2 Corinthians 8:2 Commentary and Bible Study

This grace benefits others, it embraces others. That is obvious. The collection they made was particularly for Jerusalem. Now Jerusalem which was the mother church – not the headquarters church, I must add. There were no denominations in the early church. There was no episcopal system, with an archbishop and bishops and a pyramidal tiered government down through the local churches. Every church was autonomous and independent before God. So Jerusalem was not the head church, the headquarters, but it was the mother church which in the first place had sent out the missionaries, the teachers. Well, they had been dispersed by persecution and so the entire regions around had received the gospel. In one way it was the church that suffered most. On the Day of Pentecost, May 26 AD 30, the Spirit of God came down, and 3,000 and then 5,000, and then thousands more of Jews were converted to Christ, and their lives were completely changed. They repented of their sin, received a new nature, a new life, and they lived for Christ. But that meant trouble, because the Jewish community at that time in Jerusalem was intensely nationalistic, and if anybody went over to the Christian faith, that person would be ostracised or persecuted. So in Jerusalem there were converted people and they had businesses. Those businesses collapsed overnight, and there were people in extended families, and the unconverted members of the family repudiated them and expelled them from the home. Very many people were homeless and without income and lost their employment with their nationalistic Jewish employers. So there was tremendous poverty.This was also a marvellous proof of the reality of the experience that they had had in being converted and coming to Christ. If it were a shallow or a merely emotional experience, then as soon as the rigours began, the hardship and the ostracisation and the poverty, they would go back to their previous situation because all the persecution, economic persecution was designed to bring that about. But they did not. They held fast to the Lord and their churches went on growing. We read about it in the book of Acts. They had to organise a system of community of goods to provide for the many impoverished people, and this continued with great hardship in Jerusalem. To make matters worse, as the years rolled on there was also famine in that region of Judea, and they were the least well-placed people to stand up to it. Just two years after Pentecost in AD 32, after the apostles had for two years been organising the compassionate ministry, then they were inspired by God to appoint deacons who were to oversee and supervise the giving of relief and compassion.The Macedonians paved the way for this, even though they were in poverty and they had difficulty. ‘How that in a great trial of affliction,’ those persecuted churches of Macedonia managed to get up an offering. ‘The abundance of their joy and their deep poverty abounded unto the riches of the liberality.’ It does not mean it was a huge amount. It was not. But it was riches of liberality to them. Because in the matter of giving God looks upon two things – the proportion, not the amount, and the willingness. That is where the act of worship and commitment is. And they gave as much as they could.