2 Corinthians 1:9 Commentary and Bible Study

He was weighed down with pressure. Some suggest it was torture and I am inclined to believe it. They really were dying, perhaps being tortured to death. The Greek says something like the answer of death, the conclusion of death. ‘Sentence’ is a very good translation; it is like a judicial sentence. The judge has declared, sentence must be carried out. So Paul is referring to something which was so definite. We have the sentence, the answer of death. Every bone in our body says, you are as good as dead, you are dying. This is the end. Reading the words ‘sentence of death’ some rush to conclude this is a court sentence, but all he says is we were sure we were dying as if we had the death sentence in our minds. We had the sentence of death for a reason. It was not that they were crushed and said, Lord, save us, and he did not. Nor is it as if they had given up asking the Lord for help, because he wanted them to have an experience as close as you can get to death. There was an occasion when they had thought Paul was dead and left him alone but God raised him up. Is it being suggested that we should have the same experience? No, but as our example we should have absolute conviction of the reality of what he says. He tells us why this sentence came, and this is the important thing – ‘But we had the sentence of death in ourselves,’ for this reason, ‘that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead.’ We should not trust in ourselves. Perhaps Paul needed a little help in this direction, I hardly think so, but perhaps he did. After all, he was a great intellectual by his natural gifts. I am always trying to point this out, but the words of Paul are inspired. They are God’s Word, God has composed them. And yet throughout the Bible when God uses human penmen, human instruments. When you read Paul’s letter to the Romans particularly or this letter, 2 Corinthians, you can see it was written by an intellectual. Paul was a great intellectual by nature, without God’s inspiration so perhaps he might have been inclined to trust in that, his great power of reasoning, his mental facility and liberty. I do not think he would be tempted to trust in himself so much as a preacher because from the scant evidence we have he does not appear to have been much of a preacher. He tells us so, not just in modesty but he tells us what people think of him as a preacher, and they do not think much of his oratory. Neither was he tempted to trust in himself in terms of natural strength. He was a man full of natural weaknesses of bodily and a sufferer. But nevertheless God helped him, and even this terrible extreme of suffering brought home to him his absolute helplessness and inadequacy without the blessing and the power of God. And we need that sometimes. Of course his sufferings are not the norm for us. His sufferings would have been far greater than ours as ordinary Christians.