Today’s Passage: 2 Corinthians 10
Something changes here, and you will feel it in the first sentence. For nine chapters Paul has been pouring out comfort, opening his heart, explaining his change of travel plans, glorying in the ministry of the new covenant, pleading for reconciliation, and gathering a collection for the poor saints in Jerusalem. Now the tone hardens, and it stays hard for four chapters. Some readers have wondered whether these last four chapters were a separate letter stitched on later. There is no manuscript anywhere that lacks them, and the simpler explanation stands: Paul has finished speaking to the majority who repented, and turns to deal with the men who are still working against him, and with the minority still dazzled by them. What follows is the most personal writing he ever did. Notice, though, how he opens it. Not with thunder. He appeals by the mildness and gentleness of Christ, which is the strangest possible way to begin a fight, and it is the whole argument in miniature. His opponents have been quoting a taunt about him around Corinth: his letters are heavy artillery, but the man himself is small and unimpressive and no kind of speaker. Paul does not deny the charge. He picks up the weakness they mock and holds it out as his credential. In between he gives us three verses about spiritual warfare that have been quoted more, and understood less, than almost anything else in the letter. And he ends the chapter where he ends every argument he ever made, with a line borrowed from Jeremiah about the only boasting a creature is permitted.
As you read, hold this: A man accused of being unimpressive answers by refusing to make himself impressive, because the only commendation that finally counts is the one the Lord gives.
Context The world of 2 Corinthians 10
To understand why this chapter had to be written, you have to understand how a first-century Greek city measured a man. Public speaking was the great art of the age, and a whole industry of traveling professional orators moved from city to city drawing crowds, charging fees, and being fought over by their admirers the way later ages fought over athletes. The rhetorical handbooks of the day taught that delivery was everything: the bearing of the body, the carriage of the head, the gestures, the voice. A speaker was judged on his presence before he was judged on his content. There was even a formal school exercise called synkrisis, comparison, in which students were trained to set two figures side by side and argue for the superiority of one. Corinth, a Roman colony full of new money and hungry for status, adored all of it. So when men arrived in Corinth carrying letters of recommendation, speaking with polish, taking payment as a mark of their worth, and boasting of visions and credentials, a certain kind of Corinthian was thrilled. And measured against them, Paul looked poor. He worked with his hands like a laborer. He refused their money. He had been beaten, jailed, shipwrecked, and run out of towns. And by his own report and theirs, he was not much to look at or to listen to.
A very old description of Paul, from a second-century document, calls him a small man, bald, bow-legged, with meeting eyebrows and a hooked nose. Whether or not it is accurate, it tells you what the early church remembered and was not embarrassed to record. The taunt quoted in verse ten is almost certainly a real slogan circulating in Corinth: strong letters, weak body, worthless speech. It was a devastating thing to say in that culture, because it meant he had no standing. And the deepest sting was this. If Paul was unimpressive, then the gospel he brought them might be unimpressive too, and they had backed the wrong man. Everything in this chapter is Paul refusing the terms of that contest. He will not compete for the title of most impressive apostle. He will not compare himself with men who grade their own papers. He answers a rhetorical culture with a crucified Christ, and he answers a charge of weakness by agreeing to it.
2 Corinthians 10:1–2 (BSB)
¹ Now by the mildness and gentleness of Christ, I appeal to you—I, Paul, who am humble when face to face with you, but bold when away. ² I beg you that when I come I may not need to be as bold as I expect toward those who presume that we live according to the flesh.
Read that first line slowly, because it is doing more than it appears to do. Paul is about to write four of the sharpest chapters in the New Testament, and he sets them under the mildness and gentleness of Christ. That is not a soft cushion laid over a hard rebuke to make it go down easier. It is the ground he intends to stand on. The Lord Jesus was not gentle because He lacked power; He was gentle because He had all of it and did not need to prove it. He rode into Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey. He did not break a bruised reed. And He said of Himself:
"Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls." Matthew 11:29 (BSB)
That is the model Paul appeals to, and it makes his opponents’ entire case against him look thin. They have been saying he is humble when face to face with you, but bold when away, which in their mouths meant he was a coward who blustered by mail and shrank in person. Paul takes their word and quietly hands it back with a different meaning. Yes, he is lowly in their presence. So was his Master. And then he does something you should not miss: he begs. Twice in two verses he pleads rather than commands, and what he pleads for is that he will not have to be bold when he arrives. He is not eager for the confrontation. He would rather it never happened. A man who enjoys putting people in their place does not write like this. The charge against him is that he lives according to the flesh, that his ministry is run on ordinary human calculation, working the angles, managing his image, in it for what he can get. He is about to answer that charge, and the answer will take four chapters and cost him more than the Corinthians know.
2 Corinthians 10:3–4 (BSB)
³ For though we live in the flesh, we do not wage war according to the flesh. ⁴ The weapons of our warfare are not the weapons of the flesh. Instead, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.
Here Paul turns their word around on them. Yes, he says, we live in the flesh. Of course we do. We are men, with bodies that tire and get beaten and grow unimpressive. But we do not wage war according to the flesh, and that is a different thing entirely. And now the picture becomes military. The weapons of this warfare are not the weapons of the flesh, which in this context means exactly what his opponents were using: polished speech, credentials, self-promotion, personality, the ability to work a crowd. Paul had access to all of it. He was trained under Gamaliel and could reason with philosophers on Mars Hill. He simply refuses to fight with those weapons, because they cannot do the one thing that needs doing. What can? Weapons that have divine power to demolish ochyrōma, pronounced okh-OO-roh-mah. Strong's G3794, stronghold, fortress, fortified place. An ochyrōma was a fortified place, a stronghold, a castle on a crag. The word comes from a root meaning to make firm or secure, and in the Greek Old Testament it is used again and again for the fortresses of the nations and the rock-cut refuges where men hid from armies. Corinth itself was crowned by one. The Acrocorinth rose nearly two thousand feet above the marketplace, a natural citadel with its own spring, and it had held out against besieging armies for centuries. Every Corinthian who heard this letter read aloud knew exactly what the word meant, because it was standing over their heads. But notice what Paul says the strongholds are made of. Not stone. The next verse tells you: arguments, and every presumption set up against the knowledge of God. These are fortresses of thought, the proud reasonings a mind builds to keep God at a safe distance, and they are far harder to breach than masonry. A man will surrender a city sooner than an idea he has built his life on. That is why the weapons cannot be human ones. Clever argument may rearrange a mind, but it cannot storm it. Only the truth of God, carried by the Spirit of God, goes through a wall like that. And He does it every day, all over the earth, in hearts that had sworn they would never yield. . Note where the power lies. Not in the weapon and certainly not in the soldier, but in God, and the phrase is literally powerful to God, mighty by His measure and not by ours. Now be careful here, because this is the point where these famous verses are most often lifted out of their setting. Paul is not handing you a technique. There is no formula in this passage, no method for pulling down fortresses over your city or your circumstances. Look at the whole letter and ask what weapon Paul actually deploys through these four chapters, and you will find only two things: the truth about Christ spoken plainly, and his own weakness held up where everyone can see it. That is the arsenal. It looks like nothing. It levels fortresses.
2 Corinthians 10:5–6 (BSB)
⁵ We demolish arguments and every presumption set up against the knowledge of God; and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. ⁶ And we will be ready to punish every act of disobedience, as soon as your obedience is complete.
Now Paul names the enemy, and it is worth being very plain about it. The things being demolished are logismos, pronounced log-is-MOSS. Strong's G3053, reasoning, argument, calculation. Logismos comes from the same family as logos and logizomai, and it means a reckoning, a calculation, a piece of reasoning. In ordinary Greek it could be perfectly neutral, the sum a merchant works out on his counting board. Paul uses it here for the accounts a proud mind keeps against God, and that is a sobering thing to sit with. Unbelief is rarely a shrug. It is usually an argument, carefully assembled and long defended, and often quite a good one on its own terms. The Corinthians were doing exactly this, calculating the worth of a preacher the way you would appraise a speaker at the games, and their arithmetic put Paul at the bottom. The word appears only once more in the New Testament, in Romans, where the thoughts of the nations accuse or defend them. Both times it is human reasoning on trial. And here is the payoff. If what stands between a soul and God is a reasoning, then the answer is neither a shout nor a shrug, but the truth patiently and plainly told, which God is pleased to use to pull the whole structure down. Do not despair over the fortified mind of someone you love. God has been demolishing that kind of fortress since the world began. and every presumption set up against the knowledge of God. The word behind presumption pictures something raised up high, a rampart thrown across the road, a proud height. So the battlefield is not the air above a city and it is not a set of hostile circumstances. It is the reasoning of proud human beings against the knowledge of God, and in this particular letter it is the reasoning of impressive men in a church at Corinth who have set their own credentials against the gospel Paul preached. That is the setting. Keep it, and the verse becomes more useful rather than less. Then comes the phrase that turns the whole picture around: we aichmalōtizō, pronounced aikh-mal-oh-TID-zoh. Strong's G163, to take captive at spear-point, to lead away as a prisoner of war. Aichmalōtizō is a hard, concrete word. It is built from aichmē, the point of a spear, and halōtos, taken or captured, so it means to take at spear-point, to lead away as a prisoner of war. It is what happened to the population of a fallen city. Paul uses it elsewhere for the way sin drags a man off against his will, and Luke uses it for Jerusalem’s people led captive into all nations. So there is nothing gentle in the image. Every thought is marched off in chains. And yet look at where the prisoners are taken: to make it obedient to Christ. That is the mercy hidden in the violence of the picture. In the ancient world captivity meant the slave market or worse; here it means being brought under the rule of the One who loved us and gave Himself for us. Christian obedience is not the mind’s defeat but its homecoming. Sit with that the next time a thought rises up in you that you know has no business there. You are not asked to argue it into submission by yourself. You are asked to hand it over, at once, to the Lord who has authority over it, and He has never yet lost a prisoner He took. every thought to make it obedient to Christ. A conquering army in the ancient world did not stop at broken walls; it led the defeated away in chains. Paul says the mind that fought God is not destroyed but captured, marched off, and set to work in the service of Christ. That is what conversion does to a human intellect. It does not put the mind out; it puts the mind in harness. And then verse six, which sounds severe until you see the mercy folded into it. He will be ready to punish every act of disobedience, as soon as your obedience is complete. He is waiting. He will not sweep through the church settling accounts while some are still coming home. He gives them room to repent first, and only then deals with those who will not.
2 Corinthians 10:7–9 (BSB)
⁷ You are looking at outward appearances. If anyone is confident that he belongs to Christ, he should remind himself that we belong to Christ just as much as he does. ⁸ For even if I boast somewhat excessively about the authority the Lord gave us for building you up rather than tearing you down, I will not be ashamed. ⁹ I do not want to seem to be trying to frighten you by my letters.
You are looking at outward appearances. There is the whole trouble in five words, and it is not a trouble peculiar to Corinth. They were judging by what lay in front of their eyes: the bearing, the voice, the confidence, the letters of recommendation. God has been telling His people not to do this since the day He sent a prophet to anoint a shepherd boy nobody had bothered to call in from the fields.
"But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or height, for I have rejected him; the LORD does not see as man does. For man sees the outward appearance, but the LORD sees the heart.”" 1 Samuel 16:7 (BSB)
Paul’s answer to the man who is confident he belongs to Christ is not a counterclaim to superiority. It is a floor, not a ceiling: we belong to Christ just as much as he does. He will not be pushed outside the family by men who arrived after him. Then he says something about authority that ought to govern every person who is ever given any charge over others in the church. Yes, he can boast about his authority, and he says frankly that he may be laying it on a little thick. But watch what the authority is for. The Lord gave it for building you up rather than tearing you down. That is the measuring line for all spiritual authority, and it exposes the men troubling Corinth immediately, because their whole ministry consisted in pulling down another man to raise themselves. Paul’s letters were not written to frighten anybody. He says so plainly in verse nine, and he means it. There is a kind of leader who enjoys being feared and cultivates it. Paul has spent nine chapters opening his heart to these people and pleading for their affection. He would rather be loved and disregarded than feared and obeyed.
2 Corinthians 10:10–11 (BSB)
¹⁰ For some say, “His letters are weighty and forceful, but his physical presence is unimpressive, and his speaking is of no account.” ¹¹ Such people should consider that what we are in our letters when absent, we will be in our actions when present.
Here at last is the taunt itself, quoted word for word, and there is something almost unbearably human about a man writing down what people say about him behind his back. Weighty and forceful letters. An unimpressive physical presence. Speech of no account. In a city that measured a man by his platform, this was meant to finish him. And notice what Paul does not do. He does not defend his appearance. He does not produce testimonials about his preaching. He does not tell them how many churches he has planted or how the crowds received him in Ephesus. He simply says: what we are in our letters when absent, we will be in our actions when present. In other words, I am one man. There is no public version and private version. The Paul who wrote will be the Paul who arrives. That is the only answer he offers to the charge, and it is the answer of a man with nothing to manage. The irony running through this whole chapter is deliberate and it is delicious. He is accused of being unimpressive, and his response is to refuse point-blank to become impressive. He could have come to Corinth with a prepared oration and won the room. Instead he comes appealing by the mildness and gentleness of Christ, and later in this same defense he will say that if he must boast, he will boast of the things that show his weakness. The world sneers at that. Heaven does not. God has always been pleased to put His treasure in a plain clay pot, so that when the power shows, no one on earth can mistake whose it is.
2 Corinthians 10:12–14 (BSB)
¹² We do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who commend themselves. When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they show their ignorance. ¹³ We, however, will not boast beyond our limits, but only within the field of influence that God has assigned to us—a field that reaches even to you. ¹⁴ We are not overstepping our bounds, as if we had not come to you. Indeed, we were the first to reach you with the gospel of Christ.
We do not dare. There is a fine edge on that, and you can hear Paul smiling behind it. He does not say he is unwilling to enter the contest; he says he would not presume to compete with such men. And then he lays bare the thing that is wrong with the whole enterprise. They measure themselves by themselves and synkrinō, pronounced soong-KREE-noh. Strong's G4793, to compare, to measure one thing against another. Synkrinō means to bring things together in order to judge them side by side, to compare, to measure one against another. It was a technical term in the schools of rhetoric. Students were drilled in synkrisis, the formal exercise of setting two men or two cities in parallel and arguing the superiority of one, and grown orators built whole speeches out of it. So when Paul says he does not dare to classify or compare, he is naming a practice his readers had been trained in from boyhood and probably enjoyed enormously. The Greek of verse twelve is almost a tongue-twister on purpose, the same syllables coming round and round: measuring themselves by themselves, comparing themselves with themselves. It sounds like what it describes, a closed circle with no door in it. And that is the ignorance he speaks of. Not stupidity, but a settled failure to understand, because a man locked inside his own standard has cut himself off from the only verdict that exists. There is a great rest waiting on the other side of this for anyone willing to step out of the comparison. If God has assigned you your field, then you are not in a race with the person beside you. You are responsible for your own patch of ground, and the Master who gave it to you will do the measuring Himself. with themselves, and by doing so they show their ignorance. Turn that sentence over, because it is one of the most searching lines in the letter, and it does not stay in Corinth. A man who chooses his own yardstick will always come out well. He picks the standard he already meets, selects the rivals he can beat, and grades his own paper. He can go his whole life feeling perfectly satisfied and never once be measured by anything true. Paul will not do it. He takes his standard from outside himself: he will boast only within the field of influence that God has assigned to us, and the word behind that assigned field is a measuring rod, a line drawn by Someone else. God gave him a territory, the Gentile world, and Corinth was inside it. He did not wander into another man’s parish and take credit for a harvest he had not sown. He was the first to reach them with the gospel of Christ, and he can say so without overstepping anything, because it is simply true and it was God who sent him.
2 Corinthians 10:15–18 (BSB)
¹⁵ Neither do we boast beyond our limits in the labors of others. But we hope that as your faith increases, our area of influence among you will greatly increase as well, ¹⁶ so that we can preach the gospel in the regions beyond you. Then we will not be boasting in the work already done in another man’s territory. ¹⁷ Rather, “Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.” ¹⁸ For it is not the one who commends himself who is approved, but the one whom the Lord commends.
Watch where Paul’s eyes go at the end of all this. Not inward, to his wounded reputation, and not sideways at his rivals. Outward, to the regions beyond you. This is the heart of the man. He is not fighting for Corinth so that he can keep Corinth. He wants their faith to grow up and get steady, so that he can stop defending himself and get on with the work, carrying the gospel further west to people who have never heard the name. That is his ambition, and it is the only ambition in this chapter that is allowed to stand. Everything else has been stripped away. He will not take credit for another man’s labors, he will not decorate his ministry with a harvest he did not sow, and he will not accept a reputation that he has manufactured for himself. And then the roof goes on the whole chapter with a line he has quoted before, borrowed from Jeremiah: Let him who boasts boast in the Lord. The human heart is going to glory in something. It cannot be stopped. God does not tell us to stop; He tells us where to put it. And the last verse states the principle in a sentence a person could carry for a lifetime. It is not the one who commends himself who is approved, but the one whom the Lord commends. Every letter of recommendation the false apostles carried into Corinth, every polished performance, every comparison won, comes to nothing against that. There is one Judge. His verdict is the only one that will still be standing on the last day, and He is not impressed by what impresses us. Blessed be His name for that, because it means the quietest saint in the room, unnoticed and unimpressive and faithful, may hear well done from the only mouth that matters.
Study notes Going deeper
Set the chapter out from end to end and you will see one thread running through all of it. Paul begins by appealing to the mildness and gentleness of Christ, and he ends by handing the whole question of his worth over to the Lord’s verdict. In between, everything he says about warfare and weapons and strongholds is of a piece with that, because the weapons that are not of the flesh are precisely the weapons that a gentle and unimpressive man can carry. He is not asking the Corinthians to admire him. He is asking them to stop looking at outward appearances long enough to notice that God has been at work among them through a man with nothing to look at. And the deepest comfort in the chapter is buried in that last verse, where the whole exhausting business of proving yourself is quietly taken out of your hands. Paul had already written this same church about that relief, in an earlier letter, and it is worth hearing the two passages together.
"I care very little, however, if I am judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself. My conscience is clear, but that does not vindicate me. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men’s hearts. At that time each will receive his praise from God." 1 Corinthians 4:3–5 (BSB)
At that time each will receive his praise from God. Notice that he does not say each will receive his sentence, though the searching of hearts is real enough. For those who are Christ’s, the day when everything hidden comes to light is the day the commendation finally comes, and it comes from the only One who sees the whole truth and loves us anyway. So you may lay down the measuring and the comparing. You may stop keeping the ledger of how you are doing against the person next to you, which is a ledger nobody can keep honestly and nobody has ever been made happy by. God has assigned you a field. Work it, in the strength He supplies, with the plain truth for a weapon and no need at all to be impressive. Learn the Word, boast only in the Lord, and give thanks.