CRITICAL NOTES
2 Corinthians 4:8.—“Pressed for room, and still having room” (Stanley). “Perplexed, but not utterly perplexed” (Beet). Apparent, not real, contradiction to 2 Corinthians 1:8 (same word).
2 Corinthians 4:9.—“Pursued in our flight, but not left behind as a prey to our pursuers; struck down (as with a dart, or thrown down as in wrestling), yet not perishing” (Stanley).
2 Corinthians 4:10. Dying.—Note margin. See under 2 Corinthians 1:5 for the thought.
2 Corinthians 4:11. Live.—In more than the physical sense. See, a few months later, first clause of this verse exemplified at Corinth (Acts 20:3).
2 Corinthians 4:12.—Might almost personify, and write “Death,” “Life.” “The preachers daily felt themselves sinking into the grave [query, rather being led by a Via Dolorosa to a cross on a Calvary]; and their daily deliverance was daily working eternal life among their converts” (Beet). The thoughts recur in 1 Corinthians 4:8-10 and Philippians 1:19.
2 Corinthians 4:13.—“The same (Holy) Spirit of faith” as is implied in the thought of Psalms 116:10, LXX. [Perowne says this is an impossible rendering of the Hebrew. He submits
(1) “I believe when I speak,” i.e. when I break forth into the complaint which follows in the next clause; but he prefers
(2) “I believe”—emphatic, i.e. I do believe, I have been taught trust in God by painful experience—“for I must speak”—I must confess it, “I, even I (pronoun emphatic), was greatly afflicted; I myself,” etc. “The Psalmist declares that he stays himself upon God (‘I believe’), for he had looked to himself and there had seen nothing but weakness; he had looked to other men, and found them all deceitful, treacherous as a broken reed.”] Is there anything more intended than a “happy quotation” of a familiar phrase, quite apart from its correctness as representing the Hebrew? Nothing depends on that correctness, though in some phrases of the context in the Psalm there is an appropriateness to Paul’s peril and deliverance. As it stands in the LXX., the phrase happily expresses a very great principle.
2 Corinthians 4:14. With Jesus.—Not “by,” or, as often, “in,” but exactly “along with,” as 1 Thessalonians 4:14. More than “sharing His condition” (Stanley). More truly Beet says: “Since our resurrection is a result of Christ’s resurrection, wrought by the same power, in consequence of our present spiritual union with Christ, and is part of that heritage which we share with Christ, Paul overlooks the separation in time, and thinks of his own resurrection and Christ’s as one Divine act.”
2 Corinthians 4:15. All (these) things.—“If I live such a life, it is in order that there may be more souls partaking of the grace, and then the more to thank God for it.” Similar to 2 Corinthians 1:11 and 2 Corinthians 9:12-14.
2 Corinthians 4:16. The inward man.—Same original as “the inner man” in Ephesians 3:16, or Romans 7:22; but hardly in the same sense; the moral aspect is there prominent, here only the immaterial character of it. So “renewed” is not prominently the moral renewal of Colossians 3:10.
2 Corinthians 4:17.—Note the While.—“If we cease to look, it ceases to work.” This verse helps to fix exegetically the meaning of “eternal.” If Restoration were a certainty in the ultimate future for the lost, they might in hell quote 2 Corinthians 4:17-18. Dean Plumptre wrote to Archdeacon Farrar: “I have never been able to attach any great importance to the discussions which have turned upon the meaning of the word αἰώνιος. I cannot, on philological grounds, agree with Mr. Maurice in thinking that our Lord’s teaching in John 17:3 excludes from it the idea of duration, and the whole history of the word shows that it cannot of itself denote, though it may suggest, the idea of endlessness.” [Spirits in Prison, p. 338. He repeats all this expressly, p. 336 (in an essay ad hoc).]
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.— 2 Corinthians 4:7-18
I. The outer life of an apostle (2 Corinthians 4:7-12).
1. A distressed life;
2. A vicarious life.
II. The inner life of an apostle (2 Corinthians 4:13-18).
3. A believing life;
4. A victorious life.
Who is in the “succession”?
I.
1. Distressed.—
(1) Not an unmixed good to get too vivid or realistic a view of the externals of the earthly life of Jesus. [See Homily, “Knowing Christ after the flesh” (2 Corinthians 5:16).] It is a great, and unmixed, good to realise the externals of Paul’s life. “Troubled,” “perplexed,” “persecuted,” “cast down,” to a reader’s heart, and for the purposes of his practical encouragement, gain very helpful force, if from (say) the Acts, read with such instructive side-lights as in 2 Corinthians 6:3-10, these words be filled out by the realising imagination. “Persecuted,” e.g., falls lightly from the lips of a reader, and only lightly impresses the attention of the hearers. But it should be remembered how from the day of his conversion Paul was the object of persistent, deep, malicious, murderous hatred, which never relaxed its pursuit until his head fell beneath the sword of the executioner, somewhere on the Appian Way. [It was really Jewish persecution which led to his journey “on appeal” to Rome; the influence of Poppæa, the wife of Nero, and a Jewish proselyte, was possibly one of the factors which made his imprisonment to end in death.] Hunted out from city to city. Not safe for long together anywhere. “Smuggled out” of Damascus by night; hurried secretly away from Thessalonica [to Athens (Acts 17:14)]; stoning attempted (Acts 14:5) or actually accomplished (ib. 19); and the examples in the Acts are only the cases which “happen” to be mentioned, out of an unrecorded mass of facts illustrative of this word. [Just before this time (Acts 19:31); a little after it (Acts 20:3).] He was the fox hunted from hole to hole; the bird of the air not suffered to shelter long in even a temporary nest. Very graphic (see Critical Notes) are the other words. “Troubled” [“tribulated;” it is, radically, the word so frequent in chap. 1] “in everything,” “at all points,” perpetually under the threshing-drag; within him, as well as around him, were the instruments, or the occasions of, perpetual, crushing pressure. [One thinks of the martyrdoms by crushing between boards or plates of iron, under heavy weights. There are daily martyrdoms, not suffered just once, for a short, sharp hour or two of agony, and then done with, but prolonged through a lifetime of distress. See the crowding, pushing, pressing, choking cares of his life graphically illustrated, Luke 8:45 (cognate word), as also in Mark 5:24; Mark 5:31.] To the very limit of endurance. [“Patience” in its New Testament sense of “pressing on, bearing up,” is the counterpart of this “pressure.”] “Perplexed.” “What next? Where next? Hemmed in; where is the way of escape? At our wits’ end; what is the wise and right thing to do? Is there anything that can be done?” And this when something “must” be done; for time is slipping on, circumstances are closing in around, the last door of escape will soon be closed up. Yet what to do? To see advancing trouble or disaster draw nearer and nearer, yet to stand hanging down helpless hands. “Cast down;” thrown in the wrestle, struck down in the conflict [as Christian by Apollyon in the Valley of Humiliation]; lifted, in the strong grip of circumstances or of the Tempter himself, “clean off” one’s feet, off one’s foothold on the promises and faithfulness of God; blow following on blow, buffet raised on buffet in quick succession; “facts” arising in fertile crop, which seem to “compel” doubts and questions that it is an agony to be obliged to entertain, even though only that they may be dismissed; until all strength to fight on, or even to follow on, seems lost. Reason, trust, hope, sinking, “stricken down” by the quick succession of staggering “facts,” in even the providential path; or of disheartening circumstances in the work of God. Every reader adapts to his own special circumstances the words of Paul; they are a frame which will hold many a picture of a distressed life. It is as much his personal, as his official, life which is in question. [
(2) In it we meet the time-old, world-wide fact, and the problem which is at its heart,—how scant a recognition the greatest men of their time get; how often the truest benefactors are unrecognised; how often, indeed, goodness, and the holiest life, are only recognised to be met with rebuff, to be made to suffer; how they are persecuted even to the death. This alone is, of course, no complete or adequate account of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, but, at the least, it is an account which falls in with and exemplifies this “law.” If God’s people do not really serve Him “for nought,” at least they do not serve Him for what the earthly life has to give. [Some lives only show their full beauty when “distressed.” The incense only gives out its full savour when cast upon the burning coals.] What is the rationale of persecution? For no man ever seriously entertained the thought of changing opinion by external, or physical, compulsion. There has been an element of political, governmental action in much persecution of Christianity. In the Roman Empire religiones illicitœ were always obnoxious to the State. The necessary, regulative effect of Christianity upon the action and conduct of its professors has sometimes inevitably involved disobedience to some State legislation, and very much oftener a disconformity to the informal, social, customary legislation of the world in which they were citizens. To any form of absolute government, individualism, particularly such as seems aggressive and in conflict with the established order, is a thing to be repressed, if it cannot be destroyed. But this by no means accounts for all persecution, even organised and quasi-governmental. It by no means explains the elaborated ingenuity of cruelty in punishment which is no necessary accompaniment of (even mistaken) justice. It by no means explains the elaborately ingenious and the subtly invented pain inflicted, in cases of personal, as distinguished from quasi-official, persecution. One sentence of Paul is a summary formula for the answer to the question proposed. “As then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now” (Galatians 4:29). John traces the matter further back. In the Book of Origins—Genesis—he sees in the slaying of Abel by Cain his brother the origin and first example of the deep, innate, inevitable, murderous antipathy between “the world” and “the children of God” (1 John 3:12). The Roman State persecuted the Church; the heathen state in Madagascar persecuted the Christian community; the Romish Church persecuted its fellow-Christian Albigenses and Vaudois; the Greek Church persecutes its fellow-Christians and fellow-subjects, the Stundists; Episcopal Church government persecuted Presbyterian, or Quaker, or Methodist nonconformity; in the same congregation, the lax—“worldly”—section if in the majority, will give practical, painful, penal effect to its dislike of the spiritual minority; in the same household, “the world” pursues “the Church” with its effective, pain-dealing dislike. It is, in fact, the same “world” everywhere, though it may be a baptized “world” called a Church or a section of one, hating “the spiritual”; it is the same “natural” heart everywhere, which cannot simply be indifferent to, and leave alone, “the spiritual,” the pure, the holy, the Divine. The mere contrast is exasperating; it arouses antagonism; the antagonism becomes active. And, finally, the deep underlying “animal” or “devil,” of which there is too much in every natural heart, may make its persecution the occasion to display its love of inflicting and witnessing pain. In much persecution there has been seen that “streak” of the cruel, of the savage, which is a possibility of universal human nature, apart from the grace of God.]
2. Vicarious. “All things are for your sakes.”—
(1) Living for others. Except this corn of wheat had fallen into the ground and died, it would have abode alone. Paul must be killed daily, so that Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippian gaolers, Lystran Timothys (Acts 14:5; Acts 14:19; Acts 16:1-2; 2 Timothy 3:11; ib. 2 Corinthians 1:8; 2 Corinthians 1:12; 2 Corinthians 2:1-2; 2 Corinthians 3:12; 2 Corinthians 2:11-13; a Bible-reading in germ), may have life. “Through death to life” is the “law” for a man’s own life. If a man will live for himself, introverting upon himself all thought and action—“will save his life” for himself—he will “lose it” and die. [There is no life that can more utterly be selfishness and death than that of self-culture.] “Through the death of one to the life of others” is the “law” for the life of all. Christ’s death the highest exemplification of this, though it is unique quâ the link of connection between His death and our life; there is no analogy in this between the solitary case of Christ and the common cases of ordinary mankind, though both may be stated in terms of the same great “law.” “For your sakes.” Not for Paul’s own? Certainly. They no doubt had a sanctifying and sanctified efficacy in the training and development of his own Christian life. [Below, they are seen, at the least, “dissolving the tabernacle,” and “working out the exceeding weight of glory” for him.] But in the fulness of his Christlikeness of affection, he for the moment sees this no longer; it disappears out of all reckoning. He approximates very closely to Him Who could alone say with full and exact truth, “All things are for your sakes.” [On lower planes of illustration are seen instances of the same “law” at work. Some must sacrifice the sorely needed rest of the Sabbath, that others may hear the Gospel and find “life” on the Sabbath. Any life which is to be a blessing and a comfort and a joy in a family, must be continually putting aside its own work or plans or ease, giving itself up to others, and indeed, in its highest types, be “laying itself out” with loving ingenuity, to contrive the pleasure or the convenience of others. Birth, in many ways, and in many instances, means death to the giver of the new life. No man permanently blesses his race with even new thought, except by sore pangs of mental “labour.” Etc.] “For your sake.” So that in two directions Paul’s life is the very opposite of self-centered; Christward—“to me to live is ‘Christ’ ”; manward—“all for your sakes” [cf. “beside ourselves … to God; sober … for your cause” (2 Corinthians 4:13)]. Poised between, pointing toward, these two poles, the Paul who hangs central between them is forgotten!
(2) Especially, suffering for others. So, probably, 2 Corinthians 4:12. The daily “dying” is the price—by him thankfully paid—for their daily “life.” (To extend Alford’s remark:) God shows death in the living in order that he may through them awaken and show life in the dying. Yet, as if an instinctive perception, that vicarious dying in its fullest sense was the propriety of Christ alone, guarded his language, where it trod on the very precipice-edge of error, he never says, “We die for you, or for your sakes.” Only this: “We are delivered daily unto death for Jesus’ sake.” [Farrar does indeed paraphrase: “So then death is working in us—seeing that for Christ’s sake and for your sakes we die daily—but life in you. The trials are mainly ours; the blessings yours.”] [The “vicarious” idea (in an inexact sense of the word) is suggested in 2 Corinthians 4:5-7. The Gospellers have themselves been illumined, as from a central fount of Light, that so in their turn they may show light to, and shed light upon, other dark hearts. They are filled—earthen vessels though they be—with treasure, in order that they may “make many rich.” Or as some see the picture in the words, they are the soldiers of a greater captain than Gideon, carrying each of them his light in his earthen pitcher. But “earthen” then conveys no thought of disparity between means used and ends accomplished, between contents and vessel; yet such a disparity seems required by the concluding clause of 2 Corinthians 4:7.]
II.
3. Believing.—
(1) With the same faith, begotten of “the same Spirit of faith,” which prompted, and breathes in, the declaration of the Psalmist. The whole drift of Hebrews 11 is to exhibit this real unity of the principle of faith, through all the ages and dispensations. Believers are all of a pattern; they conform to a distinctly marked and permanent type, to whatever Church they belong, in whatever age they live, how much or how little soever of light they have upon the matters for which they exercise faith, and upon Him Who, to them all, is the Object towards which faith directs itself, and on which, having reached It, faith rests. It may have the distinctly Gospel colouring and character, but that is rather gained from the matter with which it is concerned. Concerned with “providential” things, or with distinctly “evangelical,” faith’s hand is in either case “subdued unto the colour” of the thing it works upon, but it is the same hand, and the same grasp upon the same God. [Indeed, it is specially noteworthy how, e.g., the faith of Noah is declared to have won for him a grace which is described in a very “Pauline” phrase, “Became heir of the righteousness which is of God by faith.” And so in other instances. The examples of Hebrews 11 are in the closest connection with the critical points of the developing history of Redemption,—the “nodes” in the growing stem, at which miracles (and prophecy) and faith all blossom in fullest profusion.] Old Testament psalmist, New Testament apostle, both belong to the same “set”; [they are of the true Abrahamic stock;] they are “believers.” In every age, and in every sense, does God’s “just man live by faith.” In every age, in every believer, faith’s activity conforms to the general formula of Hebrews 11:1; it makes things hoped for and future to be working realities, assumed, taken for granted, in all reckoning and action in the present; it makes things unseen into elements and factors in the daily life, as powerful and as real as the things seen. [So 2 Corinthians 4:18.] Indeed, God and His word of faithful promise are more certainly assured conditions of life’s problem, than are man and his character or words. [E.g. the purpose and the protection of God are more potent considerations than is the wrath of Pharoah (Hebrews 11:27).] “Begotten of the same Spirit.” Exegesis, and the whole strain of Scripture, growing clearer as the Pentecostal age advances, require the “S.” Faith is not natural to the human heart; it is induced; it is the Spirit’s grace. No better, surer proof of this than the fluctuations in its strength, of which every believer is conscious. So unreasonable are they; and yet so little amenable to, or to be put away by, reasoning. After all the experiment of a long lifetime, with its resulting, accumulated “experience,” what more logical than “hope”? (Romans 5:4). What more reasonable, and right, than that the One Friend Who has never failed His people in any slightest particular; Whose resources of wisdom and power, and Whose love and character, have, absolutely without exception, always responded adequately to every demand made upon them by man’s need and faith; should be met with a perfectly restful trust? And yet, no! After years of accumulated experience; in the very presence of a great deliverance; with the very greatest mercy only a recent memory; still the heart, ungratefully, illogically, will doubt and be distressed, as if it were only beginning to learn the lesson of faith, instead of being already a lifelong pupil. Faith is a gift, a grace, to be used and cultivated by man, but needing to be created by God’s Spirit. Whatever “grieves the Spirit” weakens faith.
(2) The immediate object of Paul’s faith is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is accepted by faith as a fact; its consequences are also a fact to faith. In His being raised is contained and involved the further miracle that Paul and his fellows shall be raised up also. The daily deliverance from the daily, deadly peril is involved in it too. That peril is a foretaste of death; the life, thus daily guarded and renewed, is, in principle and in foretaste, a real raising up again. Whether in now daily renewing and preserving that life, or in raising it up from the grave hereafter, He Who is the God of Paul’s life is really doing one and the same great work. The daily deliverance is a simple corollary of the truth that the eternal life, in which resurrection is just one episode and incident, is already begun, and is to be kept “unto the Day.” Faith accepts the premiss—Christ’s resurrection—as fact; faith draws the inference, with its own sure logic; and accepts, and rests in the consequence—Paul shall be raised up. This strength of assurance affects his whole life; in its every expression of character. Such a faith, resting on such a God, “stiffens” the man; “puts a backbone” into him. When Paul speaks he “uses great boldness of speech”; he does not need to speak in equivoque or doubt, with bated breath or qualified certainty, or in “adulterated” Gospel. [He is a preacher who preaches not doubts, or speculations, or hopes, but what to him are certainties—“I believe, therefore have I spoken.”] And so, finally,
4. Victorious.—
(1) The “earthen vessel” is “troubled,” is “perplexed,” is “persecuted,” is “cast down”; it “always bears about the dying of Jesus”; it “perishes”; naturally it would “faint.” Yet it is not “distressed,” nor “in despair,” nor “forsaken,” nor “destroyed”; the treasure enriches many; the words are bold, with a confidence victorious over doubt or any human and unworthy motive whatever; it “looks” away from the “seen” and “temporal” to the “unseen” and “eternal”; it pursues its way, in the midst of all and in the face of all, accounting all as but “the momentary lightness of our affliction.” It is, on the one side, the victory of the vessel of frailest “earthen” mould and material; on the other, it is the victory of the resurrection-working power of God. The “excellency” of the power which works the daily wonder, guarantees, and will by-and by make real, the weight of glory which grows from “excellency” to “excellency.” [Same words. Note also 2 Corinthians 1:8.] The eternal victory is but the present daily victory “writ large.”
(2) “Not distressed;” there is always “the way of escape.” The close-hemming foes—men and circumstances—are never suffered to complete and close up their environing circle. The threshing-roller has its limit of weight; our strength of patient endurance is always just a little more than the heaped-up burdens. Frail as is the vessel, it is always made strong enough for its purpose. “Not in despair;” the word is alway heard; “I have given thee the valley of Achor for a door of hope” (Hosea 2:15); somehow it is always possible for the pilgrims to walk out of Giant Despair’s castle; they have a master key for every door. “Not forsaken;” the army of Christ has no stragglers who are left behind to perish; the weakest, who falls out of the ranks when the pursuit is hot, is never abandoned. The Captain Himself is the rear-guard for His host. “Not destroyed;” the touch of mother earth, when they are stricken down or thrown in the wrestle, seems to set them, Antæus-like, on their feet again. The wrestler is flung upon the ground, but never appeals in vain to his King and Master, Who from His throne is watching the struggle; it is not He Who, with thumb turned down, will leave him to his adversary and his fate.
(3) “Worketh out.” Which is more than merely victory, and much more than deliverance. It is the strain of the pæan of Romans 8:37, “more than conquerors.” The trials have helped the afflicted man. He has not only been through them, but on them has levied contribution toward his best welfare. He has not only escaped, but they have helped and enriched him. “One more such victory, and I am ruined,” cried Pyrrhus. There have been to this conqueror, Paul, no victories “only less calamitous than” defeats. Conquerors! “More than conquerors!”
(4) Whilst we look. [“Whilst Peter looked” at His Master, he could tread the waves; they bore him toward his Master.] Let a man become secular in temper and view and outlook, he will soon find that life’s burdens are becoming crushing in their “weight.” If he focus (as the photographer says) for the near, the distant will become faint and indistinct. To get his picture right, he must focus by the things “eternal.” He focusses for an unseen object, but the earthly, temporal foreground somehow always thus comes right. In life’s scheme and picture all is then in due and true proportion and definition.
SEPARATE HOMILIES
2 Corinthians 4:2. The Sphere of the Pulpit.—“Commending ourselves to every man’s conscience.” Of all who teach the religious teacher occupies the highest position. Others are giving in the school the lessons whose actualisation shall be the principles and habits and conduct of the men of the coming generation. They have to do with mind, and that in its most impressible condition. They may give to very much of the stream of the world’s moral and social life a tinge and a direction, as they please. But the religious teacher ought to be, might be—every faithful one is—one who deals with the conscience.
I. With the conscience in every man.—Without the physical senses, I could never feel my connection with this material system,—the green earth beneath my feet, and the blue heavens that encircle me, would be nothing without these; so without this conscience, this moral sense, I could have no idea either of moral government or God. Had you no conscience, I might as well endeavour to give to one that is born blind and deaf the idea of beauty and sweet sounds, as to give you the idea of duty and God. To this the religious teacher appeals. Expect him to appeal to it. Honour him in proportion as he does.
1. There is a ministry which reaches the conscience through the passions.—Hope and fear are appealed to; emotions are stirred, tears flow; the fear of wrath leads up to a sense of sin and guilt. There is a ministry which aims at the imagination. Beauty is the idea. Whatever in thought or form, in sentiment or style, will please the taste or charm the fancy are freely introduced. Truth is cast into sonorous periods, and presented in poetic pictures. No reason why not, if only all be consecrated to the use of reaching, in order to awaken, the conscience. The attention must first be arrested, somehow; else the preacher is a dead failure. The wrong is done, when the catching and satisfying of the imagination becomes in itself the goal of the aim of the preacher, and the only desire of the hearer. So of the ministry which aims mainly at the intellect. Verbal criticism, philosophic discussions, subtle distinctions, ingenious hypotheses, are the staple of its discourses, with the accompanying danger that the whole should be exclusively an intellectual performance. “Commending ourselves to every man’s intellect,” by all means. Religion has nothing to fear—revealed doctrine has nothing to fear—from fair, sober, reasonable reason and intellectual scrutiny. But neither the preacher nor the hearer should be satisfied if the intellectual exercise and the satisfaction it gives, be all. This should be made one of the approaches, one of the “parallels,” by which the spiritual engineer seeks to get near, that so he may seize the stronghold of the conscience for his Master, Christ. “The weapons of our warfare are not carnal” (2 Corinthians 10:4); the aims must not be carnal either. In the day of his “success” and gathered applause and goodwill, let the preacher ask, “Did I aim at, did I reach, the conscience?” In the day of his “failure,” and accompanying despondency, let him pray that the “poor performance” may—perhaps the better for its poverty—have reached a conscience. Let the hearer ask for a preacher who is mighty with the conscience.
2. “Every man’s conscience.”—The torpid; those that have never been awakened, or who, having been once aroused, have relapsed into insensibility again. Unhappily the most commonly occurring condition of the conscience. Turn over the pages of universal history; look the world through; search its literature, institutions, trades, professions, amusements; you see the flames of passion reddening the sky of ages; the creations of the imagination filling the horizon; the inventions of genius, the theories of intellect, piled mountains high on every hand; but the activity of Conscience all but absent and unknown. The alarmed and guilty conscience, with its fear of wrath, vain struggles against the tyranny of Sin, all the experiences of Romans 7, consciousness of accumulating transgression, and so of accumulating guilt. The peaceful, victorious conscience. From which the sense of guilt has been removed; which has won a conquest over all the inner antagonists of the soul; which soul has ascended the throne within the man, grasped the sceptre, and is ever carrying out the will of God, and rejoicing in God through Christ, by Whom it has “received the Atonement.” For each of these the true pulpit must have its message; the true Christian teacher is the man who has the word for each, which it at once recognises as the message from God, just adapted to its necessity.
II. Through the medium of “the truth.”—Paul saw “truth” everywhere, breathing in pagan systems, sparkling in philosophic speculations, circulating in the general current of common language and common life. But to his mind, The Truth—that which humanity wanted to raise it from its fallen state—the sin-correcting, soul-saving truth, was this: The special revelation of God developed in the teaching, embodied in the life, illustrated and concentrated and energised in the death, of Christ. This central Truth alone could uncover in daylight the awful heavens of being, and bless with new life and beauty this fallen earth. Paul could move, he knew, the conscience of his age by this potent instrument. With this he was an Archimedes who could move a world. Truth “as truth is in Jesus” (Ephesians 4:21).
III. As under the felt inspection of Almighty God.—Paul “set the Lord always before him”; he toiled and suffered “as seeing Him Who is invisible.” This abiding consciousness of the Divine inspection would remove three hindrances to the work of the preacher.
1. Man fear. By all means let the preacher—every thoughful man will—have a deep awe as he stands in the presence of souls, every one of them an heir of the interminable hereafter, every one an originating fountain of everlasting, ever-effective influence—good or evil. He may well tremble as he presumes to influence for eternity deathless intelligences. “In the sight of God” will deepen this, but it would destroy the enervating, enslaving, inordinate over-anxiety to avoid the hearer’s disfavour, and to ensure his praise and approbation.
2. Affectation. In the felt presence of the conscience, and, still more, of God, a man will become, and will be kept, real.
3. Dulness. The man who is desperately in earnest to get at, and grapple with, the conscience, and that by means which he can honestly employ as “in the sight of God,” will never be dull. And there will be no “commendation” to the best sense of the hearer like this of the evident aim, and still more of the success, at reaching and blessing the conscience. That is the type of minister who will always command an audience. He may offend some, may lose many, but he will be sought by the men of conscience. He will always have a clientele. There is always amongst “the masses” the demand for a man who can reach, and teach, and guide to rest, the conscience in men.—Suggested by “Homilist,” ii. 225.
2 Corinthians 4:3. Veiling the Gospel.—Two noteworthy things here:—
A. A veiled revelation.
B. A redeemed man lost.
I.
1. Amazing! Two purposes of God crossed and thwarted. “Re-vel-ation?” The very word means the drawing back of a veil. An evil will is seen interposing a veil again! A man “for whom Christ”—mark that, no other, no less, than Christ—“died,” “lost.” Now in the process of being lost,—such is the force of Paul’s present participle. It is the mystery to thought; a mystery which sooner or later “brings us up” sharply, as if before a dead wall that stops all further progress in our knowledge, in all inquiries on moral questions. The Problem of Evil; the Problem of Will. The marvel that the Creator has made so many of His own handiwork to possess a Self so like His own in its self-determining power, that it can use its power to say “No” to its very Maker and His purpose and desire.
2. The revelation is a Gospel.—Thoroughly, and only, practical in its object and scope; not at all to help speculation, or merely to give certain knowledge, even on the topics most urgent to the inquiring intellect. For ages, behind the veil, God had been preparing for the day when it should please Him that “the mystery hidden from ages and generations,” “the mystery which had been kept in silence through times eternal,” should at last be “made manifest” (Romans 16:25). At last, like some completed statue beneath its covering, it stood waiting for the moment—it came at Pentecost—when the veil should be lifted, and The Gospel stand out in all its perfection of salvation-beauty. [A sub-section of this revelation is in Isaiah 27:7, and 2 Timothy 1:10. All heathen, all natural life—to some extent even Jewish life—was spent under the overspreading “shadow of death.” A terror and a bondage (Hebrews 2:15) to thought and heart. In the Gospel of Christ—of the dying and risen Christ—the meaning of death, and the certainty of a life beyond death, and the hope of blessedness in that life—all stood out in the only certain, serviceable light which mankind possesses. It was revelation of the morning, when “Light shines out of darkness.” Night is a “covering” cast over all creation. What under its veil the great creative forces are silently producing, is unseen till the day dawns, and “brings to light” what was there all the while, but under the veil.]
3. The central Fact, the central Figure, of the Gospel is Christ.—He is in Himself a Revelation; His very appearance amongst men is a Gospel. The ambassador of England resident in Paris is, in his very residence there, a token of peace and amity between the two nations. [His absence or withdrawal would be understood to mean ruptured relations.] Christ going in and out amongst men for thirty-three years was in Himself a message of peace, a message of goodwill, from God to men. [Then, as below in 2 Corinthians 4:6, He discloses God to men’s mind and heart; in a fashion also which is “good-news” of God, as well as from Him.]
II. But there is a velation, over against this revelation. There is a veiler as well as a Revealer.
1. The blindness is moral.—The “mind” is “blinded”; but the mischief goes deeper; to the “conscience” (2 Corinthians 4:2), and the “heart” (2 Corinthians 4:6). The man who on these topics is enlightened in mind, knows that the light reached the mind through these channels. “After all, it is to moral causes that we must assign a main influence in the … prevalence of unbelief. ‘Our systems of philosophy,’ said Fichte, ‘are very often but the reflex of our hearts and lives.’ … Each man’s position towards Christianity is ultimately determined by the inward condition of his heart and will.… Action must go before knowledge (John 7:17), and a certain inward condition prepare the way for the Gospel message. To understand the truth we must first stand in it (Jeremiah 23:18; 2 John 1:9), or at least be willing to enter and submit to it. Wherever there is a real [ignorance of and] aversion to the Gospel, ethical causes have much to do with it. There is something humiliating in the first aspect of all Christian truth. It reminds us of personal responsibility, of personal shortcomings. It wounds our natural pride and self-sufficiency.… How hard it is to many great and aspiring spirits to come down from their high estate and confess to guilt and error! For others Christianity has too much that is alarming. It makes of human life so serious a thing; it warns so solemnly of the nearness of eternity, and the certainty of future judgment; its sign of the cross reminds us so awfully of the Divine holiness and the hatefulness of sin. Too many also are not prepared to fight their way through all these terrors to real and solid peace, and catch at the idlest doubts and shallowest surprises to escape from the pressure of unwelcome truths. What pride does for the former class, fear does for those in deterring them from embracing the faith of the Gospel. And as for both these classes the entrance to the way of life is found too strait, so for many others the way itself has proved too narrow. Their love of ease refuses to engage in the striving after holiness; their love of gain and worldly honour shrinks from the thorny path of humility and self-denial. With many, alas! sins of sensuality are either parents or offspring of unbelief; nay, every sin may be regarded as a step in that direction.” (Christlieb, Modern Doubt, p. 26.) Vice, worldliness, self-worship are most common, and most fatally dense “veils.” [Even as renunciation of self, consecration to Christ, holy and serviceable living amongst men, gracious submission to God’s hand when under trial, are most fruitful preparatives of a heart for receiving the revelation.]
2. Men can blind their own eyes.—To see requires light and eyes. God has given both. Man can close his eyes to the light. [Has eyelids as well as eyes.] Cannot give himself light; but can make darkness for himself. But—
3. Their action is referred to a power, a person, behind them, “the god of this world.”—His culminating temptation to the Representative of mankind was that he should be accepted as “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ!” “Fall down and worship me!” The world is found bowing before his seat (Revelation 2:13); as Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego stood erect amidst a plain-ful of prostrate “peoples, nations, and languages,” so the man “not of the world even as” his Master was not, stands erect, exceptional, singular, to be in consequence cast into the furnace for his disconformity. And the bait is still: “If thou wilt, … all shall be thine!”] As behind, and in, and through, the mind of the inspired man, and the will of the ordinary Christian, there stands and works a Holy Spirit, prompting all good, giving all susceptibility; so it is the constant, and self-consistent, teaching of Scripture that in perfect but evil analogy, there stands and works behind, and in, and through, the mind, heart, will of man an Evil Personality, an Evil Spirit, who has made it his business to counterwork the work of God; who is the opponent, and in himself the antithesis, of God—the anti-God, the anti-Christ. Good Spirit and evil,—both are disclosures of Revelation. And, in closest analogy, just in the same sense, and so far, as all good is referable to the Holy Spirit, without (in a true sense) taking any merit from the man; so, without taking any responsibility from the man, all evil is referable to the Evil Spirit. Man blinds his own eyes; yet “the God of this world blinds the eyes of them, that believe not.” In all the moral causes above suggested, he is at work.
III. “The eyes … them that believe not … them that are (being) lost.”—These stand in closest connection in the text, and in the closest relation in fact. Man has eyes for the supernatural world; eyes which may “see God.” To believe is to use these eyes. They who see not, who believe not, are already “the lost.” To have these things eternally “hidden from the eyes” is to be “lost” for ever. [Though this may include more than the mere penalty of loss, the pœna damni.]
2 Corinthians 4:6. The Glory of God.
I. Revealed.
II. Received.
III. Reflected.
I. Revealed in the face of Christ.—We are the gazing Israel; Christ is more than our Moses. He is showing no reflected “glory”; He is an original source of the “glory”; it is His own. When, with Peter and His brethren, we are caught up to some Mount of Tranfiguration, and see the face of Christ glorified, it is not that, like Moses’ face, His has been shone upon. It is shone through. The native glory within—“the glory of God”—permeates, penetrates, irradiates, the features. The clearest, fullest, altogether peculiar, manifestation of God is made to “every creature” in Christ and His Gospel. Herein is—
1. The one real and direct expression of God.—The Infinite brought down, softened, adapted to man’s capacity. [Can bear to gaze at the sun when reflected in the still pool.] In nature we have the indirect, inferential revelation of God; in Judaism the typical, illustrated revelation; in Jesus Christ the direct and true.
2. An embodiment of Divine excellencies in a living person.—In their abstract presentation the attributes of God are too little effective with the heart and conscience. Men cannot rest in abstractions, nor find much help in them. They want the concrete; they can only rest in a Person.
3. This personal exhibition is human in character.—The essential holiness proper to the Godhead is shown, though in the midst of the ordinary conditions and surroundings of humanity.
4. All this is in perfect exhibition.—In other revelations of God men have the divided, in some the distorted, beam; here in the face of Jesus Christ shines the whole, pure, perfect light of God.
II. Received into human hearts.—Analogy, Scripture, Fact, all show the necessity of a heart preparation for receiving the glory. The light shines on the material world; it shines into the adapted manhood with its eye.
1. This is specially a heart preparation.—The carnal mind, at enmity against God’s law, cannot perceive the beauty of holiness; how should it? Or how should the narrow, petrified, selfish heart realise a love as wide as the world, stooping from the highest glory to the deepest abasement, giving itself unto death that others may have eternal life?
2. This preparation is a great and Divine work.—“Religious truths do not grow out of logic; but pre-supposing certain spiritual tendencies and affections, they arise from immediate contact of the soul with God, from a beam of God’s light, penetrating the mind that is allied to Him.” The heart’s eyes sometimes unclose as if under the brightening beams of the morning, gently and almost unconsciously. Sometimes a lightning-flash arouses and alarms. But the opening of the eye is of God. “Whose heart the Lord [Christ] opened” (Acts 16:14). All the capacity for this revelation found in the child or in the heathen is of God, the work of His Spirit upon the universal heart.
III. Reflected upon, and into, other eyes and hearts.—The Son of Righteousness shines upon men largely through the instrumentality of men. All who have received are under obligation to reflect upon, and impart to, others the light. [“Holding forth the word of life” (Philippians 2:15-16) as “lights (=light bearers) in the world,” suggests a company holding out and up, at arm’s length, high above their head, the Light which may guide other souls through the darkness to the source of Light for themselves. “Take up the torch, and wave it wide, The torch that lights life’s thickest gloom.”]
—Some suggestions from “Homilist,” vii. 253.
2 Corinthians 4:7. “Treasure in earthen vessels.”
I. The Gospel a treasure.—An unexpected, suddenly new illustration. It was “light” in 2 Corinthians 4:6.
1. As there it first illumined the preachers’ hearts, so here it is treasure which has first enriched themselves; there, they next must endeavour to make it shine into other hearts; here, they must endeavour with the Gospel to “make many rich.” The preacher can only give what he has first received; can only enrich others with what is first riches to himself; can only preach what he knows, if his preaching is to have the power even of reality, to say nothing of spirituality.
2. It is the one knowledge, happiness, power, which is an eternal possession to man. All else is valuable relatively to the time and the man, only: this absolutely, in relation to God and eternity. “Wealth is what has exchange value.” No other has exchange value at the bar of God, or even it the hour of death. There are men with barns full to bursting, yet “not rich toward God” (Luke 12:21). Many a wise, fair, lovable life in the congregation is enriched with many “goodly pearls,” but not with that “one pearl of great price,” with which it is natural to link this text. “Cold water to a thirsty soul” is this “good news from the heavenly country” to an anxious sinner. What is the “wealth” of a caravan crossing a desert? Water, before all things besides; water, just then, and just there; as the Gospel is wealth to a soul unsatisfied with anything that earth can give. [“What best gift shall I get for my children?” See to it that they are enriched with this.] It has enriched the world with its grandest ideas of God, of immortality, truth, purity; giving the highest certainty and authority available to man in regard to these high themes. [“What is the world’s greatest possession to-day?” Before every other answer, Paul would put his own: “The Gospel of God in Christ.”] [See how this enriching of the world with hope, and light, and moral power, and God (Ephesians 2:12), is interwoven with the rejection of Israel (Romans 11:12).]
II. The preachers are earthen vessels.—
1. Like the earthen crock in which, perhaps, the ploughman found the “treasure hid in a field.” It had no value comparatively, and very little intrinsically. The lucky discoverer of the “treasure” would not preserve the pot; if indeed his ploughshare did not, by breaking this, reveal the gold within. [In the “great house” of 2 Timothy 2:19-20 there are “for the master’s use” “vessels” (N.B. not necessarily vases only; the word is vaguely wide and all-inclusive) of “gold and silver,” as well as wooden and earthen ones. All “unto honour” and “fit” for service if “purified,” those of humbler material as well as of costlier. No necessity to force into comparison two quite independent uses of the same figure of “vessel.” If one is to illustrate the other at all, it may perhaps be said that oftener, for the reason which concludes this verse, God uses the earthen rather than the golden or silver vessel, for this particular purpose. (The golden and the silver ones have their use.)] The humble “vessel” may often enrich with its contents a soul of far nobler calibre in all natural capacities. The humble “local preacher,” or perhaps only “exhorter”—in Primitive Methodist terminology—is forgotten, was forgotten almost immediately, his name a matter since of vehement dispute, who “enriched” the soul of Charles Haddon Spurgeon. Many a man who received the treasure from Paul himself would hardly see more than the Tarsian Jew, the tent-maker, in poor health, full of “tears,” beyond most men dependent upon sympathy, talking a provincial sort of Greek, scouted and hunted by his own nationality. Paul was by no means to many converts the “vessel of gold” we prize in him; in himself a real wealth to the universal Church; set high in the “Great House” as not only useful, but as a glorious adornment to it.
2. Treasure holders.—That only. [As the sun in Genesis 1 is only a light-bearer; light is independent of the sun, and known in Genesis, as in science, to be anterior to it.] Paul and his fellow-workers do not make the Gospel which they carry about and dispense. The “vessel” is the mere “holder”; containing, until it can pour out, the treasure. Simply first filled and then kept full, that they may fill the need of others. Without intrinsic value; containers; and besides—
3. Frail.—Yet, as 2 Corinthians 4:8-12 show, endowed with a wonderful tenacity, kept by “the excellency of the power”; sorely “knocked about yet not broken,” so long as the Master needs them to hold and carry about His “treasure.” Still only “earthen.” The minister is a man. The Spirit of God must do His work through his manhood, and through his particular type of manhood; through his specialties (and frailties) of mental—and to some extent of moral—characteristics. The human medium will affect the Truth in no small degree. This treasure takes something from the human “vessel” which contains it. The make and temper of the “vessel” will affect the delivery of the riches.
(1) The minister will remember this; nor be too absolute and positive, as though he could not err.
(2) The people will remember this; nor expect anything but an earthen,—very human—vessel. It will save mistake on both sides, and disappointment, to remember that the “vessels” are men. Committees and ordaining boards must remember that no ideally perfect men are to be found for the ministry. They must take “earthen vessels,” or none at all. However, they are frail, fragile. The daily failing of the “earthly [though, N.B., not “earthen,” as here] house of the tabernacle” is already in Paul’s thought. (See Critical Notes, 2 Corinthians 4:12.) Every year sees the “vessel” the worse for wear. “He is breaking,” men say of the old minister; whether with a loving tenderness of charity that understands and allows for failing powers, or with an impatience that would hastily put the old “vessel” aside for one of a newer pattern or stronger make.
III. This secures the fulfilment of a great purpose.—It is so plainly the treasure, and not the “vessel,” which has value; it is so manifest that the man himself is not an adequate explanation of the success of the work, that the thought and heart of man “enriched” turns instinctively elsewhere for explanation. “This is the finger of God” must be the verdict in every conversion. Nobody more than the true minister of Christ rejoices to stand back and be forgotten in the first joy of the soul who has found the riches. “Earthen vessels,” so manifestly inadequate in themselves to accomplish the evangelising of a world, or even of a Roman empire, that the success of Christianity becomes an argument for its Divine origin. Now that the issue is no longer doubtful, Gamaliel’s argument has new point.
2 Corinthians 4:17-18. A Contrast and a Connection.—“Our light affliction,” etc.
I. A contrast.—“Affliction;” “glory.” “Light;” “far more exceeding weight.” (Observe in Critical Notes.) “For a moment;” “eternal.”
1. What an exposition of “our light affliction” is given in Paul’s own case in 2 Corinthians 4:8-11, and more wonderfully in 2 Corinthians 11:23 to 2 Corinthians 12:10! In the experience and observation of the people of God nothing puts greater strain upon faith in the wisdom and love of God than the convergence of many, and many kinds of, trial upon one single head. Any one would have been enough, we think; yet they are cumulative. [Before the smart of one stroke has ceased to be acute, and whilst indeed the heart is still smarting, another stinging stroke seems to fall; another follows quickly, and sometimes on the same place, on the old wound.] Faith, too, is tested by the fact that the accumulation is often upon the head of that one of God’s children who, it seem to others, might best have been spared any stroke at all; who seems to need it least, for rebuke or for education in holiness. The burdens are heaped, it sometimes appears, heaviest and most numerous upon the holiest. Paul says, “Our light affliction.”
2. Set over against this a “weight of glory.” Perhaps not very definitely conceived even in Paul’s own mind. At most, probably, there is suggestion of a balance, in whose scales the Now and the Then, the “affliction” and the “glory,” are poised one against the other. [As in Romans 8:18, “not worthy to be compared with.”] He watches the scale heaped up on the affliction side, yet rising outweighed, and he cries to it triumphantly: “Ah! afflictions mine, ye are weighed in the balances and found wanting!” Yet, as the afflictions are a burden, so we may suggest what, measured by our earthly standards and strength, a burden would even glory itself be. The vessel often all but breaks, with even the foretaste of the future given into the heart of the child of God. Yet see how the immortal vigour of that life contains, carries, that weight of glory! “Heavy” and “light” are relative terms to strength: The “light afflictions” are all but overwhelming to earthly powers, even when reinforced by the grace of God. That “exceeding weight” sits “light” upon the strength of the life eternal. Everything is revised in the presence of the eternal world: “Whilst we look,” etc. Turn away the eyes from that, and everything adjusts itself to the earthly standard; the strength reverts to the earthly measurement. The vision of the “things eternal” is a real power to us amidst “the things temporal.” Let a man be lifted to the level of those and look down upon these; let a man’s life be enlarged to the scale of the “eternal,” with all his views and standards of judgment enlarged accordingly, and he understands “this light affliction.” He anticipates the estimate of the eternal world. The principle of the process is seen at work on a small scale in every-day life. With what leaden feet the hours creep along when aching temples count the number by their throbs! Or when a man must stand awaiting the fall of certain calamity, and can only hang down helpless hands and wait. Or when his heart carries day after day a load of anxiety or sorrow, or smarts under wrong, or slander, or persecution, or misconception, or misrepresentation. Or when, hour after hour, the mind is chained to thoughts which will not be shaken off. Such a day takes a great deal of living through! Every such hour seems lengthened to a day; a day, and much more a year, of perplexity, of tried faith, of walking in darkness,—they seem an eternity! By-and-by, when the cloud is gone; when pain is over; when all perplexing circumstances are resolved into clear, plain providential love; when the year that seemed endless has become only one of the thirty, forty, fifty in the review of the past life; then all becomes simply a passage in the story of life,—“the tale that is told,”—exceptional and brief. Even a year becomes by-and-by only a bar of shadow—rather broad, perhaps, but only a bar—thrown across a path whose whole extent beside shows as a line of light. After a little lapse of time the proportions of things come out more clearly; the “endless” day, the “interminable” year, become mere episodes and incidental passages in the whole life-story. Let a man write to a sympathetic friend, out of “the thick” of it all; he fills sheet after sheet; every detail is of importance. Yet even then he realises, and almost resents the fact, that it is more to live through than to write about. And in a year he will summarise in a page or two all that is salient in the review; in a few years all goes into a sentence, or is dismissed in a written line. So, in the review from the standpoint of the things eternal [“whilst we look,” etc.; cf. Romans 8:18], whether actually occupied or only mentally and by anticipation; if the life be all shadowed over; if the pain last as long as the man lasts; if the one crushing sorrow never be lifted, an “affliction” to the end; if the long strain never be relaxed; yet a very brief space in eternity, a very short section of the story there, and that whole long life will become dwindled down to a mere episode in the eternally continuous life of which “death” is also merely an incident not far away from the commencement of its course. The story of the years which meant so much to live through will become merely a page or two prefatory to the main story, to be gathered up and dismissed in a thought, hardly indeed to be accounted of at all in the longer review of life. The burden whose weight was carried along a road which itself was measured out by its painful steps, will have been decreased “to scale,” to fit into the new proportions of life, and will be remembered as “that light affliction” which we once carried “just for a moment.” In view of eternity nothing is long which is terminable; in the presence of, and actual enjoyment of, heaven, nothing is heavy which only belongs to the burdens of earth.
II. A connection.—The one “works out” the other.
1. The course of Paul’s thought, especially as disclosing itself in the opening of chap. 5, makes it evident that he, at any rate, had mainly in mind the ultimate release into “glory” by reason of the body’s “death.” Sickness, a “thorn in the flesh,” hunger, wounds, weariness, all in the broadest sense are forms of death. They hasten—they are—the destruction of the bodily frame, each in its measure. Not one of them but contributes something to expedite the loosing of the immortal part from its mortal companion. Did the young generation of Israelites look with unfriendly eyes upon the last lingering few of the old generation who lived on in the wilderness? “When will you old men die off? We cannot enter into the land whilst you live.” So the Christian, though honouring his redeemed body, yet says to it: “Body, I cannot enter into my glory, whilst I am tied fast to you. You are yourself a burden, and you bind me to a world of ‘afflictions’ each of which is a burden!” Everything which helps forward “dissolution” (2 Corinthians 4:1) brings Paul nearer to the “weight of glory” which is before him; everything which expedites bodily death is not mourned over, shrunk from, counted an evil, but a good, an assistance; “works out” the happy issue which is “glory.”
2. That may have been his thought; but the thought of the Holy Ghost, Who so guided the true and natural expression of a real man’s actual feeling that it became a saying, permanent, normal, for all Christian experience, was more than this. More than the quasi-mechanical removal of a physical disability for entering into the awaiting “glory.” When even Paul exclaims, “Now is … salvation nearer,” etc. (Romans 13:11), there is more than the rejoicing that by mere lapse of time it has every night come nearer. “A day’s march nearer home” is true, but not all the truth of any Christian “hope” worthy the name. If some “lotus-eater” Christian simply folds his arms and lets his vessel drift with the stream of time, then if he be finally saved at all, it is true that he is each night “a day’s drift nearer home.” The very day’s drift has in that sense “worked out” something towards the attainment and enjoyment of the “glory.” But “nearer than when we believed” includes a ripening for the approaching heaven. Men grow readier as they get nearer. And everything which tends to ripen, to develop, to educate character, and put it upon what are essentially “heavenly” lines even here, is “working out” the “glory.” There would be no “glory” for a man who is not made heaven-like beforehand. To an unprepared, uncongenial, non-correlated man heaven—the place—would be intolerable, a hell. Everything which makes the man receptive, prepared for the ready hereafter of a prepared glory, is so far “working out,” etc.
3. There is a suggestion in the figure of a “life-story,” employed above. The old epic, or dramatic, unities were made a bondage to authors, yet there was reason in them when they required that a “plot,” a plan, a motive, should run through and bind together into a real oneness every story, or poem, or drama which was to take rank as a work of art and genius. So in strictness no incident but such as would really help forward this “plot” to its development, was rightfully admissible; it was a redundance, perhaps an excrescence or deformity. So, further, every personage who comes upon the page should in some direct way be contributory to the unfolding and to the fulfilment of the author’s purpose. Only a childish reader of a story is plunged into inconsolable distress over the troubles of the personages whose futures are being followed. An “old hand” knows that this is a common writer’s artifice, and reads on calmly, knowing that such imbroglios of trouble always come out right. A seasoned student of such literature knows that in the midst of such embroilment of fortunes and circumstances the author is not forgetting his “plot” and its destined ending, but is steadily pursuing his way to it. Indeed, he is pursuing it by means of these. Such pages, such incidents, are as really part of the whole machinery by which he is “working out” for his personages the happy issue, as are those where all goes smoothly and without a cross. So Paul’s faith is that, though he is the maker and writer of his life’s story, there is a conjoint, supreme Worker and Author, Who has His own “plot” in the story, and by means of the “afflictions” of life is helping forward the accomplishment of that purpose. By means of even the most “untoward” incidents—not in spite of, or merely in the midst of them—He is leading on His man to, and making him ready for, “glory” designed for him. These afflictions are working out the glory, which, when it comes, shall prove so preponderantly great above all earthly suffering.
HOMILETIC SUGGESTIONS
2 Corinthians 4:7-10. The Weakness of the Agents contributes to the Furtherance of the Gospel.
I. In their weakness God’s power is displayed.
II. In their affliction God’s help is manifest.
III. In their dying the Divine life is revealed.—[J. L.]
2 Corinthians 4:14. [For Easter. Much material under 1 Corinthians 15] The Resurrection of Christ a Comfort in Affliction.
I. The fact is certain.—Christ was raised up by the power of God.
II. The inference is just.—God will raise us up, and present us in glory.
III. The conclusion is inevitable.—God will deliver us out of all our afflictions. He has the power. Intends to do it.
IV. The duty is obvious.—To suffer patiently. [How easily a reader bears the distress of the entangled and distressful parts of a story, when he has looked at the last pages and knows how it is going to end (see p. 472). So we know how our life is going to end. “This will kill me,” we say. No, it will not. We are being “kept … unto salvation,” etc. (1 Peter 1:5).] To speak confidently.—[J. L., in part.]
2 Corinthians 4:15. “For your sakes.”
I. A general principle.—Vicarious suffering, the death of one, the life of another, obtains sometimes in nature; often in human life; usually in spiritual relations (John 12:24); pre-eminently in the Atonement of Christ. There is a vicarious element in the purpose of much sanctified suffering. A Christian lady, standing with a friend, by the bedside of her Christian father, who had lain for two years helpless and nearly speechless, said to her friend: “All that, for so long, is not for him; it is for us.” Many times the work seems perfected in the sufferer, who, as we think, “need not” be kept longer out of rest and glory in heaven; but the sufferer lingers on in pain, to be a factor in the training and moral development of those who minister in the sick-room.
II. A particular application here.—Paul’s [the Apostolic, and, in some degree, all Christian] sufferings benefit others in that they—
1. Exhibit his Faith.
2. Confirm the common Hope.
3. Evoke in others a spirit of Love and Praise.
4. Exemplify the grace of Patient Endurance.—[J. L., with additions.]