2 Corinthians 1

Today’s Passage: 2 Corinthians 1

A man who has just come through something that nearly killed him sits down to write, and the first word out of him is praise. That is how this letter opens, and it sets the tone for everything that follows. Paul greets the church at Corinth and then, before a single word of business, breaks into a blessing: God is the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, and He comforts us in our troubles so that we can turn and comfort others with the very comfort we received. Only after that does Paul tell them what happened. Something in the province of Asia had pressed him past his own strength, so far past it that he despaired of life and felt the sentence of death already read over him, and he says plainly why God allowed it: so that he would stop leaning on himself and lean on the God who raises the dead. From there the chapter turns to a small and rather awkward matter. Paul had changed his travel plans, and his critics in Corinth were using it to argue that his word could not be trusted. His answer starts small and then climbs, until he is no longer talking about itineraries at all but about the faithfulness of God Himself. In Christ there has never been a Yes and a No. Every promise God has ever made finds its Yes in Him. And the God who says Yes has established you, anointed you, sealed you, and put His Spirit in your heart as a down payment on everything still to come. The chapter closes with the real reason Paul stayed away. It was to spare them.

As you read, hold this: The God of all comfort meets us in the trouble we cannot survive on our own, and every promise He has ever made is Yes in Christ, sealed upon us by His own Spirit.

2 Corinthians 1:1–2 (BSB)

¹ Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, To the church of God in Corinth, together with all the saints throughout Achaia: ² Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Every word of that opening is doing quiet work. Paul is “an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,” and in a letter where his credentials are under attack, that phrase is not a formality. He did not apply for the office and no committee awarded it to him. It came by the will of God, which means the man his critics were sizing up is not the real question, and the letter they are about to read does not arrive with the authority of an impressive personality but with the authority of the God who sent him. Beside his own name he puts Timothy, and calls him simply “our brother,” not the junior partner, not the assistant. Then look at the address. Not to my church, not to the church I planted, but “the church of God in Corinth.” He is handing them back to their true Owner in the first line. And he widens it immediately to “all the saints throughout Achaia,” which tells you that a letter written into one congregation’s particular mess was meant from the start to travel further, through a whole province, and on down nineteen centuries to the page in front of you. Then the greeting he never varies: grace, then peace. The Greek world said charis and the Hebrew world said shalom, and Paul fuses them, always in that order, because that is the order in which they come. Grace is what God gives when nothing is owed. Peace is what settles over a life once grace has done its work. Both flow from one source, “from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” the Father and the Son named together without apology or explanation.

2 Corinthians 1:3–4 (BSB)

³ Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, ⁴ who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.

Notice where a man who has just been crushed chooses to begin. Not with his troubles. With God. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” which is the old synagogue form of praise turned toward the God who has now made Himself known in His Son. And then two titles, and you should sit with each of them. He is “the Father of compassion.” Not a God who has compassion on occasion when He can be persuaded to it, but the Father from whom compassion itself comes, its origin and its home. And He is “the God of all comfort (παράκλησις) paraklēsis, pronounced par-AK-lay-sis. Strong's G3874, comfort, encouragement, a calling alongside. The noun is paraklēsis, built from para, alongside, and kaleō, to call. At its root it means a calling to one’s side, and everything about the word is stronger than the soft thing we usually mean by comfort. In ordinary Greek it could describe the friend summoned to stand beside a man in court, or the speech an officer makes to his troops before they march, the sort of words that put steel into people who were about to give way. It is not a pat on the shoulder. It is reinforcement arriving. The same root gives us paraklētos, the name the Lord Jesus gives the Holy Spirit in the upper room when He promises another Advocate to be with us forever. Paul rings this word and its verb something like ten times in the space of these few verses, hammering it until you cannot miss it. And that tells you what to expect and what not to expect. God does not promise that He will explain your trouble, or shorten it, or keep you from feeling its full weight. He promises Himself, called alongside, and strength that is not your own. That is a far better thing than an explanation, and it is the one thing that actually holds when a person has nothing left. .” All of it. Not most of it, leaving you to scrounge the rest from somewhere else. There is no comfort anywhere in this world that did not come down from Him, whether the sufferer knows His name or not. Then verse four does two things at once. First it says God “comforts us in all our troubles,” and mark that word in. Paul does not say God always comforts us out of our troubles, or before them, or instead of them. He comes into them. And second, it tells us what the comfort is for, and this is the part that changes how a sufferer sees his own life. God comforts us “so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.” The comfort is not a private supply. It is poured into you in order to be poured out. Nothing you have received from His hand in the dark is wasted, and one day some of it will come out of your mouth for somebody else.

2 Corinthians 1:5–7 (BSB)

⁵ For just as the sufferings of Christ overflow to us, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. ⁶ If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which accomplishes in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we experience. ⁷ And our hope for you is sure, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you will share in our comfort.

Here is the arithmetic of it, and it is not the arithmetic we expect. Paul says the sufferings of Christ overflow to us. He does not mean that anything is lacking in the cross, and he is not adding our pain to the Lord’s atoning work, which was finished and needs no help from anybody. He means that a believer is joined to Christ so truly that what falls on the members is felt by the Head. It was the risen Lord who asked Saul on the Damascus road why he was persecuting Me, when Saul had never laid a hand on Him. So the sufferings spill over onto His people. And then the sentence turns, and the same verb of overflowing is used again on the other side: “so also through Christ our comfort overflows.” However far the one goes, the other goes with it, and it comes through Christ. Then Paul says something no professional would say about his own reputation. His afflictions, he tells them, are for their comfort and salvation, and his comfort is likewise for their comfort. He has stopped counting his life as his own property. Whatever happens to him, hard or kind, is spent on the church. And his hope for them is sure, a settled thing, because they share both halves together. This is where the long ache of God’s people meets the long promise of God, spoken through Isaiah to exiles who thought they had been forgotten:

"“Comfort, comfort My people,” says your God." Isaiah 40:1 (BSB)

That was never a mood He passed through. It is who He is, and He has been saying it to His people for a very long time.

2 Corinthians 1:8–9 (BSB)

⁸ We do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the hardships we encountered in the province of Asia. We were under a burden far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. ⁹ Indeed, we felt we were under the sentence of death, in order that we would not trust in ourselves, but in God, who raises the dead.

Read that slowly, and do not tidy it up. Paul does not say the hardships (θλῖψις) thlipsis, pronounced THLIP-sis. Strong's G2347, pressure, affliction, tribulation. Thlipsis is a pressing word. The verb behind it was used of pressing grapes in a winepress and of a crowd squeezing in on a man until he could hardly breathe, and that physical sense never quite leaves it. It is not sadness and it is not inconvenience. It is weight and constriction, the feeling of walls closing in with no room to move. The King James translators usually rendered it “tribulation,” and it is the word the Lord Jesus used when He told His disciples that in this world they will have it, stated as a plain fact and not a possibility. Paul will use it again and again in this letter, and he never once pretends it is smaller than it is. What he does instead is tell you what it cannot do. It cannot separate us from the love of Christ. It cannot outlast the age it belongs to. And in God’s hands it produces something: endurance, and a hope that does not put us to shame. Hold both halves and do not let go of either. The pressure is real, and Paul says so honestly enough that a person in the middle of it can believe him. And the pressure is not the last word, because the God who permits it is the God who raises the dead. were manageable if you keep the right attitude. He says they were “far beyond our ability to endure.” He does not say he felt discouraged. He says “we despaired even of life,” and then, in case that was too gentle, “we felt we were under the sentence of death,” the language of a man who has already heard the verdict read. This is the great apostle, and he tells a church that had been questioning his strength that he came to the end of himself completely. It is worth noticing what he does not tell them. He never says what it was. Men have guessed at the riot in the Ephesian theater, at a deadly illness, at an imprisonment, at a legal condemnation, and the honest answer is that we do not know, because the Holy Spirit did not see fit to record it. There is a mercy in that silence. A trouble left unnamed can be entered by every kind of sufferer. What Paul does tell us is the purpose, and he states it without softening: it happened “in order that we would not trust in ourselves, but in God, who raises the dead.” That is a hard sentence and a kind one at the same time. The crushing had an aim. God was prying a strong man’s fingers off his own competence, one at a time, and the only place left to put his weight was on a God whose specialty is not improvement but resurrection. Not the God who helps the capable. The God who raises the dead.

2 Corinthians 1:10–11 (BSB)

¹⁰ He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and He will deliver us. In Him we have placed our hope that He will yet again deliver us, ¹¹ as you help us by your prayers. Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the favor shown us in answer to their prayers.

Count the tenses, because Paul has laid a believer’s whole life out in one sentence. God has delivered, past and settled. God will deliver, a promise still standing. And in Him “we have placed our hope that He will yet again deliver us,” which is the present business of faith, leaning forward on what has already been proven. Paul is not claiming he will never face such a thing again. He is claiming a God who has done it before and will do it again, and he says nothing about how or when. This is the same God Abraham trusted when there was nothing whatever to work with, and Paul described that faith to another church in words that fit here exactly:

"As it is written: “I have made you a father of many nations.” He is our father in the presence of God, in whom he believed, the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being what does not yet exist." Romans 4:17 (BSB)

Then verse eleven, and it is one of the loveliest small windows in the New Testament. “As you help us by your prayers.” The apostle asks. He does not manage his own rescue and report it afterward; he tells a struggling congregation on the other side of the Aegean that their praying is part of how God delivers him. Think of that arrangement for a moment. Believers in Corinth, who had never seen a theater in Ephesus, are on their knees for a man they cannot reach, and God works. And then see where it lands: “Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the favor shown us in answer to their prayers.” Many praying, and afterward many thanking. God arranges His mercies so that the greatest possible number of voices end up praising Him for them. He could have delivered Paul quietly and privately. Instead He gathers a crowd, puts the prayer in their mouths first and the thanksgiving in their mouths after, and takes the glory in front of everybody. Blessed be a God who does His kindnesses that way.

2 Corinthians 1:12–14 (BSB)

¹² For this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in relation to you, in the holiness and sincerity that are from God—not in worldly wisdom, but in the grace of God. ¹³ For we do not write you anything that is beyond your ability to read and understand. And I hope that you will understand us completely, ¹⁴ as you have already understood us in part, that you may boast of us just as we will boast of you in the day of our Lord Jesus.

Now Paul begins to answer the whispering, and notice how modest the claim actually is. He does not say his conscience finds him sinless. He says his conscience testifies that he has been straight with them, that he conducted himself “in the holiness and sincerity that are from God,” and he adds at once where those came from, because they are not native to Paul or to anyone else. They “are from God.” He is not boasting in a fine character he developed. He is boasting in grace, and he says so in the same breath: “not in worldly wisdom, but in the grace of God.” Worldly wisdom in that city meant knowing how to work a room, how to flatter a patron, how to say a thing in a way that could be taken two ways if it later proved inconvenient. Paul says he has not operated like that anywhere, “and especially in relation to you.” Then he makes a claim about his letters that is almost startling in its plainness: “we do not write you anything that is beyond your ability to read and understand.” No hidden meanings, no coded flattery, no clever second layer for the initiated. What the words say is what he means. A man with something to hide writes so that he can never quite be pinned down. Paul writes so that he can be. And then he looks past all the present misunderstanding to the day when it will be sorted out for good, “the day of our Lord Jesus,” where he expects that they will be proud of him and he of them. He is arguing with them while fully intending to stand beside them at the end.

2 Corinthians 1:15–17 (BSB)

¹⁵ Confident of this, I planned to visit you first, so that you might receive a double blessing. ¹⁶ I wanted to visit you on my way to Macedonia, and to return to you from Macedonia, and then to have you help me on my way to Judea. ¹⁷ When I planned this, did I do it carelessly? Or do I make my plans by human standards, so as to say “Yes, yes” and also “No, no”?

Here is the actual charge, and it looks so small next to what Paul is about to build on it. He had told them he would come one way and then came another. That is all. He had meant to stop at Corinth on the way north to Macedonia and again on the way back, giving them two visits instead of one, which is what he means by a “double blessing.” It did not happen that way. And his critics, who had been waiting for something, made it evidence: the man says yes and means no, his word is worth nothing, and if his word is worth nothing then neither is his gospel. Paul feels the sting of it and puts their accusation into two blunt questions. Did I plan it “carelessly”? Do I make my plans “by human standards, so as to say ‘Yes, yes’ and also ‘No, no’”? He means the practiced double-talk of a man who keeps every option open, agreeing to a thing in a way that leaves him room to slip out of it later. That, he says, is exactly what he has not done. A changed plan is not the same as a broken character, and it is worth remembering how travel actually worked in that world, where a journey depended on weather, on shipping seasons, on illness, on whether a road was safe that month. But Paul is not going to defend himself on those grounds. He is about to go somewhere else entirely.

2 Corinthians 1:18–20 (BSB)

¹⁸ But as surely as God is faithful, our message to you is not “Yes” and “No.” ¹⁹ For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was proclaimed among you by me and Silvanus and Timothy, was not “Yes” and “No,” but in Him it has always been “Yes.” ²⁰ For all the promises of God are “Yes” in Christ. And so through Him, our “Amen” is spoken to the glory of God.

Watch what happens now, because it is one of the great turns in Paul’s writing. He has been accused of being unreliable about a boat trip, and instead of defending his diary he lifts the whole question up to God and never brings it back down. “As surely as God is faithful, our message to you is not ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’” The ground of his consistency is not his temperament. It is the character of the God whose message he carries. Then he names the three men who preached in Corinth, himself and Silvanus and Timothy, and says the Christ they proclaimed was never a Yes-and-No Christ, because “in Him it has always been ‘Yes.’” And then verse twenty, which is one of the summits of the New Testament and deserves to be read aloud: “For all the promises of God are ‘Yes’ in Christ.” All of them. Every promise God ever made, from the seed of the woman in Eden, to the land and the offspring sworn to Abraham, to the throne pledged to David, to the new covenant announced by Jeremiah when the old one lay in ruins, every one of them runs forward through the centuries and finds its Yes in one Person. God has never once said maybe. He has never made a promise He intends to renegotiate. And so, Paul says, “through Him, our ‘Amen’ is spoken to the glory of God.” That word is Hebrew and it never really became Greek or English; it means firm, sure, so let it stand, and it was what the congregation said back at the end of a blessing to make the blessing their own. So here is the whole traffic of salvation in one line. God speaks His Yes to us in Christ, and through Christ we speak our Amen back, and the glory of the exchange goes to God. Little wonder that the risen Lord takes that very word as one of His own names when He writes to the church at Laodicea:

"To the angel of the church in Laodicea write: These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true Witness, the Originator of God’s creation." Revelation 3:14 (BSB)

2 Corinthians 1:21–22 (BSB)

²¹ Now it is God who establishes both us and you in Christ. He anointed us, ²² placed His seal on us, and put His Spirit in our hearts as a pledge of what is to come.

Take these two verses apart slowly, because there is more security packed into them than in any other two verses of comparable length in Paul’s letters, and every single verb belongs to God. Not one of them is something we do. First: “it is God who establishes (βεβαιόω) bebaioō, pronounced beb-ah-YOH-oh. Strong's G950, to establish, confirm, make legally firm. Bebaioō comes from an adjective meaning firm, steady, able to bear weight, the sort of word you would use of ground solid enough to stand a building on. But it also had a settled legal life in the Greek-speaking world. To bebaioō an agreement was to guarantee it, to make it legally binding and beyond challenge, and the noun from the same root was the technical term for the guarantee a seller gave a buyer that the goods were his to sell and the sale would hold up. Paul has already used the family of this word in the previous chapter of his life with these people, and he uses it here at the exact point where his own reliability is being questioned. The contrast is the whole argument. Paul’s travel plans wobbled. God’s establishing does not. And notice the grammar: God is the one doing it, we are the ones being done to, and the sphere in which it happens is “in Christ.” Your standing is not a structure you are propping up by daily effort, liable to collapse the day your grip fails. It has been guaranteed by the seller, and the seller is God. That is ground you can put a life on. both us and you in Christ.” Do not miss the phrase in the middle. Both us and you. The apostle under attack and the wobbly church that had been attacking him are held up by the same hand, on the same terms, in the same Christ. There are no two classes of Christian here, no mature tier who are secure and beginners who must hope. Then: “He anointed us.” In the Old Testament the oil was poured on prophets, priests, and kings, setting them apart for God’s own service, and the word Paul uses is from the same root as the title Christos, the Anointed One. So the sense is this: we are in the Anointed, and His anointing is on us. That is what makes an ordinary believer a person set apart for God, not a special experience some Christians achieve later.

Then two more verbs, and both come from the ordinary world of trade that moved through Corinth’s harbors every day. God “placed His seal on us.” A seal pressed into wax or clay on a bale of cargo did two things: it named the owner, and it declared the contents untampered with and safe until delivery. That is what God has done, and He did not use wax. He used His Spirit. And finally, He “put His Spirit in our hearts as a pledge (ἀρραβών) arrabōn, pronounced ar-rah-BONE. Strong's G728, a down payment, pledge, first installment guaranteeing the rest. Arrabōn is not really a Greek word at all. It came into Greek from the Semitic traders of the eastern Mediterranean, and it lived its whole life in the world of commerce and law. An arrabōn was the first installment of a purchase price, handed over in advance, which made the contract binding and committed the buyer to pay the rest. It was not a token or a symbol. It was actual money of the same currency, the beginning of the payment itself, and if the buyer walked away he forfeited it. In later Greek it became the word for the engagement gift a man gave his bride, and to this day the related word in Greek means an engagement ring. Now hear what Paul is saying. The Holy Spirit living in a believer is not a substitute for the inheritance, and He is not a receipt filed away somewhere. He is the first installment of the thing itself, God’s own life given to us now, of exactly the same kind as the glory we will have then. Which means the question is not whether God will finish. He has already put down a deposit He has no intention of forfeiting, and the deposit is Himself. Praise Him for that. Whatever is not yet settled in your circumstances, this is settled, and it was settled by God. of what is to come.” Here is where a believer’s assurance rests. God has not merely promised you an inheritance and left you to hope He remembers. He has placed a portion of it inside you already, and that portion is a Person. Sit with the whole sequence one more time. He established you. He anointed you. He sealed you. He gave you His Spirit as a down payment. There is not a single point in that chain where the weight rests on you, and there is not a single point where God could withdraw without going back on His own guarantee. He does not do that. All His promises are Yes in Christ.

2 Corinthians 1:23–24 (BSB)

²³ I call God as my witness that it was in order to spare you that I did not return to Corinth. ²⁴ Not that we lord it over your faith, but we are fellow workers with you for your joy, because it is by faith that you stand firm.

And now, at last, the plain answer to the question that started all this. Why did he not come? “I call God as my witness that it was in order to spare you that I did not return to Corinth.” He stays away out of kindness. Had he come when he first intended, he would have arrived while the trouble was still raw and the confrontation would have had to happen, and he could not bear it, so he waited and wrote instead and gave them room to repent. What his critics read as weakness or fickleness was in fact restraint, and they were the ones it was protecting. Then verse twenty-four, and it should be written over the door of every place where the Word of God is taught. “Not that we lord it over your faith, but we are fellow workers with you for your joy.” Paul had apostolic authority in a measure no man has today, and he refuses to stand over their faith with it. He puts himself alongside them instead, a fellow worker. And look at what he says the work is for. Not for their compliance, not for his reputation, not even primarily for their correction. For their joy. That is the goal of true ministry, and any ministry that leaves people smaller and more afraid has mistaken its own errand. He gives his reason last, and it is the reason he cannot lord it over them: “because it is by faith that you stand firm.” Faith is where a Christian stands, and no man can stand there in your place or hold you up by his own authority. You stand by trusting God. That is precisely why Paul spends this chapter telling you what God is like.