2 Corinthians 4

2 Corinthians 4:1-5

Division 3. (2 Corinthians 4:1-18; 2 Corinthians 5:1-21.)The radiancy of the glory in earthen vessels, making manifest its source. We carry these thoughts with us through the next division. We have here the radiancy of this glory, as the apostle has spoken of it, contrasted with the vessels of earth in which it is displayed. The earthen vessel may seem (in some sense may be) a hindrance, but in result God makes it only by this means manifest that the glory is not human glory, but divine. It is in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us.

1. Here then is the ministry, in its character, which characterizes the new covenant. Those who have obtained mercy become of necessity the witnesses of that mercy. There are those, of course, who are specially called of God to bear public witness of it before men, but the testimony is of the same character in the humblest witness. The character of such a ministry lifts up and energizes the soul of one who is conscious of being entrusted with it. Walking in this light, the hidden things become “things of shame.” The heart is without guile.

There need be no self-deception, and no perversion of the word of God, no hiding its plainest statements, no seeking escape from its condemnation of men as such. The gospel is that of the glory of Christ. This is the true force of that which our common version has so much dimmed as making it simply “the glorious gospel.” It is the glory of Christ now in heaven, His work achieved; and there, therefore, as the representative of His people. If upon the cross He was their representative and bore the sin which lay upon them, that is removed, the burden of it is gone forever; all the wonder of the grace and power which have come in for us shines out in His face who is gone to God. Thus His glory is indeed gospel. This glorious Christ is He in whom the image of God, invisible otherwise, shines fully out.

It is its own witness to those who realize their need and who find it thus met and abounded over. If it is veiled, it is veiled simply by the power of the god of this age in the minds of the unbelieving. It is not simply that Satan obscures it to them, but that it is their own unbelief which brings them under the power of Satan, and so hinders the radiance of the gospel shining forth to them. God never permits Satan to have this power apart from man’s consent that it should be so. If men turn away from God, they turn to Satan. The very light of God only darkens, as one may say, the shadow which they themselves cast upon their path. Solemn word it is that with the full consciousness of Christianity come, and its power for working in the souls of men, the apostle should call Satan not simply, as elsewhere, the prince of this world, but “the god of this age.” Christianity has not introduced, in this respect, a new age. It gathers men out of the world. It will never affect the world itself so as to bring in a new age for men. This, of course, lies in no inherent incapacity of the gospel itself, but in the strange mystery of man’s free will, by which he chooses darkness rather than light, and bondage to Satan rather than the freedom which God proclaims to him. But the age, one ought distinctly to understand, is not as yet an age of light, and the world will never be converted by the gospel, so that this shall be. Christ must come to effect this. The sun which has gone down upon the world in Christ’s banishment out of it through man’s unbelief, must rise again, as it will rise, and then indeed there will be a kingdom of Christ in which righteousness shall reign, and peace and blessing be the result of righteousness. In this blessed light, then, drinking it in, it would be impossible for those in character as the preachers of it, to proclaim themselves. In the knowledge of the new man “Christ is all and in all.” Christ is Lord, and the ministers of the gospel are but the servants of men for Jesus, sake. It is a glad and willing subjection in love to the need which is everywhere, and this power cannot be lacking for ministry to that need. The story of the old creation is repeated more wonderfully in the new. The God who spoke that out of darkness light should shine has shone in our hearts, in order that this knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ may shine forth to others. This is the radiancy of the glory in the face of Jesus Christ reflected from the hearts into which it has shone. 2. Here, then, is a treasure which God has designedly placed in earthen vessels for the definite purpose that the exceeding greatness of the power may be seen to be of God and not of man. The earthen vessel might seem to be an obstruction to the light which the treasure is. In some sense also it may assuredly be this. The vessel itself may need to be broken in order that the light may shine. There seems indeed an evident reference to Gideon’s men and the breaking of the vessels on their part that the lights they carried might be displayed.

It is evident that God has chosen men for His messengers to men, and not angels. Angelic ministry might seem in some sense to be more fit, that it would have more power in it as evidently from heaven, and would not be liable to be corrupted by the tendency to failure, inseparable from man, even renewed man.

But God is wiser than we, and the grace in which He makes men His ministers and messengers to men cannot be doubted. There is also a character of testimony to which the apostle refers here, which even angelic ministry could not afford. That would be a testimony in power, but not in weakness, and not manifesting that peculiar power which weakness itself alone can manifest, a power which is not its own, but of the grace which comes ever to lift up, animate and nerve to endurance in all our weakness. It is to this that the apostle goes on here. “We are every way afflicted,” he says, “but not straitened.” There is the effect of grace in the midst of the affliction. “We are perplexed, but not unto despair.” Exercise is allowed, nay, given full room for, but the soul sustained in its confidence in God so that despair is impossible. “Persecuted, but not forsaken, smitten down, yet not destroyed.” How the dying Stephen seems to be in the apostle’s mind, with the light in his face, while the body was dropping into the martyr’s grave! “Always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus,” not exactly His death, but His dying, Himself also a Martyr, the great Martyr, -and that is the point here. Bearing it about in the body is suffering at the hands of men to some extent as He suffered, but with the effect, that the life of Jesus may be manifested in the body. God, he insists, has designed this, -has delivered the living up to death for Jesus, sake, but that the life of Jesus may thus be manifested even in mortal flesh.

The final result, therefore, is “death worketh in us, but life in you.” The badge of the cross is to be borne by the disciples of it. That is God’s way of working, and it is the cross in this sense also which is to win men to God. 3. He dwells now more upon the power which sustains us under these circumstances. It is the power of faith, -a faith which, because it is such, must utter itself. We believe, and therefore speak. It is what the history of all time assures us of, and therefore he goes back here for a quotation, to the Old Testament; but we have that which Old Testament believers had not. We know God as the God of resurrection, in a sense in which yet they could not know Him.

He has raised up the Lord Jesus. and we are so identified with Him that this perfectly assures us of what is before us also, that “He shall raise up us also with Jesus, and present us with you.” The resurrection of Christ insures, as the apostle has told us before, the resurrection of His people. If we do not rise, then it must be that He has not risen.

If He has risen, He has risen as the first-fruits of those that slept. In all this the same principle which he has spoken of at the beginning of the epistle still obtains. The grace that works in some, works for the sake of all. The power manifested in some is to give energy to all, and “all things,” he says, “are for your sakes, that the grace abounding through the many may cause thanksgiving to abound to the glory of God.” God is still taking up Jacobs for His Israel, and out of weakness manifesting His strength; and if it be this, it is unfailing strength, so that the weakness can be no discouragement. What a testimony to the power of God when, whatever be the trial, His people faint not, but “if” indeed “the outward man be consumed, yet the inward is renewed day by day.” It needs to be renewed. We are conscious of the wear and tear of things as we go through them.

God makes us sensible of our dependence, sensible thus of the arms that carry us. We are learning lessons here which in eternity shall display all their fruit for us; but the present result is that the affliction is but a light one, an affliction for the moment, and “which worketh for us a more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” The apostle labors, as it were, for expressions here.

The words “weight” and “glory” would be in Hebrew the same word; a glory, as the thought is, which to us as we look at it now is almost oppressive by its intensity. It would overwhelm us in our present condition, although as we carry it presently there will be no weight, but a lifting up forever. Faith here is continually a need. Hope must be not upon the things that are seen, but upon the things that are unseen. The things that are seen, with all the power that we realize they may have for us, are for a time only. The things that are not seen are the realities. They are eternal. 4. He goes on to show us how entirely for faith the things that are against us have been made our own, and the consequences of sin for man at large have been removed for us. Death is abolished. Judgment is behind us in the cross, though there remains, it is true, the giving account before the judgment-seat of Christ, -an immense blessing for us, and in which the power of God’s grace will have its complete triumph. First, as to death. “We know,” says the apostle, “that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building or God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” He is speaking of the body, of course, as the “house of this tabernacle.” It is that which is to be dissolved, and there remains for us, for eternity, a building of God, a house not made with bands. He is thinking, of course, not of the Father’s house, but of what contrasts with and replaces the present habitation. “In this we groan,” not for the mere infirmities surely from which we suffer here, but more with the sense of the impediment to the spirit which the body in its present form implies. “We long to be clothed with our habitation which is of heaven,” that is, which belongs to heaven; not which is formed of heavenly material, so to speak, or which comes down from it, but which has its character derived from it. It is heavenly as suited to heaven, and to the perfect condition which will be ours then. In the present tabernacle we groan as burdened, not indeed to be unclothed, not as seeking death, but rather that which will swallow up death itself, -to be “clothed upon, that all that is mortal might be swallowed up of life.” The apostle is evidently thinking here of the living when the Lord comes. It is not that that which is corruptible, but that which is mortal, may be swallowed up of life. The mortal condition is the present one, and what he would desire is not death for its own sake, but the joy of the full perfection which remains for us. He interjects here a word which seems to be a warning for the conscience amongst a people of some of whom he stood in doubt. “If so be,” he says, “that being clothed upon we shall not be found naked.” That is, of course, what awaits every Christian. To lose the place in resurrection, the glorious and incorruptible body which will thus be ours, is impossible for any real Christian. It would be real nakedness, although the wicked will rise, as well as the righteous; but it will be no covering, the body with which they rise. There is a glance back, evidently, at man’s condition after the fall when he fled among the trees of the garden from the penetrating Eyes from which, after all, there was no escape. In eternity there will be no escape. Those who are found naked then, will be in all the terror that belongs to such a condition under the eye of God.

Think of the exposure! But it is plainly that which no Christian can suffer from. The resurrection is the accomplishment of that for which God laid hold upon us, and of which He has given us the pledge already, the earnest of the Spirit. “God will quicken our mortal bodies,” the apostle has told us in Romans, “because of His Spirit which He has given us.” It is in the body that the Spirit dwells at the present time, and He certainly will never give up that which in this way has become the temple of God. This gives, then, continual confidence. We are at home in the body, true. It is the only state with which we are familiar now, but faith realizes that the Lord is absent, and that we are absent, therefore, from Him.

It is by faith we walk, and not by sight. But thus to be absent from the body is for us as Christians to be at home with the Lord. Thus is death, then, abolished for us. 5. But there is another thing that lies upon man as man, and which is the terror of death to him. “After death,” says the apostle, “the judgment.” But the Lord has Himself told us that he that liveth and believeth on Him shall not come into judgment, but is passed from death unto life. If He has broken the power of death for us now, so that he that liveth and believeth in Him shall in that sense never die, so has He, and indeed in order to this, taken away the terror of judgment, which for the believer personally Christ has endured and removed. The confusion which is in the minds of Christians so much has nothing to justify it in Scripture, and is largely due, as is plain, to the forgetfulness of the coming of Christ for His own, which removes them in one company, distinct from the world, before judgment falls upon the world. They are not picked out by judgment from the world. They are separated by the coming of the Lord to gather His own to Himself.

No one of those caught up can possibly doubt whose he is or what is before him. He is raised in glory or changed into it. He is in the very likeness of Him he goes to meet, and although he is to be manifested before the judgment-seat of Christ, there can be no possible terror for him in such a thought, when at last every touch of evil has disappeared. He is in the perfect likeness of the Lord Himself. But we are to be “manifested.” That is the force of the word, not merely “we shall appear,” but “we shall be manifested.” That is the blessing of it. Our ways and works will perfectly show what we are and what we have been, and to the glory of Him who has, spite of all our failure, accomplished at last the blessed purpose of grace towards us, so that we can be with Him, and, as it were, judge with Him our whole condition. What a lack there would be if there were not this great clearing up of things before we have passed fully into eternity, -if the wisdom and grace and holiness of God were not perfectly displayed thus in all His ways with us, if we had not the lessons of time impressed upon us for the wisdom of eternity! There will be no failure of memory then, but the keenest possible appreciation of everything. Would we forget what we have been, so as to forget along with it the grace which has been with us? Would we lose materials for the song of praise which will be ours forever?

Many seem to forget the value of all this to us as the day will declare it and the glory of God which will be manifested, -the perfect fulfilment of the Lord’s words as to His people: “I am glorified in them.” The principle is plain, as the Old Testament expresses it, that “God will bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil.” Nothing else would be worthy of Him. He has nothing to hide, and no act of His has really been in vain, however much in our folly, as we look at things now, we might imagine so. He is to be found justified in this last judgment of all, and we too, for we are to receive also “the things done in the body, according to what we have done, whether it be good or worthless.” Everything is to be appraised and estimated at its right value, but this, as it is said elsewhere, that every one may have his praise from God." God is seeking good and not evil. He is still, as He does ever, taking the precious from the vile, because He loves the precious. It may be needful in this way that the vile should be looked at also, but it will only enhance the preciousness of the precious. That which is worthless will of course be judged as worthless. It will not be gain. But even here the estimation of it as such will have its gain. The continuity of the future with the present existence is strangely often lost sight of. People often look at it as if the entrance into eternity were to he the entire break with the past; whereas this cannot be without proclaiming at the same time the want of eternal meaning in things here. The principle, of course, applies also to the judgment of the wicked, and this the apostle turns to now as necessarily being brought before him with all the terror of it, when he turns to persuade men. For himself there can be no terror, but there is most solemn apprehension of what such a searching out as there will be in the day of judgment will be for men. It will still be for the things done in the body that they will give account, -a merciful limitation of it. There is no hint of what people have so strangely added to it, of sin going on even after death, and in hell itself increasing for eternity the weight of condemnation. The time of responsibility is the present time. Eternity for the wicked will be the time for receiving the things done in the body, and thus God’s mercy will limit retribution, while God’s holiness will not suffer the continuance of sin, as people imagine; apart surely, from one sentence in Scripture to justify it.

Hell is the prison-house of the condemned, not a place of manifested rebellion against God any more, or of the evil works for which the condemned are shut up there. It is mercy itself that limits all this. It is not indeed that judgment will make any essential change in men. It will not turn the sinner into a righteous person. It will not change the heart; but nevertheless it will subdue entirely men to God. God has ordained that to Christ “every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord,” and that of “beings infernal” as of all the rest. This enforced subjection is, in fact, the only mercy of which they are capable; but the lake of fire itself will have no odor of corruption in it. God will be God everywhere, in hell as in heaven, however differently He will be manifested in each place. But what a joy to the apostle the present manifestation to God, to which this brings him! We are already made manifest to God. We are living and walking in the presence of Him who is light, and can rejoice to be searched out by Him who loves us and has given Christ for us. The power of this upon his life the apostle hopes with confidence will bear witness to the consciences of those whom he addresses. He does not need to commend himself to them, but they have the opportunity, if they would, to glory with regard to such, in opposition to those who were showing themselves among the Corinthians, and glorying indeed in appearance, aiming to be somewhat, while the heart lacked. 6. He is plainly now thinking, for the moment, of the opposers in Corinth who could readily find occasion to criticise the ways of one so different from themselves. On the one hand he declares that it was to God he lived; on the other hand, for the sake, therefore, of men whom God loved, and to whom He had sent the message of love by him. To smile he might seem indeed beside himself, just for the glow of wondrous happiness when occupied directly with God Himself, but there was plenty amongst those with whom he had to do to make him sober enough with a sobriety which had reference to them, the token of the earnestness of his heart towards them for their blessing. In all, it was the love of Christ constraining him. This was the one constraint in which there was perfect freedom.

He turns to that work of the cross, to him so necessary, and which had for him the perfect revelation of the need of man, as well as the perfect provision on God’s part which had been made for it. He had died for all.

That was grace, but it was the perfect manifestation also of man’s need. Where has sin been judged as in the cross? Where has the condition of man been manifested as it has in that fact that the love that would save men must go down to the awful depths of judgment to do so? “If one died for all, then all have died.” It is not exactly, as in the common version, “all were dead.” The death that Christ died was not the death in which He found men; but it is the effect of the cross of which he is speaking; it is the perfect condemnation of man, of all men, and on the part of a Saviour, not of a mere judge, -of One who desired for them eternal blessing, but who, if He accomplished this, must meet that death which was upon all. Thus, if He died for all, all died as it were, for the soul that estimated it rightly, in that cross itself. It was the end of all hope for men, apart from Christ. Nothing could be looked for from them merely, and the words are evidently to be taken in their double relation, to the cross as condemnation and to the cross as salvation. He died indeed for all, in the desire of God, for the salvation of all. It does not and could not say that He made atonement for all, except so far as that He made life possible for all, and thus the word of the gospel could go out to all. There was no lack on God’s part for any who should seek His grace; and for those actually saved by it the cross has wrought in another way by its complete deliverance from the guilt and judgment of sin. It has wrought deliverance from the power of sin itself, so that those who now live by virtue of it live a new spiritual life in the sense of the grace that has visited them, living “no more unto themselves, but to Him who died for them and rose again.” This is the only complete enfranchisement and deliverance from all necessity for living to one’s self any more, even religiously, -divine grace securing all our interests in the most perfect way, that now His interests may be our interests, that we may live to Him. There is another change. The cross has ended for the Christian the whole history of man in the flesh, and thus removed him, as it were, out of sight. “Nay,” he even says, “if we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know Him thus no more.” This does not of course mean, cannot mean by any possibility, that the record of His blessed life on earth has not its full meaning for us. On the contrary, it is from the Christ w ho lived before our eyes and the Christ who died for us, that we know now the living Christ. We could not follow Him. as it were, into heaven, except as those who have known Him upon earth. That will constitute for all eternity a source of knowledge which can never be dried up. Nevertheless, Christ has passed out of it all. He is in another condition, and the living Christ we know is One who belongs to a new creation, to which also, through grace, and through His work, His people belong. We know Him in the place to which He has ascended, and there is no other Christ to be known than this, and this affects all our apprehension of the condition of men here, and all our ways with them. How can we ever forget what the cross has manifested as to men in nature, and where alone true blessing is to be found for them? That is what marked the apostle in the entire earnestness that belonged to him. He did not look at men as men with their social and political distinctions, and what not. What were all these in the presence of the cross and the glory? 7. So that now, “If any one be in Christ, it is a new creation. The old things have passed. Behold, all things are become new.” How simple and evident the result! We are the fruit of a new work of the Creator, which has brought us into new relationships, into a place which is eternal, a scene into which sin can no more enter, a paradise never to be blighted as the old one was. The apostle is not speaking here of our own condition as we know it by experience.

He does not mean that there is no sin remaining in us, that we have got into any perfected condition which can set us beyond the need of self-judgment, beyond the need of discipline and correction. He is speaking entirely of what we are in Christ, something which faith knows and realizes, which we judge not by experience, but by the revelation of the Word itself. Alas, Christians as we are, it is not impossible that the full reality of this may decline for us in its power over our souls. All the same it remains true that there is no one in Christ who is not a subject of this new creation, who does not belong to the scene where all things are new, and where all things are of God. Thus has He reconciled us to Himself, through Christ. He has brought us out of all the estrangement natural to us. There is no distance; there is nearness. There is no separation of our things from His. They are, so to speak, identical; and thus not the apostle alone could say, nor any class among Christians merely, that “He hath given us the ministry of reconciliation.” By the very fact that He has brought us to Himself and made Himself known to us, He has given its the power also of making known to others that with which our own souls are filled and of bringing others to Him. We have received the reconciliation; and what we have received, we have received not for ourselves alone, but to minister with it.

It is the work which Christ Himself began upon earth when God in Him assumed the attitude of perfect grace, not imputing men’s trespasses to them, reconciling, therefore, the world to Himself. It is not a question of how far this might be effectual, of how far men, in fact, responded to it.

It was His attitude. It was on God’s part complete, and now, with that work accomplished which he speaks of directly as the basis of it all, and which always must have been the basis of it, a work foreseen by God before it was accomplished, but which is now accomplished, He is still reconciling men, but through others, who stand instead of Christ here, His authenticated ambassadors, by whom God beseeches men still. “We pray,” says the apostle, “in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.” That is, Christ is not here Himself to do this, but He has multiplied the hands which are to minister it. He has on every side the witnesses that are to speak for Him. The apostle and those with him, sent in the first place direct from Christ, fulfilled this character, of course, in the most complete and authoritative way, but we must not on that account overlook our own part in it, -a part which every Christian has. It is not, indeed, a mere question of something entrusted to us, but of hearts that know God’s grace and know men’s need of it, which must necessarily, therefore, speak of what they know. As we have already seen, he who believes speaks. “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” And here is the basis of this reconciliation still: -“Him who knew no sin, He has made sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” Wonderful words are these, deeper no doubt than we can altogether fathom! It may be that “sin for us” should be thought of as “sin-offering.” The word in both Greek and Hebrew is identical, but this does not really alter the truth of what is here. The fact is that the sin-offering was presented to God of old as the “sin” of the one who presented it. He who presented it to God at this time was One who had none of His own, who emphatically knew no sin. He could not otherwise have presented it; for it was an offering of Himself, and that must be a spotless offering to be accepted. But He stood, therefore, before God as identified with the sin of others which He had taken upon Himself, endured the judgment of that, and thus the message of reconciliation can go out to all. But there is more than this here. Those who receive it become the righteousness of God, as before God in Him who has stood for them. It is not simply that God’s righteousness now can act in grace in their behalf. That is of course the doctrine of Romans, which we have had before us. This is the effect of it, however. If the righteousness of God justifies us as those identified with Christ, and in the value, therefore, of His work for them, we in receiving the value of that work become the exhibition of that righteousness which has in this way acted.

We become identified with it. He could appeal to the righteous Father when He quitted the world, on His own behalf, as One who had known Him, and puts along with Himself those who have known that God sent Him. The Spirit come down into the world is thus the witness of righteousness in which God has acted in His behalf in taking Him to Himself. He is the witness, as in us also, of the perfection which is ours in Him, and of the display of righteousness on God’s part towards Him in the fruit of His work. Thus we become and shall ever be the righteousness of God in Christ. How far beyond the thought of mere forgiveness is this!

How blessed to realize the claim that we have thus upon Him who is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and thus our God and Father! Here is indeed the basis of a reconciliation which we can now beseech men to accept, and which is in itself the fullest, brightest display of God that can ever be. Can there be another revelation of God which can exceed the glory with which He has been glorified in His beloved Son?