Visions and Revelations.
The words carry us at once to an age of miracle. They place us in the midst of a time when the eye and the ear were each occasionally opened to sights and sounds not of this earth, when the ordinary perceptions were in abeyance, and the soul, if it did not, as some have thought, actually abandon the body, was the subject of impressions not resulting from terrestrial objects, but stamped upon its consciousness by a preternatural exercise of power. Such probably was the condition in which Ezekiel saw the dry bones in the valley become instinct with fresh life. And so with the event in St. Paul's career to which the text refers. The Apostle's authority had been studiously depreciated by some of his converts, and he would vindicate himself from their derogatory insinuations. He would not dwell upon what he had done, but upon those things rather which God had done to him. "It is not expedient for me doubtless to glory in my own sufferings; I will pass to what testifies to my apostleship, but involves no idea of personal merit. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord."
I. The more we contemplate the portrait of St. Paul as depicted in the New Testament, the more, I think, we are driven back upon the inquiry, What was the source of that life of stupendous toil and faith and suffering? (1) You must give sufficient importance to his own personal sight of the face of Jesus Christ. In St. Luke's narrative of St. Paul's conversion we are told only that he heard a voice; but, as St. Paul himself twenty-eight years after relates the event, Christ appeared unto him. Now we know something from the Gospel narratives of the power of the sight of Jesus Christ. Yet Jesus was only as a Man among men. Who can measure therefore the power of the vision of His face seen through the splendour of the Shechinah of His presence? (2) The second source of St. Paul's energy and self-devotion we take to have been that recorded in the text. "I knew a man," he writes, "about fourteen years ago, caught up by the power of Christ to the third heaven; I knew such a man," he adds, "caught up into paradise who heard unspeakable words which it is not possible to utter." Here lay one main secret of St. Paul's intense unquenchable zeal: the vision of the face of Jesus Christ, the vision of the eternal world. Out of that double vision grew an unequalled love, an irresistible desire unto God, a disregard of earthly suffering; out of these revelations grew one overmastering passion to spend and be spent for Christ here, to be with Christ for ever hereafter.
II. We may hence gather the cause of our own comparative coldness, our own shrinking from the least cross, our own aversion to self-sacrifice and self-denial. The explanation of it all lies in the vagueness of our spiritual perceptions. There can be no vigorous, strong, masculine Christianity without a distinct vision of the everlasting. Heaven cannot grow dim and minute without earth waxing larger to the eye. We must have a clear vision of the King in His beauty and of the land that is very far off.
J. R. Woodford, Penny Pulpit,New Series, No. 702.
References: 2 Corinthians 12:2. J. Thain Davidson, The City Youth,p. 199. 2 Corinthians 12:2; 2 Corinthians 12:3. Brookfield, Sermons,p. 13.