INTRO
My maternal grandfather, Papa, was a bit of a trickster and he was always teasing his grandkids and what not. He’d do the little thumb trick where it looks like you’re pulling your thumb off of your opposing hand, or he’d hide something in one of his hands behind his back and you’d have to guess which hand it was in.
Just like the guessing game my grandfather played, you never know what each day holds. It may be the best day ever. However, there are days that we encounter great suffering, difficulty, and heartache.
What do we do on the bad days? How do we help our friends in the midst of suffering? Paul gives us a great look at this in the passage below.
1.3. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort,
- “Mercies and God of all comfort” – these are known and experienced through a personal relationship with Christ, see v. 5.
- “comfort” – 5 x in these verses. 1.3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Gk: parakaleo. Lit. “Helper.”
- God is a God of comfort. Ps 121.1-4 “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.”
- This is not simply a theological, head knowledge. This is a knowledge that flows from personal experience. The word comfort emphasizes God’s ‘concrete intervention.’ Unlike the pagan gods of the day who were largely unconcerned about human suffering, God cares (1 Pt. 5.7). The Bible tells us that God is aware of our suffering and intervenes in our lives in such a way to rescue us.
- “The comfort that Paul has in mind has nothing to do with a languorous feeling of contentment. It is not some tranquilizing dose of grace that only dulls pains but a stiffening agent that fortifies one in heart, mind, and soul. Comfort relates to encouragement, help, exhortation. God’s comfort strengthens weak knees and sustains sagging spirits so that one faces the troubles of life with unbending resolve and unending assurance.” – David E. Garland, 2 Corinthians, vol. 29, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1999), 60.
- But why? Why allow us to go through suffering? “We know God’s promises best when we are in direct need of them (Garland). We come to see God as sufficient to overcome the sorrow of suffering.
4. who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.
- “Affliction” – 3 x in these verses. 1.4, 6, 8. Gk: thlipsis; thibo. The word can refer to external or internal distress.
- Concerning affliction. Consider the following:
- Suffering, though it varies to degree, is shared among all creation. Mat. 5.45 – “For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” Suffering is universal to humanity. Ja. 1.2 – “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials…” Suffering may enter our life for a myriad of reasons, It isn’t always divine punishment, sometimes it is divine intervention, even divine opportunity. 9 As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. John 9.2, 3 – “And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.” Sometimes, suffering enters our lives simply because we live in a sinful world. All of creation is broken from sin and we live in a far from perfect place.
- Faithfully following Jesus Christ does not make us immune from suffering. Psalm 34.19 – A righteous man may have many troubles, but the Lord delivers him from them all.
- “Who comforts us in all our affliction” – He may not necessarily remove the affliction, the thorn in the flesh, as Paul will write later in this book, but he will bring comfort. This was not a theological concept for Paul, but something he experienced over and over again in his life. He learned it from experience, from walking with God (11.24-29).
5. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.
- “Suffering” – 3 x in these verses. 1.5, 6, 7. Gk: pathema.
- Suffering reveals our weaknesses and God’s strength.
6. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer.
7. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.
8. For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself.
- “Utterly burdened beyond our strength” – many have used the phrase, in a well meaning way that ‘God would never put more on us than we can handle.’ This isn’t entirely true. Paul argues that what they went through was far above anything they could deal with.
9. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.
- The Corinthians have not adjusted their eyes to be able to see what is still invisible (5:7). They have fixed their eyes instead on the wrong things, on temporary realities.
- ILL: My First Eye Exam. Several years ago I busted a blood vessel in my eye and it was evidently gross enough that Allison demanded I go and see Dr. Frank, an optometrist in our church in MS. After agreeing that it was just a busted vessel and that I wasn’t going blind, he asked me if I’d ever had an eye exam. I responded negatively and thought I could see fine. When he put my head in the little eye thing, I couldn’t see the first letter. When we encounter suffering, our first inclination is to look no further than ourselves, but it’s important that we put on our ‘God glasses’ to get a look at what’s really going on.
- The same power that raised Christ from the dead is available to comfort us in our pain.
10. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.
11. You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.