"For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia" (2 Cor. 1:8).
Once Paul completed the first letter to the Corinthians, he sent Titus to deliver it. Having finished his work at Ephesus, he then made his way to Troas and Macedonia—a difficult and dangerous journey. During his travels, Paul remained anxious about the situation at Corinth. He longed to know whether the letter he had written brought them to repentance. The apostle’s sorrow over the conditions at Corinth and his troubles in Macedonia frame the emotional backdrop of the second epistle to Corinth (A.D. 55). But Paul’s spirits were lifted when he met Titus once again in Macedonia and received good news. The church had received his letter properly and had come to repentance, leading them to cast out the incestuous person and to manifest warm affections for the apostle. This news gave Paul great joy and filled his heart with gratitude to God.
However, all was not well in Corinth. The false teachers still brought calumnious charges against Paul and sought to lead the people astray from the true faith. Paul’s anger could not be kept from the pages of this second epistle, and it accounts for the abrupt transitions from one subject to another. On one hand, Paul is overjoyed by the change in the Corinthians, but on the other he is appalled by the actions of the false teachers. “When writing to the Corinthians as a church obedient, affectionate, and penitent, there is no limit to his tenderness and love,” Hodge wrote. “His great desire seems to be to heal the temporary breach which had occurred between them, and to assure his readers that all was forgiven and forgotten, and that his heart was entirely theirs. But when he turns to the wicked, designing corrupters of the truth among them, there is a tone of severity to be found in no other of his writings, not even in his epistle to the Galatians. Erasmus compares this epistle to a river which sometimes flows in a gentle stream, sometimes rushes down as a torrent bearing all before it; sometimes spreading out like a placid lake; sometimes losing itself, as it were, in the sand, and breaking out in its fullness in some unexpected place. Though perhaps the least methodical of Paul’s writings, it is among the most interesting of his letters as bringing out the man before the reader and revealing his intimate relations to the people for whom he labored.”
Skim 2 Corinthians as is directed in the passage for today. Note the various shifts of tone and emotion that weave their way through this letter. How does Paul’s attitude characterize the concern we all should have for Christ’s church? Spend some time praying today that God will prepare your heart for your study of 2 Corinthians.
