2 Corinthians 11

Today’s Passage: 2 Corinthians 11

This is the strangest chapter Paul ever wrote, and he tells you so himself, over and over. He calls it foolishness. He says he is speaking as a fool, that he is not speaking as the Lord would, that he sounds like a man out of his mind. He apologizes for it before he starts and again in the middle of it. And then he does it anyway, because men had come into the church at Corinth who dazzled people, and the Corinthians were being charmed away from Christ by the sheer performance of it. So Paul holds up a mirror. If boasting is the currency you have decided to trade in, he says, very well, I will boast, and I will beat every one of them at it. What follows is a parody, and it is one of the most devastating pieces of writing in the New Testament, because Paul takes their whole game of credentials and platform and impressive presence, plays it better than they can, and then lands the entire thing on a story of a middle-aged man being stuffed into a basket and lowered down a wall in the dark to run for his life. That is his trophy. But do not miss what is underneath the irony, because it is the reason for all of it. Paul opens the chapter as a father who has betrothed a daughter to one husband and is afraid of losing her. The sharpness is real, and so is the tenderness, and the tenderness came first.

As you read, hold this: A father’s jealous love guards his children from a counterfeit Christ, and when he is finally forced to boast, he boasts of the things that show his weakness.

2 Corinthians 11:1–3 (BSB)

¹ I hope you will put up with a little of my foolishness, but you are already doing that. ² I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. For I promised you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ. ³ I am afraid, however, that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may be led astray from your simple and pure devotion to Christ.

Hear the reluctance in that first line. He is asking permission to be a fool for a few paragraphs, and he cannot resist the observation that they have grown very good at bearing with fools lately. But before a word of the parody begins, he tells you why he is doing it, and the reason is not wounded pride. It is love of a very particular kind. “I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy (ζῆλος) zēlos, pronounced DZAY-loss. Strong's G2205, zeal, ardor, jealousy; a burning for what is one's own. Zēlos is heat. The word comes from a root meaning to boil, and Greek used it for the whole range of burning feeling, from noble ardor down to the ugliest envy. Paul himself lists it among the works of the flesh when it curdles. So he is careful here: it is jealousy of God, or godly jealousy, jealousy of the sort God has. And that opens something wonderful, because the Lord says of Himself in the Law that His very name is Jealous, and He does not mean that He is insecure. He means that He has bound Himself to a people in covenant, that He will not share them, and that His refusal to share them is the measure of how much He wants them. A husband who does not care who else his wife loves does not love her. Divine jealousy is love with a spine in it. When you see that, Paul’s opening stops sounding like a man defending his turf and starts sounding like the heart of God running through one of His servants. He is not jealous of them. He is jealous for them, and the whole rest of this bruising chapter, every sarcastic line of it, comes out of that one hot spring. .” We hear the word jealousy and think at once of something small and sour, a man watching the door and counting the minutes. That is not this. Paul reaches for the picture of a father in the ancient world who has arranged his daughter’s marriage and now stands as the guardian of her purity in the long betrothal before the wedding day. “I promised you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ.” One husband. Not a menu of husbands. The church at Corinth is engaged, and Paul’s whole business until the wedding is to hand her over to her Bridegroom undivided. A father like that is not being petty when he studies the face of the stranger at the gate. He would be a poor father if he did not.

And now the fear, and notice where he goes to find the pattern for it. Not to a recent scandal, but all the way back to the garden. “Just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning (πανουργία) panourgia, pronounced pan-oor-GHEE-ah. Strong's G3834, craftiness, unscrupulous cunning, readiness to do anything. Panourgia is built from two words meaning all and work: a man ready to do anything whatever to get his end. In classical Greek it could be used almost admiringly of a clever operator, the way we might say a person is resourceful, but by the time it reaches the New Testament it has gone entirely dark. It is unscrupulous ingenuity, the skill of a mind that will use any tool, including a true statement, to accomplish a false purpose. That is exactly the serpent’s method in Genesis 3, where he does not begin with a lie at all but with a question about what God actually said. Notice that Paul does not describe the danger to the Corinthians as force. Nobody was going to march into the assembly and compel them. They were going to be talked into it, gradually, agreeably, by people who were better at talking than they were. This is why the plainest safeguard God has given His people is not cleverness but Scripture, patiently read and honestly held. You will not out-argue the serpent. You do not have to. You only have to know what God has said and refuse to be walked off it. , your minds may be led astray from your simple and pure devotion to Christ.” The first temptation was not an invitation to atheism. Nobody offered Eve a philosophy in which God did not exist. She was offered a slightly different God, a slightly adjusted word, a small revision of what had been said, and it came wrapped in the promise of an upgrade. That is the ancient method and it has never needed replacing. Paul is not afraid the Corinthians will announce that they have given up on Jesus. He is afraid their minds will be quietly walked away from a simple and pure devotion into something more sophisticated, more impressive, more suited to a church that wanted to be taken seriously. Guard the simplicity. It is not a lack of depth. It is the fixed point from which all real depth is measured.

2 Corinthians 11:4–6 (BSB)

⁴ For if someone comes and proclaims a Jesus other than the One we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit than the One you received, or a different gospel than the one you accepted, you put up with it very easily. ⁵ I consider myself in no way inferior to those “super-apostles.” ⁶ Although I am not a polished speaker, I am certainly not lacking in knowledge. We have made this clear to you in every way possible.

Three counterfeits, and every one of them keeps the right vocabulary. Another Jesus. A different spirit. A different gospel. Nobody arrives announcing a new religion. They arrive using the same holy words with the contents quietly swapped out, and Paul’s grief is not chiefly that such men exist but that the Corinthians “put up with it very easily.” They had strained at Paul, audited him, questioned his credentials, complained about his letters and his bearing, and then swallowed these men whole. A church can be enormously critical and completely undiscerning at the same time. Paul says elsewhere, and it is the same fire burning:

"But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be under a curse!" Galatians 1:8 (BSB)

Then comes the phrase, delivered with the quotation marks practically audible: “those super-apostles.” He is quoting Corinth back to itself. And his answer to their measuring is dry and exact. He grants the one charge, because it was true and everyone knew it: “I am not a polished speaker.” He had no gift for the performance the city admired, and he never pretended otherwise. But he will not grant the second, and here he plants his feet: “I am certainly not lacking in knowledge.” That is the whole distinction the Corinthians had lost. Delivery is not truth. A man may have a magnificent voice and nothing to say, and another man may stumble over his words and be carrying the very knowledge of God. Learn to listen for the freight, not the packaging, because the packaging is the easiest thing in the world to counterfeit and the freight is not.

2 Corinthians 11:7–9 (BSB)

⁷ Was it a sin for me to humble myself in order to exalt you, because I preached the gospel of God to you free of charge? ⁸ I robbed other churches by accepting their support in order to serve you. ⁹ And when I was with you and in need, I was not a burden to anyone; for the brothers who came from Macedonia supplied my needs. I have refrained from being a burden to you in any way, and I will continue to do so.

You can hear him almost laughing, and it is not a happy laugh. Was it a sin to preach to you for nothing? Of all the charges a man might have to answer, this is the one that shows how badly the Corinthians had absorbed the values of their city. He had lowered himself, taken the workbench and the awl and the calloused hands, so that they might be lifted up, and it was held against him as evidence that he was not a first-class minister. Then he chooses a word he must have enjoyed: “I robbed other churches by accepting their support in order to serve you.” Plundered them, like a soldier stripping a battlefield. He is exaggerating on purpose, of course, but the fact underneath is sober enough. Poor congregations in Macedonia, Philippi among them, sent money to sustain the apostle while he gave himself away free to the wealthier city that thought him second-rate. The Macedonians, who had little, supplied his needs so he would not be a weight on the Corinthians, who had much.

"For even while I was in Thessalonica, you provided for my needs again and again." Philippians 4:16 (BSB)

Understand why Paul held this line so stubbornly, because he is careful elsewhere to insist that a preacher has every right to be supported, and he defends that right at length. He simply declined to use it in Corinth. In a city where taking money bound a teacher to a patron and turned the message into a service rendered, he would not let anyone say the gospel had a price or that he had a paymaster. The gift of God is free, and he intended his own empty hands to preach that sermon alongside his mouth. It cost him comfort, and it cost him standing, and he says plainly that he will go right on paying it.

2 Corinthians 11:10–12 (BSB)

¹⁰ As surely as the truth of Christ is in me, this boasting of mine will not be silenced in the regions of Achaia. ¹¹ Why? Because I do not love you? God knows I do! ¹² But I will keep on doing what I am doing, in order to undercut those who want an opportunity to be regarded as our equals in the things of which they boast.

Somebody in Corinth had put a very cruel construction on Paul’s refusal of their money. He will not take from us, they said, because he does not really care for us; he takes from Macedonia because Macedonia is where his heart is. And Paul, who has been fencing and being ironic for ten verses, suddenly drops every weapon and says it straight out. “Why? Because I do not love you? God knows I do!” That sentence is the hinge of the whole chapter. Everything before it and everything after it, the sarcasm, the parody, the terrible catalogue still to come, is fueled by that. He calls God as his witness, which a man does not do lightly, and then he tells them exactly what he intends to accomplish by keeping his hands empty: he means to cut the ground out from under the men who want to be measured on the same scale as he is. If the standard is money and patronage and platform, they win. So he refuses to stand on that scale at all. He will keep serving for free, and their whole appeal collapses, because they cannot match a man who wants nothing from anybody.

2 Corinthians 11:13–15 (BSB)

¹³ For such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ. ¹⁴ And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. ¹⁵ It is not surprising, then, if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their actions.

Now the gloves come off, and this is the soberest paragraph in the letter. Paul has been patient and ironic; here he is neither. False apostles. Deceitful workers. Masquerading (μετασχηματίζω) metaschēmatizō, pronounced met-ah-skay-mat-ID-zo. Strong's G3345, to change the outward appearance, to disguise or masquerade. Metaschēmatizō is a precise and rather cold word. The schēma of a thing is its outward figure, the shape it presents, as distinct from its inner nature. So this verb means to change the presentation while leaving the substance untouched, the way an actor changes costume without becoming another man. Paul uses it three times in two verses, hammering it: they masquerade, Satan masquerades, his servants masquerade. The likeness goes no deeper than the surface, and it is meant to. Now hear the warning as Paul actually gives it, and be careful how you carry it out of the room. He wrote this to a congregation being courted by men who preached another Jesus and took their money, and he wrote it so that a bride would not be stolen. He did not write it to hand every reader a magnifying glass and send them out to audit the people who teach them. A suspicious heart is not a discerning one, and a Christian who has appointed himself inspector of everyone else’s soundness usually ends up doing the enemy’s work of dividing rather than God’s work of guarding. The test Paul gives is not a feeling about a man. It is the gospel itself. Is it the same Jesus, the same Spirit, the same good news you received? Then thank God for the man and sit under him gladly. as apostles of Christ. He is not saying they are sincere men who have taken a wrong turn. He is saying they are counterfeits, and he traces the counterfeit back to its source: this is what the enemy does, and it is the only way he has ever done it. Satan does not appear in the church as a monster; he appears as an angel of light, and his servants appear as servants of righteousness. Read that carefully and let it do its proper work, because it cuts in a direction most of us do not expect. The warning is not that error will look obviously wicked. The warning is that it will look good. It will be well spoken, impressive, morally serious, and full of the name of Jesus. And Paul closes the paragraph with a line that takes the whole matter out of our hands: “Their end will correspond to their actions.” God will settle it, exactly and finally, and He does not need our help.

2 Corinthians 11:16–19 (BSB)

¹⁶ I repeat: Let no one take me for a fool. But if you do, then receive me as a fool, so that I too may boast a little. ¹⁷ In this confident boasting of mine, I am not speaking as the Lord would, but as a fool. ¹⁸ Since many are boasting according to the flesh, I too will boast. ¹⁹ For you gladly put up with fools, since you are so wise.

He circles the runway one more time before he takes off, and he wants no confusion about what is happening. “I am not speaking as the Lord would, but as a fool.” Weigh that sentence, because it tells you how to read everything that follows. Paul knows perfectly well that boasting in your résumé is not the mind of Christ. He is doing it deliberately, in character, the way a man might hold up a forgery next to the real thing so you can see the difference at last. Others are boasting according to the flesh, and the Corinthians are eating it up, so he will step into the costume for a few paragraphs and let them watch where it leads. And then verse nineteen, which is the most withering line in the chapter and takes a second to land: “For you gladly put up with fools, since you are so wise.” You are such wise people. That is how you have room in your wisdom for so many fools. It is not cruelty. It is a father saying something sharp enough to wake a child who has been walking toward the road.

2 Corinthians 11:20–22 (BSB)

²⁰ In fact, you even put up with anyone who enslaves you or exploits you or takes advantage of you or exalts himself or strikes you in the face. ²¹ To my shame I concede that we were too weak for that! Speaking as a fool, however, I can match what anyone else dares to boast about. ²² Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I.

Look at the list of what a congregation will tolerate when it is impressed. Being enslaved. Being exploited. Being taken advantage of. Being condescended to by a man promoting himself. Being struck in the face, which may be literal and would be shocking enough, and is in any case the picture of a leader who humiliates the people he is supposed to serve. And Paul’s comment on all this is the driest thing he ever wrote: “To my shame I concede that we were too weak for that!” Forgive us. We simply did not have it in us to bully you. That single line exposes the difference between an apostle and a con man more completely than any argument could, and it is done in nine words. Then the credentials, matched item for item. Hebrews, Israelites, descendants of Abraham. Whatever bloodline these men were waving, Paul has it, in full, without a gap. He is not proud of it here. He is clearing it off the table, because if the contest is going to be settled on pedigree, the contest is over, and it settles nothing at all.

2 Corinthians 11:23–25 (BSB)

²³ Are they servants of Christ? (I am speaking as if I were out of my mind.) I am so much more: in harder labor, in more imprisonments, in worse beatings, in frequent danger of death. ²⁴ Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. ²⁵ Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked. I spent a night and a day in the open sea.

And here the parody turns, because a boast is supposed to be a list of honors and Paul begins reading out his wounds. He even stops to apologize in the middle of the sentence, in a parenthesis: I am speaking as if I were out of my mind. Then the numbers, and you must not let your eye slide over them, because every figure is a season of a real man’s life. Five times the forty lashes minus one. That was the synagogue discipline, thirty-nine strokes because the Law set a limit of forty and no one dared risk a miscount, laid across the back and chest of a man stripped to the waist. Five times. That is a hundred and ninety-five strokes, and men died under that punishment. Three times beaten with rods, which was the Roman lictors, a separate agony in a separate legal system. Once stoned, and we know where: at Lystra, where they dragged him out of the city and left him for dead, and he got up and walked back in. Three shipwrecks, none of which is the famous one in Acts, because that had not happened yet. And then the small, terrible detail he drops without comment: a night and a day in the open sea. Picture that. Twenty-four hours in the water in the dark, alone, waiting. He mentions it in six words and moves on.

2 Corinthians 11:26–27 (BSB)

²⁶ In my frequent journeys, I have been in danger from rivers and from bandits, in danger from my countrymen and from the Gentiles, in danger in the city and in the country, in danger on the sea and among false brothers, ²⁷ in labor and toil and often without sleep, in hunger and thirst and often without food, in cold and exposure.

Let the list stay long. He wrote it long on purpose, and the piling up is the point. Danger from rivers, which meant fording swollen mountain streams where a man could simply be swept away with no one ever knowing. Danger from bandits, which was the ordinary condition of the roads once you left the coast. Danger from his own countrymen and danger from the Gentiles, so that there was no nation on earth where he was safe. Danger in the city and danger in the country, so that there was no kind of place either. Danger on the sea. And then the last one on the list, and it is the one that would hurt the worst: danger among false brothers. Men who sat down at the table with him and called him brother and meant him harm. After the dangers come the daily grindings, which are not dramatic and wear a man down faster than drama does. Labor and toil. Often without sleep, because the tents had to be made at night if the preaching was done by day. Hunger and thirst. Cold and exposure, a man on a road in bad weather without a cloak. This is the man the Corinthians had decided was unimpressive.

2 Corinthians 11:28–29 (BSB)

²⁸ Apart from these external trials, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches. ²⁹ Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is led into sin, and I do not burn with grief?

And now the sentence that should stop you where you stand. After the whips and the rods and the stones and the sea, Paul says: apart from all of that, here is what actually presses on me every single day. The word he uses is the word for a crowd pushing in on a man from every side, and what is pushing is not persecution. It is his concern for all the churches. Every congregation he ever planted, every quarrel, every wavering believer, every young church with wolves circling it, all of it, every morning, before anything else. He would rather be flogged than watch a church be deceived. Read verse twenty-eight and verse twenty-four together and you will understand something about pastoral love that no seminary can teach. Then he opens the door and lets you see all the way in: “Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is led into sin, and I do not burn with grief?” When one of them was weak, he felt it in his own body. When one of them was tripped into sin, something in him caught fire. That is not professional concern. That is a father, and it is a faint and holy echo of the Shepherd who left the ninety-nine. Blessed be God for giving such men to His church, and blessed be God for the far greater love of which theirs is only a shadow.

2 Corinthians 11:30–33 (BSB)

³⁰ If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. ³¹ The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, who is forever worthy of praise, knows that I am not lying. ³² In Damascus, the governor under King Aretas secured the city of the Damascenes in order to arrest me. ³³ But I was lowered in a basket through a window in the wall and escaped his grasp.

Here is the turn the whole chapter has been building toward, and it is one of the great sentences of Scripture: “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness (ἀσθένεια) astheneia, pronounced as-THEN-ay-ah. Strong's G769, weakness, frailty, lack of strength. Astheneia is simply the absence of strength: a- meaning without and sthenos meaning force. Greek used it for bodily sickness, for frailty, for incapacity of any kind, and it carried no honor whatever. Nobody boasted in astheneia. It was the thing you concealed if you had any sense, particularly in a city that measured a man by his presence. Paul takes that word and makes it the one credential he is willing to display. Watch what he is not saying. He is not romanticizing failure, and he is not calling weakness a virtue. Weakness is just weakness. He is saying that a weak vessel is the only kind through which the power of God can be seen for what it is, because nobody watching will confuse the treasure with the clay. This is the same man who has already told this church that we carry the treasure in jars of clay, so that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. And it is the door into the answer he is about to receive from the Lord Himself, when he asks three times for the thorn to be taken away. If you have spent your life quietly ashamed of the places where you have no strength, hear this carefully. Those are not the disqualifying parts of your life. In the hands of God they are the load-bearing ones. .” He has just proven he can beat these men at their own game, and having proven it, he throws the game away. He will not compete on strength. He will compete, if he must compete at all, on the evidence of his frailty, because that is where the power of God is on display. And then, having sworn before the God and Father of the Lord Jesus that he is telling the truth, he chooses his closing exhibit. Of everything he could have ended on, he ends on this. Damascus, early days, the governor watching the gates, and the great apostle folded into a basket like a load of fish and let down a wall by rope in the dark. No angel. No thunder. No heroic stand. A man in a basket, running. It is the least dignified story in his whole life, and he saves it for last and sets it in the place of honor. That is the joke, and it is not a joke at all. The super-apostles would have led with a triumph. Paul leads with a rope, and hands you the key to everything that follows in the next chapter.