Second Corinthians

William M. Ramsay

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781611643329
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This accessible Bible study will help to explain some of the more challenging aspects of Second Corinthians, especially by focusing on what is delightful and inspiring about the biblical book. In Second Corinthians, we find promises of a glorious life after death, interesting and thought-provoking figures of speech describing followers of Christ, powerful stewardship messages, an amazing example of humility and proper respect, and much more. By the end of this study it will be easy to see why the folk at Corinth so loved and revered Paul that they collected this letter and others to save for future generations.Interpretation Bible Studies (IBS) offers solid biblical content in a creative study format. Forged in the tradition of the celebrated Interpretation commentary series, IBS makes the same depth of biblical insight available in a dynamic, flexible, and user-friendly resource. Designed for adults and older youth, IBS can be used in small groups, in church school classes, in large group presentations, or in personal study.

1: 2 Corinthians 1:1–22

Suffering and Encouragement

Sometime around A.D. 54 an itinerant tent-maker and evangelist dictated to his young assistant a letter to a church he had founded. This was at least the fourth time he had written them, and he had been back to see them at least once. That visit had been a disaster. Sick, angry, and depressed, he had written them one letter so full of bitterness that he had wished that it had never been sent.

Now, however, he has received good news: Angry as it was, the letter had been successful. The church member who had been most difficult had been disciplined, and reconciliation was taking place.

Corinth was an important Greek coastal city.

Encouraged by that report, Paul began another letter. Though he was well aware that he had authority from God, Paul had no thought that he was writing for the ages. Christians down through the centuries, however, have revered 2 Corinthians as an important part of the written word of God, a word not just to Corinthians but to themselves. The first word Paul had for that disturbed church—and now for us—was “comfort” or “encouragement.”

The Heading of the Letter (1:1–3)

Paul begins in the form that was conventional for letters in that time. He gives his name, then says to whom the letter is addressed, gives a greeting, and voices a brief prayer. What he pours into that standard mold, however, already begins to make this letter worth our study.

He identifies himself as “an apostle of Jesus Christ.” That is, he is “one sent” by his Lord. There were twelve original “disciples” (students), eleven of whom, with others, were given the great commission and thus were sent to spread the word. Paul too has been sent, and he recognizes that other Christians may be “apostles” also (Rom. 16:7). His authority lies in his Spirit-led fulfilling of that apostolic commission.

He includes Timothy as his partner, even though the letter itself makes clear that the real author is simply Paul. Timothy probably served as secretary while Paul dictated. The mention of Timothy helps also to renew a tie. The church at Corinth would remember Timothy, for that young man, Paul’s “loyal child in the faith” (1 Tim. 1:2), had been with him in the early days of the Corinthian church (Acts 18:5).

He is writing to the church at Corinth, the capital of the region in Greece called Achaia. Paul could have addressed them honestly: “You bunch of greedy, feuding, rebellious sinners.” Instead he calls them “saints.” To Paul, all Christians are saints, “holy,” set apart because they know the good news.

In every one of Paul’s letters he uses a double greeting: “grace” and “peace.” Even today you may hear two Israelis, as they meet each other, say not “Hello” but “Peace” (in Hebrew, shalom). It means that one wishes the other not only peace but prosperity and welfare. Shalom is frequently used in the Old Testament. “Really, now, do you think the world will ever have peace?” I asked a study group. One saintly woman was caring for her beloved husband as he slowly sank deeper into Alzheimer’s disease. “In a way, I think I already have that peace,” she told us. Her kind of peace comes from the “grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

If “peace” is an Old Testament greeting, “grace” is a New Testament greeting. It recalls the unmerited favor of God given through Christ. Paul will use that word again in the benediction that ends this epistle, and we still sing of God’s “amazing grace.”

The opening prayer is simply a brief exclamation of joy: “Blessed [praised] be … God.” That God, however, is carefully distinguished from other gods. Most Corinthians were religious, worshiping at Corinth’s great temple to Aphrodite or at shrines to Isis or Demeter. In recent years Americans have become familiar with shrines to Allah, Buddha, and Krishna, and some Americans have a kind of one-size-fits-all god of the pledge of allegiance and public prayers. Paul’s is a very distinctive God, however: “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” That title describes the uniqueness of this God. Paul’s God, and ours, is the one to whom Jesus prayed, the one whom Jesus revealed, the one whom Jesus showed on the cross to be “the Father of mercies,” and whom now Paul will describe as the giver of “consolation.”

First Comes Affliction (1:3–9)

When Paul writes of comfort he does not mean that he has been comfortable! Five times in seven verses he uses the words “affliction” or “afflict,” and three times he writes “suffering” or “suffer.” Indeed he has been so “utterly, unbearably crushed” that he had “despaired of life itself.” Nobody knows exactly what difficulty Paul is writing about. Perhaps he had been so ill that he nearly died. Perhaps he had had one of those beatings he describes later in this epistle (6:4–5).

One kind of affliction we know he had been experiencing: Paul was deeply distressed about what had occurred on his last visit to Corinth. He had felt “afflicted in every way—disputes without and fears within” (7:5). For more than a year and a half, he had been a pastor to those people, he had risked his life for them, and now they seemed to be rejecting him. He was “so … unbearably crushed” that he “despaired of life itself” (1:8). John Calvin paraphrases Paul in this verse as saying, “so that I thought life was gone, or at least I had very little hope of it remaining, as those are wont to feel who are shut up and see no way of escape.”

“The preacher’s job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”—familiar saying among ministers.

Paul speaks in three ways of “the sufferings of Christ.” There is first of all the humiliation and torture Christ went through for us. Christ’s suffering is so “abundant” that in a way it has spilled over to Paul. Calvin speaks of that “abundance” as “beyond measure,” like an overloaded ship that seems almost to sink. Thus the agonies Paul has gone through for the Corinthians and their Lord have been “the sufferings of Christ.” There is also a third meaning: They share in the “sufferings of Christ,” too. It was not easy to be a Christian in Corinth. You might have to give up your job if you worked for a construction firm building a temple or a sculptor making idols. You might antagonize your husband who wanted meat when you could no longer go to the butcher shop, where the meat had been offered to a pagan god. You were likely to be ridiculed by friends; and as for enemies … they had nearly lynched Sosthenes (Acts 18:17)! From Christ to Paul to ordinary Christians, those “sufferings of Christ” kept spilling over; they were indeed “abundant.” As the old gospel hymn by Thomas Shepherd (1693) mourns:

Must Jesus bear the cross alone, and all the world go free?
No there’s a cross for everyone, and there’s a cross for me.

The Purpose of Suffering: Consolation (1:3–7)

Now comes the good news: “consolation.” Count the number of times in this passage that the word “consolation"—or “console”—occurs. Over and over Paul glories in it. He has received consolation; now they will, too. Just as the sufferings of Christ were so abundant that some overflow to us, “so also our consolation is abundant through Christ” (1:5).

Paul can even find a purpose in his sufferings: It is “so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction.” There was a purpose in Christ’s sufferings. “Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested” (Heb. 2:18). Whatever difficulties Paul went through, Christ had been through even more. And now, having gone through what he has experienced, Paul can help his sisters and brothers in Corinth.

For example: I think of a woman, herself no longer young, who had been visiting in a nursing home to comfort a church member, now old and infirm. “I don’t know whether I helped her,” she later reported, “but she surely helped me!” Somehow those who experience affliction often comfort us best. Knowing that they “patiently endure” their share of suffering comforts Paul, too. Their patient endurance, he says, gives him hope.

Encouragement (1:3–7)

The word Paul uses for “consolation” is paraklesis. Its root meaning is literally “called to the side of.” The beloved King James Version translates it “comfort.” The word does mean that. But Paul is not comfortable, nor were the Corinthian Christians. The translation I like is “encouragement” and “encourage.”

That word is used of Barnabas. The other Christians nicknamed him “son of paraklesis.” We can understand why. When others rejected the newly converted Paul, their former persecutor, it was Barnabas who stood beside him. When Paul rejected Mark, who had left him in an earlier missionary journey, it was Barnabas who stood by Mark, giving him another chance. There is one other of whom almost the same word is used. The night before he died, God’s Son promised the disciples that his Father would send the paraklete, the Holy Spirit (John 14:26). That One is the source of true consolation and encouragement, for Barnabas, for Paul, for the Corinthians, and for us.

To grasp, then, the consolation or encouragement that Paul says may come to us through suffering, think of what the Holy Spirit does for us in times of distress. Think, too, of Barnabas, a human being filled with that Spirit, who was “called to be beside” others, encouraging them when they needed a friend.

“Friends halve the sorrow and double the joy.”—traditional saying.

Early in the third century Septimus Severis attempted to stamp out Christianity. Perpetua, soon to be a mother, was arrested. As she cried in the pains of childbirth her tormenters asked her how she would endure the even worse suffering of being thrown to wild beasts. “When I face the beasts,” she replied, “there will be another who will live in me.” She would not be alone. Her courage in the arena amazed the crowd and encouraged other Christians. She knew there was One “called to be beside” her.

Partners in Service (1:7–22)

“Called as Partners in Christ’s Service"—Paul would like Jane Parker Huber’s hymn. Paul thinks of the Corinthian Christians as partners with him in four ways:

1.They share with him in suffering.

2.They share with him in consolation and encouragement.

3.They are his partners in prayer: “you also join in helping us by your prayers” (1:11).

4.Plus, he wants them to join with him in boasting (1:14).

Paul has already described their partnership in trouble and encouragement. Now he mentions prayer. Perhaps few things had encouraged Paul more than the news Titus brought him that the church was praying for him. This kind of partnership means that “many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many” (v. 11). Spreading the prayer spreads the joy. The whole church can feel that they have had a share as he resumes his ministry.

Paul wants them also to be partners with him in “boasting.” Verse 12 introduces this word “boast.” Boasting will be a repeated theme throughout the epistle, especially in chapters 10–13. If you are a parent you can understand something of how Paul feels about the church he has brought to birth. “You are our boast,” he tells them. He is humbly proud of his spiritual children.

Want to Know More?

About the pattern of ancient letters? See William M. Ramsay, The Westminster Guide to the Books of the Bible (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 396–97.

About words such as grace, peace, and comfort? See Geoffrey W. Bromi-ley, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1985).

He also wants them to be proud of him, to look up to him and trust him as God’s messenger. “I hope… that on the day of the Lord Jesus [the judgment day] we are your boast,” he says (1:13–14, emphasis added). Though apparently Paul has received reassuring news from Titus (7:6–7), he knows that his position in the church in Corinth still may not be secure.

Some in the Corinthian church still question his integrity. He had promised to visit them again, and he has not yet done so. “Paul can’t be trusted,” they said, so now he must defend his word. He writes plainly, he reminds them, “with frankness and godly sincerity” (1:12). He had indeed planned to make them two more visits, coming and going on his way to and from Macedonia. If he let them down about that expected visit, he insists, it was because he was divinely guided (v. 12). Later he explains that if he had come earlier it probably would have stirred up even more trouble.

Since he didn’t keep his promise to visit, some accuse Paul of “vacillating,” of talking out of both sides of his mouth. They accuse him of saying on the one hand, “Yes, yes,” and then turning around and saying, “No, no.” Their criticism seems petty. We can be grateful for it, however, for it causes Paul to write a ringing affirmation of the trustworthiness of Christ and of God. To help support that claim to trustworthiness he recalls the ministry of Silvanus (or Silas) and Timothy as well as his own among them (compare Acts 18:5). The Christ they all three preached never spoke double-talk. This leads him to give us one of the great texts of this letter: “For in him every one of God’s promises is a ‘...