2 Corinthians 11:23 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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2 Corinthians 11:23

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These Judaisers. Are they genuine? Are they real ministers? They claim to be apostles, can it be true? What is the difference between them and me, says the apostle in so many words? Well of course, they were not true ministers of Christ, but he is going to run this comparison in which he lists his sufferings. ‘In labours more abundant.’ And the word translated labours means to toil, but it comes from a root which means to cut. It refers to painful toil, sacrificial toil, toil which costs injury, and difficulty, and setback. And the apostle seems to know little else: all his toil is so painful – pioneering in Gentile areas, the Jews against him, the Gentiles against him. In labours, painful, sacrificial toil, more abundant.The Judaisers did not engage in sacrificial toil. Just consider their message: you have got to take up the ceremonies of the Jews; you have got to be a Jewish cult; you have got to append yourself to the Jewish system. Well they were not going to be persecuted by the Jews for a message like that. That was accommodating Christianity to Judaism and subsuming it under Judaism. And among the Gentiles, when they went to Gentile churches such as Corinth, they were not militant as he was. They did not evangelise. They did not stir up the community to hostility. They simply sought to proselytise the converted Gentiles. They did not go beyond that. They lived very well. They took offerings, they helped themselves. So when the apostle says, ‘in labours more abundant,’ it was an understatement. His labours were considerable. Their painful labours were zero.‘In stripes,’ beatings, ‘above measure’. He had been beaten many times. He tells us how many in a moment, but it is not the full total because this letter is relatively early, and there is at least one of these beatings in the book of Acts which falls after this letter, and there were possibly others because he uses this term, ‘stripes above measure’. ‘In prisons more frequent.’ Consider the imprisonments of the apostle Paul – and imprisonment then was a very terrible thing, to be thrown into some kind of a dungeon without any provision. ‘In deaths oft.’ We read in the book of Acts how he was once taken up for dead. It was remarkable that he could stand, and he went on to travel and to preach, even though he was thought to be dead. But it did not happen just that once. How he must have suffered.

Application

I remember a deacon of a church in the UK for which we have prayed, and some years ago they wanted to call a pastor. They listened to a man, they liked his preaching, and the deacons were about to recommend him to the church for the pastorate. Well, then he presented to them his ‘wants’ list. This is what you have to do for me. He wanted a five bedroomed house, he wasn’t married yet, but anyway he wanted a five bedroomed house. He wanted this, he wanted that, he wanted something else. It was a formidable list. They told me this afterwards. And the deacons looked at each other and said, well, I think we have gone off this man. I do not think we will make this recommendation. I do not think we can possibly have this man. They were very wise. That was right.

You look back and you see certain young men who wanted to be pastors but they did not do anything. They were not interested like many others in volunteering to teach the young, Bible classes, Sunday school classes, visiting. They showed no evidence of commitment and zeal and fire, so we could not take them seriously. But eventually they found a seminary who would take them and they went into the ministry. Some of them dropped out in the course of time, not too surprisingly. In the case of others, you could be forgiven for thinking they were embarking on a bit of careerism. They would go from one pulpit to another to get a larger, larger church. And now you look back and you think, that church is terribly compromised, and that brother has presided happily over it all.

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2 Corinthians 11:23 Commentary and Bible Study