2 Corinthians 10:7 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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2 Corinthians 10:7

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The verses that follow are notoriously difficult, and at times seemingly totally obscure. They are regarded by many as the most difficult to understand patch in the whole of 2 Corinthians. Our rendering makes them a little more difficult than they need be because it is a very neutral rendering, but they are typical of the apostle Paul and are full of illustration. They deal with the vital subject of the defence of the true church of Christ. The passage moves to Paul’s justification of his apostolic calling, and leads into a magnificent piece of autobiography which follows in chapter 11.Now the trouble was that the Corinthians had let in false teachers. They had come from Judea, possibly from Jerusalem itself, and they claimed to know the real apostles and even to have known or have heard Christ himself. They were the Judaisers, Jews who seemed to think it was their mission in life, as a kind of Jewish sect, to go around the various churches that were being founded by Paul particularly and his fellow preachers, and to bring them back into the Jewish fold. They would come in and say, ‘Well yes, Christ is fine, and we believe in Christ and we are Christians, but he is not enough. Christ and his atoning death on Calvary for sinners and the converting power of God, it is not enough. You have got to come back into Jewish ceremonies. Even the Gentile converts, who had never been Jewish, were being told, ‘Come into Judaism. Become proselytes, be circumcised. Go through the various ceremonies of the law. You need to do that if you are going to be, in your words, saved.’ The Corinthians had been far too easy going about this and they had let these teachers in who were now threatening to take over. They were very clever people, but they were in it for money. They were very good speakers and they could tell stories and fables and entertain the people. They seemed to have very winsome personalities. They watered down the faith, making it very easy: ‘You do not have to come out to church so much. You do not have to attend prayer meetings. You can continue to go to your idolatrous guilds, if it allows you to keep your jobs. Subscribe to us, pay us.’ It seems that the senior people had been very relaxed, and so the apostle challenges them: ‘Do you look on things after the outward appearance?’ Are you really so superficial that you let these teachers come and you did not ask any searching questions. When they said that they came from Judea, you said, ‘Wonderful.’ When they said, ‘We are Christians’, you just accepted their word for it. When they used Christian terms about being saved and converted, you asked no deep questions at all. You did not ask, ‘How did you come to Christ? Tell us your testimony. Did you go through conviction of sin? Did you feel your need of forgiveness of God? Did you trust solely in the substitutionary death of Christ on Calvary as the only way of forgiveness?’ They just stayed on the surface. ‘If any man trust to himself that he is Christ’s.’ And he has probably got in mind the false teachers here. ‘Let him of himself think this again.’ It is not enough to say I am a Christian simply because I think so. What is the evidence? Have you had a new life? Has sin which was your friend become your enemy? Are you fighting the battle for holiness? Are you obeying the Lord? Do you read the Word and pray to him and depend upon him? Are there signs of conversion really there and in you?

Application

When I was newly converted I was in a church in the Baptist Union of churches. Now the Baptist Union went very largely off the rails as far as the truth was concerned many years ago, and only a very small minority of churches actually believed the Bible and the essentials of the faith. The church that I was in believed those things, but they were so wide open that I remember the church secretary when I was a youngster, I remember him giving out a notice, ‘It is the Baptist Union annual assembly and we are sending delegates to the annual assembly of our beloved denomination.’ But their beloved denomination was in theological confusion, and the leaders did not believe in an inspired Bible anymore. They should have been contending for the faith, but people were so lacking in discernment. We had a visiting speaker in a young people’s meeting, and he was utterly unsound. We were talking about this and there was an older lady said to us, ‘Oh, but this cannot possibly be true, after all he was trained in a Baptist Union college.’ Well that was the trouble; that was the seat of liberalism and false teaching, but they were unaware of it. When you read this Corinthian epistle, you can see that history was repeating itself.

I remember as a youngster when I was in National Service being in churches and hearing liberal preachers. They used the right language; they would talk about conversion, and they would use all kinds of evangelical terms, but they did not mean the same things by them. I remember one sound old preacher saying to me, ‘You can always detect a liberal by what he leaves out.’ It is not so much the language he uses; it is what he leaves out; it is what he will not say.

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2 Corinthians 10:7 Commentary and Bible Study