Hughes 2 Corinthians

Power in Weakness
1. Auflage 2006
ISBN: 978-1-4335-1875-1
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

Reihe: Preaching the Word

During Paul's ministry, Corinth was a newly rebuilt, bustling, important city in the Roman Empire. It was a place full of pride, individualism, wealth, and religious pluralism. No wonder its inhabitants held little regard for Paul's message! Sound familiar? Our contemporary culture has much in common with ancient Corinth. The relevance of this book to churches today is astounding. Paul delivers powerful theology that turns the values of the ancient Roman world upside-down-the grace of God, the centrality of the cross, and God's power made perfect in weakness. He challenges us to live counterculturally. In this commentary on 2 Corinthians, Pastor R. Kent Hughes carefully examines this letter from the apostle Paul to the church in Corinth, continuing to provide rich biblical insight for the body of Christ.  Part of the Preaching the Word series.

R. Kent Hughes (DMin, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is senior pastor emeritus of College Church in Wheaton, Illinois, and former professor of practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Hughes is also a founder of the Charles Simeon Trust, which conducts expository preaching conferences throughout North America and worldwide. He serves as the series editor for the Preaching the Word commentary series and is the author or coauthor of many books. He and his wife, Barbara, live in Spokane, Washington, and have four children and an ever-increasing number of grandchildren.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hughes, R. Kent

Leseproben

2

The Comfort of God

2 CORINTHIANS 1:3-7

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of a handful of German theologians to stand up to the Nazification of the German church. He was prominent in writing the famous Barmen Declaration, which rejected the infamous Aryan clauses imposed by Nazi ideology. Bonhoeffer’s courage thrust him into the leadership of the Confessing Church along with other stalwarts like Martin Niemöller. Bonhoeffer went so far as to found an underground seminary in Finkenwald, Bavaria, which was closed by Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler. This led to Bonhoeffer’s joining the resistance movement and his being imprisoned by the Gestapo in April 1943. Bonhoeffer’s Letters from Prison became a best seller after the war.

Among the letters is a beautiful poem written to his fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer entitled “New Year 1945.” Stanza 3 is famous:

Should it be ours to drain the cup of grieving
Even to the dregs of pain,
At thy command, we will not falter,
Thankfully receiving all that is given
By thy loving hand.1

Poignant words that became more so when, three months later, just as the war was ending, Bonhoeffer was hung in Flossenbürg prison.

Fast-forward to some eighteen years later, across the Atlantic in America, when another bride-to-be was grieving the death of her fiancé and found much comfort in Bonhoeffer’s poem. Her fiancé, who died from injuries in a sledding accident, was the son of author Joseph Bayly and his wife Mary Lou. When she mailed Bonhoeffer’s poem to them, Joe and Mary Lou also found comfort in “New Year 1945.”

Twelve years after this (thirty years after Bonhoeffer’s death), Joe Bayly received a letter from a pastor-friend in Massachusetts relating that he had visited a terminally ill woman in a Boston hospital for some period of time and had given her Joe’s book of poems, Heaven, as comfort for her soul. The pastor said that the dying woman had stayed awake late the previous night to read it and told him of the comfort and help she had received from it. A few hours later she died. The woman, the pastor revealed, was Maria von Wedemeyer-Weller, Bonhoeffer’s fiancée three decades earlier!

God’s comfort circulates among his children — and sometimes it comes full circle, as it did from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Maria von Wedemeyer in her grief to Joseph Bayly, Jr.’s grieving fiancée to Joe and Mary Lou Bayly in their grief and then back to Bonhoeffer’s one-time fiancée as comfort in her dying hours.2 Our text alludes to this astonishing cyclical nature of comfort — its mutuality — its overflowing nature.

By any estimation 2 Corinthians 1:3-7 frames the Bible’s greatest text on comfort. The word “comfort” occurs no less than ten times in its noun and verb forms in this brief paragraph — essentially one-third of all thirty-one occurrences in the New Testament.3 Paul says more about suffering, and more about comfort, than any other writer in the Bible. And it is here that he says the most about it.

There is a reason for this, and it was to answer critics who held that the sufferings that characterized Paul’s life were evidence that he was not an apostle, because if he was the real thing he wouldn’t be experiencing so much trouble. Paul’s answer was that abundant suffering and abundant comfort are in fact signs of apostolic authenticity.

CELEBRATION OF THE GOD OF COMFORT (v. 3)

In verses 3-7 Paul carefully crafts his words as he recasts the traditional opening words of the synagogue blessing in Christian terminology so as to celebrate God as the God of all comfort: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort” (v. 3).

The first of the nineteen synagogue benedictions then in use began, “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob. . . .”4 Paul takes it and identifies “the God of our fathers” as “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” thus testifying to the dramatic revelation of Christ to him on the Damascus road and his radical conversion. This Christianized Jewish blessing is original here in 2 Corinthians and appears also verbatim in Romans, Ephesians, and 1 Peter. In restating the synagogue blessing in Christian terms, Paul was evidently having a go at his Judaizing enemies, the fallen apostles in Corinth (cf. 11:22, 31). It was of the utmost importance for the apostle to establish in no uncertain terms that the God of Israel’s patriarchs was the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The synagogue prayer of Paul’s day described God as “The Father of Mercies,” but here Paul enlarges it to include “and God of all comfort” — the first of the ten references to comfort contained in this short paragraph. Paul’s intentionality is immense! Chapters 40 — 66 of Isaiah repeatedly speak of the comfort or consolation of the Messianic age. Isaiah 40 begins, “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,” and the final chapter, 66, says, “As one whom his mother comforts, so I will com-fort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem” (v. 13). So when Christ came, the devout, including Simeon and Anna, were “waiting for the consolation of Israel” (Luke 2:25) — salvation and comfort. It was and is through Christ that the comfort of God the Father comes.

Here in our passage the idea of comfort is “to strengthen much,” to encourage5 — to stand by another and encourage him as he endures testing. Paul wanted his hearers to understand that the merciful Father is the author of all possible comfort and consolation. There is no enduring comfort apart from him.

Paul’s own heartfelt celebration of God was for his deliverance from deadly peril in Asia (cf. 2 Corinthians 1:8-11), and then the gentle comfort brought to him by the return of Titus with good news about the Corinthian church (cf. 7:6, 7). For all this he passionately blessed God: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort” (1:3). How beautiful.

The explanation of God’s comfort thus began with the celebration of God’s comfort.

PAUL’S APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE OF GOD’S COMFORT (vv. 4, 5)

As we consider what Paul says in verses 4, 5 we must understand that Paul is referring to his own experience alone — that the plural “we” and “us” is what is sometimes called the “apostolic we.”6 This is made clear when we get to verses 6, 7 where there is a contrast between “we” (the apostle) and “you” (the Corinthians).

Description of God’s comfort. So here in verse 4 Paul describes his own experience of comfort and how it graced the Corinthians: “who com-forts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”

Paul was certainly one of the most afflicted men ever. He suffered cold, nakedness, beating, imprisonment, criminal assault, shipwreck, betrayal, desolation, desertion, and more. His was a life of perpetual death: “For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake” (4:11a). However, this said, he found that God comforted him in all his afflictions. Not in some but in “all” of them!

Every one of Paul’s epic miseries was attended by God’s comfort. His repeated imprisonments in Asia Minor, in Greece, and in Rome’s dank Mamartine prison were venues of God’s comfort. Through each of the forty lashes administered on five separate occasions, with the final lashes meant to bring him to the point of death, and through the torturous days of healing that followed each of the five beatings, he experienced the comfort of God. When he was stoned in Lystra with the largest stones being hurled upon his fallen body as the coup de grace, he experienced the com-fort of God. Adrift like flotsam on the high seas (for the third time!) he knew the comfort of God again. When he was in danger from rivers —God’s comfort, danger from robbers — God’s comfort, danger from his own people — God’s comfort, danger in the city — God’s comfort, danger in the wilderness — God’s comfort, danger from false brothers —God’s comfort. “In toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure” (11:27), Paul always experienced God’s comfort. Never once was he without the com-fort of God.

The result was that Paul was able to comfort those “in any affliction” (imagine, any affliction) — and he did so with the comfort with which he himself had been comforted by God.

How did Paul comfort others with the comfort with which he had been comforted by God? Overall by his example — as they observed his attitude and deportment in and through and after his sufferings. And then there were his prayers. And of course there were his gentle words of comfort, graced with authenticity and power, so that God’s comfort was administered through him.

Affliction is essential. What we conclude here is that affliction was the...