CRITICAL NOTES
2 Corinthians 11:12. Occasion.—General drift clear, particular application difficult, from our ignorance of facts. Hard to reconcile some of the presumed cavils and accusations; which have to be inferred from Paul’s replies. But consistency in perversity is not to be looked for. [Cf. “We have piped; … we have mourned”; q.d. “Whatever we do, there is no pleasing you anyway.”] Last clause plainly means: “That they and we may be made to stand on same footing, as to our worthiness and our rights.” This, however, is ambiguous to us, for lack of the key of actual facts. Found does not mean “found out” in any sense of being “unmasked,” but (as it were, judicially) “found” [cf. the “findings” of a court] in the opinion of others (Galatians 2:17; 1 Corinthians 4:2; 1 Corinthians 15:15; 2 Corinthians 5:3 [?]).
2 Corinthians 11:13.—Contrast with “supereminent app.” (2 Corinthians 11:5), “I say, They are no apostles at all! They say, I am ‘catching you with guile.’ Nay, they are workers full of guile [related word] in all they do.” good.
2 Corinthians 11:14.—The only Jewish parallel adduced is a solitary opinion of a Rabbi that the angel who wrestled with Jacob was a so-transformed evil spirit! Perhaps Job 1 may have been in Paul’s mind. Or a perfectly general assertion. Light.—Cf. Epb. 2 Corinthians 5:8; 1 Thessalonians 5:5; 1 John 1:5, etc. No marvel.—“If the Prince of Darkness can stride over the vast gulf which separates his real nature from the outward appearance of an angel of light, his agents can step over the narrower chasm which divides them from apostles of Christ.… Beings of darkness and beings of light are opposites, whereas human beings are capable of living and moving in either … darkness or light. They are flexible to either element, although they cannot belong to both at the same time. Satan, who is ‘the ape of God,’ counterfeits the Divine, and his strategy is a terrible caricature of the Almighty’s ordinances.” (Waite, in Speaker’s Commentary.)
2 Corinthians 11:15. Ministers.—Cf. of Paul, 2 Corinthians 11:8. End.— Philippians 3:19.
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.— 2 Corinthians 11:12-15
“Like Master, like Servants.”
I. What sternness of denunciation!—
1. Quite alien to the spirit of our time, with its “breadth” of view, its “tolerance” of all shades of opinion and of almost all types of practice, and with its euphemistic condemnation when it does condemn. It means the intensity of conviction; the intolerance of loyalty to “light,” and truth, and Christ; the necessary, inevitable detection and condemnation of falsehood and ignorance by “knowledge.” [See “we know,” four times, in 1 John 5:18-20. “We know … sinneth not” (“What dangerous spiritual presumption!” cries even the half-hearted Church); “We know … we are of God, … world lieth in the Wicked One” (“What wretched narrowness of judgment; how uncharitable!”); “We know … Son of God is come,” etc. (“Yes,” says the agnostic temper of all ages; “you theologians and metaphysicians are dreadfully sure; you ‘know’ this, and that, and the other; we don’t; we neither affirm nor deny”); “We know Him that is true” (“Impossible; God is unknowable; and His Son, if He have one, is unknowable too!”) Nevertheless, John and the Church say, “We know.” Christ and His people say, “We know” (John 3:11; John 9:25).] Need to take care lest our milder words, and “more charitable” judgments, betray a less hearty allegiance to truth and holiness, an enfeebled appreciation of the questions at issue, and of their importance, or even a degree of cool indifference to the fundamental distinctions which underlie the sharply defined judgments of such words as Paul’s. Yet—
II. Any apparent change, any seeming approximation between good and evil, is only upon the surface; the real distinction beneath abides unalterable.—[Remember the distinction between “form” and “fashion” (Trench, Syn., § lxx.); very marked in Romans 12:1-2; Philippians 2:6-8. “Fashion” (the root of word used here; see R.V.) is (Bengel) “habitus, cultus, vestitus, victus, gestus, sermones et actiones”; what offers itself, upon the surface, to observation.] Satan cannot be “transformed into” [A. V., inaccurately]; he can only be “fashioned like.” The deep gulf, the necessary antagonism in their very nature, between “darkness” and “light,” he can never pass, nor does he desire to. At the most, he can only assume some show of “light.” His ministers can only “be fashioned as ministers of righteousness.” The Christian conscience and heart must not allow moral distinctions to be obscured or confused; the instinct of holiness must be kept in full sensitiveness of touch and perception [“quick of scent,” Isaiah 11:2 (literally)]. Such self-fashioning on the part of evil is a tribute to the beauty of “light,” goodness, holiness. It acknowledges, too, that evil is no dress to wear openly, or in which to do “Satan’s” work. Goodness never pretends to be Evil. The Tempter once dared shamelessly to ask Incarnate Purity to fall down—just for a moment—and worship him. Conversely, in the very fact that he must needs borrow the livery of the servants—angelic and human—of that Pure One, to do some at least of his evil work, he is ever bowing before Him, with a very real acknowledgment of supremacy. “Hypocrisy is the homage Vice pays to Virtue.”
III. No practical use in speculating as to what particular case of “transfashioning” on the part of Satan is in Paul’s mind.—The working of the principle of such a change, such an assuming of “goodness,” is common enough, and clear.
1. Bad men, for selfish, or even malicious ends, put on the life, speak the language, do something of the work, of the good. Not many mere, and downright, hypocrites in the world. Far oftener the discrepancy between profession and fact, which, when discovered, is denounced as “hypocrisy,” has been largely mixed with self-deception. Good and evil are sharply distinguishable in their salient, conspicuous examples. Like two neighbouring mountains [as Guesses at Truth suggests] which stand clearly apart so long as attention is only directed to their summits, but are hard to discriminate lower down, where their bases mingle in almost unapportionable stretches of nearly level ground; so on the ordinary level of common life, in the thousand questions of the minute ethics of daily conduct which are perpetually presenting themselves for solution, right and wrong are seldom so sharply divisible but that a man may sometimes find some real difficulty in keeping them apart, and in not transgressing across the boundary-line; whereupon the first step seems to lead on to, or even “to necessitate” another, and that another; till the man is involved in a position which he never meant to reach, and, to the last, may try to persuade himself is not wholly untenable. He is not therefore blameless, or to be simply pitied, but he is hardly the mere hypocrite. Yet there is such a thing as the life which is the calculated, persistent, clever, devilish lie; the garb of righteousness is worn for evil ends, known from the first to be evil, distinctly proposed to himself by the “deceitful worker,” and deliberately followed up to the last. Rare, but not unknown. So in morals, evil is disguised, made to speak fair, plausibly pleaded for, or excused until excuse passes over into defence; until young, inexperienced minds and hearts, without fixed principles, or any definite principles at all, begin to think the sterner judgments “narrow,” “old-fashioned,” “bigoted,” “unfair”; and yield themselves to the blandishments of the “angel of light.” The poets, the novelists, the dramatists, the secular newspapers, greatly help the dangerous disguise of evil. How, for example, has Lust been glorified under the stolen name “Love”! The oft-sung praise of “Wine” has covered with “light” the mere, animal, filthy Drunkenness. Such talking and writing readily catches the public ear in every age. The same principle is at work in the details of individual life. A business opening; a marriage-proposal; a form of relaxation; essentially evil, but so proposed that social advantage, or profit, or pleasure, disguises the true character of the thing; and not until the soul has yielded and the “deceitful work” is done, does the disguise drop off, and the “darkness” stand revealed.
IV. In the special application of the passage we note:
1. “False apostles” are self-constituted, having no real “call” from God; their real and only commission is from Satan, who puts his own stamp upon them, so that they work upon his lines, copying his falsehood of claim, and of methods, and of purpose. They assume an unwarranted position, and have no real authority.
2. “Such,” i.e. they, like these Corinthian examples, are selfish, ambitious of men’s honour, malignant towards the real servants of God, tyrannical in their assumed authority (2 Corinthians 11:20), preach error (2 Corinthians 11:4), are full of party spirit. [“Then none was for a party, but all were for the State,”—for “the Church of Christ.”]
3. Yet their “end” is a certain, swift, just detection and destruction. The “world,” with all its evil, is even now so far God’s world that the issue of its course and history must be a victory and a full vindication of goodness and truth and of God’s Christ. The white robe must be stripped off from the falsehood sooner or later, and evil and evil men stand revealed in all their native “darkness.” The servants share with their Master “fire prepared for him.” Every Church should keep jealous watch over the door into its ministry; and should keep in full working order a door out of the ministry. Every minister of Christ, every worker, of every order and degree, should [not be perpetually scrutinising, suspecting his neighbours, but, better, like the apostles at the Supper-table] be asking, “Lord, is it I?”
HOMILETIC SUGGESTIONS
2 Corinthians 11:15. “According to their works.”—God’s penalties are inflicted. [In many forms directly and ab extra. Else what is “forgiveness”? The indirect and providential—“natural”—penalties of sin are often only very slowly, and very incompletely, reversed or negatived, even to a pardoned, happy, holy child of God. These are taken up into the sanctified disciplinary life of the pardoned man.] Yet never merely arbitrary in their connection with the sin, but congruous.
I. “In kind.”—This most nearly Paul’s point here. Fruit corresponding to seed sown; prepared for, and growing out of, seed sown.
II. “In measure”: God never will overdo the penalty. No one indiscriminate punishment of sin; as no indiscriminate, undistinguishing reward of righteousness; there are degrees of suffering, as of heavenly joy, though in all cases of equal, eternal duration. [“Many stripes, few stripes.”] May vary from something scarcely more than privation of His favour and presence, up to the most intense suffering of which mind and body in eternity capable. [Doctrine of rewards and penalties must be studied as one indivisible, homogeneous subject with strictly parallel branches, the principles in each strictly analogous to those in the other.]