2 Corinthians 4
McGeeCHAPTER 4THEME: God’s comfort in the ministry of suffering for ChristHere we have another facet of God’s comfort. We have seen God’s comfort for life’s plans in chapter 1. Then in chapter 2 it was God’s comfort in restoring sinning saints. Chapter 3 showed God’s comfort in the glorious ministry of Christwasn’t that third chapter wonderful? Now we are not going to come down from the mountain, but we are going to stay right up there as we see God’s comfort in the ministry of suffering for Christ. We may even have to climb a little higher, and I’m not sure but what we may get into an atmosphere where I really have difficulty in breathing. Paul says, “Come up higher,” and that’s what we want to do.
2 Corinthians 4:1
This is a glorious ministry. God has given to us a message which no man could have conceived. It would be impossible for a man to work out such a plan as the gospel presents. I don’t know why God allowed me to be a minister of the glorious gospel other than because of His mercy. We have seen before that God is rich in mercy. God did not exhaust His mercy before He got to me, because He saw that I would need a whole lot of it. He has been rich in mercy to me. By mercy He has permitted me to have a Bible-teaching radio program. Since it is by His mercy, we faint not. We rejoice in it! What is so wonderful about this ministry? I’ll tell you what is wonderful about it. When I was in seminary, I studied religions. In fact, they so fascinated me that in the first few years of my ministry I almost decided to specialize in the field of comparative religions. Although I didn’t do that, I am acquainted with quite a few religions of the world. It is very simply expressed by one word.
All the religions of the world say, “Do, do, do.” The gospel says, “Done.” The gospel tells me that God has done something for me; I am to believe it; I am to trust Him. The only way I can come to Him is by faith. That is my approach to Him. “But without faith it is impossible to please him …” (Heb_11:6). In contrast to this, the religions of this world all say, “Do.” It is almost amusing to see what the cults in this country say one must do to be right with God. One cult declares there are four things, one of them says there are seven things you must do, another has ten things you must dothe Ten Commandments. Some of these cults say you must have faith. However, by “faith” they do not mean a trust in Jesus Christ, but rather an acknowledgment as historical fact that Jesus lived and that He died over nineteen hundred years ago. May I say to you, it will not save you simply to believe that Jesus died. My friend, Jesus Christ died for our sins and rose again, according to the Scriptures. That is the important distinction. In His finished work we must put our trust. It is done. At one time Paul had been under the Law. He knew what it was to be under a system of “do, do, do.” He says he was “an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee …touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless” (Php_3:5-6). He was really under the Law, and he hoped that he would be able to work out his salvation. Then one day he met the Lord Jesus Christ on the Damascus road. After he came to know Him as Lord and Savior, he wrote, “That I may …be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith” (Php_3:8-9). You see, after Paul had stood in the presence of Jesus Christ, he saw that he could never make it on his own.
Any righteousness he might have by the Law would not be enough. He would need to have the righteousness of Christ. Paul says that was a new day for him. It is a new day for each of us when we recognize this fact. Today we need mercy. God has been merciful; God loved us. God in His mercy provided a Savior for us, and now He saves us by His grace. How wonderful He is!
2 Corinthians 4:2
We are saved by the grace of God through faith in Christ Jesus. However, after we have been saved, that gospel must live in us. We have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty. Coming to Christ and trusting Him is more than an intellectual assent to the fact that Christ died on the Cross. It is placing our trust in Him and experiencing His regeneration. When Christ has saved us, we ought to be an example of the gospel. In other words, the man who preaches the gospel should be a holy man. Paul says that we have “renounced the hidden things of dishonesty.” The translation of this verse from The Amplified Bible is very good, and it brings out all the facets of these words which Paul uses in this verse. Compare your Bible with this version: “We have renounced disgraceful wayssecret thoughts, feelings, desires and underhandedness, methods and arts that men hid through shame; we refuse to deal craftily (to practice trickery and cunning) or to adulterate or handle dishonestly the Word of God; but we state the truth openlyclearly and candidly. And so we commend ourselves in the sight and presence of God to every man’s conscience.” We are not to walk in hypocrisy. We should not be unreal. Our behavior should not contradict that which we are preaching. It ought to be a conduct which meets the approval of the Lord Jesus Christ. We are not perfect, but we are to walk in a way that is well pleasing to Him. We are not to handle “the word of God deceitfully.” We are not to be huckstering the Word of God. This gets right down to where we live. Mr. Preacher, why do you preach? Are you preaching for money? You say that you preach for the love of souls, but is it really the love of souls? Or is it for money? I need to examine my own heart on this score. Paul wrote “…woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!” (1Co_9:16). A person can preach the gospel and say things that are absolutely true, but at the same time his life can be speaking another message. I pray a great deal about this in my own life. I pray, “O God, don’t let me preach unless I can have a clear conscience, and unless I am preaching in the power of the Spirit of God.” I don’t want to preach unless there are those two things. It is a glorious thing to preach the gospel, but it is an awful thing to preach it if down underneath there is a lack of sincerity, a lack of being committed to Him and having a conviction about Him. Actually, this is directed to the Christian layman. Do you want to be a witness for Christ? You are a witness either for or against Him. When Paul speaks of the ministry here, he is not referring to the clergy or the man in the pulpit, he is speaking of the man in the pew. The man in the pulpit is to train people for the work of the ministry. Our business is to help equip them for that work. I heard a tremendous analogy the other day: Sheep produce sheep. The shepherd cannot produce sheep. He watches over the sheep. It is the sheep today who are going to win sheep, because sheep produce sheep. My business is to equip the layman to witness. By the way, are you doing something to get out the Word of God? That is witnessing. God may have given you the gift of making money. Do you use it to send out the Word of God? Perhaps you are a man or woman of prayer, interceding for those who preach and teach the Word of God. You have contact with some person whom no one else could reach. Many people will not listen to me. They tune me in and then they tune me out. Maybe you can reach a person who will not listen to anyone else. God has called you to be a witness, my friend. This is tremendous!
2 Corinthians 4:3
“The god of this world” should be translated “the god of this age.” I don’t like to hear Satan called the god of this world. One fall Mrs. McGee and I had the privilege of driving through eastern Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, around Virginia and across into Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas. How beautiful it was! May I say to you that it was God’s world that we were looking at. Although sin has marred it, it is still God’s world. Satan is the god of this age. He is running it. He runs the United Nations; he runs all the amusements; he is running the whole show as far as I can tell. He is the god of this age. He has “blinded the minds of them which believe not.” Have you ever heard someone say, “I don’t understand the gospel. I have heard it all my life, but it doesn’t mean anything to me”? I have heard people say that again and again. What has happened? The Devil has blinded them. The light is shining, but the Devil has blinded their eyes so they cannot see.
This always reminds me of a group of miners who were trapped in a mine in West Virginia after an explosion. Finally rescuers got food over to them, and then they got an electric light over to the place where they were trapped. A young miner there was looking right into the light and said, “Why don’t they turn on the lights?” All of the men looked at him, startled. He had been blinded by the explosion. Satan blinds many folk. They say, “Why don’t you turn on the light?
I don’t see the gospel at all.” That is the blindness that comes from Satan. There are other folk who say, “There are things in the Bible that I cannot believe. I don’t know why, but I just can’t believe them.” I had a letter the other day from a man who accused me of preaching a gospel that is not true and of knowing that the Bible is not true. Oh, what arrogance! I wrote to him that I had never read a letter in which I had seen such a display of arrogance and ignorance. But do you know what was really his problem? It was not that there are things in the Bible which he couldn’t believe.
The problem was that there was sin in his life, sin that the Bible condemns. He didn’t want to believe. That is the condition of a lot of folk today. The problem is not with the Bible; the problem is with their lives. My friend, if you choose to go on indulging your sins, then you can go on doing that. It is your loss.
But you can turn to Christ. Don’t tell me you cannot. You can turn to Christ if you will. The moment a man comes to the place where he sees himself as a sinner and says, “I am ready to renounce my sin; I’m ready to receive Christ as my Savior,” he will be saved. The Word of God is light. Instead of saying you cannot see the light and instead of trying to blame the Bible, why don’t you face your sins before God?
Then there will be no difficulty about your believing. I would like to give you a quotation from Sir Isaac Newton. Certainly no one could say that he was not an intellectual or that he was not a man of remarkable ability. One day someone said this to him: “Sir Isaac, I do not understand. You seem to be able to believe the Bible like a little child. I have tried but I cannot. So many of its statements mean nothing to me.
I cannot believe; I cannot understand.” This was the reply of Sir Isaac Newton: “Sometimes I come into my study and in my absentmindedness I attempt to light my candle when the extinguisher is over it, and I fumble about trying to light it and cannot; but when I remove the extinguisher then I am able to light the candle. I am afraid the extinguisher in your case is the love of your sins; it is deliberate unbelief that is in you. Turn to God in repentance; be prepared to let the Spirit of God reveal His truth to you, and it will be His joy to show the glory of the grace of God shining in the face of Jesus Christ.” Sir Isaac Newton was not only a great scientist but also a great preacher. Why don’t people believe? Because Satan has blinded their eyes “lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.” It is a glorious gospel, but it is glorious because it reveals the glory of Christ. Apparently that is what men do not want to see.
2 Corinthians 4:5
We preach Christ Jesus the Lord. Believe me, my friend, you and I are helpless when we give out the Word of God. There is an enemy opposed to us, and he blinds the minds of people.
2 Corinthians 4:6
Paul goes back to the time of creation when God created light. I don’t know when creation took place. A great many folk believe that in order to be a fundamentalist one must believe that God created this universe in 4,004 B.C. I do not know any of my fundamental brethren who hold that viewpoint. Way back yonder in the beginning God created it. He did not give us the date.
Our God is a God of eternity. He wasn’t just sitting around twiddling His thumbs waiting for man to appear on the scene. Man is a Johnny-come-lately, of course, but God has been here a long, long, long time. I hold the position that this universe has been here for a long time and that something happened to it. It bears evidence of some titanic convulsion that took place. Something must have happened to a perfect creation.
We are told in Genesis 1 that God moved in. The Spirit of God moved, or the actual word is brooded, upon the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light! Now Paul tells us that God, “who commanded the light to shine out of darkness [in Genesis 1], hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Just as the Spirit of God brooded over the waters, so the Spirit of God broods over a soul. He moves in to bring conviction to our hearts. Then He regenerates us. And the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, shines in. Here we are back looking at Him. As someone has said, “The look saves, but the gaze sanctifies.” We need to spend a lot of time looking at Him. But even doing this, we are weak vessels.
2 Corinthians 4:7
We are just an “earthen vessel.” The picture here is a vivid one. The Greek word for “earthen” is ostrakinosthis is what archaeologists are digging up today. Actually, many of their diggings are in the old city dumps where all the broken pottery (clay vessels) was thrown. When I was in Lebanon, I went down to Tyre and walked along an excavation. It goes across the place where Alexander the Great filled in between the mainland and the island to form a peninsula there. I walked out on that to see the excavation going on. There was so much broken pottery there that I could have filled bushel baskets. That is how we are pictured hereweak clay vessels, pottery that can be broken. “But we have this treasure.” What is the treasure? That is the glorious gospel. We carry this glorious gospel in our little, old earthen vessels. That is why Paul says, “For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake.” Sometimes we get the idea we want to be a great preacher or even a great Christian. That is one reason that I am not sure we ought to be having all these testimonies that we hear today. It is pretty easy for a man to begin to brag in his testimony. If Jesus Christ is not glorified in a testimony, there is no point in it whatsoever. After all, we are just servants. That is the best that can be said of us. The simile of earthen vessels takes us back to the incident at the time of Gideon. In Judges 7 we read that Gideon took only three hundred men with him to free their land of innumerable Midianite invaders. Each man had a trumpet and a torch and a pitcher or an earthen vessel. They carried their torches in the earthen vessels so that the light couldn’t be seen from a distance. Then when they got among the Midianites, they broke the earthen vessels. It wasn’t until the earthen vessel was broken that the light could shine out. My friend, that is the thing which we need today. We need the vessel to be broken. The apostle Paul was a man who knew what it was to suffer for Jesus’ sake. That vessel had to be broken. The trouble today is that we don’t have very many who are willing to do that. I remember that Dr.
George Gill used to tell us this in class: “When someone is born, someone has to travail. The reason that more people are not being born again is that there are not enough who are willing to travail.” We hear a great deal about witnessing today, but, my friend, what kind of a price are you willing to pay? It is not enough to just knock on a door and visit someone. I’m not minimizing that, and I’m not saying it isn’t important, but I am saying that the earthen vessel must be broken. We cannot have our way and His way in our lives. We need to make up our minds whether we are going to follow Him or not.
2 Corinthians 4:8
Paul is making a comparison here. He says, “We are troubled.” That is a comparative degree. But he says, “Yet not distressed.” That is a superlative. He was pressed for room, as it were, but he still had room to preach the gospel. There was hand-to-hand combat in the corner, but he still could turn to God. “We are perplexed"he was unable to find a way out"but not in despair.” He did get outthe Spirit of God led him.
2 Corinthians 4:9
He was “persecuted,” pursued by enemies, but he was “not forsaken"he was not overtaken by the enemies. When he was in prison, he could write to the Philippians, “But I would ye should understand, brethren, that the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel; so that my bonds in Christ are manifest in all the palace, and in all other places” (Php_1:12-13). Even when he was in prison he could always say that the Lord stood by him. “Cast down, but not destroyed.” This is tremendoushe was smitten down; the enemy got him down, but the enemy did not destroy or kill him. Actually, in all these phrases Paul is making a play on words which is lost in the translation into English. If I could paraphrase it in English, it would be something like this: “I am struck down, but I’m not struck out.” Even at the end of his life Paul could say, “…I have finished my course …” (2Ti_4:7, italics mine). Paul seems to be fighting a losing battle. Can’t you sense that this man is very weak? And yet, in his weakness, he is strong.
If we could have seen this little crippled, weak, sick Jew up against the mighty juggernaut of Roman power, we would have concluded that he was nothing. But, my friend, the fact is he brought a message that withered the Roman Empire. Even the historian Gibbon said that the Roman Empire could not stand up against the preaching of the gospel of Christ. (May I say that the gospel still continues to topple thrones.) Paul seemed to be so weak, and yet God delivered him again and again. He used miraculous means and He also used natural means. God will never forsake His servants. You and I live in a day of compromise, a day of expediency, a day when we seem to measure a man by how popular he is or by how many friends he has. The late Dr. Bob Shuler, pastor in downtown Los Angeles, used to say, “I measure a man by the enemies he has.” It is important to make the right kind of enemies. Jesus said that if we would love Him and follow Him, the world would hate us. Paul had the right kind of enemies. I am confident that I have the right kind of enemies also.
2 Corinthians 4:10
Remember that in 1Co_15:31 Paul could say that he died daily. In Rom_8:36 he wrote, “As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” In 1Co_4:9 he wrote: “For I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were appointed to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men.” Christian, do not be afraid to suffer. Jesus said the world would hate us if we were following Him. It is wonderful to take our place with the Lord Jesus Christ in these days.
2 Corinthians 4:11
We may actually be the strongest at the moment we feel the weakest.
2 Corinthians 4:12
It is interesting to note here, and this is very important to see, that Paul did not consider death to be the end. He is looking on beyond. Death is merely one of the experiences which he will have. In the next chapter he will speak of the comfort in the ministry of martyrdom for Christ. There is a comfort in laying down your life for Jesus’ sake. He is saying here that he is joined to a living Christ. He is dead to the things of the world because he is joined to a living Christ. “He which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus.”
2 Corinthians 4:15
This is a wonderful verse. As we grow older, we sort of begin to die out as far as the body is concerned. However, we grow in grace and in the knowledge of Christ. I said to my wife no later than yesterday, “I wish that I were thirty-five years old and knew what I know now.” This old body that I have is dying. I can tell it all over. I’m ready to trade it in on a new model. It is beginning to waste away, but the inward man is renewed day by day. I feel closer to the Lord today than I did the day I entered the ministry. I was young then and I had a lot of enthusiasm, but I didn’t know very much. What a stumbler I was and how often I failed. I was a real ignoramus then. Now I know a little more; I have grown a little down through the years.
2 Corinthians 4:17
Again he makes a contrast. Down here we seem to have a lot of trouble and, my, it does seem to last a long time, doesn’t it? It seems so hard. But when we begin to measure it by the weight of glory that is coming someday, it is a light affliction compared to that weight of glory. Someone has said, “At eventide it shall be light.” “…we spend our years as a tale that is told” (Psa_90:9). Our years pass as “…a watch in the night” (Psa_90:4). “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” We are not to fix our gaze on the things which are seen. These things that we see around us are all passing away. The things which are not seen are eternal. I think of the changes that have taken place right here in Southern California. There were a number of very wonderful Christians whom I knew when I came here in 1940. Many of them are gone today. The cities have changedeverything is different. The things which are seen are passing away. The things which are not seen, those are the things of eternal value, and they are beginning to loom larger and larger. “For the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” My friend, I am looking for that city whose builder and maker is God. I love Pasadena; I love Southern California, but I can truthfully say that I am now looking for another city.