If he wishes, in the very act of preaching, to conciliate a class, or an interest; to create an opinion in favor of his own learning, ability, or eloquence; to enlist sympathy for a cause or an institution which is only accidentally connected with the Gospel, -the truth will not be seen, and it will not tell. The truth, we are further taught here, makes its appeal to the conscience; it is there that Gods witness in its favor resides. Now, the conscience is the moral nature of man, or the moral element in his nature; it is this, therefore, which the preacher has to address. Does not this involve a certain directness and simplicity of method, a certain plainness and urgency also, which it is far easier to miss than to find? Conscience is not the abstract logical faculty in man, and the preachers business is therefore not to prove, but to proclaim, the Gospel. All he has to do is to let it be seen, and the more nakedly visible it is the better. His object is not to frame an irrefragable argument, but to produce an irresistible impression. There is no such thing as an argument to which it is impossible for a willful man to make objections; at least there is no such thing in the sphere of Christian truth. Even if there were, men would object to it on that very ground. They would say that, in matters of this description, when logic went too far, it amounted to moral intimidation, and that in the interests of liberty they were entitled to protest against it. Practically, this is what Voltaire said of Pascal. But there is such a thing as an irresistible impression, -an impression made upon the moral nature against which it is vain to attempt any protest; an impression which subdues and holds the soul for ever. When the truth is manifested, and men see it, this is the effect to be looked for; this, consequently, is the preachers aim. In the sight of God-that is, acting with absolute sincerity
Paul trusted to this simple method to recommend himself to men. He brought no letters of introduction from others; he had no artifices of his own; he held up the truth in its unadorned integrity till it told upon the conscience of his hearers; and after that, he needed no other witness. The same conversions which accredited the power of the message accredited the character of him who bore it.
To this line of argument there is a very obvious reply. What, it may be asked, of those on whom "the manifestation of the truth" produces no effect? What of those who in spite of all this plain appeal to conscience neither see nor feel anything? It is sadly obvious that this is no mere supposition; the Gospel remains a secret, an impotent ineffective secret, to many who hear it again and again. Paul faces the difficulty without flinching, though the answer is appalling. "If our Gospel is veiled [and the melancholy fact cannot be denied], it is veiled in the case of the perishing." The fact that it remains hidden from some men is their condemnation; it marks them out as persons on the way to destruction. The Apostle proceeds to explain himself further. As far as the rationale can be given of what is finally irrational, he interprets the moral situation for us. The perishing people in question are unbelievers, whose thoughts, or minds, the god of this world has blinded. The intention of this blinding is conveyed in the last words of 2Co_4:4 : "that the illumination which proceeds from the Gospel, the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, may not dawn upon them."
Let these solemn words appeal to our hearts and consciences, before we attempt to criticize them. Let us have a due impression of the stupendous facts to which they refer, before we raise difficulties about them, or say rashly that the expression is disproportioned to the truth. To St. Paul the Gospel was a very great thing. A light issued from it so dazzling, so overwhelming, in its splendor and illuminative power, that it might well appear incredible that men should not see it. The powers counteracting it, "the world-rulers of this darkness," must surely, to judge by their success, have an immense influence: Even more than an immense influence, they must have an immense malignity. For what a blessedness it meant for men, that that light should dawn upon them! What a deprivation and loss, that its brightness should be obscured! Pauls whole sense of the might and malignity of the powers of darkness is condensed in the title which he here gives to their head-"the god of this world." It is literally of this age, the period of time which extends to Christs coming again. The dominion of evil is not unlimited in duration; but while it lasts it is awful in its intensity and range. It does not seem an extravagance to the Apostle to describe Satan as the god of the present aeon; and if it seems extravagant to us, we may remind ourselves that our Savior also twice speaks of him as "the prince of this world." Who but Christ Himself, or a soul like St. Paul in complete sympathy with the mind and work of Christ, is capable of seeing and feeling the incalculable mass of the forces which are at work in the world to defeat the Gospel? What sleepy conscience, what moral mediocrity, itself purblind, only dimly conscious of the height of the Christian calling, and vexed by no aspirations toward it, has any right to say that it is too much to call Satan "the god of this world?" Such sleepy consciences have no idea of the omnipresence, the steady persistent pressure, the sleepless malignity, of the evil forces which beset mans life. They have no idea of the extent to which these forces frustrate the love of God in the Gospel, and rob men of their inheritance in Christ. To ask why men should be exposed to such forces is another, and here an irrelevant, question. What St. Paul saw, and what becomes apparent to every one in proportion as his interest in evangelizing becomes intense, is that evil has a power and dominion in the world, which are betrayed, by their counteracting of the Gospel, to be purely malignant-in other words, Satanic-and the dimensions of which no description can exaggerate. Call such powers Satan, or what you please, but do not imagine that they are inconsiderable. During this age they reign; they have virtually taken what should be Gods place in the world.
It is the necessary complement of this assertion of the malign dominion of evil, when St. Paul tells us that it is exercised in the case of unbelievers. It is their minds which the god of this world has blinded. We need not try to investigate more narrowly the relations of these two aspects of the facts. We need not say that the dominion of evil produces unbelief, though this is Joh_3:18-19; or that unbelief gives Satan his opportunity; or even that unbelief and the blindness here referred to are reciprocally cause and effect of each other. The moral interests involved are protected by the fact that blindness is only predicated in the case in which the Gospel has been rejected by individual unbelief; and the mere individualism, which is the source of so many heresies, doctrinal and practical, is excluded by the recognition of spiritual forces as operative among men which are far more wide-reaching than any individual knows. Nor ought we to overlook the suggestion of pity, and even of hope, for the perishing, in the contrast between their darkness and the illumination which the Gospel of the glory of Christ lights up. The perishing are not the lost; the unbelievers may yet believe-"in our deepest darkness, we know the direction of the light" (Beet). Final unbelief would mean final ruin; but we are not entitled to make sense the measure of spiritual things, and to argue that because we see men blind and unbelieving now they are bound forever to remain so. In preaching the Gospel we must preach with hope that the light is stronger than the darkness, and able, even at the deepest, to drive it away. Only, when we see, as we sometimes will, how dense and impenetrable the darkness is, we cannot but cry with the Apostle, "Who is sufficient for these things."
This passage is one of those in which the subject of the Gospel is distinctly enunciated: it is the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. The glory of Christ, or, which is the same thing, Christ in His glory, is the sum and substance of it, that which gives it both its contents and its character. Pauls conception of the Gospel is inspired and controlled from beginning to end by the appearance of the Lord which resulted in his conversion. In the First Epistle to the Corinthians, {1Co_1:18; 1Co_1:23} and in the Epistle to the Galatians, {Gal_6:14} he seems to find what is essential and distinguishing in the Cross rather than the Throne; but this is probably due to the fact that the significance of the Cross had been virtually denied by those for whom His words are meant. The Christ whom he preached had died, and died, as the next chapter will make very prominent, to reconcile the world to God; but Paul preached Him as he had seen Him on that ever-memorable day; with all the virtue of His atoning death in it, the Gospel was yet the Gospel of His glory. It is in the combination of these two that the supreme power of the Gospel lies. In the distaste for the supernatural which has prevailed so widely, many have tried to ignore this, and to get out of the Cross alone an inspiration which it cannot yield if severed from the Throne. Had the story of Jesus ended with the words "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried," it is very certain that these words would never have formed part of a Creed-there would never have been such a thing as the Christian religion. But when these words are combined with what follows-"He rose again from the dead on the third day, He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father"-we have the basis which religion requires; we have a living Lord, in whom all the redemptive virtue of a sinless life and death is treasured up, and who is able to save to the uttermost all that trust Him. It is not the emotions excited by the spectacle of the Passion, any more than the admiration evoked by the contemplation of Christs life, that save; it is the Lord of glory, who lived that life of love, and in love endured that agony, and who is now enthroned at Gods right hand. The life and death in one sense form part of His glory, in another they are a foil to it; He could not have been our Savior but for them; He would not be our Savior unless He had triumphed over them, and entered into a glory beyond.
When the Apostle speaks of Christ as the image of God, we must not let extraneous associations with this title deflect us from the true line of his thought. It is still the Exalted One of whom he is speaking: there is no other Christ for him. In that face which flashed upon him by Damascus twenty years before, he had seen, and always saw, all that man could see of the invisible God. It represented for him, and for all to whom he preached, the Sovereignty and the Redeeming Love of God, as completely as man could understand them. It evoked those ascriptions of praise which a Jew was accustomed to offer to God alone. It inspired doxologies. When it passed before the inward eye of the Apostle, he worshipped: "to Him," he said, "be the glory and the dominion forever and ever." Whether the pre-incarnate Son was also the image of God, and whether the same title is applicable to Jesus of Nazareth, are separate questions. If they are raised, they must be answered in the affirmative, with the necessary qualifications; but they are quite irrelevant here. Much misunderstanding of the Pauline Gospel would have been prevented if men could have remembered that what was only of secondary importance to them, and even of doubtful certainty-namely, the exaltation of Christ-was itself the foundation of the Apostles Christianity, the one indubitable fact from which his whole knowledge of Christ, and his whole conception of the Gospel, set forth. Christ on the throne was, if one may say so, a more immediate certainty to Paul, than Jesus on the banks of the lake, or even Jesus on the cross. It may not be natural or easy for us to start thus; but if we do not make the effort, we shall involuntarily dislocate and distort the whole system of his thoughts.
In the fourth verse the stress is logically, if not grammatically, on Christ. "The Gospel of the glory of Christ," I say. "For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus sake." Perhaps ambition had been laid to Pauls charge; "the necessity of being first" is one of the last infirmities of noble minds. But the Gospel is too magnificent to have any room for thoughts of self. A proud man may make a nation, or even a Church, the instrument or the arena of his pride; he may find in it the field of his ambition, and make it subservient to his own exaltation. But the defense which Paul has offered of his truthfulness in 2Co_1:1-24. is as capable of application here. No one whom Christ has seized, subdued, and made wholly His own for ever, can practice the arts of self-advancement in Christs service. The two are mutually ex-elusive. Paul preaches Christ Jesus as Lord-the absolute character in which he knows Him; as for himself, he is every mans servant for Jesus sake. He obtained mercy, that he might be found faithful in service: the very name of Jesus kills pride in his heart, and makes him ready to minister even to the unthankful and evil.
This is the force of the "for" with which the sixth verse begins. It is as if he had written, "With our experience, no other course is possible to us; for it is God, who said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." But the connection here is of little importance in comparison with the grandeur of the contents. In this verse we have the first glimpse of the Pauline doctrine, explicitly stated in the next chapter-"that if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature." The Apostle finds the only adequate parallel to his own conversion in that grand creative act in which God brought light, by a word, out of the darkness of chaos. It is not forcing the figure unduly, nor losing its poetic virtue, to think of gloom and disorder as the condition of the soul on which the Sun of Righteousness has not risen. Neither is it putting any strain upon it to make it suggest that only the creative word of God can dispel the darkness, and give the beauty of life and order to what was waste and void. There is one point, indeed, in which the miracle of grace is more wonderful than that of creation. God only commanded the light to shine out of darkness when time began; but He shone Himself in the Apostles heart: Ipse lux nostra (Bengel). He shone "to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." In that light which God flashed into his heart, he saw the face of Jesus Christ, and knew that the glory which shone there was the glory of God. What these words mean has already been explained. In the face of Jesus Christ, the Lord of Glory, Paul saw Gods Redeeming Love upon the throne of the universe; it had descended deeper than sin and death; it was exalted now above all heavens; it filled all things. That sight he carried with him everywhere; it was his salvation and his Gospel, the inspiration of his inmost life, and the motive of all his labors. One who owed all this to Christ was not likely to make Christs service the theatre of his own ambitions; he could not do anything but take the servants place, and proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord.
There is a difficulty in the last half of 2Co_4:6 : it is not clear what precisely is meant by πρὸς φωτισμὸν τῆς γνώσεως τῆς δόξης τοῦ Θεοῦ κ.τ.λ. By some the passage is rendered: God shined in our hearts, "that He might bring into the light (for us to see it) the knowledge of His glory," etc. This is certainly legitimate, and strikes me as the most natural interpretation. It would answer then to what Paul says in Gal_1:15, f., referring to the same events: "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me." But others think all this is covered by the words "God shined in our hearts," and they take προς φωτισμον κ.τ.λ., as a description of the apostolic vocation: God shined in our hearts, "that we might bring into the light (for others to see) the knowledge of His glory," etc. The words would then answer to what follows in Gal_1:16 : God revealed His Son in me, "that I might preach Him among the heathen." This construction is possible, but I think forced. In Pauls experience his conversion and vocation were indissolubly connected; but προς φωτισμον κ.τ.λ.. can only mean one, and the conversion is the likelier.
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
B. W. Johnson 1891 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 1–4. Seeing we have this ministry. The ministry of…
1–4. Seeing we have this ministry. The ministry of the Spirit and of Life; of the new covenant, described in the preceding chapter. As we have received mercy. Christ, though he was a persecutor, had mercy on him and called him to the ministry. Hence, he was under obligations to “faint not,” though meeting trouble and persecution.
B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On vv1, 7 N.B. A continuous outpour of argument and appeal, all…
CRITICAL NOTES
N.B. A continuous outpour of argument and appeal, all “alive,” and quivering, thrilling, with quick emotion, from 2Co_2:17 to 2Co_6:10.
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2Co_3:1.—Q.d. “There, he is at it again! [2Co_2:17, or perhaps cf. 1Co_9:1-6; 1Co_9:15; 1Co_9:21; or something he had said at Corinth, known to his readers]. Praising himself!” [Familiarly, “Blowing his own trumpet, since no one else will do it for him.”] “Am I?” (q.d. in 2Co_2:17). Letters of commendation.—Such as Apollos brought to Corinth (Act_18:27); or such as this very letter became to Titus (2Co_8:17-19). Rom_16:1 is a good example; for Phœbe. These Christians travelling from Church to Church appear in 2Jn_1:10-11, 3Jn_1:5-9 [“I wrote unto the Church”]. Seen also in the Didache, xii., xiii. Perhaps such as came “from James” to Antioch (Gal_2:12) carried such “letters.” These became a very common institution in the early Church. N.B., Paul himself had once asked the “authority and commission” of such letters to the synagogue of Damascus (Act_26:12). Note the shorter reading.
2Co_3:2.—“Certainly, ‘to you’ we need none. We, who know what place yon occupy ‘in our hearts,’ know that we do not; you—‘all’ of you—can ‘read’ our love to you, and you ‘know’ that we do not.” In our hearts.—Others carry theirs in their hands.
2Co_3:3.—New turn given here to the figure. The Corinthians are a letter of commendation for him, not to themselves only, but to other Churches and the world. The Christians at Corinth are a credential for him so conspicuous that it is “known and read of all men.” Notice the adroit, courteous, ad homines argument. In 1 Corinthians 15 he urges that they cannot deny Christ’s resurrection without abandoning all hope of their own, and all reality in their salvation from sin. So here, they cannot deny his apostleship without also denying the work of the Spirit of God in their own heart. Ministered.—“Carried about” as his rivals did their letters. An epistle of Christ.—I.e. written by, and given to His servant Paul by, Christ Himself. The argument is that of 1Co_9:2-3. In the phraseology, rather than in the thought, are reminiscences of such Old Testament passages as Pro_3:3; Pro_7:3; Eze_11:19; Eze_36:26. So also the application of the metaphor, like the use of the original figure of “letters of commendation,” is modified almost from sentence to sentence. Thus a letter written with “ink” passes over into the “tables of stone” at Sinai (Jer_31:33). Flesh … stone.—Plainly not here in any moral sense: “fleshen” [analogous to “wooden”] would exactly represent the thought. By the Spirit.—Note the capital letter rightly in the; His work, the “new creation” of 2Co_5:17, the experiences of their new life,—these are the writing of the “Living God.” Note the name, “Living God,” in 2Co_6:16; was Paul in Ephesus, as once he had been in Athens, “stirred … when he saw the city full of idols”? [Another impressively used Old Testament name in 2Co_6:18, “the Lord God Almighty.”]
2Co_3:4.—See Appended Note from Stanley. Such confidence, etc.—A real answer to the cry of 2Co_2:16, “Who is sufficient?” etc. The word “sufficient” and its cognates is here resumed in 2Co_3:5-6. [Say, “adequate to, competent to, up to the level (measure) of.”] He looks “toward God,” the source of his commission, the giver of adequate grace to fulfil it, the giver of his success at Corinth or elsewhere; he expects all from God, the source, “through Christ,” the channel.
2Co_3:5. To think … of ourselves.—Misleading to our modern English ears; clearer in Q.d. “to give ourselves any such confident encouragement, drawing our confidence of sufficiency from any presumed resources within ourselves.”
2Co_3:6.—“Proof that this competency comes from God. God gave him a further and a greater competency, which involves the less. God made him competent (2Co_1:22) to be a minister of a dispensation, which from its very nature must produce, when it took effect, exactly such a result as he counts the Corinthian Church to be” (Waite, in Speaker). Ministers.—Reverts to the word of 2Co_3:3; but the personal purpose of that “ministration” is gone from his thought; he is “carrying about and dispensing”—“administering”—something far greater and of more importance than any personal credentials, even of the best. A New Covenant—N.B. this in, correctly. To be studied with Mat_26:28 [and this with Exo_24:8]; Jer_31:33-34. [This last in Hebrews 10 is the pivot around which turns an exposition of the “first” and the “second” (2Co_3:9), and in Hebrews 8 clenches the discussion as between the “new” and the “old”; both of which comparisons should themselves be compared with this of “letter” and “spirit,” which is also found in Rom_2:27-29; Rom_7:6.] The letter.—The Law of Moses, graven in so many letters and words on the tables of stone. [The Decalogue is, then, practically “the Law,” throwing light on Paul’s frequent discussions of “the law,” as affecting Christian thought and life.] The Spirit.—Capital S; the Holy Ghost, Who is the characteristic and crowning glory of the Gospel order. In the argument of Gal_3:2; Gal_5:5, “the Spirit” is the summary gift of that whole continuous “covenant” of which believers, pre- and post-Pentecostal both, are Abraham’s heirs. Killeth.—He explains how, in Rom_3:19; Rom_5:20, and, particularly, Rom_7:9-24. [See especially Rom_7:9; Rom_7:11; Rom_7:24, and Rom_8:2,] of which this verse—this word—is a summary. Giveth life.—Joh_6:63; 1Co_15:45 (very interesting), Gal_6:8, cast light on this; as does Rom_8:11, where the action of the life-giving Holy Ghost is carried further.
2Co_3:7. Of death.—Though this was not its purpose (Rom_7:10), but its incidental result. Keep “written” distinct from “graven on stones”; not “written on stones.” “Written” is opposed to “glorious”; lit. “in letters,” “in glory,” respectively. From this point the chapter is framed on the lines of the narrative of Exo_34:28-35; many words and terms of expression being borrowed from the LXX.
2Co_3:8. Glorious.—“With glory,” slightly changed from 2Co_3:7. Shall be.—Beet carries this forward into a future revelation of a glory for believers analogous to that which clothed Moses’ face. But is the “glory” in the second case anything but spiritual, and analogous to that in the first? “Shall be” occupies the (mental) point of time just before the advent of the “glorified” order which was just then becoming actual.
2Co_3:9.—Moses was a dispenser, administrator, of “condemnation,” in that he brought a Law to men which in issue, if not purpose, condemned them.
2Co_3:10.—The phraseology here is full of reminiscences of the LXX. In this respect.—Stanley: “In this instance of Moses”: “In this particular instance was fulfilled the general rule, that a greater glory throws a lesser glory into the shade.” Beet: “In this matter; in the comparison of the two Covenants.” Waite: “In this particular of comparative or relative glory.” Conybeare [and Howson]: “Literally, For that which has been glorified in this particular, has not been glorified, because of the glory which surpasses it.” “The moon is as bright after sunrise as before, but, practically, its brightness is set aside by that of the sun” (Beet).
2Co_3:11. Is done away.—“Is being done away,” now, historically, in that Pauline age. Prepositions changed; see how tries to show this. “The two prepositions … do not necessarily express the difference between transitoriness and duration [? permanence, as Farrar and others], but they may do so as matter of language, and the distinction is too much in accordance with the context to be set aside” (Waite, in Speaker). Beet says well: “In the history of the world, as in the experience of each individual, God speaks first in the form of Law, ‘Do this or die.’ When we hear the good news, ‘He that believes shall not die,’ the voice of condemnation loses its dread power, and comes to nought. But the good news of life will remain sounding in our ears for ever.”
2Co_3:12.—Returns to 2Co_3:4, but “confidence” is now “filled out into hope.” Also he was charged with insincerity; he repudiates the charge, “I speak openly, plainly, confidently; there is no concealment, nothing underneath.”
2Co_3:13.—Note that the A.V. of Exo_34:33 inserts “till”; reading the story as that Moses hid the refulgence of the glory whilst he was speaking. The LXX. and Vulgate translate Exo_34:33 otherwise. Paul follows for his purpose their account, that Moses put on the veil after he had finished speaking, to hide, not the unbearable refulgence of the glory, but its waning brightness. In 2Co_3:13 that which was passing away (R.V.) does not very definitely go beyond the literal glory mentioned in the narrative. But the further application to which the words so aptly lend themselves, is beginning to come into view.
2Co_3:14.—Like the “letters of commendation,” or the “triumph and the incense bearers” (2Co_2:14), the figure of the veil, even whilst he is using it, suggests to Paul another distinct, but related, use of it. Like the Tallith—the curious fringed scarf which to this day every born Israelite wears on head or shoulders at public worship—there is a veil on the heart of Israel as they read even the Law. Not merely is its waning glory concealed from them, but even its real Secret, “the Lord.”
2Co_3:15. Moses.—As in Act_15:21.
2Co_3:16. Shall turn.—“Turn in,” as Moses did (Exo_34:34). What is the nominative? Choose between
(1) “it” [=their heart];
(2) “a man,” margin;
(3) “Moses” [=The Old Covenant, or the people of Israel].
(1) most in favour;
(2) and
(3) are of course true, whether expressed here or not. Note: “But whensoever,” etc. (R.V.).
2Co_3:17.—“The Lord” in the passage and story from the Pentateuch “is,” practically, “the Spirit.” [Query, “corresponds to the Spirit in my allegory.” Thus, accepting
(3), As Moses turns in to the Lord (in the narrative), so the Old Covenant turns in to “the Spirit” (=the New Covenant, symbolised by its characteristic blessing, as in 2Co_3:6). So “is” (Gal_4:25).] To Christians the Lord [=Jehovah] of the Old Testament is Christ. He who turns to Christ, finds that he has met with, and received, the Spirit. Remember the deep unity of Son and Spirit in the undivided Trinity; so that, e.g. in Rom_8:9-10—in redemption language and in regard to redemption facts, the one may often be interchanged with the other. “An administrative, not a personal, identity” (Beet). Liberty.—Once more, in a word a paragraph of another letter is condensed: here Gal_4:1 to Gal_5:1 are thus “packed away” into a single phrase.
2Co_3:18.—Note again the changing phrases; “The Spirit of the Lord” Christ is also Himself “the Lord the Spirit.” The name “Lord” belongs to Him also, equally with Father and Son. Observe “unveiled,” keeping up the story of Exodus. Also notice the “face” not the “heart,” is in this instance without the veil. Difficult, on lexical or grammatical grounds only, to decide between “beholding” and “reflecting.” Each is supported. [Winer (Moulton), p. 318, thinks that the middle voice fixes the sense as “Beholding (for ourselves) the glory of the Lord (as in a mirror).”]. Both are needed for the facts of Christian experience; we must first, like Moses, go in and “behold,” before we can come forth and “reflect.” Paul is, however, insisting that he (=“we”) has nothing to conceal, as Moses had; that, in fact, he had used “great boldness of speech.” Without a veil he had let what glory of the New Covenant he had received, and had to communicate, shine forth; reflecting it as Moses did, but not veiling it, as did Moses. On the other hand, Farrar, carrying on the thought into 2Co_4:3; 2Co_4:6 : “For God had shone in the hearts of His ministers only in order that the bright knowledge which they had caught from gazing, with no intervening veil, on the glory of Christ, might glow for the illumination of the world.” In favour of “beholding” is the progressive transformation, by assimilation, into conformity to the glory of Christ. [Stanley makes “from glory” the terminus a quo of the process; “to glory” the terminus ad quem; the completeness rather than the progressive character of it being in view.] 2Co_4:6 fixes, and expounds, “the glory of the Lord.”
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS—Chap. 2Co_3:1 to 2Co_4:6
This section has as the unifying thought, “Openness.”—We find
I. Open letters.
II. A law now open [unveiled].
III. An open [unveiled] Gospel.
IV. Open character and conduct of the ministers of the Gospel.
I.
1. The Corinthians are “letters patent” for Paul.—Not credentials merely to themselves, assuring them of his true Apostolic standing. [Nor are they merely a letter for his own personal reassurance, in any moment of faintness or discouragement.] They are carried about by him unsealed, “open,” to be his credentials to all who will take pains to examine them. [When Sanballat sent “an open letter” to Nehemiah (Neh_6:5), the privacy of its contents unsecured by a seal, it was, and was meant to be, an insult. Paul is glad that, as part of the issues of his work, men should read “the epistle from Christ” with which his Divine Master has accredited him.] Happy that ministry whose “fruit” guarantees that there has been no mistake as to the “call.” Happy that people whose personal experience of blessing and life received through the human messenger, and whose joyful observation that newly quickened souls are by his words ever being added to the Church, agree to assure them that his letters of ordination, his commission of apostleship, still run in unabated validity. No need, as between them and him, that he should continually be vindicating his true ministerial status. “We know what he has done for us; we can no more doubt that he is a true minister, than that through him we have a place in Christ ourselves. Our Paul no true apostle? Nonsense! Look at us! Read us! You who depreciate him may bring your letters from Jerusalem and James, [from Rome or Lambeth, or Conference, or College]; his credentials are sufficient for us. We are his seals.”
2. A real reason, though not the strongest, for an open profession of Christ.—“Secret discipleship,” if such a thing were long possible, would be of no service as a “letter of commendation.” Something is due to the man, and to the Church, by whose instrumentality the life-giving Spirit has been “ministered” to a Christian man. [Very much is due, for the sake of those whom the preacher has still to quicken by his ministry. “Let your minister be manifestly, and to the gaze of all, a many-lettered man. They will hear him the more attentively, if your quickened life in the Spirit accredit him to their heart. For their salvation’s sake, be ye an unsealed ‘letter,’ which all may peruse, if they will.”] Something is due to Christ Who sends him. He also needs accrediting to the unsaved. [Though the words do not mean “a letter of commendation for Christ” (2Co_3:3).] A man’s changed life should be an open lettter.
3. It should be legibly and beautifully written.—[Drunken man, rolling up against a bishop: “You converted me.” “Yes, it looks like my work, not my Master’s.”] Too many Christians are at their best badly written letters; often the writing—though true enough—needs some discovering and deciphering. [Like the shabby, thumbed, torn “references” which the professional beggar brings out of his dirty pocket.] Some of these open letters accredit nobody, with any satisfactory evidence. [Poor credentials of the Gospel itself. When God’s Love first came to men, with what a perfect Open Letter it came “commended”! (Rom_5:8).] Because they are a letter not for Paul’s sake only, he might read fairly the most faulty Corinthian and understand him and do him justice, recognising in him a real work of the “quickening Spirit.” But others need to read these “letters,” and will not always do it with favourable eyes.
4. Moses came down from Sinai bearing two God-inscribed slabs of granite, as the tokens that he had been with God, Who made him His Mediator for Israel; he bore them in his hands. [As Paul’s rivals so bore their imposing credentials, perhaps from James.] “Look in my heart, Corinthians. See yourselves written there, deeply graven in my affection. ‘I have you in my heart’ (Php_1:7), ‘in my heart, to die and live with you’ (2Co_7:3). My love writes you there, on fleshen tables. Your witness, indeed, is not for me only, or chiefly. The tables of Sinai accredited Moses; but they were also Jehovah’s ‘testimonies’ to His own holy nature and will, and the standard of the holiness required of His people. Your ‘quickened’ life—‘quickened’ by no mere ‘letter’ of my message, but by ‘the Spirit’ who infused Himself into it—not only accredits me, but is a witness for Christ, of His mind and good pleasure towards His people. It is an exposition, it ought to be a standard of measurement, of the blessed purpose and contents of the ‘new Covenant.’ What is this purpose? To give life; to give the Spirit Who gives that life. The embodiment for the new Order is no mere formal, external Code of rules for conduct, but a Life, with a new Life principle in it. [A βίος which is the outgrowth of a ζωή, as Gal_5:25.] The “letter” of the code will have its office and its necessary place in such a life, at least in that life’s earlier, weaker, formative stages. But the “glory” of the new life, and of the new Order to which it belongs, will be realised, partly in the very independence of such helps because of the better, higher, all-comprehending Law of the life within,—the life of the Spirit Who quickens.
II. The very Law itself was now unveiled.—Paul and his readers were living in one of the transition times of the world’s history. Ceaseless change, death and birth, the New springing out of the Old,—such are the invariable characteristics of the life story of Man and his World. But these were times of specially rapid and significant change. [There are “times and seasons” (Act_1:7), periods of time, and points of time; the stretches of duration wherein the great clock is quietly, surely ticking on, and the marked moments when It strikes. Paul lived in a “season”; at one of the points when the striking of the clock proclaimed a new “time” begun.] One of those complete, but not violently, openly, cataclysmatic abolishings of the Old was taking place. [At the cession of Corfu by England to the Greeks, a large and costly and important fortification had first to be demolished. Gun-cotton, then a somewhat new thing in such use, was the agent employed; much curiosity to know what its action would be Fired by electricity. A dull, deep rumbling heard, but no great, earth-heaving convulsion seen or felt; no masonry flying into the air. But after a few moments it was seen that the immense fortification had quietly disappeared. The destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, the historic cessation of the sacrifices and the Jewish polity, were more really an end visible and catastrophic; but these had not yet taken place. Paul knew that on Calvary and at Pentecost the spark had been fired. He saw the old System disappearing; his Jewish-Christian brethren would not see, and so could not. “Their eyes were blinded.” Such critical periods always have men with clearer vision than their fellows; before the rest they discern the times.] The Old System, with its Shekinah-glory, its Sacrificial routine, its laws of clean and unclean, its separate nation physically sealed by circumcision, was fading away, dissolving before men’s eyes, becoming plainly a shadowy thing. There was appearing [projected like a new Image, a new picture, on Time’s great screen] a New System, in which the one conspicuous thing was a Person, Christ: “the end of the Law.” The old system was coming to an end, because its various lines of suggestion and teaching had arrived at Christ. The streams of history, prophecy, type, had found their way to the Sea, the end of their journey. The very Decalogue itself had arrived at Christ, to stand henceforth by His side, with a John Baptist voice and office, pointing, sending the guilty souls whom it “condemned” and “killed,” to the “Lamb of God” with a “Behold!” Moreover, it had reached One in Whose “Day” the Spirit was to secure for it a new glory, a fulfilment such as it had never received while itself was the distinctive, central fact of the old order.
2. The old had been a glorious system. The new was to surpass it.—In no other had God been so clearly revealed to men; as much as Mahometanism is vaunted as an advance upon African fetishism and idolatry, so much was Judaism more gloriously in advance of every other system, past, present, to come, except Christianity. No nation was “so great, or had God so near to them,” as Israel (Deu_4:7), until in Christ God created a Church, a new Israel, and came nearer still. Sin and Holiness had hardly any meaning outside the Old Order of the Law; holiness had hardly any existence. God’s character, God’s will, God’s redeeming purpose, His remedy for the ruin which even the heathen saw, but did not understand,—the light in Israel, at its most dim, had on all these points been a “glory” for the old Covenant, with which there was nothing in the world to compare. It is not Christian thought, to depreciate the Old Testament. It had been a moon and stars ruling and illuminating the deep night of earth. Now the Sun was arisen, and moon and stars were to lose their lustre in competition with His. [It had been a glorious illuminant for earth’s night; now one still better had come. The gas-jet shows as a dull silhouette, when seen projected upon the white, electric-lighted globe.] The revelation of God, of Sin and its Remedy, of the significance and the true goal of man’s Life, given to the world in Christ, has no serious competitor amongst the religions of the world. All this was dramatically told upon the top of Hermon. For a few brief moments human eyes saw Law, Prophets, Christ, side by side, speaking together of His “decease.” Men saw and heard the transfer of testimony and office from the lesser to the Greater. The Shekinah-cloud enveloped all three in its glory; it belonged to them all. When it was past, Moses was gone, and Elijah. The day of the Law and the Prophets was past. “Jesus only with themselves.” Something of this had been dramatically told at Sinai. Moses had veiled his resplendent face; the glory had waned and waned away beneath the veil; if men might have been permitted to see, they would have seen an ending of the glory caught on the Mount of the Law; though even then it would not have been given to them to see the End of that which was revealed. His day was not yet. And the Old, though God-given and “made glorious,” became a bondage, became an idol. Men gazed upon it, and saw nothing in it but itself. Men studied it; they had to defend it, to die for it; they began to pique themselves upon being its faithful guardians. They hugged the dying or dead thing the closer to their hearts, when the life was departing or gone. Their affection became mechanically rigid in its grasp. Their eye grew accustomed to the moonlight night; they resented and refused the day. Their devotion became a slavery; it fettered thought; it blinded the eye; it wove a veil for the very heart. [All partial truth may. (To be remembered that God’s “partial truth” is absolutely true so far as it goes. Unlike our “partial truth,” nothing in it needs unlearning before the new, complementary truth can be added. Our “partial truth” is often false because only relative, and is out of proportion, needing much adjustment before it can be made to fit into a new discovery.) The eye must not lose its power to receive new light, must not fill its vision with the familiar and precious thing so fully that it can see no new object.] How had Paul and his Christian readers escaped? “With unveiled face” they beheld with equanimity the glory fading fast from an unveiled Law; nay, with a new sense of “liberty” and a larger life. Why? The Spirit had led them into the presence of “the Lord” Christ. [Shall He one day so lead Israel in, into the Holy Place where “the Lord” dwells? (2Co_3:16).] They have come forth again, transformed into the same image, each of them a Moses with resplendent face; [albeit many of them know not how resplendent. See Separate Homily on “Unconscious Goodness.”] Their heart has a strange new sense of freedom. The old is still interesting, precious, glorious, not lightly to be cast away; but they have grown into something larger. [The man remembers vividly the day when the youth found himself to have grown past running after his boyish hoop; the woman the day when, with a little shock, she found herself grown too big to play with her splendid doll.] Liberty has come with the manhood of the days of the Spirit.
3. They see the ending of the Old, because they see that it has reached its End and has lost itself in its Fulfilments.—Now they see and understand the Law, indeed the entire Old Testament, and see it full of Christ. Familiar experience to every Christian reader of Old Testament. In it he (say) reads some passage, and passes on into the New Testament. Returning to the Old Testament, with his mind and his vision filled with the Christ he has seen there, he comes across his passage again, and finds himself saying, “Why, this might be written of Christ. It is truer of Christ than of the man to whom it originally belongs. Truer of Christ than of any man besides.” Or, it is an incident of the narrative; he rubs his eyes and looks wonderingly, “Is this David’s history, or Jonah’s, that I am reading,—or Christ’s?” Or, it is a priest, a prophet, a man, a child; familiar enough; yet, again and again, when, with eyes and heart full of the Christ into Whose presence he has “turned,” he reads the Old Testament, he finds the familiar features somehow transfigured. The same, yet somehow different. As if the Old Testament face had become tenanted, possessed, by another personality; as if Another looked out of the eyes of the Old Testament man. And this happens so often, and with such consistency of system and harmony, that a principle establishes itself, “The Old Testament is full of Christ.” A tentative, working hypothesis at first, each added fact that falls in with it strengthens the probability of its truth, till it rises to a practical certainty. In the end, the man whose unveiled heart has been in and gazed upon the glory of Christ in the New Covenant revelation—a glory which does not wane and die away as we are gazing on it—finds the presence of Christ, so constantly and so clearly, in the unveiled Law; sees so often the glory of the Old fade away, and almost the very Old itself, until only Christ, “the Lord” in His glory, is left visible; that he wonders how any heart can miss Him in the Old Testament, in its reading and its search. [The man who has the key is almost ashamed of proposing the riddle to another man, it seems so obvious. The hidden face once discovered in the puzzle pictures which amuse childhood, it is then impossible not to see it.] Sometimes language so obviously adapted to contain a larger meaning than was contemplated by the first who used or wrote it,—a vessel so obviously adapted for something larger and fuller than its Old Testament contents; sometimes a “staringly like” anticipation of Christ’s person, or work, or Sacrifice, unexpectedly flashing out upon the New Testament reader of the Old Testament; sometimes a real, but fitful, flash of resemblance [like those seen in a “family likeness”], seen, and then disappearing when looked for with closer purpose to discover it; sometimes highways, sometimes byways, of history or suggestion, leading with surprising and unlooked-for directness to Christ;—these things so continually occur and recur, that one cannot “turn in unto” even the Old Testament without at every turn meeting Him Who is its End, and therefore its Ending. All this pre-eminently true of “The Law” in its narrower sense. Its ritual system, the very details of its Sanctuary, so persistently, so consistently, lend themselves to suggest Christ and the Gospel; and often with such minuteness of complete suggestion; that, as the instances accumulate, it becomes, even mathematically calculated, almost as 2Co_8:1, that they should merely be coincidences; that the correspondences should be accident, and not Divine design. But to see the Christ there, in the midst of the passing away of the glory of the unveiled “Law” needs the unveiled heart, which as yet Israel does not possess. Such a heart is a gift, part of the life given by the quickening Holy Spirit, Who is the characteristic of the New Covenant.
[III. and IV. belong to chap. 4.]
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.—2Co_3:4-6
Responsibility and Sufficiency.
I. The responsibility of ministering the “New Testament.”—
1. The Responsibility of ministering the Old was great. It was a sacred deposit from God; with real, if incomplete, truth in it. It had a “glory” of origin, of history, of office, and above all it was the root from which sprung Christ and the Gospel (Rom_9:4-5). Judaism was the providential nidus of Christianity. When the Virgin Israel had brought forth a Son, “born under the Law,” then she had done her greatest work. The Old Covenant had not existed in vain when it yielded up its life in giving historic birth to the New. The “librarians of the world” had had a weighty charge upon them in that age after age they “ministered” the written Truth and Law of God. Mosaism had been an episodic fact; for a special purpose it had been grafted on to the main stem of God’s redeeming purpose and work (Gal_3:19). It had run its course by the side of that main purpose; an “after-thought,” a by-thought, providing for a special emergency which had arisen, so far as we may speak thus of any work and thought of God. Yet intrinsically it had been a great, a glorious system, and the responsibility of its “ministers,” from Moses onward, had been great. And because of the deeper issue which lay in the Law—its condemning effect—does every Christian preacher feel a new responsibility of being in any degree a minister of the “killing letter.” That it issued in death was a disparagement to the Law, only as this stood compared with the Gospel. Intrinsically it was an honour to the Law that it bore such clear, unflinching testimony to God’s holiness of nature and requirement, and also, indirectly, to the honourable possibilities of human nature. (“Man was made to live, then, up to that standard! Man can be commanded to live up to that, and the command have the reasonableness of possibility!”) It was no real disparagement to the Law that it could only guard and train and correct growth, and not give life. Law per se can do no more, under any conditions. It is itself a real forerunner, “preparing the way of the Lord” Christ, when it “condemns” and “kills.” The Gospel preacher of “the Spirit” needs to build upon the work of the Law. Just in proportion as he knows how, evangelically, to “minister the letter,” is his work thorough. And no part of his work presses more heavily upon the worthy minister than that of so preaching as to bring the sense of sin home to the conscience. Nothing needs more a sanctified judgment; some consciences are abnormally indurated, some morbidly tender; under the Gospel the demand of the Law must not be overpressed, any more than it must be understated. If his words may not only kill self-righteousness, but may even slay hope, “who is sufficient”? Whether to preach Law or Gospel, man’s sin or God’s grace, we feel keenly: “not sufficient of ourselves,” etc. Much greater, then,—
2. The responsibility of ministering the New is greater.—The treasure entrusted to him for distribution is more precious than the former. If the Old order had many “goodly pearls,” yet the New has the “one pearl, of great price.” Is it not easier to misrepresent the Gospel of life than the Law of death? Is there not more liability to make the Gospel too easy than to make the Law too stern? If a man needs wisdom and strength above his own, to preach the Law and to bring men to a sense of sin, how much more to awaken their death into life! To know that men are “dead”; that they must live again in the Spirit, or must abide in death eternally; that upon his skill and fidelity, in some one instance, or upon some one occasion, “life” (or death) may depend,—brings him back to Paul’s burdened sense of inadequateness for such a task. A responsibility so great becomes to some men a real temptation not to “use great plainness of speech,” to soften their tongue, to conciliate their hearers, to modify their message.
3. There is a “sufficiency,” however, even for this. “Through Christ,” “To Godward.”—Very graphic. He “stands in the presence of God.” All the minister’s work is done as though He were seen looking on. At every point the worker offers his work to God, with a perpetually renewed devotion of it to His glory and service. He has himself been “converted to God” (Act_15:19), turned about, and set Godward. He does his work, facing Godward always. “Sets the Lord always before him,” and so is not “moved” even by a sense of personal inadequateness to his task, or by the fear of man, or by the consideration of the fateful issues which hang upon his ministry. He turns all his work toward God; seeks to give it a Godward direction. There is a supply of strength, in this realisation of Him Who is invisible. The man whose life and thought are filled with, and lifted up to the level of, “the powers of the world to come,” feels little force, whether deterrent or alluring, in the opinion of man, be it favourable or unfavourable. His soul is liberated from the slavery to which regard for man’s favour subjects the heart. He speaks out fearlessly, clearly, without diminishing or admixture, with “great boldness of speech,” the message he has first heard from God. [He who “sanctifies Christ as Lord in his heart” will not fear “men’s fear” (1Pe_3:14-15).] That man has laid hold of the secret of steadfastness in opinion, of courage in utterance, of stability of character, of unwearying continuance in labour, who has come into, and abides in, the presence of God, and who directs himself and his every act Godward. He sees God; he is blind to man. “The Master praises; what are men?” And this is “through Christ.” Paul comes in nowhere! All communication between God and man has from the first been mediatorial, “through Christ.” All God’s advances toward man have been made along that path of approach; man has not—never has had—any way to “a Father” but this. Christ has all along been the great underlying Condition, the great Presupposition, in all intercourse between God and man. Paul’s strength, his endowment of adequacy for his responsible task,—he expects it, and receives it through this one, only Channel. He is
“Strong in the strength which God supplies
Through His Eternal Son.”
This alone ever makes a man “able” as a “minister of the new covenant.” This may co-exist with, and be the infused life and efficiency of, great natural fitness,—of gift, temperament, education, social position, sacred office; it can make all these its vehicles and organs, and in so doing puts on them their highest honour. But it is independent of these; and whether with or without them is the essential requisite. There is no “sufficiency,” where this is not found. The regard steadfastly directed Godward, the ceaselessly renewed supply of grace through the one Channel, Christ,—these alone will enable a man to bear the burden of the ministration, whether of Law or Gospel; certainly of the Gospel, and of an ambassadorship wherein his words force men upon sharp, decisive verdicts and issues; this alone will sustain a man who bears about a Gospel in whose words are certainly inherent a power to kill, or to quicken with the fulness of the life of the Spirit.
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.—2Co_3:7-11
“Glorious and More Glorious.”
Introduction.—
1. The Infinite Father has made a special revelation of Himself to His human offspring.
2. This has mainly come through two great general channels—Moses and Christ.
3. The special revelation of Himself, as it came through Christ, far transcends in glory the form it assumed as it came through Moses.
I. Glorious as it came through Moses.—Evidenced by four things.
1. The wonderful display of Divinity attending the expression of it on Mount Sinai.
2. The magnificence of its religious scenes and celebrations.
3. The stupendous miracles that stand in connection with it.
4. The splendid intellects which were employed in connection with it.
II. More glorious as it appears in connection with Christ.—
1. The Christian form of revelation is more adapted to give life than is the Mosaic. “Millions, I will hope, were quickened by” the Mosaic. But men frequently died spiritually under it. Cf. the effect of an address from an ancient prophet, with the words of Christ, spoken through Peter on the Day of Pentecost.
2. The Christian form of revelation is more emphatically spirit than the Mosaic. In the Mosaic there was spirit; the elements of eternal truth, ethical and religious, were there, but nearly overlaid with ceremonial. In Christianity only Baptism and the Supper; and it throbs through every sentence with the eternal spirit of truth. [This is all very inadequate and inexact exegesis. It should be “Spirit.”]
3. Is more restorative.
4. Is more lasting. Moses is no longer our Master. Christianity is the permanent system; the final revelation of God to our world. There is nothing to succeed it.
Application.—
1. Do not go to Moses to expound Christ.
2. Nor to support opinions (e.g. war, slavery, etc.) which cannot be supported from Christ’s Gospel.
3. The immense responsibility of men who have the Gospel.
4. The glorious position of a true Gospel minister.—In abstract, from “Homilist,” New Series, ii. 421.
SEPARATE HOMILIES
2Co_3:6. The Deadly Letter; the Life-giving Spirit.
I. What this does mean.
II. What it does not mean.
I.
1. Like many another phrase in this chapter, this particular saying is a summary of an extended paragraph found elsewhere in the pages of St. Paul. Romans 7 is concentrated into it. Not that this is a germ afterwards deliberately expanded into a paragraph. The truth which underlies germ and expansion, is habitual, fundamental, to all Paul’s thinking about Christian experience. Here it crops up at the surface in a phrase; there it lies, of set purpose all laid bare and exposed to examination.
2. Paul’s own experience is concentrated into it. Acts 9, with its companion, complementary, accounts in 22 and 26, give the externals of Paul’s “conversion.” In Php_3:4-11 (particularly 2Co_3:7) he analyses the inner process, and in 2Co_3:7 precisely fixes the critical point around which his new relation to God and the outflowing new life turn. In Rom_7:7 to Rom_8:4, whilst no doubt sketching a universal programme of the moral revolution culminating in Regeneration, and stating a universal formula of the conversion process, he is nevertheless drawing upon his memories of the heart-searchings of the three days’ darkness in Damascus, and of the earlier days when he felt the prick of the Master’s goad and kicked against it. Every man’s conversion is “universal.”
3. He had “profited in the Jew’s religion above many his equals” (Gal_1:14). He had “lived a Pharisee,” and that, we may believe, of the best type. Christ’s charges of hypocrisy by no means lay against all Pharisees. These were not all “whited sepulchres.” Yet “blameless as he was in all the righteousness of the Law,”—and, let it be noted, it is with a Christian conscience reviewing these days, that he thus pronounces upon his Jewish life,—the Talmud and the New Testament, with fullest agreement in their evidence enable us to appreciate how almost entirely external was the righteousness he thus recalls; how very largely it amounted to a minutely faithful fulfilment of Rabbinical refinements upon the original legislation of Moses, which were childishly frivolous, when they were not an actual offence to the Divinity of that sacred code.
4. There arrived a day when the “commandment came,” particularly the “Tenth” of the “Words” of the Decalogue, which in effect sums up all the prohibitive enactments of the Divine Law; laying its forbiding hand upon every “coveting” of the natural heart for that which is against the mind and will of God, and the beneficent moral order of His world. For the first time, any adequate “knowledge of sin” awoke within the heart of Paul; it “came by the law.” He had hardly known that such a thing as sin was in him; he had done it so naturally that it excited no notice. Now the Law had been the revealer of sin. In the light of this new discovery the robe of his own righteousness showed seamy, “shabby,” utterly unfit for a garment in which a man might present himself before God. He discovered that whilst he had been busy in fulfilling a round of minutiæ of ordinances, even to learn which was an exercise and a study to fill a long and laborious lifetime, he had missed altogether the reality of obedience; that sin and righteousness lay quite apart from any mere mechanical fulfilment of such a code, or of any code, as such; that the very motives of the fulfilment, and the complacent satisfaction into which it was reviewed, were self-centered,—“gains to me”;—pride! Saul the Pharisee fell slain at the feet, and by the stroke, of the Law, as it stood before him for the first time “spiritual,” “holy, just, and good.” All self-complacency was gone from, and was from that moment impossible to, the man who now learned, “I am carnal, sold under sin.”
5. And a further stage was reached immediately. To attempt to set things right was the death of hope; the discovery of the wrong had been the death of peace. The man discovered himself helpless and a slave. Sin held him under its power. Resolve as he might, hate himself for his moral impotence as he might, bewail the moral division within him as he might, struggle as he might, he seemed to have no power but to sin. The discrepancy between the holy Law of God and his own unholy life and heart grew more and more glaring as the light came more clear and full. A new sinfulness was added to sinful acts, in that they were now done in the full light of a known command. And the deepest depth of self-slaying discovery was touched when he found the very commandment, whether precept or prohibition, arousing an innate opposition to its holy requirement; adding a new attractiveness to the forbidden fruit; and with a consuming intensity inflaming desire for it. And such sinfulness stood out clearly as “death,” in the new light of the unveiled Law. What had he ever done but sin! What could he hope to do but sin! What could he promise or purpose or perform,—he whose very heart found a new desireableness given to prohibited action! [No “bread so pleasant” as that “eaten in secret.” (“But you often want to change your baker!” said Jackson Wray.) No liquor so good as that which was smuggled. No garden so fair as that which is over the fence!]
6. This a universal experience. Even moralists, who are only half serious, like Gay in his fable of the young cock, or whose society verse lapses into occasional earnestness like his who cried, “Meliora video proboque, deteriora sequor.” But all noble souls feel it. “I certainly have two souls, for if there were only one, it surely could not be at the same time good and bad, nor could it at the same time love good and base actions, and also at the very same time wish the very same thing, and not desire to put the wish into action; but evidently there are two souls, and if the good soul gets the upper hand, then good will be done, and if the evil than shameful actions will be perpetrated” (Xenophon, Cyropedia, vi.). Action is always lower than knowledge, in the noblest heathen. “I should have lived better than I have done, if I had always followed the monitions of the gods” (Marcus Aurelius, Conf.). “The wages of sin is death.” And not that only, but, “To be carnally minded is death.”
7. Why could there not have been “a commandment given bringing life”? (a) Partly from the very nature and office of Law. It is directory, educational, not enabling. It is the model which trains the artistic sense; but the artistic sense and faculty cannot be given by the most perfect model. It is the standard which enables the student to measure his progress and to set before him the goal at which he is to aim. But the real conforming power, the real source of effort and endeavour, are within himself. Truth, beauty—at all events, moral truth, moral beauty—are external to the man, external to all men; and are altogether independent of personal, or racial, or interested estimate and approbation. They are of no school, of no age, of no one heart or intellect; they are universal, and of God. The Law is the fingerpost which points out, the wall of definition and of defence on either side of, the one Way of Life, as the Creator understands “Life” and designed “Life” for man. But the will and power to walk in the “Way” are within the man himself. The Law declares with authority what is Obedience, but only in a secondary sense does it offer any help to Obedience; just in that it makes the path definite, and would at once indicate divergence. The actual, concrete, Jewish “Law” said little about forgiveness, and offered no direct help to holiness. (b) But the more effectual reason why not, is found in the morally perverted heart and will of man. What was in design educational, for that reason became in fact condemnatory. The directorial rule reveals and convicts the discrepancies of the actually irregular line of life. The rebellion of the heart against restraint makes the Law irksome instead of helpful. The hedge which marks out the path for the willing traveller must pierce with its sharp thorns the man who is bent upon breaking through into the wide space—the “liberty”—on either hand beyond. The silly bird which will take its cage for a prison instead of a home; which will dash itself, perhaps even to its death, against bars which were intended for a protection, but in which it will only see a restriction upon its freedom; must hurt itself. If the letter “kills,” it is because the evil heart in man will not accept and use it as the guide of wise, safe, happy living, the guide to Life; because the heart resents its attempt to support inexperience and weakness, and to educate the moral sense, and its necessary exposure of moral immaturity, or failure, or revolt.
8. “To be spiritually minded—to mind the things of the Spirit—is Life.” “It is the Spirit that quickeneth.” He Who said so, and also that “the Flesh profiteth nothing,” is Himself the High Priest of a system, a new Law, “not of a carnal commandment, but of an endless life” (Heb_7:16). “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” [The cry of the shipwrecked man straining his eyes for the token of a sail, or for the breaking of the day. It is the eager longing of Wellington at Waterloo for the promised Prussian help.] The answer comes, “Through Jesus Christ our Lord!” which is expounded further on (2Co_8:2). “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” “In Christ Jesus;” the secret of Life and of the unity between Law and Life is there. (More of this under 2Co_3:17.) A new motive springs up in the heart where “the love of God is shed abroad by the Spirit which He hath given” (Rom_5:5). “We love Him because”—as on that Spirit’s authority we are made to know—“He first loved us.” And there is a new hope; for the same Spirit who brings peace, brings also power. The will is enabled with a new force. Sin no longer “has dominion”; the man is no longer “sold under sin.” A new direction to thought; a new attraction for the affections; a new bias and bent to the will. All the life, all the natural life, obeys a new directing principle, and becomes interfused with that yet truer life which is Life indeed. Peace, hope, liberty, victory,—all by the indwelling of the quickening Spirit. Deep problems of mental science underlie the method by which the fact of the adopting love of God towards the penitent, pardoned sinner is communicated to the heart; or by which the will is reinforced as with a power coming distinctly ab extra. But the fact is abundantly verified. Experience in every Church and age, and in thousands of cases of every variety of type and temperament, lights up the Scripture declaration. The Scripture declarations guard, in their turn, from the vagaries of unregulated, extravagant, or merely viciously personal, “experience.” And that a new idea should be a new motive, transforming a man, transfiguring his life, begetting a new life, is but a particular instance of a widely obtaining law. The new idea, the new power, are the gift and work of the Spirit Who is in the man who is in “Christ.” “The Spirit giveth life.”
II.
1. Kingsley wrote to one of his curates—“a very new curate”—what has an applicability far beyond its original occasion: “Let not Swedenborg, or any other man, argue you out of the scientific canon that to understand the spirit of Scripture or any other words, you must first understand the letter. If the spirit is to be found anywhere, it is to be found by putting yourself in the place of the listeners, and seeing what the words would have meant to them. Then take that meaning as an instance (possibly a lower one) of a universal spiritual law, true for all men, and may God give you wisdom for the process of induction by which the law is to be discovered” (Life, ii. 95). Allegorising has run mad, and has in some quarters given a bad name to everything but the barest, most meagre, historical, naturalistic reading of what are indeed ancient books, but are very much besides. The Philonian method dealt with the Old Testament, the Origenic dealt with New and Old, in a fashion which made the stories of the Book very little more than so much convenient framework, and the persons so many happily serviceable starting-points, for fine theorising or fanciful moralising, whose value in no way depended upon the historicity or otherwise of the story or the saying which gave form and colour to the teaching. Sound allegorising is nothing but the sober, Spirit-guided development of the general principles which are carried by particular instances. The Scripture teaches by the concrete—the story, the biography—rather than by the abstract. [E.g. we need, and might have had, a chapter in A Treatise of Christian Ethics headed, “The Relation between Ignorance and Responsibility, and between Conscientiousness and Guilt.” Instead, we have the conscientious “chief of sinners,” Saul of Tarsus, and the prayer of the Redeemer on His cross for those who “knew not” what they did.] There are widening circles of application, all starting from the one central fact or truth, with a widening radius. The mischievous, untrue allegorising forsakes the centre, or disdains and denies it. The “letter” is the merely accidental, and more or less convenient, literary vehicle; the “spirit,” so called, the truth to be taught, is the alone really valuable and important. The erroneous thing is, so to say, a literary Gnosticism which refines away, or denies, the historic Word, hoping to retain the Idea; as the theologic Gnosticism refined away, or denied, the real humanity of the Divine Christ, and tried to retain a Divinity whose manifestation to man was but a phantom. Yet, as the Divinity of the Incarnate One must not be denied, and the humanity overprized; so the Letter is not all.
2. Loyalty to the written Word.—There is a “spirit” which has become incarnate in the “letter.” Whatever be the philosophic decision of the question whether or not words are, to the man himself, indispensable to thought; as a fact God’s thoughts have come to us in words. They have come to us in a Book. The experiment of the race all goes to show that outside this Book there is no certain, no clear knowledge, of the mind and will of God. Nature speaks with a stammer, and is intelligible, to any practical effect, only to those who have heard from the Book what it is she has to say. As indistinct, as variable, as scanty, of as little practical service, are the utterances of the “natural” conscience. Its “truths,” “innate ideas,” need interpreting and checking by the external Word. The witness of no two consciences agrees long together. God, duty, right, the hereafter of man,—if on these topics men forsake the written Word, there is no verifiable truth, none authoritative except to the man who propounds it—if even to him. It is not slavery to the “letter,” to refuse to go beyond the distinct teaching of the Bible, either by direct statement or by fair and necessary inference. That Book certainly gives but a narrow standing ground of dry land amidst a far-stretching, surrounding ocean of mystery. It is but a question of a step or two more beyond his fellows, when, forsaking this, the tallest man amongst them wades out into the depths, and finds himself out of his depth, and progress impossible. Or, to change the figure, there is no sure, safe walking out into these depths, except so far as the inquirer keeps hold of the rope which is fast to the Bible. Practically all the facts upon which religion can base itself, have for all the Christian centuries been long complete; all lie within the area of the completed “letter.” No new facts can be looked for; all that can be done is to examine these with ever fresh scrutiny, to see whether there may be in them anything which has hitherto escaped discovery. No such supplement, no such corrective appendix, is from time to time issued, whether in the larger knowledge of the universe, or in the intuitions of man’s heart, as may yield us something, or all, of the original Work. Christianity can never dispense with its foundation documents. The Christian speculator, during his excursions into the regions of the mysterious or the unknown, must never lose touch with his base, as the soldiers say. To be loyal to the Word is not to “kill,” but to assist, to nourish, to protect, knowledge. Not, “What do I think? what do my intuitions, my moral sense, teach me.” Not, “What do I feel must be true?” But, “What does God—not merely a Book—say?”
3. The historical Christ and “the Christian idea.”—Schelling (quoted in Luthardt, Saving Truths, p. 252), on the analogous hope to preserve the “ideas” of Christianity, whether or not the historical Christ be believed in and retained, says: “How frequently has not the historical character of Christianity been declared to be heathenish (not its external, but its higher facts, e.g., the pre-existence, the pre-mundane being of Christ, His position as Son of God), and on that account, as that which is no longer compatible with modern thought? The very essence of Christianity is, however, its historical character, not the ordinary part of its history, as, e.g., that its Founder was born under Augustus, died under Tiberius, but that higher history on which it properly rests, and which is its peculiar matter. I call it a higher history, for the true subject-matter of Christianity is a history in which divinity is implicated—a Divine history. That would be but a poor explanation, and entirely destructive of the peculiarity of Christianity, which should distinguish between the doctrinal and the historical, and consider the former the essential and special matter, and the latter as mere form and clothing. The history is not merely incidental to the doctrine, it is the doctrine itself. The doctrinal matter, which might perhaps remain after the excision of the historical, as, e.g., the general doctrine of a personal God, such as even rational theology sometimes admits, or the morality of Christianity would be nothing peculiar, nothing distinctive; … the history is the distinctive feature of Christianity. It is altogether incongruous to speak only of the teaching of Christ. The chief matter of Christianity is Christ Himself; not what He says, but what He is, what He did. Christianity is not directly a body of doctrine, it is a thing, an object; doctrine is but the expression of the thing.” [Schelling in some degree thus meets by anticipation the position of Ritschl. Luthardt goes on to speak of a “so-called liberal theology, which really sees nothing more in Christianity than a certain general religious feeling, or the mere force of civilisation.”]
4. Dogma and religion.—There is an embodiment of truth in formal statements of doctrinal confessions and creeds which is sometimes regarded as not helpful to, but as the death of, religious life, and indeed of the interests of truth itself. And in this connection the text is often quoted. [The use of this verse sometimes made, with that application, is a flagrant instance of the employment of the mere words of Scripture, apart from the context and connection, and without regard to the rule which requires some real analogy between the primary meaning of the passage and the matter to which it is sought to apply it. It was not because the Law of Moses was written, and so was fixed in unchanging record upon the tables of Sinai, that it wrought death; the Spirit which works life uses as His instrument a written Word.] It is, in reply, pointed out that what is known of any truth, can be stated inexact form, and demands to be so stated, and that the mind inevitably seeks to systematise its knowledge—to unify it. It is pointed out that if truth be objective, if, e.g., it be a real disclosure of a fact of God’s government of mankind in Christ, then once made, once ascertained to man, it abides true, and that putting it into formal shape and statement, or embodying it in a creed, is no more than Science does with its accumulating corpus of ascertained truth. It endeavours unceasingly to put into exact expression, and to co-ordinate into systematic relationship and statement, the results at which, from its own data, and by its own proper methods, it from time to time definitely arrives. It is urged that if Theology too be a science, if it deals with a section of the whole universe of facts which is capable of exact study, with its own appropriate methods, then results once arrived at abide valid, and not less so that formal, or confessional, expression has been given to them. If “Justification by faith” be really the method of a sinner’s acceptance with God, then it is of no age or Church; and if that formulation of God’s method be Scriptural, it is not to be challenged or set aside as a passing, or only relatively true, form of statement. If between the death of Christ and the pardon of sin there once be revealed or ascertained a relation which is independent of any act or feeling or change in the sinner himself, then true once this is true always. In this instance well appears what gives occasion to, and such justification as there may be found for, the revolt against the letter. In endeavouring to state this relation between the death of Christ and sin, it has been forgotten that all the phraseology, even though borrowed from Scripture, is analogical, drawing from the relations between man and man, a mutually corrective, mutually expository, and complementary series of illustrations for the relation between the sinner and God. It has been forgotten how imperfectly the whole “scheme” of the Atonement is revealed or comprehensible. There has been an unwise insistence on some particular mode of statement; there has above all been a zeal for one’s own particular phraseology and confessional form which has made the form everything, or at least has made it overshadow altogether the truth which this was designed to express or guard. But to remember this is far removed from any demand that all creeds, and the very statements of Scripture themselves, should be thrown afresh into the melting-pot, and be continually in a state of flux, nothing ever cast into permanent mould; and this only lest instead of the living, “growing” thing, there should come out the dead cult, to be the object of a truth-dishonouring, God-dishonouring idolatry of the “letter.” The “letter” is the body of “the spirit.” Can the spirit exist without a body? Without its own body? Is the identity of the body part of the unchanging identity of the truth? [As in the case of the ceaseless change of the component particles of the human body, whose ceaseless flux does not affect the identity, so in this case the essential form remains; the changing “body” does clothe the same truth; and receives its shape from the same informing truth. A spirit freed from, and independent of, the letter—is it parallel to the grotesque idea of Carroll in Alice in Wonderland, who imagines a grin which remains when the cat has faded away?]
2Co_3:6. “Letter and spirit.”—“Able ministers” misleading, to our ears. Connect closely with “sufficient,” “sufficiency.” “Killeth” cannot have so inadequate a reference as to the frequency of the death penalty under the Law.
I. Divine commands alone cannot produce obedience.—Owing to an imperfection not in the Law, but in human nature, which does not yield to the obligation: Conscience is on the side of the Law, but is overborne by the baser nature. The habitual failure of conscience produces habitual disquiet and misery, a constant sense of discord, a consciousness of powerlessness against evil;—Death. The Law even became the occasion of sin. Prohibition pro vokes the natural heart and irritates it to impatience of restraint. The restive horse rears against the bridle; at last throws off its rider. Then follows the licence of self-will,—Death. Christianity has a quickening power. The Law was inaugurated by the code of the Ten Words; Christianity by the code of a Perfect Human Life exhibited in Christ [written out on the fleshen tables of His heart and blameless life]. Christ not only obeyed the Law with an absolutely perfect obedience, but showed its new and sublimer meaning. Thus the code of human duty is presented in a form most intimate and intelligible and affecting. Christianity quickens by a secret influence on the heart. The higher nature receives an increase of power. Conscience is afresh enthroned, and governs; the Law is obeyed not so much because it is obligatory, but because it is loved. As natural weakness requires aid it turns ever anew to the Divine Source of strength, till the lower nature becomes subjugated, and the higher triumphant.
II. The intellectual deficiency and mischievousness of mere writing as a means of instruction.—Correspondence is at best a poor comfort in separation; is often obscure, and open to misinterpretation; the writer cannot be appealed to. An ancient writing, a holy writing, and that in translation, leaves many openings for misunderstanding and consequent mistake. Technical theological terms sometimes hinder spiritual life and growth, or kill them.
1. They were perhaps originally only imperfectly correspondent to the truth, and may come to be regarded with a reverence which belongs only to the words of Scripture, a reverence often innocent of their real sense. Hearers do not recognise old truth in new phraseology, and crucify the preacher.
2. Knowledge of, and sympathy with, the writer is indispensable to the understanding of his writings. So the knowledge of the Divine Author and the inspiration of His Spirit, are necessary to the interpretation of the Bible. The Christian man, and he only, is in a position to understand, and live by, the Scriptures. In constant contact with the Spirit, he is a constant recipient of moral and intellectual life.
3. Paul is not only the trustee of a Book, but the dispenser of the Spirit. What a noble view of the Christian ministry!—From “Homilist,” Third Series, ii. 101 sqq.
2Co_3:6. “Ministers of the New Covenant.”
I. Not of Naturalism.—Christianity is the grand subject of all true modern ministries, the one primary text of religious discourses the world over, the ages through. Had man retained primitive innocence, Nature would have been that grand text; budding earth, sparkling skies, murmuring brook, booming billow, beasts of the forest, fowls of heaven. Men would have seen in Nature what they cannot see now, true ideas of God; they would have found there food for souls. All the parts of material nature would have been regarded as embodiments of Divine thought and symbols of eternal truth. But, as it is, they cannot reach the spiritual significance of nature; if they could, it would not meet their spiritual exigencies or improve their spiritual condition. [How many sermons have nothing distinctively Christian,—in the topics they discuss; in their method of discussing even topics derived from Scripture; in their standards of judgment of men and conduct; in their lessons inculcated! Sermons to the Natural Man is a good and worthy book; but it is by a “spiritual” man. There are “Sermons by the Natural Man to the Natural Man.” The “natural” man does not mind “natural” preaching. They who preach thus are sure of a clientèle. Such preachers at least rouse no antagonism in the natural heart. Anybody is “sufficient for” these things! (Cf. 2Co_2:16).]
II. Not of Judaism.—It flamed, a grand torch for Truth, breaking the moral darkness of successive generations, and lighted great multitudes of souls into the calm heaven of eternity. But it is “done away.” [No man formally preaches Judaism. But there is a style of experience and a scale of enjoyment in the Divine life which is Jewish—Old Testament—not Christian. The man who is righteous only by shaping his course and character according to external commands, who can do nothing, and decide nothing, without a “text,” a positive plain rule, is a Jew, not a Christian, in the principle of his holiness. He who is hoping to sin and repent and find pardon, only then to sin and repent again, is living in the Jewish order, whilst the Christian covenant has now brought a larger, victorious grace. He who is only a penitent, and has not found or expected a peace which is a matter of consciousness, has not passed the John Baptist stage of the order of the dispensations. Much current, conventional, respectable morality is Jewish, the morality rebuked and superseded in the Sermon on the Mount by, “I say, unto you.” The thinker who only sees a Jesus of Nazareth, is a Jew (perhaps only a Pilate), not a Christian. He who calls the Spirit “it,” not “He” (John 15, 16), who speaks of, and prays for, the Spirit to be “poured out,” and the like, should at least remember that this is Old Testament thought and language, still employed although Christ, the Introducer of the personal Holy Ghost to the Church, has spoken and done His work. Preachers in their doctrine, their people in their experience, need still to beware of making up their bread, or feeding upon a spiritual staff of life, with “the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.” It is still on active sale in the world’s religious bread-shops.]—Founded upon a paragraph in “Homilist,” Third Series, ix. 122.
2Co_3:17. The Liberty of the Spirit. “Where the Spirit,” etc.—“The Spirit” is the Holy Spirit; the characteristic, crowning privilege of the Christian dispensation. “The Lord” is the Lord Christ. The verse is another of the incidental, compressed embodiments of the habitual thought of Paul. We see it expounded by him in two leading passages.
I. The Law of Moses is a system of bondage; the Gospel is a system of liberty (Gal_3:1 to Gal_5:6).—
1. Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration would have kept Moses and Elijah and Christ! Law and Prophets and Gospel! Daybreak, Dawn, Day, all together. Moon and stars in all their number and glory, after the Sun was risen. He “knew not what he said,” indeed. And the Conservative, old-school, Jewish Christians who followed Paul into Galatia, would have tried the same impossible combination also. They were representatives of a large class who, in all times of revolutionary change, are not indeed insensible to the value and truth of the new order, but who are also, from long habit and honest appreciation, reluctant to part with the old, and are slow to take in the fact that the old is hopelessly past as to its form, whilst all that was really valuable in it is taken up by and into the new. The first time we hear of them, their line was definitely stated: “Except ye [Gentiles] be circumcised … ye cannot be saved” (Act_15:1; Act_15:5). After a long conference, Peter turned the vote upon the question by a speech in which he declared—and appealed to the confirmatory knowledge of all his hearers—the old system “a yoke which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear.” Paul will have none of it for his Galatians. It is “a different gospel”; a true heterodoxy.
2. The case has its analogies to-day, wherever the externals of religion are so emphasised as to become for their own sake matters whose observance is righteousness, and their neglect sin. There are still consciences greatly distressed if one tittle of a cumbersome round of external ordinances has by any chance been forgotten, or has for any reason gone (blamelessly) unfulfilled. It is, moreover, easier to perform a round of duties, catalogued and prescribed and “ticked off” in the day’s list as each is accomplished, than to cultivate the holy life within, to wage the unceasing warfare there and to keep up the incessant guard over one’s own spirit. A piece of external asceticism is easier than an act of merely inward self-denial. To keep the Galatian converts at such a round of externalism was to keep them at a low level, and to make their life one of only an elementary type. For Galatians to assume the burden of the Mosaic ritual, was for men to put themselves into the position of children learning their A B C; it was for the heir who has come of age to put himself again under the tutors and governors and school-slave. These things had had their meaning, but the Gospel had evacuated them of meaning; even the sacred sign and seal, circumcision, was now nothing but a mutilation or a piece of surgery. For the man to tie himself to the “go-cart” which had supported the child’s tottering steps into steady walking, is not only folly; the man feels it a bondage.
3. And these Jewish teachers made the bondage a more serious one still. “Except … ye cannot be saved.” That the tedious, burdensome, often frivolously minute, Rabbinical glosses upon the original Law, as well as that Original itself, should be matters on which salvation hinged, was as serious as that it should be supposed (say) that sin can with us be atoned for by any round of external or ascetic actions. Serious, because it seemed to imply that the work of Christ was Dot by itself the sufficient ground of the sinner’s safety; that He needed a co-ordinate ground of acceptance with God to complement His work. And serious because the impossibility, too often most sadly verified by the most earnest souls, of keeping the Law, made salvation on this basis and condition impossible. “Away with it all! Stand fast in your liberty.… Be not entangled again” (Gal_5:1). “The dispensation of the Spirit knows nothing of such parallel requirements in addition to, in competition with, the simple ones of Repentance and Faith, which He will also help you to fulfil.” Under the dispensation of the Spirit there must be no entangling of the soul with a system of externalisms or ceremonial, presumed in any sense to have merit attached to their fulfilment. “Ye are called unto Liberty!”
4. Under another aspect the Galatian controversy raised a wider, a universal, question. There are always two conceivable ways—two only—of finding for oneself a standing before a holy God. The one is by doing, by our own acts and their merit; the other by believing, by resting alone on the act and merit of Another. The “Jewish” and the “Gospel” plan respectively. “Faith and Works” is no stock theological topic of discussion. It is no academic issue which is raised. It is the vitally and perennially interesting one, always raised so soon as a man understands Sin, and himself, as a Sinner. The natural heart always propounds “Salvation by Works,” even when it has never heard of the term. For the acceptance of a guilty sinner—his justification before God—the way is now shorter. The Spirit teaches every man who will learn, that he need not encumber himself—as it is quite useless to do—with any fancied store of things he has done—or has not done—of things he has been—or has not been. As regards the past and its guilt before God, he is now free to find mercy and acceptance forthwith in the merit of Christ.
II. A larger, more generalised, thoroughly universal treatment of “bondage” and “liberty” appears in Rom_8:14-16. The antithesis between “servant” and “son” appears in the Galatian passage. But in the Roman letter the local colouring, the temporary shape, of the question is gone. Nothing is left but the sinner, whether Jew or Gentile, passing from the status and experiences of a servant, a bond-servant, of God into that of a son of God. There is a new name for the man, “child”; a new name for God, “Abba.” It is the summation in the life-history of the individual of the moral education of the race. Paul and his readers stood historically at the meeting-place of two stages in God’s leading of the world. Until the Day of the Spirit all God’s most holy and devoted people had been His servants. No most favoured one ever ventured, under that earlier order, to apply the name “Father” to God. The name “Father” rarely occurs at all, and never as the appellation of God habitually on the lips of an individual. “Like as a father, etc.,” “Doubtless Thou art our Father,” are rare expressions in the Old Testament, and are far beneath the privileged common use of the name “Abba,” which is for those who are no longer “servants,” but “sons.” David never said, as every Christian does, “Father.” And the converted man has his Old Testament stage too. Too many earnest people of God stop there, in these days of New Testament grace. They have received the Spirit, indeed. In their heart is many “a good thing towards the Lord their God.” They serve with a dutiful devotion, that after all is only “duty.” They ought to serve; they must serve. “These many years do I serve thee.” The son who talks and feels thus, is a servant still. The Spirit is in them a “Spirit of bondage.” And preeminently such is He to the awakened man, whose unavailing struggle with himself and the sin of his “flesh” is so graphically portrayed in chap. 7. The first impulse of the man to whom for the first time comes the knowledge of sin to any practical purpose, is to reform—to set himself to do right for the future. And his first and speedy discovery is that he cannot. He is not his own master. He must “serve sin.” He once neither knew nor fought against sin. Now he knows and fights and falls. Habits are iron bonds which he cannot break. Temptations are assaults to which he is dragged into yielding, as if by a power of evil within him. It is no “law of Moses” only, or chiefly. It is a “law of sin” in his members. Sin is known by every awakened man as not only a guilt and a defilement, but as a power, a bondage. The new life of the Spirit, the new life in Christ, brings a new power and a new liberty. The bondage is broken, “that henceforth he should not serve sin.” The Spirit Who “witnesses” that he is “a child of God,” and not a servant in his relation to God any longer, Who puts into his lips the new—the child’s—name for God, “Father,” and makes his heart and love those of a child towards God, releases him and energises him for the child’s life and service. The service is not less faithful and devoted than before, now that he is “a child” of God; but the “bondage” is gone out of it. In a perfect family life, in perfect filial love, the dutiful “bondage” and respectful “fear” of the servants are not found in the children. They have a larger, freer life, one which, sure of itself in the happy instinct of a loving heart, has not even an overshadowing, haunting, fettering fear of displeasing the father. The Spirit of the Lord is a “Spirit of adoption”—of sonship. Not only are the limbs free from the fetters of habit and from sin’s power. The heart is free, with the natural, unconscious, perfect liberty of the child in the home. This leads up to
III. Liberty from Law in the Christian life.—
1. James gives us, “The perfect Law of Liberty.” There is an ideal of Christian life in which the soul is “filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding” [Col_1:9, followed up by the happy consequences in life and practice enumerated in 2Co_3:10]; in which “an unction from the Holy One” so “teaches all things” that the man of God “needeth not that any man should teach him”; in which the very instincts of the heart “renewed in knowledge, after the image” of God would be a sufficient directory for all Christian living, passing continually the enactments of a perfect legislation within the parliament house of the inner man; when the heart knows and loves, always, and to the last degree of detail, what God wills; when the law of God without, and the heart and will within, coincide in their promptings; when the law and the love lie perfectly, closely, side by side; when the heart “runs in the way of God’s commandments.” It is clear that such a life in ideal needs no external direction, and feels no restraint. [The law-abiding citizen goes through life ignorant of very much of the legislation of his country, and finding nothing irksome or ungrateful about obedience to it; so perfectly obeying that obedience or law not are adverted to.]
2. But that is ideal, though approached more and more nearly as the life of the “son”—not the “servant”—is cultivated, and educated and developed. The positive, ab extra, legislation still has its value and office, and its necessity. The early days of the new life are days of childhood, with its ignorance and its weakness. The “law” trains and refines the newly awakened perception of what is sin and what is holiness. It may serve, or be needed, like the stake which supports the sapling, until this rises in established, self-supporting, self-guarding strength. Its “witness” is a defence against the peril of heedlessness or of declining watchfulness; its warning voice may arrest the very beginnings of divergence from the “perfect way.” It is needed as an absolute standard, to which the subjective pronouncements may be continually referred for confirmation, for revision, for the illumination of unsuspected error. There is an ever recurrent need that it should be made clear that Obedience and Right are objective, and are obligatory because of the Legislator’s will. No most intense love, no most utter trust in Christ, can dispense with the need of holiness in heart and life. If the “Law of Moses” do not now bind, there is a “Law of Christ” (Gal_6:2) which does. Indeed, in regard to all the abiding principles which in the old Code appear in local, national, temporary dress, the Christian man is “under the law to Christ” (1Co_9:21).
3. Against the lawless freedom which is licence and even licentiousness, the Apostle’s instinctive recoiling, “God forbid,” is argument good enough. For it, “Whose damnation is just,” is the unerringly, instinctively, just verdict of the healthy life, rejoicing in the most abundant freedom of the Spirit.
2Co_3:17. The Freedom of the Spirit.
I. General statement of this truth.—The glory of the Old Covenant, symbolised by the glowing face of Moses, was of an inferior order to that of the New. As a rule of life, without the Atoning Blood to pardon sin and without the grace of the Spirit to make obedience possible, the Law had been but a ministration of condemnation. As a typical system, it had been destined to pass away on the appearance of the Antitype which fulfilled it. The Gospel was, in marked contrast, endowed with perpetuity and was a ministration of spiritual righteousness. Symbolically, and really, the early dispensation was protected from a too searching scrutiny, which might have revealed at the very moment of its introduction a Higher Object beyond itself which was yet to come. Those who are converted to Jesus Christ have escaped from the veil which darkened the spiritual intelligence of Israel. The converting Spirit is the source of positive illumination; but before He thus enlightens, He must give freedom from the veil of prejudice which denies to Jewish thought any real insight into the deeper sense of Scripture. The Christian student of the ancient Law seizes that sense, because he possesses the Spirit, and He gives liberty, and faculty, for inquiry. The specific liberty here is not merely liberty from the yoke of the Law; but liberty from the tyranny of obstacles which cloud the spiritual sight of truth; liberty from spiritual rather than from intellectual dulness; from a state of soul which cannot apprehend truth. The Spirit still gives this liberty. This is the enunciation of a master-feature of the Gospel. This liberty is the invariable accompaniment of His true action, the very atmosphere of His presence. Nor is the freedom which He sheds abroad a poor reproduction of the restless, volatile, self-asserting, sceptical temper of Pagan Greek life, adapted to the forms and thoughts of modern civilisation, and awkwardly expressing itself in Christian phraseology. He gives liberty in the broad, deep sense of that word. He gives freedom from error for the reason; freedom from constraint for the affections; freedom-for the will from the tyranny of sinful and human wills. Human nature has imagined such a freedom, but has sighed in vain for the reality. It is, in fact, a creation; the sons of God alone enjoy it. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”
II. In more of detail.—
1. Mental liberty.—God has from the first consecrated liberty of thought. He has so ordered the framework of human social order that society cannot force the sanctuary of our thought. Without our consent society cannot enter within us (1Co_2:11). So, in the martyrdoms of the first three centuries, the strength of those who to the death bore their witness for not merely moral, but mental liberty, was strength given by the Spirit. Their testimony was His under whose illumination Christians became conscious of a new power, almost a new sense for the supernatural. To-day it is supposed that the Churches and their creeds, their “dogmas,” are enemies of religious freedom. To value dogma is invidiously contrasted with setting a value on Christian character and life; as though he who cares for the one must by some necessity neglect the other. The Church of the Future “will dispense with dogma.” In such talk, dogma is assumed, rather than stated in words, to be untrue. The leaven of Hegelian philosophy is in the current talking and thinking. There is no recognised rule for reason; in human opinion all is true, and yet nothing is true. All truth is partial, limited; all statements of truth are true and false at once. And the like. Further, the prevalence of experimental methods of inquiry leads many minds tacitly to assume that nothing is real, the truth of which cannot be established and tested by [physical] observation. Yet “Dogma” is a neutral, innocent word, suggesting lexically or by its history nothing untrustworthy or discreditable. The philosophers who denounce Christian “dogma” have their own “dogmas,” in the true sense, [and are sometimes “dogmatic” enough, in the accidental, evil sense]. “Dogma is essential Christian truth thrown by authority [N.B. this] into a form which admits of its permanently passing into the understanding and being treasured by the heart of the people.” Accordingly it is found abundantly in the New Testament; 1 Corinthians 15 is largely pure dogma. “The Divine Spirit, speaking through the clear utterances of Scripture, and [N.B.] the illuminated and consenting thought of Christendom, is the real Author of essential dogma.” Dogma is a restraint upon thought, only where liberty is mischievous or impossible. He who believes that revealed truths are true should not dislike their being stated dogmatically. To admit the truth of a position of course takes away the liberty to deny it. Every new discovery of ascertained truth takes something from freedom to think otherwise. The freest and most exact science known to the human mind has at its base axioms which cannot be demonstrated, yet cannot be rejected. Euclid begins by demanding a sacrifice of mental liberty. Refuse to submit to, accept, use, these dogmas; a man can go no further, and arrive at nothing. True or false, the dogmas of Christian truth are not discredited by being stated in dogmatic form. Submission to revealed truth [whether at the end of a personal investigation of its claim, or at the bidding of a Church, or in acquiescent following of the custom of a man’s circle] does involve some limitation of intellectual licence. The lamps in the streets do trench upon space where the passenger might walk. In English public and private life the supremacy of law curtails, whilst it gives and protects, personal freedom. “The free intelligence of the Church bows before the language of the Creeds, because that language guards a truth which the faith of the Church recognises as of heavenly origin.” Dogma stimulates thought, provokes it, sustains it at an elevation otherwise impossible. Dogma stimulates in its earlier, but petrifies into uselessness in its later, stage. No Christian who seriously believes that Jesus is God, that His Death is a World-redeeming Sacrifice, that the Eternal Spirit sanctifies the redeemed, that Scripture is the inspired Word of God, “that the Sacraments are the appointed channels whereby we partake of the Life of Jesus, can say that in himself these truths have petrified, arrested, stifled thought.”
2. Moral liberty.—In the kingdom of the Spirit alone is the will free. Naturally we are bound with fetters of habit, passion, prejudice; we hug our chains; even dare to promise men liberty, etc. (2Pe_2:19). There is no such thing as a resurrection from moral slavery, except for the soul which has laid hold on a fixed objective truth. When at the breath of the Divine Spirit upon the soul heaven is opened to the eye of faith, and man looks up from his misery and his weakness to the Everlasting Christ upon His throne; then freedom is possible, for the Son has taken flesh, and died, and risen again, and interceded with the Father, and given us His Spirit “and His Sacraments,” expressly that we might enjoy it. “On the condition of submission?” Yes; but in obeying God, a man acquires not only freedom, but royalty, in its highest exercise of empire,—command over himself, a thing he best learns by voluntary submission. Bend the knee to that Christ of Bethlehem and Calvary, listen to the New Commandment as the Charter of freedom,—rise a king and priest to God and the Father! You have free access to the courts of heaven: you serve One Whose service alone is perfect freedom! Liberty of conscience and will is the greatest blessing of all “freedoms.” “It is freedom from a sense of sin, when all is known to have been pardoned through the atoning blood; freedom from a slavish fear of our Father in Heaven, when conscience is offered to His unerring Eye morning and evening by that penitent love which fixes its eye upon the Crucified; freedom from current prejudice and false human opinion, when the soul gazes by intuitive faith upon the actual truth; freedom from the depressing yoke of feeble health or narrow circumstances, since the soul cannot be crushed which rests consciously upon the Everlasting Arms; freedom from that haunting fear of death, which holds all who really think upon death ‘all their lifetime subject to bondage,’ unless they are His true friends and clients, Who by the sharpness of His own death has led the way and ‘opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers.’ It is freedom in time also, and beyond, freedom in eternity. In that blessed world, in the unclouded Presence of the Emancipator, the brand of slavery is inconceivable. In that world there is a perpetual service; yet, since it is the source of love made perfect, it is only and by necessity the service of the free. For ‘where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty.’ ”—Adapted from Lid-don, “University Sermons,” iv. This last paragraph may itself suggest a Homily.
2Co_3:17. Christian Liberty and the Law.
I. The bondage.—“The condition of believers under the past dispensation … is spoken of as a certain species of restraint or bondage,—not the bondage, indeed, of slaves [?], and mercenaries, which belonged only to the carnal as opposed to the believing portion of the Church; but the bondage of those who, though free-born children, are still in nonage, and must be kept under the restraint and discipline of an external law. This, however, could in no case be the whole of the agency with which the believer was plied, for then his yoke must have been literally the galling bondage of the slave. He must have had more or less the Spirit of life within, begetting and prompting him to do the things which the law outwardly enjoined, making the pulse of life in the heart beat in harmony with the rule of life prescribed in the law; so that, while he still felt ‘as under tutors and governors,’ it was not as one needing to be ‘held in with bit and bridle,’ but rather as one disposed readily and cheerfully to keep to the appointed course.… So it unquestionably was with the Psalmist; … the law was not a mere outward yoke, nor in any proper sense a burden: it was ‘within their heart,’ they delighted in its precepts, and meditated therein day and night: to listen to its instructions was sweeter to them than honey, and to obey its dictates was better than thousands of gold and silver” [Fairbairn, Typology, ii. 193, 194. Does this do justice as to Act_15:10? He says admirably as to]—
II. The liberty.—“When the believer receives Christ as the Lord his righteousness, he is not only justified by grace, but he comes into a state of grace, or gets grace into his heart as a living, reigning, governing principle of life. What, however, is this grace but the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus? And this Spirit is emphatically the Holy Spirit; holiness is the very element of His being, and the essential law of His working; every desire He breathes, every feeling He awakens, every action He disposes and enables us to perform, is according to godliness. And if only we are sufficiently possessed of this Spirit, and yield ourselves to His direction and control, we no longer need the restraint and discipline of the law; we are free from it, because we are superior to it. Quickened and led by the Spirit, we of ourselves love and do the things which the law requires.…” [As in an adult son] “the mind has become his from which the parental law proceeded, and he has consequently become independent of its outward prescriptions. [Strictly this last is only true in proportion as he has become possessed of the ‘mind.’] And what is it to be under the grace of God’s Spirit but to have the mind of God?—the mind of Him who gave the law simply as a revelation of what was in His heart respecting the holiness of His people. So that the more they have of the one, the less, obviously, they need of the other; and if only they were complete in the grace of the Spirit, they would be wholly independent of the bonds and restrictions of the law.” (Ib., p. 190.) The law was not made for a good man who stands in a right relation to the law of his country. So “to one who has become a partaker of ‘the Spirit of God’ the law, considered as an outward discipline placing him under a yoke of manifold commands and prohibitions, has for him ceased to exist. But it has ceased in that respect only by taking possession of him in another” (Ib., p. 191).
[Fairbairn adds (ib., p. 201):—
III. “From the law in its strict and proper sense—the law of the ten commandments—the freedom enjoyed by the Christian is not absolute, but relative only, just as the Israelites’ want of the Spirit was relative only. But in regard to what is called the ceremonial law the freedom is absolute; and to keep up the observance of its symbolical institutions and services after the new despensation entered was not only to retain a yoke that might be dispensed with, but also an incongruity to be avoided, and even a danger to be shunned. For, viewed simply as teaching ordinances … they were superseded … by the appointment of other means more suitable as instruments in the hand of the Spirit for ministering instruction to … men. The change then brought into the Divine administration was characterised throughout by a more immediate and direct handling of the things of God. They were now things no longer hid under a veil, but openly disclosed to the eye of the mind. Ordinances which were adapted to the state of the Church when neither was the Spirit fully given, nor were the things of God [by Him] clearly revealed, could not possibly be … adapted to the Church of the New Testament. The grand ordinance here must be the free and open manifestation of the truth—written first in the word of inspiration, and thenceforth continually proclaimed anew by the preaching of the Gospel; and such symbolical institutions as might yet be needed must be founded upon the clear revelations of the word—not like those of the former dispensation, spreading a veil over the truth, or affording only a dim shadow of better things to come.’ (Ib., p. 201.)]
2Co_3:17. Liberty from Law under the Dispensation of the Spirit.—The Christian religion as the Perfect Law of Liberty finds its perfection in the bestowment through the Holy Spirit of an internal freedom from the restraint of law which is quite consistent with subjection to external law as a directory of the life.
I. There is nothing more characteristic of the Christian economy of ethics than that it sets up an internal rule (Rom_8:2).—This interior rule responds to the exterior, and in a certain sense supersedes it. The external law ceases as a law of death; it has vanished with the conscience of sin removed in pardon. And in contrast to the Law which was against and over the soul in its impossibility of fulfilment, the Spirit of life within gives strength for all obedience; and the law to be obeyed is set up within us (Heb_8:10). This is more than the restoration of the almost effaced traces of the law engraven on the heart of universal man.… This internal law is supernatural; it is nature still, but nature restored and more than restored; a supernatural nature. This is the interior polity of holy government of which St. James speaks (Jas_1:25); perfect law becomes perfect liberty from external obligation. The nearer obedience is to the uniformity of the ordinances of nature—being conscious and willing obedience, though in its perfection not conscious of its willing—the nearer it approaches the Creator’s end.… In all the economy of the physical universe His law works from within outwardly, and there is no need of any outward statute to be registered for the guidance of His unintelligent creatures. The Divine Spirit in the heart of the regenerate man seeks to work out in a similar way a perfect obedience to the law of love.
II. In a loose and general way this may be called the rule of conscience (Act_24:13; but this is pre-Christian).… We may speak of the internal law as that of Self-government restored. The rule of God’s Spirit in the spirit of the regenerate, is the administration of conscience or the renewed self, according to the normal idea of the Creator. Men thus trusted—under authority to that Holy Ghost, yet having their own souls under them—are in the highest and purest sense a law unto themselves (Rom_2:4). Yet this is only as under the law to Christ (1Co_9:21), Who is the common Lord of all.
III. For there is still an external law … which is continued by reason of the weakness of the new nature.—
1. The external standard still maintains the dignity of law.… We are delivered from the law of sin and death, not from the law that directs to holiness and life. Written on the fleshly tables of the heart, the commandments are deposited also in an ark on tables of stone for common appeal amongst probationary mortals. The eternal morals of the old economy have not passed away. They are re-enacted under other forms, and re-written in the pages of the New Testament as [a] the Standard of requirement, [b] the Condition of the Charter of privileges, and [c] a Testimony against those who offend. [A good Homily in germ.]
2. The outward enactments are still the directory of individual duty.… The best Christians need a remembrancer; they obey the law within, but are not always independent of the teaching of the law without.
3. The external is the safeguard of the internal law: against its only or chief enemy, Antinomianism, which regards the law as abolished in Christ, or treats it as if it were so. Theoretical or theological Antinomianism … makes a Christian’s salvation eternally independent of any other obedience than that of the Gospel offer of grace.… There is a teaching which holds that the Substitute of man has not only paid the penalty of human offence, but has fulfilled the law also for the sinner; thus making the salvation of the elect secure. The believer has in this doctrine [call it “Vicarious Holiness”?] no more to do with a legal rule save as a subordinate teacher of morality. He will never to all eternity stand before any bar to be judged by the law.… This is the very truth of the Gospel so far as concerns the demand of the law for eternal and unbroken conformity with its precepts, … but there is only a step between precious truth and perilous error here.… There is also a prevalent practical Antinomianism (Gal_5:13), sometimes connected with the theoretical renunciation of law. [It is] found in all communities, the disgrace of all creeds and confessions.… The written commandments are a safeguard.… If Christian people recite their Creed to keep in memory the things they surely believe, not less necessary is it that they should also recite the Commandments to keep in memory what they must do to enter into life.—Adapted. See also under 1Co_9:21.
HOMILETIC SUGGESTIONS
2Co_3:2. “Living epistles.”
I. What they contain.—The record of ministerial faithfulness—and success.
II. Where they are written.—In the heart, as a testimony of Divine approval, as a certain proof of a Divine call.
III. By whom they are read.—By all men—easily with intelligent conviction.—[J. L.]
2Co_3:4-11. The Glory of the Christian Ministry.
I. Its foundation.—Trust in God through Christ. Divine sufficiency. Suitable qualifications.
II. Its function.—The ministration not of the letter, but of the Spirit.
III. Its means.—Not external, that dazzle and then vanish away. But the co-operation of the Holy Ghost.
IV. Its object.—Not condemnation and death, but righteousness and life.
V. Its reward.—Even now a more excellent glory. Hereafter a glory everlasting.—[J. L.]
Or thus:—
The New Testament Ministry—
I. Has the vastest resources.
II. Effects the greatest wonders.
III. Secures the most enduring results.—[J. L.]
2Co_3:8. “The ministration of the Spirit.”
I. Deals with “the spirit” in man.
II. Is effectual only when in the power of the Holy Spirit.
III. Has for its great purpose the communication of the Holy Spirit, the characteristic, distinctive glory, and privilege of the Christian dispensation.
2Co_3:9. The Ministration of—
I. Condemnation.—Reveals and enforces law. Convinces of sin. Brings condemnation.
II. Righteousness.—Satisfies the law. Teaches faith. Brings pardon and holiness.
III. II. therefore exceeds
I. in glory in that it perfects the work of the latter. Saves the sinner. Secures greater glory to God.—[J. L.]
2Co_3:18. Conformity by gazing.—Foundation and building not identical, yet related. So Judaism and Christianity. “Judaism contained not the completeness of Christianity; Christianity halted not at the beginnings of Judaism.”
1. They agree, in source, God; in purpose, to preserve the knowledge of the true God; in matter, a revelation of God’s will; Judaism, “coarse,” rude; Christianity, a life-inspired system.
2. They differ, in their method of revelation, by the Mediator and the Master; in their expositors; in the perpetuity of Christianity. “After Adamism, Noachism; after Noachism, Abrahamism; after Abrahamism, Judaism; after Judaism, Christianity; after Christianity,—Eternity!” Judaism limited; Christianity universal. Judaism veiled the light; in Christ the veil is gone. Text shows:—
I. Religion in its sanctity of nature.—Its one object is to change man into the image—of whom? Of God? Of Christ? No matter. God inconceivable and unconceived. The study of His works and even of His words alone only introduces man to “a Voice in the dark.” All we can know, or need to know, is embodied in Christ. Christ removes the two barriers—man’s incapacity, God’s invisibility. And Christ did not come to teach Dogma or merely create a religious “guild,” but to conform man to Himself. Look at Him in His many-sided, symmetrical, pure spirituality. See Him “crystalline-translucent” in conscience. See His deliberate, undeflected devotedness. His mind, Divine.
II. Manner of attaining conformity.—
1. “Beholding.” Not merely “staring at.” There must be the unveiled glass, and the unclosed eye.
2. Once more, neither is the study of His works and words enough. May read the New Testament once a year; may study critically, “with audacious freedom.” Men, acute enough, saw His works: their verdict was “Beelzebub,” “Blasphemer, enthusiast, traitor.”
3. Must bring Christ to study of Christ. May not repudiate His teaching and yet hope to understand Him.
4. This only “by the Spirit of the Lord,” “taking of the things of Christ,” etc. Unveiling the mirror; opening the eye.
III. Progressive conformity.—No hurry in God’s working. “If a young Christian begin young, the conformity shall fill a life of many years.” “Even God cannot create growth.”—Notes of sermon by John Burton, penes H. J. F.
[On the Old Testament passage underlying 2Co_3:7 to 2Co_4:6, particularly. “Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone,” the suggestion may be useful:—]
“A Picture of True Glory.” [“Unconscious Goodness.”]
I. Involves fellowship with the Eternal.—Character is formed on the principle of imitation. This process perfected needs: a perfect model; the love of a perfect model; the knowledge of a perfect model.
II. Has an external manifestation.—Was it not a reflection of the moral glory of his soul, glorified by communion with God? The heart does—notwithstanding the possibility and the fact of successful hypocrisy—stamp itself upon the face. Stephen’s face. And upon the language yet more certainly. Upon our lives: “as the man thinketh in his heart so is he.” [A pregnant saying, capable of many readings: What he means, though he expresses himself badly in word or act, that is the man to be recognised; what his heart’s bent and love are, that surely the man becomes; a man will let slip a word, or do instinctively some action, which reveals the evil man of the heart under the plausible mask of the face.]
III. Is never self-conscious.—But greatness drowns egotism. The standard of judgment is outside the man’s self. He lives amongst a circle of persons and things which forms a true standard of measurement. Christian love, above all, casts out egotism; too eager about others to serve, or even think about, itself.
IV. Commands the reverence of society.—Conscience will instinctively respect true, unconscious greatness. Guilt will bow the wrong-doer in homage before it.—More fully in “Homilist,” Third Series, vi. 343.
APPENDED NOTES
Chap. 3. Openness of Apostolical Service.—The whole argument of this passage is so interwoven with personal allusions, and with illustrations from a particular interpretation of a single passage in the Old Testament, that there is a difficulty in deducing any general truth from it directly.… It may be worth while to go through the various images which the Apostle has called up. First, there is the commendatory Epistle of the Corinthian Church, written on his heart. Next, the same Epistle written on their hearts and lives, read and re-read by the wayfarers to and fro, through the thoroughfare of Greece. Thirdly, the contrast between this Epistle, written on the tender human feelings, on the vibrations of the wind, by the breath of the Spirit; carrying its tidings backwards and forwards, whithersoever it will, with no limits of time or space, like the sweep of the wind on the Æolian harp, like an electric spark of light,—and the Ten Commandments graven in the granite blocks of Sinai, hard, speechless, lifeless. Fourthly, there rises into view the figure of Moses, as he is known to us in the statue of Michael Angelo, the light streaming from his face, yet growing dim and dark as a greater glory of another revelation rises behind it. Fifthly, the same figure veiled, as the light beneath the veil dies away and shade rests upon the scene, and there rises around him a multiplication of the figure, the Jews in their synagogues veiled, as the Book of the Law is read before them. Sixthly, the same figure of Moses once more, but now unveiled as he turns again to Mount Sinai and uncovers his face to rekindle its glory in the Divine presence; and now again, this same figure multiplied in the Apostle and the Corinthian congregation following him, all with faces unveiled, and upturned toward the light of Christ’s presence, the glory streaming into their faces with greater and greater brightness, as if borne in upon them by the Spirit or breath of light from that Divine countenance, till they are transfigured into a blaze of splendour like unto it.—Stanley, pp. 418, 420.
2Co_3:11. “That which remaineth.”—Christianity is connected with all those religions which have preceded it, and that not merely as one of them, but as their truth, their aim, as simply religion. Christianity is the absolute religion—the only true and intrinsically valid religion. Such is the pretension with which it entered the world, and which it constantly maintains. This may be called exclusiveness and intolerance, but it is the intolerance of truth. As soon as truth concedes the possibility of her opposite being also true, she denies herself. As soon as Christianity ceases to declare herself to be the only true religion, she annihilates her power, and denies her right to exist, for she denies her necessity. The old world concluded with the question, What is Truth? The new world began with the saying of Christ, I am the Truth. And this saying is the confession of Christian faith. The form which the Christian faith may assume may alter; the human notions by which it seeks to express itself may change; but Christian faith must declare itself to be the unchangeable truth. It must affirm that this truth is the answer to the old questions of human nature, and that all the religions which have been its predecessors were mostly preliminary and preparatory, and have found in it their aim and goal. Heathenism was the seeking religion, Judaism the hoping religion; Christianity is the reality of what heathenism sought, and Judaism hoped for.—Luthardt, “Saving Truths,” p.
20. He adds in notes:—
“Christianity is the religion which, in the person of its Founder, actually realises that union of man with God which every other religion has striven after, but none attained; and from this creative centre, by doctrine and moral influence, by redemption and reconciliation, restores the individual and the human race to their true destiny, to that true communion, to that mind with God in which all that is human is sanctified and glorified.” (Ullmann.)
“If we consider the different religions with respect to this fundamental problem [of the bringing together Creator and creature, Holy God and sinful man], we may say that heathenism knows not the problem; that Israel is living in the problem, and awaiting its solution; but that Christianity alone furnishes the solution, through its Gospel of the Incarnation of God [and the Atonement of the Cross]. (Martensen, Dogmatik.)
CRITICAL NOTES
2Co_4:1. This ministry.—Viz. that in 2Co_3:3; 2Co_3:6-9; and more definitely expounded at the end of this long section, in 2Co_5:18-19; 2Co_6:3-4. Therefore.—Looks back to the substance of chap. 3, and returns, with a new phase of connection, to 2Co_3:4; 2Co_3:12. Yet, again a half-parenthetical passage intervenes before “we faint not” is expanded in 2Co_4:7 sqq. Note the comma in the after “mercy.” See the “mercy” and the “ministry” closely connected in 1Ti_1:12-13, with the same link of thought as here. Faint.—Word peculiar to Paul and his friend Luke, in the New Testament. “Flag, ‘give out.’ ”
2Co_4:2.—Hidden things (of which it is) shame (to speak or to be guilty). Yet hardly so much as is suggested in Eph_5:12. Underhand, insincere, double-minded motives, such as he was accused of. No “veil” on his conduct at all events; cf. “manifest,” 2Co_4:10-11. No “veil” upon “the truth,” as he “ministers” it. Handling deceitfully.—Same thought as 2Co_2:17. Commending ourselves.—True reply to 2Co_3:1.
2Co_4:3.—“Hid” is “veiled,” q.d. if there be a veil it is as with Moses and Israel, rather upon “the hearts” of readers and hearers than upon the minister, or than upon the Law or Gospel themselves. Note “are perishing” (R. V.); 2Co_2:16.
2Co_4:4. The god of this world.—Not “Rabbinical” teaching, but absolute truth of the revealing Holy Ghost. Christ leads the way with His most definite “prince of this world” (Joh_12:31; Joh_14:30). Paul follows in Eph_2:2, “the prince of the power of the air,” etc. (2Co_6:12). “World” is “age”; “minds” may be “thoughts.” [These are “blinded” here; “hardened” in 2Co_3:14.] Shine.—“Dawn” (R.V.). Note, specially, this word is cognate with “the brightness of His glory” (Heb_1:3). Also note the fuller, and exact, and significant “Gospel of the glory of Christ.” [So again, and close to the “ministry” and “mercy” combination, we have the “Gospel of the glory” in 1Ti_1:11.]
2Co_4:5. “Lord.”—, with most moderns, makes this a predicate: “We preach Him as Lord.” In that case, obviously, it could not be appended also to the parallel “ourselves”; unless in reply to the charge of 2Co_1:24 (cognate word), “we do not propose [proclaim] ourselves to you as masters, but Him as the only Master; ourselves only your slaves [not διάκονοι as throughout chap. 3, in relation to God and the Gospel]; indeed, we do not commend ourselves to your notice or acceptance at all, but Him.” Note the variant reading “through Jesus.”
2Co_4:6.—Gen_1:3 is directly quoted (so R.V.). Note how he again contrasts the things of “shame” and this awakening to the “light” in Eph_5:11-14.
2Co_4:7.—Gold, in a common jar of earthenware. Excellency is “exceeding greatness of the power.” Similar in cognate language, and in thought, to Eph_1:19.
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.—2Co_4:1-7
[Section continued from chap. 3]
III. An open [unveiled] Gospel.—
1. Observe the phrase, “Gospel.”
(1) In regard to the Old Order, and to the New alike, Paul’s phraseology is noteworthy; in its variety of designations for each, and in their practical interchangeableness. Not that the various designations are used at haphazard or for the mere sake of an assonance. There is a propriety in the particular phrase used in each case; yet in use one readily passes over into another.
(2) There is a strangely modern sound about the words, “The reading of the old testament.” It would be going too fast for the development of Paul’s thought and God’s revealing order to print, “The reading of the Old Testament”; yet such a meaning is coming fast into view; a distinct, complete Book, or Literature, which may be called—from its main subject and contents—“The Old Testament.” As yet, however, the Subject—the Old Covenant—is to the forefront in Paul’s mind. To “minister the old testament” and to “minister the new testament” [not yet “New Testament”] are to “minister condemnation” and to “minister righteousness” respectively; these are the issues of the two testaments in their effect upon those who come into testing, decisive relation with them. The characteristic “note” of the one is that it is “a letter,” external, exact, unalterable, formulated into a definite code of rules; of the other, that it is internal to the man, governing not by rules, but by principles; not with the rigidity of half-mechanical, external regulation and control, but the elasticity and freedom of Life within; unfettered, yet not irregular or morally abnormal, because the Life and the Liberty are those of the indwelling Spirit of God.
(3) So here. Moses brought down a Law from Sinai; Paul and his brethren have received “a Gospel.” This is described more fully as “the Gospel of the glory of Christ.” He is its great Subject; His glory in it puts glory upon it. Yet the Gospel which reveals Him reveals Him as Himself a Revealer of God and of His glory. By the help of “the Gospel” we know Christ, and, yet more, we come to know “God’s glory.” And, further, this Gospel of the knowledge of the glory of God is “the truth.” Then is it good tidings to know the truth about God and His glory? It is, seeing that that knowledge comes to men through Christ as its medium. To come into direct contact with the “bare,” unveiled glory of God were death to sinners. Israel saw the glory of God on the face of Moses, absorbed, reflected; we see “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,” inherent, but, as it were, shining through the humanity.
2. The contents of the Gospel.—
(1) Perfectly true as a “working” statement, that the Gospel reveals the way of salvation, “God’s righteousness” for sinners. But the better, larger, truer, whole, view, is that it reveals God. As a redeeming God, for the race; as a pardoning God, for the penitent sinner. “Have faith in God” is, in the deepest analysis, the true formula for saving faith. “Faith in Christ” is the shape which it naturally and serviceably assumes in the evangelistic work of the Church, and in which it offers itself to the sinner’s most easy apprehension. But underneath the faith in Christ is a faith in God. Christ is the object of faith, truly; but in laying hold of Him the sinner lays hold of God’s promise of a mercy which is by express proclamation attached to the act of believing in Him. Christ is God’s Word—of promise; He is a Promise incarnate; faith which takes hold of Christ, takes hold of God, Who in Christ has expressed Himself and His will and heart.
(2) God reveals Himself, as well as His will and heart, in the Gospel. We have seen “God in the face of Jesus Christ.” In homely phrase, He is the Father “over again.” Whatsoever things the Father doeth [and saith] those things doeth [and saith] the Son likewise [=in similar manner], Joh_5:19. We hear of God from Christ; we also hear God in the words of Christ. The manner and the principles of the works of God are seen in those of Christ, e.g. such as belong to the matter here in hand. The Son pardons the sins of (say) the paralytic (Mark 2) because the Father pardons sin; the act of Christ is intended to reveal to men a God Who pardons. Study Christ pardoning sin, and see how God pardons sin. The faith of the friends of the paralytic [“their faith,” the man being, no doubt, included] is closely connected with the word of Christ, “Thy sins be forgiven thee.” There is then an efficiency about faith which brings others to God for pardon. The paralytic comes to Christ and finds forgiveness; then men may come to God and find forgiveness. He goes out from the presence of Christ, knowing that his sin is forgiven. Then men may go forth from the presence of God also, knowing that sin is forgiven. Every miracle of Christ is more than an act of benevolence toward suffering or sorrow or need; it is this, but also, and still more, a carefully chosen, deliberately done [and with special authenticity recorded] part of Christ’s whole revelation of God. Works, words, character, motives, principles underlying and governing acts and words,—in them all, as we study them in Christ, we see God.
(3) And this is a revelation of the “glory of God.” The only “glory” belonging to Him which sinners could bear to see. The one “glory” which they need to see. To a sinner the revelation [as to Moses (Exo_33:18-19)] of the “goodness,” specially as “showing mercy, pardoning iniquity,” etc., is the revelation of God’s truest “glory” to such as he. The heart which “turns to the Lord” Christ, goes into a sanctuary where it gazes upon a real glory of God. The written Gospel is such a sanctuary. Not every foot treads its floor, even of those who diligently read the evangelical narratives, or even write upon their sacred Topic. In reading this revelation of God, “we have our access, our introduction, unto the Father, through Christ, by the Spirit” (cf. Eph_2:22).
3. The veiling of the Gospel.—
(1) Not by its ministers. They “manifest the truth.” (a) They do not obtrude themselves, but “preach Christ Jesus as Lord.” To do otherwise—as perhaps Paul’s rivals at Corinth [or in Galatia] did—would be a most effectual veiling of the Gospel. They would be lamps calling attention to, and arresting it at, their own form and pattern and beauty, instead of to the light which it is their business to exhibit. The perfect lamp lets the light shine, whilst itself inviting the least attention possible. The ministry is for the sake of the light, and for the sake of those on whom it needs to be shed. “Ourselves your servants.” And yet with no slavish subserviency; not as mere creatures of those to whom they bring the illuminating Gospel. “Yours, as being first Christ’s; your servants, as, in so serving you, fulfilling our service to Him and bringing glory to Him. Yours for Jesus’ sake.” The personality of the man is a valuable element in every successful ministry; it must needs stamp itself upon every real man’s “manifestation of the truth.” [The burner will give shape and size to the gas-flame, but it must not affect the quality of the light.] But the moment the ministry becomes an end, and not a means; the man a stopping-point, and not a point of “new departure,” and of assistance, to help men on their way to the knowledge of God in Christ; the minister then becomes a “veil” to the Gospel. (Yet he is himself only a sinner who has “obtained mercy”; the personal mercy of acceptance with God, and the official mercy which has made even him a “minister.”) Moses and his system had thus become a veil instead of a medium; as a popular man or a Church system may come to intervene between the soul and God. “Cannot see God, or hear the Gospel, for the Man.” Only One may thus interpose Himself; Jesus Christ may, did, preach Himself. “I am the Way,” and not a hindrance on the way to God, and to the knowledge of Him and to the vision of His “glory” of grace, (b) They use no veil of reserve, or insincerity, or crafty handling of the Word, in their acts or teaching. Have “renounced” all this, for the Gospel may very effectually in that way be “veiled.” There is no arrière pensée about their proclamation. They have no selfish ends to serve, in the way they teach it. There is no dishonest suppression of any part of the whole Gospel, from a fear that the whole truth might be awkward for a theological system or an ecclesiastical theory. Truth may be made falsehood, not only by positive additions of alleged “truth,”—perhaps by development, but by omitting complementary truth, or by giving exaggerated prominence to what needs balancing by other aspects of the whole Divine revelation. And if this were done for the sake of courting a reputation for being “progressive”; or of shunning the reproach of being a “fossil,” or “retrograde,” or “obscurantist”; or, more unworthily, for the sake of avoiding “the offence of the Cross,” or of winning the good word of the unchanged heart; it would be a real, terrible “veiling” of “the Gospel” and of its “truth.” [A wise ministry, of course, practises a (perfectly honest) “economy” of teaching. The babes must have milk. They do not need more. But this not akin to the (technical) “Reserve.” True and false “development” have been thus discussed: “There is a modern Romish ‘Theory of Development’ of which Newman’s celebrated essay is the classical exposition, and there is a rationalistic theory which is an application of the hypothesis of evolution to the religious ideas of man. According to the former, the process of development is the expansion, under an infallible directing authority, of doctrinal germs and ideas into a variety of new forms and aspects, ‘and the existing belief of the Roman Communion is its mature result.’ According to the other theory, all religious conceptions have their origin in the human mind, and Christian doctrine is but one branch of its general progress, the Scriptures themselves, and all belief arising from them, being the natural outgrowth and product of the mind acted upon by surrounding conditions. These opposing theories have much in common, and this among the rest—that truth is not made the test of dogma. In the one case authority is the sole criterion; in the other there is strictly speaking no criterion at all, seeing that, from the rationalistic point of view, dogma can possess no other kind of truth than a temporary and relative adaptation to the religious consciousness from which it springs. Between these … there is room for a theory of doctrinal development … distinguished by the following ‘notes.’ First, development does not consist in additions to the Revelation contained in Holy Scripture; … it does not call new doctrines into existence [above all, to support or complete any dogmatic system or Church claim]. Second, it is development, not of doctrine in its subject-matter, but in the understanding and apprehension of the Church. Third, neither for the process nor for the results … is infallibility claimed, or anything beyond the general guidance and blessing [of the Church’s great Head], … which … does not preclude the possibility of error in His people.” (F. W. Macdonald.) The personal character of the ministry, too, as well as all their dealings with their fellows, show that they have “renounced,” etc. No denser “veil” to the Gospel than a questionable or damaged reputation in its ministers, in regard to their transparent honesty of speech, their simple directness of motive, their entirely “above-board” action. Many seekers after God and after truth have failed to find both, even in the Gospel, as they have read it or have heard it preached, by reason of the known ill-repute of the minister. If the idolised minister, or system, may become a veil, the discredited or discreditable, man, or system may as certainly be so. The ministers need to be thoroughly transparent in life and character and teaching. (c) The true ministry has but one aim,—so to let “the light shine” upon the path, and into the mind and heart, of the “lost,” as that they may best be brought out of their darkness and into the presence of “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” It originally “shone out of darkness.” The primal fact of the material creation was repeated in the moral. It was the ray of the dawn of a day, ever since shining more and more unto its perfection of noontide light. That dawn sprang forth from the bosom of darkness, flashing into a world dark in ignorance. Now the Sun Himself was arisen. His light had shone into the darkness of the “heart” (and intellect and life) of Paul and his fellow-workers; into and “in,” for it was an abiding day within them. Now they have but one simple, open, unveiled purpose, open to the scrutiny of men and of God—to “manifest the truth,” all unveiled, to every dark mind and heart which could be induced to gaze. They know of no “handling the Word of God” but such as will contribute to this end.
(2) Not by its Divine Author.—He is the God who loves to “make light shine out of,” and upon, “darkness.” A God of light; a God Who is light; Whose attitude is, “If … not so, I would have told you”; Who loves to reveal, rather than to conceal. Silent, He has spoken by His Word; invisible, He has shown Himself in His Image. God is working in and with the soul which craves to see the light.
(3) By the hearers themselves.—(a) The “open” Gospel needs to be met by “open” thoughts and hearts. The “spiritual man” is in thorough rapport with the “spiritual” minister. [“He that knoweth God, heareth us; he that is not of God, heareth not us” (1Jn_4:6; where note also the following sentence. A noteworthy claim!) A true minister may borrow the words of a Higher Teacher: “My sheep know My voice; … they know not the voice of strangers.”] The conscience in man leaps [like the unborn Baptist at the approach of the unborn Christ] in response to the truth. Even in the unsaved there is so much of grace that they know, and, at least secretly, honour, even if they do not love, the man who plainly speaks truth. Even in such conscience has from the beginning some power to recognise the truth when it meets with it. It is an eye made for the light. “It is a pleasant thing for this eye to behold this Sun.” The sincere Nathanael is ready to welcome and follow new light. Much more does the enlightened man respond to, and go out towards, the man whose truth commends him to his conscience. The man who is in Christ, and even the sincere inquirer for Christ, knows a true minister of Christ when he meets him and hears him; for him that minister carries letters of “commendation” of unimpeachable, unquestionable validity. The true minister “commends himself” to such. He blamelessly asks their endorsement of his credentials, and their acceptance of himself and his message. He must conciliate the unsaved man if he is to do him good. If he cannot gain his ear, he will not make the light reach his dark “mind.” He appeals thus with hope of success; the “conscience” in “every man” is the preacher’s hope; it is the starting-point of his work. Were it originally absent; let it be blinded or killed; the minister of the Gospel has then nothing to appeal to; “he cometh and hath nothing in” the man. (b) It is actually met with “veiled” minds. The “veiled” heart in the Israelite made the Law a veil, and not a mirror or a medium; the “veiled” mind of “the world,” puts a veil upon the Gospel. Nothing more sadly wonderful to the man who sees, than to find how utterly unable to see what is so clear to him, are the “lost” men and women about him. Nothing, unless it be that himself once did not see what is now so plain. There may be many causes of blindness. Prejudice, whether induced by early educational bias, or—more than a man is always conscious—by subtle love of sin and dislike of holiness. [“Men love darkness rather than light” (Joh_3:19 sqq.).] Moral indolence, which will not “be bothered” about such things, and turns away, with an indifference that is as weary as it is worldly, from The Truth [Pilate-like, Joh_18:38]; an indolence which has an uncomfortable misgiving that to listen might involve inquiry, and inquiry compel to action, and that in a direction in which the heart has no desire to look or go. Preoccupation; for the mind and heart need to be kept free from entanglement; too eager, too close, contact with any secular pursuit becomes an entanglement, a bondage, a “veil” to the heart; art, music, business, home, may swallow up a man until he has neither leisure nor desire for “the light.” [The value of the Sabbath to even the “lost,” and to the young, consists not a little in this, that it is a “break” in the engrossing, enslaving round of secular life, enslaving even its noblest types and forms. The Sabbath does something towards preventing the “veil” from becoming too densely impervious to the light.] Idolatry, in its many modern forms; sensuality, and in its varying degrees even the sensuous; any sinful habit indulged; mental pride, which cannot brook “backing down” from a position once openly taken up; worldliness of life and temper, in its widest sense,—all veil the mind and heart. The “man in Christ” sees Christ in Law and Gospel; he understands, too, why the man who is “lost” does not, cannot. And to the man living under the gracious influences of the Spirit of God, there is not infrequently given a revelation—from which he shrinks in horror—of the nearness of a Power of Evil,—a very “god of this world.” That evil Power is behind, and in, all the veiling of the heart, as the good Spirit is analogously behind, and in, all opening of the eyes and all clearness of disclosure and vision. In neither case is man’s personal responsibility destroyed. The veiling is man’s own doing, whilst it is also the work of the great Anti-God, “the god of this world.”
HOMILETIC SUGGESTIONS
2Co_4:4. “The god of this world.”—[“Grandis et horribilis descriptio Satanæ” (Bengel, in loc.)].
I. His dominion.—Usurped. Extensive. Powerful.
II. His subjects.—The lost. Who believe not.
III. His work.—To blind their minds. By ignorance, error, delusion.
IV. His object.—To hinder the grace of God. To ruin souls.—[J. L.]
2Co_4:4. “Through Christ to Godward.”
I. Godward.—
1. A Godward look.—Standing with face toward God. Having God in full view in all his life. Everything else then adjusts itself accordingly; everything falls into due, true proportion; truth, man, earthly interests, etc.
2. A Godward hope.—[Cf. 1Jn_3:21; different word for “confidence”; thought related.] Hemmed in hopelessly on all sides, but can look and hope upwards. Hated by his Jewish fellow-countrymen; mistrusted, disliked, even hated, by many of his fellow-Christians; only a few understanding and loving him. But One does understand him; he can commit his cause to that One, and go on in hope.
3. A Godward plea.—Looks Godward for inspiration; looks toward Him for help. His look is an appeal. [So Hebrews 12 is really “looking at Jesus,” but leads up to “looking unto Jesus” for help.] His need is an appeal; the very sight of his need will not fail to move God’s heart. [As the blind or crippled street mendicant stands and says nothing, but simply shows himself to the gaze and heart of the benevolent passers-by. To show himself is itself an appeal.]
II. Through Christ.—Can only see God when he gazes upon Him in Christ. Can only see God when he looks in a Christward direction. Down that road also, by that channel, must His help be expected to reach Paul. In Joh_1:51 all intercourse between heaven and earth is “upon the Son of Man,” the New Testament Jacob’s ladder. All communication between man and God is through the Mediator. His intervention is the middle term supposed in every “transaction” between God and man. Observe how this makes all religious life Christian. All has the Christian tinge; everything—hope included—has taken on a Christian colour.
2Co_4:5-10. The Preacher’s—
I. Duty,
II. Qualifications,
III. Triumphs.—[J. L.]
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
William B. Godbey 1900 · Public Domain On vv1, 7 1. “Therefore, having this ministry,” i. e., the wonderful…
LEVITICAL VERSUS HOLY GHOST MINISTRY
1. “Therefore, having this ministry,” i. e., the wonderful and responsible ministry of the Holy Ghost, in contradistinction to the Levitical ministry under Moses, “as we obtained mercy, we faint not,
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2. “But we lay aside the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness nor handling the Word of God deceitfully, but through the manifestation of the truth presenting ourselves to every conscience of men before God.” As Christ had not come and Moses was only a type, it was pertinent that the Mosaic ministry should preach the gospel through types and symbols. Hence the bloody sacrifices symbolizing the work of Christ, and the watery catharisms representing the work of the Holy Ghost, constant and exceedingly operose during the Mosaic dispensation. The gospel ministry under the Holy Ghost dispensation is entirely different, being a pure spirituality, whose end is the revelation of Christ to the human spirit, i. e., to the sinner as a Savior and to the Christian as a Sanctifier. This is done by faithfully preaching the Word, and not handling it deceitfully in craftiness. Priestcraft is one of the devil’s most successful inventions. It is the quintessence of handling the Word deceitfully, i. e., bending it about to suit the creed, the congregation, the times and circumstances. The devil’s preachers are wonderfully shrewd and accommodating. They will twist the Scripture around to suit everybody and everything except holiness to the Lord. It is so deplorable to see the religious world today groping along in the dispensation of Moses, wasting the Lord’s money in building costly church edifices, pouring out thousands for mere show, and even ruining the acoustic facilities of the building. Then the services are all about as rigidly ritualized as in the days of the Levitical priesthood. I do believe that in many instances the worship in the Jewish synagogue was more simple and spiritual than in the metropolitan churches of the present day, where it is ritualized to death. It is so alarming to see the millions of Christendom today groping along in the dispensation of Moses, reading the Bible with the veil over their faces, pulled and hauled about by the devices of priestcraft, often “handling the Word of the Lord deceitfully,” making the Bible the mere tool of their caprices. It is a sine qua non of the Holy Ghost ministry to let the blessed Spirit have His way in everything; read and preach the Word just as it is, fearlessly of men and devils, and recognize the Holy Ghost in His personal presence, not only preaching to them His own Word, but conducting the service in song, prayer, testimony, exhortation and sermon.
3. “If our gospel is hidden, it is hidden among those who are being lost.” All the wicked are now in a perishing condition, going every moment down to Hell, opportunities and privileges incessantly taking their flight into the vast eternity. All this is because the gospel is being hidden to them, and they are living as if they had no Savior.
4. “In whom the god of this age has blinded the minds of those that believe not, that the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ may not shine on them.” Here we find the problem solved, and the reason why people are going into Hell by millions is because they do not see Hell open and coming to meet them, and black devils dragging them into the burning pit. The reason why they see none of these things is because the devil has blinded them through unbelief. Faith is the medium through which all light enters the mind. One of the darkest omens of the age is the rapid rush of all religious denominations into the infidelity of No-Hellism. This subtle demon has already put a padlock on the mouths of about ninety-nine preachers out of every hundred. If you would keep people out of Hell, you must convince them there is one, and that they are going to it. You can not convince them without telling them so. This part of the gospel constitutes the grand break-water against the wild rush of people into Hell. So soon as they wake up to the fact that the Bible Hell is an awful reality, and they are rushing into it at race-horse speed, they will begin to cry out: “What must I do to be saved?” Then the time comes to preach the gospel of grace, get them saved and sanctified, and put them in the school of Christ to feed on His precious Word and glorify Him in the salvation of others. This explains the reason why the fear of God is not in the popular churches. People go there with the pomp and hilarity of the theater. The true readiness “the god of this age,” not as E.V., “this world.” When Satan captured Eden, the ages of his dark and gloomy reign set in.
“One day with God is a thousand years” (2Pe 3:8).
The sixth one-thousand year days of Satan’s dreary week of darkness, toil, bloodshed and damnation are almost at an end, when he is to be arrested like a common criminal and taken out of the world (Revelation 20) and locked up in Hell. So, while he is the god of this age, ruling kings, princes, potentates and ecclesiastical hierarchies, it is a happy reflection that he is not the god of this world, but that Jesus has redeemed it by His blood and is going to utterly rescue it from Satan’s black tread, glorify it and add it back to Heaven, where it first swung out from the creative fiat amid the shouts of angels and archangels. During the present age of darkness, sin and misery, as we see here, the devil is god on the earth, ruling its rulers in State and Church, and tumbling all into Hell as fast as possible. The word for “church” in the Scriptures, ecclesia, from ek, “out,” and kaleo, “call,” simply means the people who have come out of this wicked world, responsive to the call of the Holy Ghost. In every case in all by-gone ages, when the good ones go to Heaven, the devil has supplied their places with his counterfeits from the world, thus maneuvering soon to capture the church and fill it up with the world. Hence we have this day the whole world crowded with the devil’s churches, eight hundred millions being pagans, two hundred millions Mohammedans, two hundred and fifty millions Roman Catholics, a hundred millions Greek Catholics, and among the hundred millions of Protestants he certainly has the lion’s portion. God, in His great mercy, ever and anon calls His people to come out of the world. If He did not call them out of the worldly churches, the devil would get them. The very fact that a church is worldly is demonstrative proof that the devil has it; because he is the god of this age, i. e., the god who rules the world during the present age of darkness and sin. So fast as the devil can keep the people from believing the Bible, he blinds them through their own unbelief, thus utterly disqualifying them to see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
5. “For we preach not ourselves, but Jesus Christ the Lord, and ourselves the servants for Jesus’ sake.” The true gospel preacher has but one theme, and that is Christ the Lord. Christ means God’s Anointed One, who redeemed the world by His blood, and is the name of our Savior in His mediatorial capacity. Lord means a ruler of this world, and has always been applied to the temporal rulers of the earth Hence in its application to our Savior, it signifies His regal office and character. Jesus is His birth-name and means “Savior”; Christ, Redeemer; and Lord, “King.” Hence we are to preach all of these great cardinal truths appertaining to the Christhood everywhere we go. The whole Bible is but the biography of Christ; the Old Testament that of Christ concealed, the New Testament that of Christ revealed. We are to preach faithfully the historic Christ in His first advent, bleeding and dying to redeem the world, and actually perfecting the universal, vicarious atonement. We are also to preach the experimental Christhood, enforcing with all our might the great fact that all of His followers must be like Him. At the manger, where He was born in utter obscurity, we must follow Him and be born of the Spirit from above. We must also follow Him to the cross, be nailed to it, bleed and die to this world, rise again to walk in newness of life. We must also follow Him in the transfiguration if we would ascend with Him to glory. It is an awful insult to the gospel calling to preach anything but Christ. Hence we have no right to preach our opinions, creeds nor dogmatisms of any kind.
6. “Because God is the one saying, ‘Out of darkness the light will shine which shone in our hearts in order to the knowledge of the glory of God in Christ.’” This is still contrastive with the case of Moses, who had a veil over his face, whereas Christ has none. This Scripture is fulfilled in all human experience wrought by the Holy Ghost. In regeneration, lie reveals Christ to the sinner, shining on him, his heart yet much encompassed with the darkness of his sinful nature, in which he was born. In sanctification, lie reveals Christ sitting on the throne of the heart shining in cloudless splendor, reigning without a rival.
William B. Godbey, Commentary on the New Testament (1896–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Sermon Bible 1900 · Public Domain On v1 2Co 4:2
2Co 4:2
The Self-Evidencing Nature of Divine Truth.
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I. (1) By the statement that the truths of revelation commend themselves to the conscience or consciousness of man, it is not implied that man, by the unaided exercise of his consciousness, could have discovered them. The power to recognise truth, when presented to us, does not by any means imply the power to find out or originate the same truth. (2) Again, in averring that the truths of revelation commend themselves to the conscience or consciousness of man, not only do we not ascribe to the consciousness a power to discover those truths, but we do not even imply that the consciousness in its unrenewed and imperfect state is qualified fully to recognise and verify them when discovered to it. Divine truth exerts on the mind a restorative and self-manifesting power. It creates in the mind the capacity by which it is discerned. As light opens the close-shut flower-bud to receive light, or as the sunbeam, playing on a sleeper’s eyes, by its gentle irritation opens them to see its own brightness, so the truth of God, shining on the soul, quickens and stirs into activity the faculty by which the very truth is perceived.
II. In what way may we conceive of Divine truth as commending itself to the consciousness of man? It does so (1) by revealing to man the lost ideal of his nature; (2) by discovering to him the mode of regaining it. The great obstacles to the soul’s recovery of its lost ideal are obviously these two—the sense of guilt and the consciousness of moral weakness—and the two great needs, therefore, of every awakened mind are the need of Forgiveness and the need of Moral Strength. And it is in meeting and supplying these wants that the truth as it is in Jesus commends itself most profoundly to the consciousness of man.
J. Caird, Sermons, p. 1.
Conscience a Witness to the Truth.
I. Both the promises and threatenings of the Bible may be handled deceitfully. It should be in the hope and with the design of obtaining a willing hearing for the gracious proffers of forgiveness and reconciliation, that the preacher portrays the fearful things of vengeance, and shows the hosts of the disobedient overtaken and overwhelmed by the just anger of God. If we use the law as a schoolmaster, it should be specifically with the purpose of bringing men to Christ; and the preacher who should leave his hearers appalled by his representations of a coming day of vengeance, and not strive to take advantage of their fears in order to induce them to seek a place of refuge, would be acting in forgetfulness of the first duty of the Christian preacher, and deserve all that could be said as to the handling God’s word deceitfully: deceitfully, just as though the word were given to furnish figures which might move awfully and mysteriously to and fro on a darkened stage, in place of the display of a cross, on which He who hangs gives utterance to the cheering words, "Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth."
II. There is a manifestation of truth to the conscience, when perhaps it is not acted on, nor even encouraged. There is something very expressive in the words "in the sight of God." St. Paul was satisfied that the doctrines which he preached and the motives by which he was actuated, were equally such as approved themselves to God. He had no hesitation as to this, that whatever the opposition and misrepresentation which he met with from men, he could appeal to Him who searcheth the heart, secure of being accounted a faithful minister of Christ.
It was a noble thing thus to be able to speak of commending himself to the conscience of his hearers in the sight of God. This assurance of the approval of his Master in heaven must have been more to the Apostle than the applause of the world, and might well compensate for its frown and its scorn.
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1674.
References: 2Co 4:2.—Homilist, vol. iv., p. 225; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. vii., p. 91; Archbishop Magee, Church of England Pulpit, vol. xii., p. 249; G. T. Perks, Catholic Sermons, vol. ii., p. 121; C. G. Finney, Gospel Themes, p. 231. 2Co 4:3.—T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. v., p. 339.
2Co 4:3-4
The Gospel the Manifestation of God.
I. St. Paul speaks of the gospel or good news being hid from those to whom it was proclaimed. St. Paul is not declaring what may be the consequences of rejecting the gospel, but what was the cause of its rejection. He is explaining a fact that was happening continually before his eyes. When he found the Gentiles given up to sensuality, he called them lost. Their minds, he said, were darkened; they were alienated from the mind of God in consequence of the ignorance that was in them, in consequence of the hardening of the heart. When St. Paul found the Jews shut up in self-righteousness and self-glorification, exulting in the law, exulting in their difference from all other men, he called them lost. There was the same blindness, the same hardness of heart, as in the other case. He knew that there was, for he had felt it; he had been lost.
II. Then follows an explanation, drawn from his own experience, of the darkening of the heart which he has been describing in these two apparently different cases. "The god of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not." Could he have uttered a more pregnant truth? A god of this world lay beneath all the superstitions of the nations; ready to develop himself whenever the belief in some higher and better Being, which lived on amidst all confusions in their consciences, should be utterly crushed under the moral corruptions against which it protested.
III. If we understand who it was that was blinding the minds of those who did not believe, we shall understand better what it was that St. Paul wished them to believe—what the purpose of his gospel was, what the effect was upon those whose blindness it overcame. This is expressed in the last clause, "Lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them." Here was the subject of the good tidings: they were tidings concerning God. They set forth the true God, the living God, in opposition to the false god, the dead god, the god of this world, who was blinding the minds of Jews as well as of Gentiles. But this true God, this living God, could not be declared to one or to the other in any words of St. Paul or of any man. He could only be presented in a person; there must be a living image of Him; He could only be seen in the life and death of a man. What St. Paul had to do was to proclaim that God had shown forth such an image of Himself in the world, that it would confound all images which men had made of Him out of nature or out of themselves. Therefore the Apostle was to say, "This good news is none of mine. I have no power to make you entertain it or accept it. My rhetoric, my vehemence, cannot effect a passage for it into your souls. If it could, what would it profit you? The message is concerning a Person: you are called to submit to a living Ruler; you are called to embrace a living Friend. How can a whole heap of words, suppose you took them in ever so readily and liked them ever so much, work in you this obedience, bestow on you this fellowship? God is doing that, not we. He is manifesting His Son in you. His light is shining about you, and seeking to enter into those hearts which must just as much take it in as the eyes the light of the sun. Another god—the god of this world—is using all arts to intercept this light, to draw a veil between you and it, to put out the organ which should transmit it to you. What I would have you believe is that Christ’s light is stronger than the darkness and can break through it all."
F. D. Maurice, Sermons, vol. i., p. 117.
References: 2Co 4:3, 2Co 4:4.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxviii., No. 1663; H. W. Beecher, Sermons, 3rd series, p. 549. 2Co 4:4.—Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. ii., p. 97; vol. iii., p. 27; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines, p. 2.
2Co 4:5
I. The Church is the union of believers, outwardly manifested by the sacraments, but having its essence in the personal union of each believer’s soul with Christ. I see the gates of the New Testament open outward. That life which had been taking shape within the little world which the New Testament enclosed, goes forth so quietly, so simply, to meet the larger life of the world. It is Peter coming down from the housetop to go to Cornelius at Caesarea. It is Paul crossing over from Troas into Macedonia. I see the history that has come since. And all bears testimony to the naturalness of the New Testament process by the way in which it has possessed the world. This Jesus must be a true Lord of men.
II. The Church exists before the ministry. There are disciples first, and their discipleship lies behind their apostleship to the end. There is only one place for the ministry to hold. If it is not the master, it must be the servant of the Church. If it is not set to rule, it must rejoice to obey; to know the Church to be greater than it, and not its creature; to accept it as its highest duty to help the Church to realise itself, and to grow into the full power of the Divine Life of which it, through the relation between Christ and the souls of its individual members, is perpetually the recipient. Ruler or servant, which shall it be? Strange how from the first the very name by which the successors of the apostles have been called has seemed to answer the question for itself. They have been ministers, and ministers mean servants. Strange that, with words like those of the text written in the very forefront of its shining history, the Church should have so loved the other notion of the rulership of the clergy, the dominion of the priest; and monarchies, splendid with pomp, or subtle with intrigue, but always bad with tyranny, should have so filled the story of the Christian ages.
III. There are three possible calls to every minister,—the call of God, the call of his own nature, and the call of needy men. May not one almost say that no man has a right to think himself a minister who does not hear all three vocations blending into one and marking out his path to walk in past all doubt? And these three come in perfect union in the soul of him who hears the Father call one of His children to serve the rest in those great necessities which belong to them all. The Church of the millennial days shall be nothing less, nothing else than a regenerated and complete humanity. There all shall be ministers, for all shall be servants; all shall be people, for all shall be served. In these imperfect days, let us watch and wait for those days of perfectness. Let us do all we can to help their coming. Let us count no condition final till they come. Let us live in, and live for, and never despair of, the ever-advancing, ever-enlarging Church of Christ.
Phillips Brooks, The Light of the World, p. 199.
I. The subject-matter of the Apostle’s ministry was Christ Jesus the Lord. Wherever he went he preached nothing else but Christ. It was always one and the same gospel. He (1) preached Jesus as the Messiah whom the Jews were taught to expect; and also as the desire of all nations. He showed how His atonement was a sacrifice for sin. (2) He preached Him as the Prophet, Priest, and King of the Church. (3) He preached Him in the dignity of His person, not only as man, but God. (4) He preached Him in the grandeur of His miracles. (5) He preached Him in His wondrous atonement. (6) He preached Christ Jesus in all the purity and power of His righteousness. (7) He preached Him as the Lord of the conscience. We preach Him then as Lord in every sense of the term, in the highest sense, in the most extreme sense—the Lord over the body as well as the soul; the Lord over our conscience, over our property, of our hopes, of our love and desire the Lord of our future, and the Lord of our confidence here; our Lord in times of prosperity and in times of trial, in times of joy, in the dying moment, at the day of judgment, and in the endless ages of eternity; our Lord for ever and ever. We preach Jesus Christ the Lord.
II. The manner or mode of the preaching of Paul. It was one of the most remarkable features of the apostolical ministry that the Apostles really exercised self-denial. They thought not of themselves but of their Master. Paul preached himself as the servant of the Church. The minister of religion should give to the Church, first of all, the entire use of his time. There are a variety of ways in which a man may preach himself. He may preach to show his learning, or for pecuniary advantage, or to exercise authority over men, to head a party. A minister should give to his church all his ability, and also be with his people in times of trial and especially in times of affliction, and his great motive of action must be love to Christ, and "for Jesus’ sake."
H. Allon, Penny Pulpit, No. 3252.
Christ as Lord.
What is the substance of the message which a Christian preacher has to bring? "We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord."
I. First of all, we preach the Divine personality in Christ. Man’s great need, after all, is to see God. Life can yield only limited pleasures, and we wait for a sight of the great continent of eternity. All biblical history is a series of pathways leading through the tangled perplexities of man’s ignorance back to God. Christ may remain unknown as God to many, but that does not alter His Divinity. Still He is Divine. When the sons of Jacob first went to Egypt they received corn and kindness at the hand of Joseph, but they did not know Joseph to be the son of Jacob, their father. So our systems of thought and our best activities are filled with Christ’s spirit today as the sacks were filled with corn, and men do not know how Divine is the hand that gives them all things. But then comes a day of revelation. Just as Joseph was made known to his brethren, so Jesus is made known to His Church. Love is the great revealer: Jesus is known to His people; God is manifest in the flesh.
II. We preach the Divine propitiation through Christ. "Mercy" is a very humbling word, a very crushing word to our proud minds and hearts. Yet, when conscience is awake and conviction has been brought home to us that we are guilty, it is the one word out of God’s rich vocabulary that we most of all need. We preach Christ Jesus as Lord.
III. We preach the Divine sovereignty in Christ. Christ is Saviour in order that He may be King. He saves us first, because it is the only effective way of ruling over us. It is love that rules and love that changes. When St. Peter’s was built at Rome, its soaring vastness and overtowering greatness and grandeur seemed man’s homage to Christ’s greatness; and on the granite obelisk opposite St. Peter’s was written in Latin: "Christ conquers; Christ rules; Christ is Emperor; Christ delivers His people from every evil." It was a worthy sentence, but that it may be realised and fulfilled it must be approved by every heart and must be written in the history of every sanctuary.
S. Pearson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxiii., p. 360.
References: 2Co 4:5.—Homilist, vol. v., p. 73; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxv., p. 376; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. v., p. 32; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. iv., p. 321; Harris, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. vi., p. 13. 2Co 4:5, 2Co 4:6.—S. Martin, Westminster Chapel Sermons, vol. i., p. 94.
2Co 4:6
I suppose each one has his own ideal Christ. As you think of Him He appears with the face your imagination loves to give Him. If we do not know much about the actual outline of His face, there are many things that we do know concerning it, and I want to turn a few lights of Scripture on the lovely face of Jesus Christ. Let us see what is said about His countenance.
I. I observe, first, that the face of Jesus was a sad face. Think of the sorrow, care, grief, fastings, watchings, anxieties, which this Man of Nazareth had. Do you think that any man could be, as He was, a man of sorrows and griefs acquaintance, and not bear some marks of it upon his face? His countenance became so careworn and haggard that He looked twenty years older than He was; for when but thirty, the Jews, guessing His age, said, "Thou art not yet fifty years old." Look into those sad eyes of His, and when you have had a little communion with the Man of sorrows and grief’s acquaintance, I believe you will drink in an inspiration to bear your trials which you never had before.
II. The face of Jesus Christ was a face full of purpose and indicative of force of character. "He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem." Go and see Christ just before that baptism of His into sorrow and suffering, and go forward to bear your cares and sorrows aright; and when you look into that face so steadfastly set to go towards Jerusalem, ask God to give you also an unswerving spirit in treading the path of Divine direction.
III. The face of Jesus Christ was an outraged face.
IV. It was a face shrouded in death.
V. It was a glorified face. It shineth like the sun now.
VI. It is the terror of the ungodly.
VII. It is a face that may be sought. "When Thou saidst, Seek ye My face, my heart said unto Thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek."
A. G. Brown, Penny Pulpit, new series, No. 828.
2Co 4:6
The Light of the Heart.
I. The first and simplest truth involved in the text is the universality of the grace of God in Christ—at least, its capability of application to all mankind. This is implied in the unlimited range of influence attributed to the Divine light, as shining not on a chosen few, e.g., on the Apostles themselves, but on all whom St. Paul addressed, uniting his brethren with himself in a community of participation of the same grace, the same light shining on our hearts; and also in the imagery employed, the light of the day being a universal gift, shed without limit for the common benefit of all creatures. Thus the light of Christ hath shined without respect of persons on our common humanity.
II. Moreover the text touches upon the momentous difference permitted between the elect of the past and those of the present dispensation of God; the marked distinction in the relation in which Israel stood towards Him and that which we occupy. In the Epistles there is expressed no such cry as that which continually rose out of the heart of old Israel. On the contrary, the most restful spirit, though in the midst of sorest trials, marks the language of the Apostles, and their ground of rest lies in the inherent consciousness of God.
III. The light shining in our hearts is not merely the manifestation of the truth or the possession of an idea. It is the light of the glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ which has shined in our hearts.
IV. It requires to be carefully noted that there is a momentous difference between the inward shining of God in the heart and the heart’s own embracing of this perfect light. We may be all alike in regard to the one, but infinitely differing in regard to the other.
V. Again, we see here the basis on which a true human fellowship is formed. Our feelings towards our fellow-creatures are true, if we view them in the light which the Incarnation has shed on our redeemed nature. Natural love, when combined with this new bond of union with God, becomes the deepest rest and satisfaction of the heart’s language towards God; and spiritual ties may become as close, as tender, as full of sympathy, of rest and trustful communion, as the fondest ties of nature, through the unction of the Holy One uniting heart with heart in the circle of Divine love which is shed abroad upon the creature in his transformation in Christ.
T. T. Carter, Sermons, p. 359.
The Gospel of the Face.
Consider if there is not a gospel of the face, an all-transcending fact-form, life-form gospel made out for us, which it behoves us always to live in, and have always living in us; for the most living form of the doctrine is that, of course, which as our human nature works will have the most immediate and divinest power.
I. Let us look into the New Testament, and distinguish, if we can, what is called preaching there. And we find our Apostle testifying, "Whom we preach—that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus." He does not say about whom, or the just account and formula of whom, but whom: the fact-form Man, the life and life-history and feeling and sorrow and death and resurrection of the Man. The souls to be gained are to be presented perfect in Christ Jesus; that is, in the new possibilities and powers of grace embodied for them in the face and person, or personal life, of their incarnate Redeemer.
II. What importance there is in a revelation or presentation of God, which enters Him into the world as He can be entered in no form of abstraction. The very purpose of incarnation is to get by or away from abstractions, and give the world a concrete personation. Thus in Christ’s living person, we are to have God, who is above all history, entered into history, and by such human ways of life as history takes note of, becoming incorporate with it.
III. If there is to be any remedy for the precise disability and woe of sin, it must be such as may, in some way, restore God to His place in the soul. Re-inspiration is our first want, for not even the Holy Spirit re-inspires, save as He shows the things of Christ objectively without. God is to look Himself in again from the face of Jesus; but what is nowise different, Jesus dying into our dead sympathies, is to enter back the Divine and quicken us to life.
IV. It is a consideration having great weight, that no other kind of doctrine but that which adheres to the concrete, matter-of-fact gospel makes a true, or any but a false point for faith. Salvation, we say, is by faith, and what is faith? The faith that brings salvation is the act of a being towards a being, sinner to Saviour, man to God. "He that believeth in Me" says Christ—not he that believeth some things or many things about Me. It is the act of an undone, lost man, giving himself over in trust to Jesus Christ, person to person; a total consenting to Christ, to be of Him and with Him and for Him, to let Him heal and renovate and govern, and be made unto us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption—in one word, everything.
V. It is a fact to be carefully noted, that all the best saints and most impressive teachers of Christ are those who have found how to present Him best in the dramatic forms of His personal history. Such were Chrysostom, Augustine, Luther, Tauler, Wesley. These great souls could not be shut up under the opinional way of doctrine, or even under their own opinions. Their gospel was not dry and thin and small in quantity. They had a wonderful outspreading of life and volume, because they breathed so freely the supernatural inspiration of Christ, and let their inspiration forth in such grand liberties of utterance.
H. Bushnell, Sermons on Living Subjects, p. 73.
I. God commanded the light to shine out of darkness. To this, after all, we must come. When we have discovered the properties of any natural agent, and pass from inquiring what it is to inquire why it is, we have no answer left but the will of the Almighty Creator. He willed it, and so it was, or as His word expresses it in condescension to our human ways, He spake it, and it was. Such is the Divine character. God is not the author of confusion, not the abettor of obscurity and concealment, not the enemy of life and progress; but the God of order and peace, the God of revelation and of knowledge, the Friend of all that was made and of its highest advance to life and happiness. In the text a spiritual act of God is spoken of analogous to the creation of light in the outward world. That He who is light and the Father of light, who is the author of that which reveals and cheers the physical world, should also create the light of the intellectual and spiritual world, appears to follow as a matter of course from any consistent idea of His power and of His providence.
II. The beginning of the work of grace is the first lighting of the candle of the Lord in the heart. It is totally unlike any mere inference of the reason, or anything which can be gained by information from without. It is gentle, gradual, but none the less a certainty. The spiritual day is as real as the natural day. There are those who are blind to the daylight of this earth. But the day is none the less real for their ignorance of it. The wide world lives in its beams and walks in its light. And there are those who are blind to the light of which we treat; who never saw its rays, and though they speak of it as others do, are wholly unconscious of the reality. But it is none the less real for them. The great multitude which no man can number, the Church and people of God, live by its beams and walk in its light.
H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. i., p. 84.
References: 2Co 4:6.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv., No. 1493; Homilist, vol. vii., p. 351; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. ii., p. 95; E. Paxton Hood, Sermons, p. 101. 2Co 4:7.—Homilist, 3rd series, vol. v., p. 287; J. C. Harrison, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxv., p. 219; H. Moore, Church of England Pulpit, vol. xi., p. 283. 2Co 4:8.—C. C. Bartholomew, Sermons Chiefly Practical, pp. 475, 490.
2Co 4:8-9
The Broken Life.
The mystery of evil has many aspects. There is one which is contained in that sad word, waste. How much that was born with each one of us must pass unused and undeveloped into the grave! Who is there that has begun to think, and has passed the entrance on actual life, what man of thirty, what woman of five-and-twenty, has not already learned to relinquish what had once seemed possible.
I. The vision of life in early youth, for those who think and feel, has a unity and completeness, as of the body of heaven in his clearness. Whether the aim of aspiration be the triumph of a single power, or the varied exercise of many, there is a flawless completeness in it, a rounded perfection, which those who have travelled further cannot but envy, if they retain enough of sympathy to perceive it. But we all find out at some point in our course that feeling and energy must be adapted to circumstances; that while desires and aims may be boundless, opportunity and time and human power are limited; that after all false starts and mistaken efforts, we have still a work to do, a place to fill, a line of action which experience points out to us as our duty.
II. And it is here that the difference becomes apparent between the true and false resolution of enthusiasm, which has attempted the impossible. The possible remains. But does there remain in us the strength and will to do it? While there is life there is the power of will, and that is the power of working, if need be of suffering. Disappointment will have a weakening effect for a while, but it will only be for a while if we have any strength in us. If there be the fixed determination to do what the hand findeth to do, even though it may seem poor and mean, we need not fear that any experience, any separation, any love, any effort of our past lives will be utterly lost to us. To act in the present is not necessarily to break with the past. Let us gather up the fragments that remain. Though sometimes we may be cast down, let us know that we are not destroyed; though we have sometimes fallen, let us trust that we shall not be cast away, for the Lord upholdeth us with His hand.
L. Campbell, Some Aspects of the Christian Ideal, p. 88.
References: 2Co 4:10.—H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xi., p. 59. 2Co 4:11.—T. Birkett Dover, A Lent Manual, p. 139. 2Co 4:12,—A. Parry, Phases of Truth, p. 5; W. M. Punshon, Sermons, p. 11.
2Co 4:13
Faith, the Ear of the Soul.
Every Christian has heard what is worthy of repetition.
I. Jesus Christ is Himself a word. Jesus spake—not His lips, but Himself. His nature, His presence, His character, His deeds were voice—not echo. He was the living word of the living God.
II. But the lips of Jesus Christ spake also.
III. And the Christian has heard. The Apostles first heard, and they believed and spake. Other faithful men heard, believed, and spake. Through this means the voice of God is made yet to linger upon earth, and the Christians of this day have heard and do hear Christ’s voice. To them Christ speaks from heaven. He who hath an ear for godlike grace and eternal truth will hear Divine love and wisdom in Christ the voice and in the voice of Christ.
S. Martin, Westminster Chapel Pulpit, 3rd series, p. 145.
References: 2Co 4:13.—Homilist, 2nd series, vol. iv., p. 494; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines, p. 347; T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. i., p. 199; G. Harris, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxviii., p. 328; J. Sherman, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. ix., p. 151. 2Co 4:14-18.—H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. vi., p. 264; vol. viii., p. 89; vol. ix., p. 149; vol. xxiv., p. 313; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. ii., p. 158.
2Co 4:15
I. The text teaches this glorious fact, that "all things are yours" or "for your sakes." Every process of godly advancement is all to our advantage. Christ is heir of all things. Then if Christ is yours all things are yours. Let us understand and do justice to that expression ’’all things are yours" as to this, not only the present wealth and possession, but the power we have in connection with that wealth for present enjoyment and usefulness. It is in proportion as I feel "all things are mine" that I feel joy unspeakable and full of glory. Exactly in proportion as we have faith to grasp these mighty truths do they carry us through all our difficulties. Lay hold of these truths now; they will give you a joy, strength, and power no tongue can tell.
II. The text turns our attention off from self to others. "All things are yours." There is the value of the doctrine of the sovereignty of God. Whether we see what He is doing or not, whether we can understand its bearing or not, whether we can realise its benefit or not, the fundamental truth in regard to practical and experimental Christianity is "The Lord reigneth." With His Son He has promised, pledged, and secured to me eternal happiness and glory. Then what follows? Everything that occurs to me must be subordinate to that. All things must of moral necessity work together for my good. Trials serve to bring me nearer to God, to make me more meet for the everlasting inheritance, and finally to be the means which will bring me before my God perfect as He is perfect, holy as He is holy. The text goes on to say "that the abundant grace may through the thanksgiving of many redound to the glory of God "; that is, that God’s people may be increased in number, and that those who are so, in their increased grace, devotedness, usefulness, and all else which results from a higher order of spiritual experience, may in the whole of their character and conversation redound to the glory of God.
C. Molyneux, Penny Pulpit, new series, No. 365.
References: 2Co 4:15.—H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiv., p. 331. 2Co 4:16.—Homilist, vol. v., p. 55; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xii., p. 362; J. Leckie, Sermons at Ibrox, p. 161. 2Co 4:16-18.—J. H. Thom, Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, p. 389; F. W. Robertson, Lectures on Corinthians, p. 309; J. Duncan, The Pulpit and Communion Table, p. 261. 2Co 4:17.—G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines, p. 54. 2Co 4:17, 2Co 4:18.—R. W. Church, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxii., p. 344; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. iv., p. 88; G. Matheson, Moments on the Mount, p. 62.
2Co 4:18
Things Temporal and Things Eternal.
I. There is a truth which we all know equally well—whether we are learned or ignorant, old or young; we are all equally well assured of the truth—that the things which we see are temporal—only for a time and fast passing away. And yet, though we know it so well, our heavenly Father seems to take great pains to remind us of it constantly, as if it were of very great consequence that we should be continually thinking of it, and as if we were very likely, practically, to forget it. All the changes in us and about us are the voice of God; and when He speaks, infinitely important is it that we should listen to His voice; but there is another way in which He speaks to us more distinctly than this, i.e., the Bible. We that are alive live more among the dead than among the living. When we read a book and think of the person who wrote it as a friend, and ask for him, it is very likely we shall find that he is now among the dead and not among the living. When we talk of acquaintances and others, how often do we find, as it were accidentally, that they are now among the dead and not among the living. And indeed, with all persons who have lived any time in the world, and who are at all given to reflection, their affections and their thoughts are more among the dead than the living.
II. Nature does not declare to us that the things which are not seen are eternal, but when God has made everything to preach aloud to us such warnings about everything here slipping away from under our feet, we might conclude that there was something coming on, something of great consequence. What it will be to wake from the grave and to find ourselves in one of these states, for good or evil, this must be a thought of which we can have no adequate conception. But we may form some faint idea of it from things temporal. For a sailor to find after a very dangerous voyage that he is indeed safe upon shore—or for a soldier to find that the battle is over and that he is safe—for persons to find after a state of very great danger that they are saved, we may tell what their feelings are; and this may give us some idea of what it will be to wake in eternity and to find that we are safe, that we shall never again be separated from Jesus Christ.
Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times" vol. ii., p. 1.
The Seen and the Unseen.
I. The things which are not seen: what are they? Doubtless they are in part those moral and spiritual truths and virtues which are obscured or crowded out of view in the present life of most of us, but which are nevertheless beautiful and enduring realities: they are justice, charity, truth, sanctity. We see an approximation to these things in the lives of God’s servants on earth, but we do not see the perfect and abstract qualities themselves: they lie beyond the sphere of sense; they are perfectly seen, and seen only, as attributes of the Most Holy and the Self-Existent. The things which are not seen: we do not see (1) God, (2) the angels, (3) the souls of the departed. That which meets the eye of sense is here only for a season; it will pass away. That which meets the eye of the soul illuminated by faith is known to belong to another order of existence. It will last for ever. It is this quality of eternity, of enduring, of unlimited existence, which makes the Christian look so intently on the things which are not seen.
II. This truth as to the relative importance of the seen and the unseen, if it be really held, will affect our lives in not a few ways. It will, for instance, govern the disposal of our income. If we look only at the things which are seen, we shall spend it mainly upon ourselves, reserving, perhaps, some portion for objects of a public character, what is creditable or popular to support. If we look mainly at the things which are not seen, we shall spend at least one-tenth, probably more, upon some agencies that will bring the eternal world, and all that prepares people for it, home to our fellow-creatures. In days of prosperity a Christian’s prayer should constantly be: "Oh turn away mine eyes, lest they behold vanity, and quicken me in Thy way."
H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxiv., p. 387.
If the things which are seen are temporal,—
I. The good things seen are not enough for us.
II. The grievous things seen should not make the Christian faint.
III. In nothing seen ought a man to find either his hell or his heaven.
Two duties spring from this truth. (1) The duty of moderation in our use and enjoyment of all things seen. (2) The duty of seeking a heritage and portion in that which is unseen and eternal.
S. Martin, Westminster Chapel Sermons, 1st series, p. 83.
For and by things temporal are given things eternal. There is a great deal said about looking away from the things of time to the things of eternity; and Paul is credited with this idea on the score of the language of the text. Whether he would accept the credit is more doubtful. It certainly is no conception of his, that we are to ignore the temporal and go clear of it, in order to being fixed in the eternal. Indeed this kind of prescription, so constantly reiterated and soaked in, as it were, by a long dull-minded usage, is really about the most noxious drug that Christian living has ever had put in its way. How can we think in real earnest that such a world as this was made just to be looked away from? And if we try to do it, tearing our mind away from the visible and the temporal, and requiring it to see only the invisible and eternal, how certainly do we find the air too thin to support our flighty endeavour, and drop away shortly on the ground, held down to it, after all, by temporal weights and visibilities we cannot escape. And just here I imagine is the reason, in great part, of that inability to realise or give a sound existence to spiritual things of which so many complain: they misconceive the problem. It is not to literally look away from temporal things in order to see the eternal, but it is to see the temporal in the eternal, or through it and by means of it. By not looking at the temporal things, Paul means simply not fastening our mind to them or upon them as the end of our pursuit.
I. There is a fixed relation between the temporal and the eternal, such that we shall best realise the eternal by rightly using the temporal. We shall best conceive the true point here by observing the manner of the Apostle himself, for it was one of the remarkable things about him as a Christian that he was so completely under the power, so sublimely invigorated by the magnitudes of the world to come; longing for it, wishing himself in it, and carrying the sense of it with him into the hearts of all who heard his preaching. Things temporal he saw, and a great deal more penetratingly than any mere worldly mind could; saw far enough into them to discover their unsolidity and their transitory and ephemeral consequence, and to apprehend just so much the more distinctly the solid and eternal verities represented by them. Things and worlds are passing—shadows all that pass away. The durable and strong, the real continent, the solid lasting place is beyond. But the present things are good for the passage, good for signs, good as shadows. So he tramps on through them, cheering his confidence by them, having them as reminders, and renewing day by day his outward man by what of the more solid and glorious future is so impressively represented and so solidly set forth in them. He does not refuse to see with his eyes what God puts before his eyes.
II. We have eternals garnered up in us all, in our very intelligence; immortal affinities which, if we forget or suppress, are still in us; great underlaid convictions also, ready to burst up in us and utter even ringing pronouncements; and besides there is an inevitable and sure summons always close at hand, as we know, and ready for its hour. Consent that you are dying and that time is falling away, and your soul will arrive at the conviction of God’s eternity and of things beyond this life very soon. Nay, she will hear voices of eternity crying out in her own deep nature, and commanding her on to a future more solid and reliable than any mere temporalities can afford.
H. Bushnell, Sermons on Living Subjects, p. 268.
The Invisible World.
I. We are in a world of spirits, as well as in a world of sense, and we hold communion with it and take part in it, though we are not conscious of doing so. If this seems strange to any one, let him reflect that we are undeniably taking part in a third world, which we do indeed see, but about which we do not know more than about the angelic hosts—the world of brute animals. Can anything be more marvellous or startling, unless we were used to it, than that we should have a race of beings about us whom we do but see, and as little know their state, or can describe their interests or their destiny, as we can tell of the inhabitants of the sun and moon? It is indeed a very overpowering thought, when we get to fix our minds upon it, that we familiarly use—I may say, hold intercourse with—creatures who are as much strangers to us, as mysterious as if they were the fabulous, unearthly beings, more powerful than man and yet his slaves, which Eastern superstitions have invented. Is it not plain to our senses that there is a world inferior to us in the scale of beings, with which we are connected without understanding what it is? and is it difficult for faith to admit the word of Scripture concerning our connection with a world superior to us?
II. The world of spirits, then, though unseen, is present, not future, not distant. It is not above the sky; it is not beyond the grave: it is now and here; the kingdom of God is among us. Men think they are ends of this world, and may do as they will. They think this earth their property and its movements in their power, whereas it has other ends beside them, and is the scene of a higher conflict than they are capable of conceiving. It contains Christ’s little ones whom they despise, and His angels whom they disbelieve; and these at length shall take possession of it and be manifested. We are looking for the coming of the day of God, when all this outward world, fair though it be, shall perish; when the heavens shall be burnt and the earth melt away. We can bear the loss, for we know it will be but the removing of a veil. We know that to remove the world which is seen, will be the manifestation of the world which is not seen. We know that what we see is as a screen hiding from us God and Christ and His saints and angels. And we earnestly desire and pray for the dissolution of all that we see, from our longing after that which we do not see.
J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. iv., p. 200.
References: 2Co 4:18.—J. Leckie, Sermons at Ibrox, p. 350; W. J. Knox-Little, Contemporary Pulpit, vol. ii., p. 351; T. M. Herbert, Sketches of Sermons, p. 169; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiii., No. 1380; Ibid., Morning by Morning, p. 29; T. J. Crawford, The Preaching of the Cross, p. 357; H. P. Liddon, Advent Sermons, vol. ii., p. 225; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 387; Ibid., vol. xix., p. 204; Ibid., vol. xxiii., p. 266; W. G. Horder, Ibid., vol. xxviii., p. 115; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines, p. 50; F. W. Farrar, Everyday Christian Life, p. 70; Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times" vol. viii., p. 131; vol. ix., p. 213; J. R. Illingworth, Sermons, p. 32; Saturday Evening, pp. 95, 102. 2Co 5:1.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxix., No. 1719; C. Moore, Church of England Pulpit, vol. x., p. 411; J. B. Heard, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxi., p. 150; J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 10th series, p. 135. 2Co 5:1, 2Co 5:2.—Church of England Pulpit, vol. xxi., p. 77. 2Co 5:1-4.—Preacher’s Lantern, vol. i., p. 533. 2Co 5:1-5.—Homilist, 3rd series, vol. iii., p. 33.
The Sermon Bible, ed. William Robertson Nicoll (1888–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
F. W. Grant 1903 · Public Domain On v1 Division 3. (2Co 4:1-18; 2Co 5:1-21.)
Division 3. (2Co 4:1-18; 2Co 5:1-21.)
The radiancy of the glory in earthen vessels, making manifest its source.
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We carry these thoughts with us through the next division. We have here the radiancy of this glory, as the apostle has spoken of it, contrasted with the vessels of earth in which it is displayed. The earthen vessel may seem (in some sense may be) a hindrance, but in result God makes it only by this means manifest that the glory is not human glory, but divine. It is in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us.
1. Here then is the ministry, in its character, which characterizes the new covenant. Those who have obtained mercy become of necessity the witnesses of that mercy. There are those, of course, who are specially called of God to bear public witness of it before men, but the testimony is of the same character in the humblest witness. The character of such a ministry lifts up and energizes the soul of one who is conscious of being entrusted with it. Walking in this light, the hidden things become "things of shame." The heart is without guile. There need be no self-deception, and no perversion of the word of God, no hiding its plainest statements, no seeking escape from its condemnation of men as such. The gospel is that of the glory of Christ. This is the true force of that which our common version has so much dimmed as making it simply "the glorious gospel." It is the glory of Christ now in heaven, His work achieved; and there, therefore, as the representative of His people. If upon the cross He was their representative and bore the sin which lay upon them, that is removed, the burden of it is gone forever; all the wonder of the grace and power which have come in for us shines out in His face who is gone to God. Thus His glory is indeed gospel. This glorious Christ is He in whom the image of God, invisible otherwise, shines fully out. It is its own witness to those who realize their need and who find it thus met and abounded over. If it is veiled, it is veiled simply by the power of the god of this age in the minds of the unbelieving. It is not simply that Satan obscures it to them, but that it is their own unbelief which brings them under the power of Satan, and so hinders the radiance of the gospel shining forth to them. God never permits Satan to have this power apart from man’s consent that it should be so. If men turn away from God, they turn to Satan. The very light of God only darkens, as one may say, the shadow which they themselves cast upon their path.
Solemn word it is that with the full consciousness of Christianity come, and its power for working in the souls of men, the apostle should call Satan not simply, as elsewhere, the prince of this world, but "the god of this age." Christianity has not introduced, in this respect, a new age. It gathers men out of the world. It will never affect the world itself so as to bring in a new age for men. This, of course, lies in no inherent incapacity of the gospel itself, but in the strange mystery of man’s free will, by which he chooses darkness rather than light, and bondage to Satan rather than the freedom which God proclaims to him. But the age, one ought distinctly to understand, is not as yet an age of light, and the world will never be converted by the gospel, so that this shall be. Christ must come to effect this. The sun which has gone down upon the world in Christ’s banishment out of it through man’s unbelief, must rise again, as it will rise, and then indeed there will be a kingdom of Christ in which righteousness shall reign, and peace and blessing be the result of righteousness.
In this blessed light, then, drinking it in, it would be impossible for those in character as the preachers of it, to proclaim themselves. In the knowledge of the new man "Christ is all and in all." Christ is Lord, and the ministers of the gospel are but the servants of men for Jesus, sake. It is a glad and willing subjection in love to the need which is everywhere, and this power cannot be lacking for ministry to that need. The story of the old creation is repeated more wonderfully in the new. The God who spoke that out of darkness light should shine has shone in our hearts, in order that this knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ may shine forth to others. This is the radiancy of the glory in the face of Jesus Christ reflected from the hearts into which it has shone.
2. Here, then, is a treasure which God has designedly placed in earthen vessels for the definite purpose that the exceeding greatness of the power may be seen to be of God and not of man. The earthen vessel might seem to be an obstruction to the light which the treasure is. In some sense also it may assuredly be this. The vessel itself may need to be broken in order that the light may shine. There seems indeed an evident reference to Gideon’s men and the breaking of the vessels on their part that the lights they carried might be displayed. It is evident that God has chosen men for His messengers to men, and not angels. Angelic ministry might seem in some sense to be more fit, that it would have more power in it as evidently from heaven, and would not be liable to be corrupted by the tendency to failure, inseparable from man, even renewed man. But God is wiser than we, and the grace in which He makes men His ministers and messengers to men cannot be doubted. There is also a character of testimony to which the apostle refers here, which even angelic ministry could not afford. That would be a testimony in power, but not in weakness, and not manifesting that peculiar power which weakness itself alone can manifest, a power which is not its own, but of the grace which comes ever to lift up, animate and nerve to endurance in all our weakness. It is to this that the apostle goes on here. "We are every way afflicted," he says, "but not straitened." There is the effect of grace in the midst of the affliction. "We are perplexed, but not unto despair." Exercise is allowed, nay, given full room for, but the soul sustained in its confidence in God so that despair is impossible. "Persecuted, but not forsaken, smitten down, yet not destroyed." How the dying Stephen seems to be in the apostle’s mind, with the light in his face, while the body was dropping into the martyr’s grave! "Always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus," not exactly His death, but His dying, Himself also a Martyr, the great Martyr, -and that is the point here. Bearing it about in the body is suffering at the hands of men to some extent as He suffered, but with the effect, that the life of Jesus may be manifested in the body. God, he insists, has designed this, -has delivered the living up to death for Jesus, sake, but that the life of Jesus may thus be manifested even in mortal flesh. The final result, therefore, is "death worketh in us, but life in you." The badge of the cross is to be borne by the disciples of it. That is God’s way of working, and it is the cross in this sense also which is to win men to God.
3. He dwells now more upon the power which sustains us under these circumstances. It is the power of faith, -a faith which, because it is such, must utter itself. We believe, and therefore speak. It is what the history of all time assures us of, and therefore he goes back here for a quotation, to the Old Testament; but we have that which Old Testament believers had not. We know God as the God of resurrection, in a sense in which yet they could not know Him. He has raised up the Lord Jesus. and we are so identified with Him that this perfectly assures us of what is before us also, that "He shall raise up us also with Jesus, and present us with you." The resurrection of Christ insures, as the apostle has told us before, the resurrection of His people. If we do not rise, then it must be that He has not risen. If He has risen, He has risen as the first-fruits of those that slept. In all this the same principle which he has spoken of at the beginning of the epistle still obtains. The grace that works in some, works for the sake of all. The power manifested in some is to give energy to all, and "all things," he says, "are for your sakes, that the grace abounding through the many may cause thanksgiving to abound to the glory of God." God is still taking up Jacobs for His Israel, and out of weakness manifesting His strength; and if it be this, it is unfailing strength, so that the weakness can be no discouragement. What a testimony to the power of God when, whatever be the trial, His people faint not, but "if" indeed "the outward man be consumed, yet the inward is renewed day by day." It needs to be renewed. We are conscious of the wear and tear of things as we go through them. God makes us sensible of our dependence, sensible thus of the arms that carry us. We are learning lessons here which in eternity shall display all their fruit for us; but the present result is that the affliction is but a light one, an affliction for the moment, and "which worketh for us a more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." The apostle labors, as it were, for expressions here. The words "weight" and "glory" would be in Hebrew the same word; a glory, as the thought is, which to us as we look at it now is almost oppressive by its intensity. It would overwhelm us in our present condition, although as we carry it presently there will be no weight, but a lifting up forever. Faith here is continually a need. Hope must be not upon the things that are seen, but upon the things that are unseen. The things that are seen, with all the power that we realize they may have for us, are for a time only. The things that are not seen are the realities. They are eternal.
4. He goes on to show us how entirely for faith the things that are against us have been made our own, and the consequences of sin for man at large have been removed for us. Death is abolished. Judgment is behind us in the cross, though there remains, it is true, the giving account before the judgment-seat of Christ, -an immense blessing for us, and in which the power of God’s grace will have its complete triumph.
First, as to death. "We know," says the apostle, "that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building or God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." He is speaking of the body, of course, as the "house of this tabernacle." It is that which is to be dissolved, and there remains for us, for eternity, a building of God, a house not made with bands. He is thinking, of course, not of the Father’s house, but of what contrasts with and replaces the present habitation. "In this we groan," not for the mere infirmities surely from which we suffer here, but more with the sense of the impediment to the spirit which the body in its present form implies. "We long to be clothed with our habitation which is of heaven," that is, which belongs to heaven; not which is formed of heavenly material, so to speak, or which comes down from it, but which has its character derived from it. It is heavenly as suited to heaven, and to the perfect condition which will be ours then. In the present tabernacle we groan as burdened, not indeed to be unclothed, not as seeking death, but rather that which will swallow up death itself, -to be "clothed upon, that all that is mortal might be swallowed up of life." The apostle is evidently thinking here of the living when the Lord comes. It is not that that which is corruptible, but that which is mortal, may be swallowed up of life. The mortal condition is the present one, and what he would desire is not death for its own sake, but the joy of the full perfection which remains for us.
He interjects here a word which seems to be a warning for the conscience amongst a people of some of whom he stood in doubt. "If so be," he says, "that being clothed upon we shall not be found naked." That is, of course, what awaits every Christian. To lose the place in resurrection, the glorious and incorruptible body which will thus be ours, is impossible for any real Christian. It would be real nakedness, although the wicked will rise, as well as the righteous; but it will be no covering, the body with which they rise. There is a glance back, evidently, at man’s condition after the fall when he fled among the trees of the garden from the penetrating Eyes from which, after all, there was no escape. In eternity there will be no escape. Those who are found naked then, will be in all the terror that belongs to such a condition under the eye of God. Think of the exposure! But it is plainly that which no Christian can suffer from. The resurrection is the accomplishment of that for which God laid hold upon us, and of which He has given us the pledge already, the earnest of the Spirit. "God will quicken our mortal bodies," the apostle has told us in Romans, "because of His Spirit which He has given us." It is in the body that the Spirit dwells at the present time, and He certainly will never give up that which in this way has become the temple of God. This gives, then, continual confidence. We are at home in the body, true. It is the only state with which we are familiar now, but faith realizes that the Lord is absent, and that we are absent, therefore, from Him. It is by faith we walk, and not by sight. But thus to be absent from the body is for us as Christians to be at home with the Lord. Thus is death, then, abolished for us.
5. But there is another thing that lies upon man as man, and which is the terror of death to him. "After death," says the apostle, "the judgment." But the Lord has Himself told us that he that liveth and believeth on Him shall not come into judgment, but is passed from death unto life. If He has broken the power of death for us now, so that he that liveth and believeth in Him shall in that sense never die, so has He, and indeed in order to this, taken away the terror of judgment, which for the believer personally Christ has endured and removed. The confusion which is in the minds of Christians so much has nothing to justify it in Scripture, and is largely due, as is plain, to the forgetfulness of the coming of Christ for His own, which removes them in one company, distinct from the world, before judgment falls upon the world. They are not picked out by judgment from the world. They are separated by the coming of the Lord to gather His own to Himself. No one of those caught up can possibly doubt whose he is or what is before him. He is raised in glory or changed into it. He is in the very likeness of Him he goes to meet, and although he is to be manifested before the judgment-seat of Christ, there can be no possible terror for him in such a thought, when at last every touch of evil has disappeared. He is in the perfect likeness of the Lord Himself.
But we are to be "manifested." That is the force of the word, not merely "we shall appear," but "we shall be manifested." That is the blessing of it. Our ways and works will perfectly show what we are and what we have been, and to the glory of Him who has, spite of all our failure, accomplished at last the blessed purpose of grace towards us, so that we can be with Him, and, as it were, judge with Him our whole condition. What a lack there would be if there were not this great clearing up of things before we have passed fully into eternity, -if the wisdom and grace and holiness of God were not perfectly displayed thus in all His ways with us, if we had not the lessons of time impressed upon us for the wisdom of eternity! There will be no failure of memory then, but the keenest possible appreciation of everything. Would we forget what we have been, so as to forget along with it the grace which has been with us? Would we lose materials for the song of praise which will be ours forever? Many seem to forget the value of all this to us as the day will declare it and the glory of God which will be manifested, -the perfect fulfilment of the Lord’s words as to His people: "I am glorified in them." The principle is plain, as the Old Testament expresses it, that "God will bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil." Nothing else would be worthy of Him. He has nothing to hide, and no act of His has really been in vain, however much in our folly, as we look at things now, we might imagine so. He is to be found justified in this last judgment of all, and we too, for we are to receive also "the things done in the body, according to what we have done, whether it be good or worthless." Everything is to be appraised and estimated at its right value, but this, as it is said elsewhere, that every one may have his praise from God."
God is seeking good and not evil. He is still, as He does ever, taking the precious from the vile, because He loves the precious. It may be needful in this way that the vile should be looked at also, but it will only enhance the preciousness of the precious. That which is worthless will of course be judged as worthless. It will not be gain. But even here the estimation of it as such will have its gain. The continuity of the future with the present existence is strangely often lost sight of. People often look at it as if the entrance into eternity were to he the entire break with the past; whereas this cannot be without proclaiming at the same time the want of eternal meaning in things here.
The principle, of course, applies also to the judgment of the wicked, and this the apostle turns to now as necessarily being brought before him with all the terror of it, when he turns to persuade men. For himself there can be no terror, but there is most solemn apprehension of what such a searching out as there will be in the day of judgment will be for men. It will still be for the things done in the body that they will give account, -a merciful limitation of it. There is no hint of what people have so strangely added to it, of sin going on even after death, and in hell itself increasing for eternity the weight of condemnation. The time of responsibility is the present time. Eternity for the wicked will be the time for receiving the things done in the body, and thus God’s mercy will limit retribution, while God’s holiness will not suffer the continuance of sin, as people imagine; apart surely, from one sentence in Scripture to justify it. Hell is the prison-house of the condemned, not a place of manifested rebellion against God any more, or of the evil works for which the condemned are shut up there. It is mercy itself that limits all this.
It is not indeed that judgment will make any essential change in men. It will not turn the sinner into a righteous person. It will not change the heart; but nevertheless it will subdue entirely men to God. God has ordained that to Christ "every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord," and that of "beings infernal" as of all the rest. This enforced subjection is, in fact, the only mercy of which they are capable; but the lake of fire itself will have no odor of corruption in it. God will be God everywhere, in hell as in heaven, however differently He will be manifested in each place.
But what a joy to the apostle the present manifestation to God, to which this brings him! We are already made manifest to God. We are living and walking in the presence of Him who is light, and can rejoice to be searched out by Him who loves us and has given Christ for us. The power of this upon his life the apostle hopes with confidence will bear witness to the consciences of those whom he addresses. He does not need to commend himself to them, but they have the opportunity, if they would, to glory with regard to such, in opposition to those who were showing themselves among the Corinthians, and glorying indeed in appearance, aiming to be somewhat, while the heart lacked.
6. He is plainly now thinking, for the moment, of the opposers in Corinth who could readily find occasion to criticise the ways of one so different from themselves. On the one hand he declares that it was to God he lived; on the other hand, for the sake, therefore, of men whom God loved, and to whom He had sent the message of love by him. To smile he might seem indeed beside himself, just for the glow of wondrous happiness when occupied directly with God Himself, but there was plenty amongst those with whom he had to do to make him sober enough with a sobriety which had reference to them, the token of the earnestness of his heart towards them for their blessing. In all, it was the love of Christ constraining him. This was the one constraint in which there was perfect freedom. He turns to that work of the cross, to him so necessary, and which had for him the perfect revelation of the need of man, as well as the perfect provision on God’s part which had been made for it. He had died for all. That was grace, but it was the perfect manifestation also of man’s need. Where has sin been judged as in the cross? Where has the condition of man been manifested as it has in that fact that the love that would save men must go down to the awful depths of judgment to do so? "If one died for all, then all have died." It is not exactly, as in the common version, "all were dead." The death that Christ died was not the death in which He found men; but it is the effect of the cross of which he is speaking; it is the perfect condemnation of man, of all men, and on the part of a Saviour, not of a mere judge, -of One who desired for them eternal blessing, but who, if He accomplished this, must meet that death which was upon all. Thus, if He died for all, all died as it were, for the soul that estimated it rightly, in that cross itself. It was the end of all hope for men, apart from Christ. Nothing could be looked for from them merely, and the words are evidently to be taken in their double relation, to the cross as condemnation and to the cross as salvation.
He died indeed for all, in the desire of God, for the salvation of all. It does not and could not say that He made atonement for all, except so far as that He made life possible for all, and thus the word of the gospel could go out to all. There was no lack on God’s part for any who should seek His grace; and for those actually saved by it the cross has wrought in another way by its complete deliverance from the guilt and judgment of sin. It has wrought deliverance from the power of sin itself, so that those who now live by virtue of it live a new spiritual life in the sense of the grace that has visited them, living "no more unto themselves, but to Him who died for them and rose again." This is the only complete enfranchisement and deliverance from all necessity for living to one’s self any more, even religiously, -divine grace securing all our interests in the most perfect way, that now His interests may be our interests, that we may live to Him.
There is another change. The cross has ended for the Christian the whole history of man in the flesh, and thus removed him, as it were, out of sight. "Nay," he even says, "if we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know Him thus no more." This does not of course mean, cannot mean by any possibility, that the record of His blessed life on earth has not its full meaning for us. On the contrary, it is from the Christ w ho lived before our eyes and the Christ who died for us, that we know now the living Christ. We could not follow Him. as it were, into heaven, except as those who have known Him upon earth. That will constitute for all eternity a source of knowledge which can never be dried up. Nevertheless, Christ has passed out of it all. He is in another condition, and the living Christ we know is One who belongs to a new creation, to which also, through grace, and through His work, His people belong.
We know Him in the place to which He has ascended, and there is no other Christ to be known than this, and this affects all our apprehension of the condition of men here, and all our ways with them. How can we ever forget what the cross has manifested as to men in nature, and where alone true blessing is to be found for them? That is what marked the apostle in the entire earnestness that belonged to him. He did not look at men as men with their social and political distinctions, and what not. What were all these in the presence of the cross and the glory?
7. So that now, "If any one be in Christ, it is a new creation. The old things have passed. Behold, all things are become new." How simple and evident the result! We are the fruit of a new work of the Creator, which has brought us into new relationships, into a place which is eternal, a scene into which sin can no more enter, a paradise never to be blighted as the old one was. The apostle is not speaking here of our own condition as we know it by experience. He does not mean that there is no sin remaining in us, that we have got into any perfected condition which can set us beyond the need of self-judgment, beyond the need of discipline and correction. He is speaking entirely of what we are in Christ, something which faith knows and realizes, which we judge not by experience, but by the revelation of the Word itself. Alas, Christians as we are, it is not impossible that the full reality of this may decline for us in its power over our souls. All the same it remains true that there is no one in Christ who is not a subject of this new creation, who does not belong to the scene where all things are new, and where all things are of God.
Thus has He reconciled us to Himself, through Christ. He has brought us out of all the estrangement natural to us. There is no distance; there is nearness. There is no separation of our things from His. They are, so to speak, identical; and thus not the apostle alone could say, nor any class among Christians merely, that "He hath given us the ministry of reconciliation." By the very fact that He has brought us to Himself and made Himself known to us, He has given its the power also of making known to others that with which our own souls are filled and of bringing others to Him. We have received the reconciliation; and what we have received, we have received not for ourselves alone, but to minister with it. It is the work which Christ Himself began upon earth when God in Him assumed the attitude of perfect grace, not imputing men’s trespasses to them, reconciling, therefore, the world to Himself. It is not a question of how far this might be effectual, of how far men, in fact, responded to it. It was His attitude. It was on God’s part complete, and now, with that work accomplished which he speaks of directly as the basis of it all, and which always must have been the basis of it, a work foreseen by God before it was accomplished, but which is now accomplished, He is still reconciling men, but through others, who stand instead of Christ here, His authenticated ambassadors, by whom God beseeches men still. "We pray," says the apostle, "in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God." That is, Christ is not here Himself to do this, but He has multiplied the hands which are to minister it. He has on every side the witnesses that are to speak for Him. The apostle and those with him, sent in the first place direct from Christ, fulfilled this character, of course, in the most complete and authoritative way, but we must not on that account overlook our own part in it, -a part which every Christian has. It is not, indeed, a mere question of something entrusted to us, but of hearts that know God’s grace and know men’s need of it, which must necessarily, therefore, speak of what they know. As we have already seen, he who believes speaks. "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh."
And here is the basis of this reconciliation still: -"Him who knew no sin, He has made sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." Wonderful words are these, deeper no doubt than we can altogether fathom! It may be that "sin for us" should be thought of as "sin-offering." The word in both Greek and Hebrew is identical, but this does not really alter the truth of what is here. The fact is that the sin-offering was presented to God of old as the "sin" of the one who presented it. He who presented it to God at this time was One who had none of His own, who emphatically knew no sin. He could not otherwise have presented it; for it was an offering of Himself, and that must be a spotless offering to be accepted. But He stood, therefore, before God as identified with the sin of others which He had taken upon Himself, endured the judgment of that, and thus the message of reconciliation can go out to all.
But there is more than this here. Those who receive it become the righteousness of God, as before God in Him who has stood for them. It is not simply that God’s righteousness now can act in grace in their behalf. That is of course the doctrine of Romans, which we have had before us. This is the effect of it, however. If the righteousness of God justifies us as those identified with Christ, and in the value, therefore, of His work for them, we in receiving the value of that work become the exhibition of that righteousness which has in this way acted. We become identified with it. He could appeal to the righteous Father when He quitted the world, on His own behalf, as One who had known Him, and puts along with Himself those who have known that God sent Him. The Spirit come down into the world is thus the witness of righteousness in which God has acted in His behalf in taking Him to Himself. He is the witness, as in us also, of the perfection which is ours in Him, and of the display of righteousness on God’s part towards Him in the fruit of His work. Thus we become and shall ever be the righteousness of God in Christ. How far beyond the thought of mere forgiveness is this! How blessed to realize the claim that we have thus upon Him who is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and thus our God and Father! Here is indeed the basis of a reconciliation which we can now beseech men to accept, and which is in itself the fullest, brightest display of God that can ever be. Can there be another revelation of God which can exceed the glory with which He has been glorified in His beloved Son?
F. W. Grant, The Numerical Bible (4th ed., 1903) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. R. Dummelow 1909 · Public Domain On v1 1-6. The messengers of this gospel are not afraid…
1-6. The messengers of this gospel are not afraid to proclaim it, for they preach Christ, who has revealed the glory of God.
1, 2. Paraphrase. 'Having this glorious gospel to preach, we proclaim it boldly. (2) We have nothing to do with methods and practices which cannot bear the light (like those of your false teachers), for we neither seek to undo another's work by unscrupulous hints and disgraceful insinuations, nor try to gain the favour of the Jewish Christians by false teaching about the relation of Christ and the Gospel to the Law of Moses. On the contrary, we proclaim the simple truth, and make our appeal to the conscience as in the sight of God.'
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1. As we have received mercy] in his conversion from the blindness of Judaism.
2. The hidden things of dishonesty] i.e. the disgraceful methods of gaining adherents used by the false teachers: see on 2Co_2:17.
3-6. Paraphrase. 'If our gospel is not understood by any, it is only by those (4) whose minds are dulled by sin. (5) For the subject of our preaching is not ourselves, but Christ. (6) As God at first created light, so has He created spiritual light in our hearts, that we might reflect His light, even the knowledge of His love revealed in Christ.'
3. Are lost] RV 'are perishing.' If some will not let the light of the gospel shine into their hearts, it is their own fault.
4. The God of this world] cp. Joh_12:31; Joh_14:30. Worldly men make the devil their god by serving him, and thus serving him become even more worldly. Lest the light, etc.] For the thought, cp. Mat_13:13-15. Image of God] Christ is the expression of God's character of love and holiness.
5. Not ourselves] as do the false teachers. For Jesus' sake] Love to Jesus is his motive in seeking to serve the Corinthians.
6. For God.. hath shined] RV 'Seeing it is God that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts.' The reference is to Gen_1:3. He who gave natural light gave also spiritual light.
(iii) 4:7-5:10. The Sources of the Apostle's Comfort in the Ministry, and the Hopes that give him Courage
7-18. This glorious gospel is entrusted indeed to frail and suffering messengers, but that is in order that the glory may be given not to man but to God. Life is a continual affliction and danger, but it enables the Apostle to learn how to comfort and edify the Corinthian converts, and he gladly suffers that many may learn the salvation of God and glorify His holy name, while he is upheld by the hope of the resurrection life.
7. This treasure] i.e. the work of the ministry. In earthen vessels] i.e. in a weakly body. Herodotus tells us that Darius Hystaspis melted his gold into earthen pots, which could be broken when it was wanted.
8. We are troubled, etc.] Images are heaped one upon another in picturesque accumulation to express the fact that, in spite of many great trials (cp. 2Co_11:26; 2Co_12:10), the Apostle has grace given him to persevere.
10-12. Paraphrase. 'In suffering for Christ's sake we are drawn into close communion with Him who suffered and died on our behalf; and thus sharing His experience and “having this mind in us which was also in Him,” we are enabled to show forth in our life the power of Christ, whose indwelling influence gives us the victory over the temptations which these trials bring. (11) Indeed, it is for this very purpose that we are constantly brought into peril and affliction; (12) and the result is that, while we suffer and draw near even to death itself, your spiritual life is strengthened by the spectacle of our spiritual victory.'
10. Bearing about, etc.] He 'dies daily,' he 'stands in jeopardy every hour' (1Co_15:30-31) for Christ's cause, and thus he has learnt 'the fellowship of his sufferings' (Php_3:10; Col_1:24). In the body] cp. 2Co_1:5; Gal_6:17.
11. Explaining and emphasising 2Co_4:10.
13-15. Paraphrase. '(13) Our faith is like that of the Psalmist, who spoke out of the depths of his inward conviction, and we speak what we verily believe. (14) For we are confident that God who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead will raise us also and unite us with you in the blessings of the resurrection life. (15) And all my experiences are a source of blessing to you, because as the grace of God enables me to overcome my difficulties, many of you are inspired by my testimony to rise to higher levels of Christian life, and to give thanks to God for so many mercies.'
13. The reference is to Psa_116:10.
14. By Jesus] RV 'with Jesus.'
15. The AV is here inaccurate. RV 'For all things are for your sakes, that the grace being multiplied through the many, may cause the thanksgiving to abound unto the glory of God.'
16-18. St. Paul goes on to speak of the things that comfort him in the presence of his trials. These are the strengthening of his spirit, the thought that the temporal is transient, and the assurance of a future life.
16. Though our outward man perish, etc.] These afflictions may weaken the body, but through them the spirit is strengthened. Experience shows us the truth of this in many cases; e.g. bodily weakness often produces beauty of character, and grey hairs bring wisdom: cp. for the thought, Joh_15:2; Heb_12:11.
17. Our light affliction, etc.] The affliction is light, and vastly outweighed by the glory which it helps to secure; seen in its true perspective, too, it is but momentary, while the glory is eternal.
18. We look not] If we look at these afflictions they will loom so large in our view as to shut out the prospect beyond; therefore we look past them. The things which are seen] the material, including these afflictions. The things.. not seen] the spiritual, including the results of these afflictions in character and spiritual life.
J. R. Dummelow, A Commentary on the Holy Bible (Macmillan, 1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. W. McGarvey 1914 · Public Domain On vv1–10 [Having shown that the Christian ministry is superior to…
[Having shown that the Christian ministry is superior to the Mosaic, Paul, in this section, enlarges upon the two antithetical phases of that ministry, showing that viewed carnally it leads to the severest suffering and to death, while, viewed spiritually, it leads to ever-increasing life, culminating in celestial and eternal glory. The prospect of this blessed culmination enables the minister to sustain his present distress without fainting.] Therefore seeing we have this ministry, even as we obtain mercy, we faint not [having been forgiven for prosecuting the church, and having been graciously called to this glorious ministry of the open vision, we are moved and inspired to holy courage and perseverance]:
J. W. McGarvey (with Philip Y. Pendleton), Commentaries on the New Testament (The Fourfold Gospel, 1914; Acts; and the epistles) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
C. I. Scofield 1917 · Public Domain On vv1, 10 Lord Jehovah.
Lord Jehovah.
Exo 34:34.
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changed into transformed. The same Greek word is rendered "transfigured" in Mat 17:2; Mar 9:2.
The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Arno C. Gaebelein 1922 · Public Domain On v1 5. The Character of the True Ministry.
5. The Character of the True Ministry.
CHAPTER 4
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1. The Gospel of the Glory of Christ. (2Co 4:1-6)
2. The Treasure in Earthen Vessels; Weakness and Power. (2Co 4:7-12)
3. Resurrection and Coming Glory. (2Co 4:13-18.)
This ministry which the apostle mentions is the ministry of the Gospel. And those who know it by having received mercy are to be the witnesses. Every Christian who has obtained mercy, who is saved by grace, is called to witness to this blessed fact in some way. “We faint not”--we are not discouraged, but encouraged to go on in its proclamation, knowing that it is a sweet savor unto God and the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth. The hidden things of shame, the methods of the flesh, craftiness, the deceitful handling Of the Word of God, were renounced by the apostle: he avoided those things. All carnal things, all artifices, human wisdom and rhetoric, by which men’s minds might be captivated and their applause gained, were unknown to the apostle. His commendation to every man’s conscience in the sight of God was by the manifestation of the truth. He had implicit confidence in God’s Word and in the Gospel of the glory of Christ. This confidence is sadly lacking in our days among the professed preachers of the Word. As a result the methods of the flesh are used and the holy things are dragged down into the gutter. What abominable methods are used by professional “evangelists” to gain notoriety, secure large crowds and large collections! And the falsifying of the Word, the deceitful handling of the Scriptures, which go along with those methods! No wonder the world applauds such methods and the defense of the cross lies ceased.
And the gospel is here called “the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” And this gospel shines in all its radiancy. In the first epistle we had a blessed definition of what the Gospel is (1Co 15:1-4). There we read of His death for our sins, His burial and His resurrection. But here we are lifted higher; the Christ who died and rose again is in heaven crowned with glory and honor. He is there at the right hand of God as our representative, and all the love, the grace and power which are for His people shine out in His blessed face. A glorified Christ in all His fulness and glory, is the gospel in its highest meaning. But if this gospel, which Paul calls “my gospel” is hid, that is, veiled, it is in those that are perishing. They are unbelieving, and unbelief puts them under Satan’s power. He is called here the god of this age (the word world means age), that is our age. The age rejected Christ, and that has made Satan the god of the age, a title which he did not possess in the previous age. And he blinds the eyes of them that believe not. As they refuse to see the light which now shines in the gospel of the glory of Christ, they become blinded by the father of lies by various methods and means. He blinds the eyes by the age itself over which he domineers. He makes it appear as if this age is fast making for better things. Righteousness and peace are impossible during the present evil age; this age is one of darkness, ending in a complete manifestation of the mystery of iniquity in the person of Satan’s man, the Antichrist. Righteousness and peace can only come through the Return of the Lord Jesus Christ and by His enthronement as King over this world. Satan hides the real character of this age and this is one of the ways by which he blinds the eyes of them that believe not. He leads man to exalt himself, and nourishes self-trust and self-exaltation.
But what is the message of the true servants of Christ? Do they exalt man, or themselves, or the age with its boasted progress? “We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake. Because it is God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, who hath shined in our hearts for the shining forth of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” As it was in the hour of creation when darkness covered all, so it is in redemption. God hath shined in His grace into the hearts of them who believe. And He hath shined, in that, through us, the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ may shine forth to others. This unspeakable treasure and glory is in earthen vessels that the exceeding greatness of the power may be of God and not of us. As the ancients kept the most valued treasures in earthen jars, so all those glorious things God has given in the gospel, as well as the ministry of it, are deposited in earthen vessels. The believer, with a body of humiliation, weak and frail, though no longer in the flesh, yet the flesh, the old nature, still in him, is the earthen vessel. The term reminds us of Gideon and his men with the torches in earthen pitchers (Jdg 7:16-25.). The pitchers had to be broken to pieces so that the light could shine, and thus in that dark night the victory was won. The old man has to be kept constantly in the place of death, self must be judged and broken to pieces, that the light may shine forth. This is a truth which is more than suggested by this statement, though the outward man in his weakness and frailty, subject to affliction and suffering in the world is principally in view.
Then follow statements which illustrate the earthen vessels in their weak and helpless condition, and the exceeding greatness of the power of God. The power is manifested through the earthen vessels in trial and affliction. The earthen vessels may be troubled, afflicted on every side, but the power keeps them from being straitened or distressed. Perplexed, persecuted, smitten down--such is the condition of the earthen vessels. But God’s gracious power is manifested in all these earthly and trying circumstances.
“Always bearing about in his body the dying of the Lord Jesus (made like Him, in that the man as such was reduced to nothing), in order that the life of Jesus, which death could not touch, which has triumphed over death, should be manifested in his body, mortal as it was. The more the natural man was annihilated, the more was it evident that a power was there which was not of man. This was the principle, but it was morally realized in the heart by faith. As the Lord’s servant, Paul realized in his heart the death of all that was human life, in order that the power might be purely of God through Jesus risen. But besides this, God made him realize these things by the circumstances through which he had to pass; for, as living in this world, he was always delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, in order that the life of Jesus might be manifested in his mortal flesh. Thus death wrought in the apostle; what was merely of man, of nature and natural life, disappeared, in order that life in Christ, developing itself in him on the part of God and by His power, should work in the Corinthians by his means. A thorough trial of the human heart, a glorious calling, for a man to be thus assimilated to Christ, to be the vessel of the power of His pure life, and by means of an entire self-renunciation, even that of life itself, to be morally like unto Jesus. What a position by grace! What a conformity to Christ” (Synopsis).
How little of all this is known experimentally in our easy-going days among God’s people! In 2Co 4:12 we read, “So then death worketh in us, but life in you.” Different explanations have been given of this statement. True ministry in self-denial and self-forgetfulness works death to the servant. His self-forgetting love brought him constantly hardships and suffering; he followed the Lord in all this and knew the fellowship of His sufferings. But through it the people of God were helped, comforted and blessed. In this sense life worked in them through the self-sacrifice of the apostle.
And what sustains in all this? It is faith. And faith reckons on God who raiseth the dead. “Knowing that He who raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise us up also with Jesus, and shall present us with you.” The faith of the believer and the servant looks forward to the glorious consummation when Christ comes for His saints and the great presentation (Jud 1:24) takes place. This is the glorious goal when we shall no longer see in the glass darkly, when we shall know as we are known, when we shall see Him as He is and be like Him. Therefore, “we faint not; but if our outward man be consumed, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” Faith always looks upon things seen as temporal. Unseen things, the things above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God, are eternal; with these faith is to be occupied. But who is able to say what awaits us there? Who is able to tell out the meaning of that wonderful sentence, “A far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory?” There is a surpassing, an unspeakable, an indescribable, an unfathomable and eternal glory for the Saints of God. In ages to come God will display the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:7).
Arno C. Gaebelein, The Annotated Bible (1913–1922) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On vv1, 7 The Gospel-Message of Light and Life.
The Gospel-Message of Light and Life.
Paul uses frankness in delivering his message:
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v. 1. Therefore, seeing we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not,
v. 2. but have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the Word of God deceitfully, but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.
v. 3. But if our Gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost;
v. 4. in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.
v. 5. For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake.
v. 6. For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our heart s, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
To be a minister of that office which he has just praised so highly was Paul’s privilege: Therefore, having this ministry, even as we have received mercy, we do not become faint. It was an unmerited act of God’s mercy which made him a minister of the Gospel, Eph 3:8. He had received this ministry, not for any reason for which he might boast, but by a free gift of God. This fact sustained him amidst the difficulties and trials of his official duties and kept him from becoming finally and definitely discouraged. Humble heroism was the key-note of Paul’s character; his exalted position did not fill him with pride. The mercy and the grace of God, whose strength is made perfect in weakness, was the inexhaustible fount of his strength and courage.
But not only has Paul a certain remedy against discouragement and faintness, but also against the evils which he saw in the case of the false teachers: But we have renounced, disclaimed, the hidden things of shame. He wanted openness, candor, frankness to stand out most prominently in all his work. For unless the work of a pastor is at all times carried on in this manner, he will become identified with hidden things, with matters which shun the light of the sun, and which thus produce or bring dishonor upon him and his office. This behavior is almost invariably associated with such false prophets as try to break into organized congregations and steal the hearts of the members. And with reference to the same people Paul writes: Not walking in craftiness nor handling the Word of God deceitfully. He was not found engaged in, not busying himself with, intrigues and schemes by which men without a conscience sought to make a way for themselves and to acquire influence; he did not try to insinuate himself into powerful positions by false ambition. Nor did he adulterate the Word of God for such ends by preaching so as to obtain favor with the people, instead of proclaiming the Law in all its severity and the Gospel in all its beauty, 2Ti 4:3. Rather by the manifestation of the truth he commended himself, literally, to every conscience of men in the sight of God, to every possible variety of the human conscience. In his public and private teaching he brought out the truths of the Gospel plainly, so that no one could be in doubt as to the way of salvation. To every variety of human conscience he thus commended himself; they must needs acknowledge his sincerity, they must give him this testimony, that his motives were above reproach, that his teaching conformed to the highest ideals of truth and duty. He knew also that all his work was being done in the sight of God, that God was present at all times to hear him. Men recognized the truth and the honesty of his preaching, and before God he had a clear conscience fact being established, Paul can once more refer to his words in 2Co 1:15-16; 2Co 2:12-17, by saying: But even if our Gospel is veiled, in them that are perishing it is veiled. The Gospel in itself is anything but dark and obscure, chap. 3:13; it is a light that shines in the dark place of this world, intended to illumine the hearts of all men. But the opposition of men, their refusal to accept its simple statement of grace, places the veil of willful ignorance before the bright beauty of the Gospel, thus preventing its clear rays from entering into their hearts. Thus it is the punishment of their own guilt that they are lost, 1Co 1:18; they are judged already, Joh 3:18. "But it must be so, the Word of God must be the most peculiar thing in heaven and earth; therefore it must do both things at the same time, enlighten and honor in the highest degree those that believe and honor it, and blind and disgrace in the highest degree those that do not believe it. To the former it must be the most certain and best known: to the latter it must be the least known and most hidden. The former laud and praise it in the highest degree; the latter blaspheme and disgrace it in the highest degree, so that its works bear full sway and are not unimportant, but peculiar, terrible works in the hearts of men."
The cause for this condition is very distinctly not in the Gospel itself, but in man, due to the machinations of the devil: In whom the god of this world, of this present age, has blinded the minds of the unbelieving. Satan is the god, the prince, of this present age, chap. 2:11; Joh 12:31; Joh 14:30. He has his work in the children of unbelief, Eph 2:2; Eph 5:6; 1Jn 3:10; they give him willing obedience. But he, in turn, as a fitting wage, has blinded the minds of the unbelieving. Because they were guilty of rejecting the truth, the blinding could make progress in their hearts, could be a judgment upon them; for Satan could not perform this wickedness in the hearts of the believers, of them that are being saved, because to them the Gospel is not veiled. And the purpose of the devil in blinding the hearts of the unbelieving is: That the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not shine forth, should not dawn upon them, or that they should not see it clearly, it should remain hidden before them. The sum total, the content, of the Gospel is the brightness of the glory of God in Christ Jesus, the glorious revelation of Jesus as the Savior of the world. But so well is the design of Satan realized in the children of unbelief that this glory of Christ, who also in regard to His work is the perfect image of God, is not seen by them, does not penetrate into their understanding.
To justify his calling the Gospel which he preached the proclamation of the divine glory, the apostle now writes: For not ourselves preach we, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves your servants for the sake of Jesus. If Paul had been preaching himself, his own wisdom, if he had been seeking honor and glory for himself, it would have been wicked presumption on his part to condemn those that refused to accept his teaching as being on the way to perdition. But his one thought, his one object, was to set forth Christ Jesus before his hearers as the Lord, to whom they owed the obedience of faith by reason of His redemption. And far from asserting any authority, power, or lordship over them, he stated, on the contrary, that he considered himself and his fellow-teachers the servants of the congregations, not absolute slaves bound to do their will as they dictated, but servants for the sake of Jesus, ministers of Christ, stewards of the mysteries of God. And in this sense also every true preacher of the Lord Jesus Christ is a servant of the congregation entrusted to him, as he becomes all things to all men in order to gain souls for Christ, 1Co 9:19.
There is another reason also which causes Paul to be so fearless and frank in his ministry: For it is God that said, Out of darkness light shall shine, who has shined in our hearts for the enlightenment of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. It was in the beginning of the world that the creative power of God’s word caused the light to shine out of darkness, Gen 1:3. And the same God who thus created the physical light is the Author of the true spiritual light. It was not merely that he blew a dying ember into flame, as Luther remarks, but that he brought forth light out of darkness. There was darkness in the heart of Paul, as in that of all men by nature, spiritual darkness and death. But God created spiritual life and light in his heart in his conversion; and this reflection of the glory of God is now used to illuminate others; God has given to the preachers of the Gospel the ability to give to others the light of the knowledge of God through Christ, as manifested in Christ. Note: This function of the converted people is not confined to the pastors, but every believer that has experienced the illuminating power of God in his own heart will, in turn, act as a light tower to lead others to know Christ as their Lord and be saved. Mark also the contrast in the entire passage: The god of this world, the devil, blinds; the ministry of the Gospel gives light. Without the Gospel and its illuminating power the heart of man will remain forever in spiritual darkness; but if that power removes the darkness, there is a fullness of light and glory.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 3, 5, 7 Connecting Statement:
Connecting Statement:
Paul writes that he is honest in his ministry by preaching Christ, not praising himself. He shows the death and the life of Jesus in how he lives so that life can work in the Corinthian believers.
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we have this ministry
Here the word "we" refers to Paul and his coworker, but not to the Corinthians. (See: Exclusive and Inclusive "We")
and just as we have received mercy
This phrase explains how Paul and his coworkers "have this ministry." It is a gift that God has given to them through his mercy. AT: "because God has shown us mercy" (See: Assumed Knowledge and Implicit Information)
we have rejected secret and shameful ways
This means that that Paul and his coworkers refused to do "secret and shameful" things. It does not mean that they had done these things in the past.
secret and shameful ways
The word "secret" describes the things that people do secretly. Things that are shameful should cause people who do them to feel ashamed. AT: "the things that people do secretly because they cause shame" (See: Hendiadys)
live by craftiness
"live by deception"
we do not mishandle the word of God
"Word of God" here is a metonym for the message from God. This phrase uses two negative thoughts to express a positive thought. AT: "we do not mishandle God's message" or "we use the word of God correctly" (See: Double Negatives and Metonymy)
we recommend ourselves to everyone's conscience
This means that they provide enough evidence for each person who hears them to decide whether they are right or wrong.
in the sight of God
This refers to God's presence. God's understanding and approval of Paul's truthfulness is referred to as God being able to see them. AT: "before God" or "with God as witness" (See: Metaphor)
translationWords
to minister
receive
mercy
shame
life
word of God
true
conscience
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 2, 3, 5, 7 4:1 This new way (or This new ministry) shows…
4:1 This new way (or This new ministry) shows us God’s mercy. Paul felt privileged to have the ministry of sharing the message of good news (1 Cor 15:9-11; 1 Tim 1:12-17).
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.