Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of 2 Corinthians 4:17
For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding [and] eternal weight of glory;
17. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment ] Literally, For the momentary lightness of our affliction. The argument is advanced another step. Not only have we this inner fount of strength and consolation, but we know that it is eternal, while our afflictions endure but for a moment. Cf. Rom 8:18.
worketh for us ] Literally, worketh out, bringeth to perfection. The precise opposite of the word translated ‘brought to nought,’ ‘done away.’ See ch. 2Co 3:7.
a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory] Over measure an everlasting birthun into higness of glorie, Wiclif. Literally, a weight of glory in excess and unto excess: the whole passage denoting that the glory to come exceeds the power of words to tell. The Vulgate renders ‘supra modum in sublimitate.’ Alford, ‘in a surpassing and still more surpassing manner.’ The old English versions, including the A. V., follow Tyndale here. An expression very closely approaching to this is the usual one in Hebrew for anything immeasurably great, as for instance, in the original of Gen 7:19. The word glory in Hebrew is derived from the original idea of weight. It is possible that this connection of ideas may have influenced St Paul in the choice of this expression.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
For our light affliction – This verse, with the following, is designed to show further the sources of consolation and support which Paul and his fellow-laborers had in their many trials. Bloomfield remarks on this passage, that in energy and beauty of expression, it is little inferior to any in Demosthenes himself, to whom, indeed, and to Thucydides in his orations, the style of the apostle, when it rises to the oratorical, bears no slight resemblance. The passage abounds with intensive and emphatic expressions, and manifests that the mind of the writer was laboring to convey ideas which language, even after all the energy of expression which he could command, would very imperfectly communicate. The trials which Paul endured, to many persons would have seemed to be anything else but light. They consisted of want, and danger, and contempt, and stoning, and toil, and weariness, and the scorn of the world, and constant exposure to death by land or by sea; see 2Co 4:7-10, compare 2Co 11:23-27. Yet these trials, though continued through many years, and constituting, as it were, his very life, he speaks of as the lightest conceivable thing when compared with that eternal glory which awaited him. He strives to get an expression as emphatic as possible, to show that in his estimation they were not worthy to be named in comparison with the eternal weight of glory. It is not sufficient to say that the affliction was light or was a mere trifle; but he says that it was to endure but for a moment. Though trials had followed him ever since he began to make known the Redeemer, and though he had the firmest expectation that they would follow him to the end of life and everywhere Act 20:23, yet all this was a momentary trifle compared with the eternal glory before him. The word rendered light ( elaphron) means that which is easy to bear, and is usually applied to a burden; see Mat 11:30, compare 2Co 1:17.
Which is but for a moment – The Greek word used here ( parautika) occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. It is an adverb, from autika, autos, and means properly, at this very instant; immediately. Here it seems to qualify the word light, and to be used in the sense of momentary, transient. Bloomfield renders it, for the at present lightness of our affliction. Doddridge, for this momentary lightness of our affliction, which passes off so fast, and leaves so little impression that it may be called levity itself. The apostle evidently wished to express two ideas in as emphatic a manner as possible; first, that the affliction was light, and, secondly, that it was transient, momentary, and soon passing away. His object is to contrast this with the glory that awaited him, as being heavy, and as being also eternal.
Worketh for us – see the note, 2Co 4:12. Will produce, will result in. The effect of these afflictions is to produce eternal glory. This they do:
- By their tendency to wean us from the world;
- To purify the heart, by enabling us to break off from the sins on account of which God afflicts us;
- By disposing us to look to God for consolation and support in our trials;
- By inducing us to contemplate the glories of the heavenly world, and thus winning us to seek heaven as our home; and,
- Because God has graciously promised to reward his people in heaven as the result of their bearing trials in this life.
It is by affliction that he purifies them Isa 48:10; and by trial that he takes their affections from the objects of time and sense, and gives them a relish for the enjoyments which result from the prospect of perfect and eternal glory.
A far more exceeding – kath’ huperbolen eis huperbolen. There is not to be found any where a more energetic expression than this. The word ( huperbole), used here (whence our word hyperbole) means properly a throwing, casting, or throwing beyond. In the New Testament it means excess, excellence, eminence; see 2Co 4:7. The excellency of the power. The phrase kath’ huperbolen means exceedingly, supereminently, Rom 7:13; 1Co 12:31; 2Co 1:8; Gal 1:13. This expression would have been by itself intensive in a high degree. But this was not sufficient to express Pauls sense of the glory which was laid up for Christians. It was not enough for him to use the ordinary highest expression for the superlative to denote the value of the object in his eye. He therefore coins an expression, and adds eis huperbolen. It is not merely eminent; but it is eminent unto eminence; excess unto excess; a hyperbole unto hyperbole – one hyperbole heaped upon another; and the expression means that it is exceeding exceedingly glorious; glorious in the highest possible degree – Robinson. Mr. Slade renders it, infinitely exceeding. The expression is the Hebrew form of denoting the highest superlative; and it means that all hyperboles fail of expressing that eternal glory which remains for the just. It is infinite and boundless. You may pass from one degree to another; from one sublime height to another; but still an infinity remains beyond. Nothing can describe the uppermost height of that glory; nothing can express its infinitude.
Eternal – This stands in contrast with the affliction that is for a moment ( parautika). The one is momentary, transient; so short, even in the longest life, that it may be said to be an instant; the other has no limits to its duration. It is literally everlasting.
Weight – (baros). This stands opposed to the ( elaphron) light affliction. That was so light that it was a trifle. It was easily borne. It was like the most light and airy objects, which constitute no burden. It is not even here called a burden, or said to be heavy in any degree. This is so heavy as to be a burden. Grotins thinks that the image is taken from gold or silver articles, that are solid and heavy, compared with those that are mixed or plated. But why may it not refer to the insignia of glory and honor; a robe heavy with gold, or a diadem or crown, heavy with gold or diamonds: glory so rich, so profuse as to be heavy? The affliction was light; but the crown, the robe, the adornings in the glorious world were not trifles, or baubles, but solid, substantial, weighty. We apply the word weighty now to that which is valuable and important, compared with that which is of no value, probably because the precious metals and jewels are heavy; and it is by them that we usually estimate the value of objects.
Of glory – ( doxes). The Hebrew word kabowd denotes weight as well as glory. And perhaps Paul had that use of the word in his eye in this strong expression. It refers here to the splendor, magnificence, honor, and happiness of the eternal world. In this exceedingly interesting passage, which is worthy of the deepest study of Christians, Paul has set in most beautiful and emphatic contrast the trials of this life and the glories of heaven. It may be profitable to contemplate at a single glance the view which he had of them, that they may be brought distinctly before the mind.
The one is:
- Affliction, thlipsis.
- Light, elaphron.
- For a moment, parautika.
The other is, by contrast,
- Glory, doxa.
- Weight, baros.
- Eternal, aionion.
- Eminent, or excellent, kath’ huperbolen.
- Infinitely excellent, eminent in the highest degree, eis huperbolen .
So the account stands in the view of Paul; and with this balance in favor of the eternal glory, he regarded afflictions as mere trifles, and made it the grand purpose of his life to gain the glory of the heavens. What wise man, looking at the account, would not do likewise?
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
2Co 4:17-18
For our light affliction.
., worketh for us a weight of glory.
Light affliction and eternal glory
I. A few preliminary observations upon affliction.
1. There are afflictions which are common to humanity. Disease and death (Gen 3:17-19).
2. There are afflictions which are of a self-procured character. We can no more sin with impunity against physical laws than we can against moral laws.
3. There are afflictions which are of Divine appointment.
4. Afflictions are not meritorious. They cannot make atonement for sin, nor regenerate our nature.
5. Afflictions in themselves, abstractly considered, are heavy, but light when compared with those of others.
II. Let us ponder our afflictions. They are light–
1. When compared with the demerit of our sins.
2. When compared with those of our forefathers. The saints have had to suffer hunger, thirst, nakedness, fire, faggot, sword, imprisonment, and death (Heb 11:1-40.).
3. When compared with those of Christ.
4. When compared with the weight of glory referred to in the text.
5. Being but for a moment when compared with the eternity of glory.
6. When compared with the exceeding greatness and infinite excellence of the glory.
III. Consider the beneficial and gracious tendency of our afflictions. All trials, whether personal, relative, or national, may be regarded in the light of a gracious discipline. The tendency of affliction in the saint is–
1. The development and maturity of moral purity. There is much about him which needs correction and refinement. Afflictions operate as fire upon metal (Heb 12:5; Heb 12:11; Jam 1:2-4; Jam 1:12).
2. The development and exhibition of principle and character. It is possible for a man not to know his own real character and strength of principle, till cast upon his own resources. What a living embodiment of magnanimity, self-denial, goodness, and moral sublimity in the lives and deaths of many of the people of God!
3. To test the truthfulness of our Christianity and exhibit its character before the world.
4. The exercise and perfection of our faith. Faith is a principle which is strengthened by exercise. In trials faith finds ample scope for action (Heb 11:1-40.).
IV. The future glory of the saint is–
I. Substantial. The word weight gives us the idea of ponderousness. The Greek word doxa and the Hebrew word kabhodh mean an opinion, doctrine; and then praise, dignity, splendour, and perfection. The words are applied to the visible manifestations of the Divine Being. Heaven is spoken of as a most glorious locality. It is compared to a house eternal in the heavens, a mansion, an inheritance incorruptible, a great city, and a prepared kingdom. There will be perfect correspondence betwixt the resurrection body of the saint and heaven as an abode (1Co 15:39-58; Php 3:20-21; 1Jn 3:2). Glory embraces also the perfection of the soul. We shall be perfect in body and in mind. Enjoyments and employments will be all complete.
2. Ever-enduring. The perpetuity of bliss is bliss.
3. Ever-increasing. Progress is as essential to mans nature as gravitation to the universe, and light and heat to the sun. (C. Briggs.)
The work of affliction
1. The text contains, a repetition of , which is generally used when a person in any excited manner oversteps the truth. What the apostle means, therefore, is that no proportion whatever can be instituted between present affliction and future glory.
2. Now, there is much in Gods dealings with our race which seems hopelessly intricate, and we satisfy ourselves by referring to the disclosures of another world when, evolving order from confusion, God shall vindicate His proceedings on the broad stage of the judgment. But while in the main this course may be correct, we must take heed that we do not refuse to be wise up to what is revealed. It would be a great clue for us, in the labyrinth of Providence, if we were to regard all that takes place in the body as preparatory to the dispensation of another state: e.g., we ought to be able to show that all which a righteous man suffers goes to heighten and multiply his future enjoyments; so that each sorrow shall not only be counterbalanced, but shall be distinctly preliminary to some portion of happiness. The apostle speaks of the affliction as working out for us glory. There is a vast deal more asserted than the mere succeeding of glory to affliction; there is the connection of cause and effect; the present and the future are so linked, that the two may be surveyed as parts of the same dispensation.
I. In what sense can it be true that affliction worketh for us glory?
1. It cannot be that suffering in this present life is to be accounted a make-weight for punishment in the next. We have heard persons express a hope that they should endure all their pains on this side the grave, as though pain had a power of making compensation for sin. No doubt pain is the consequence and punishment of sin; but it is evident that the future and not the present is the time at which Gods threatenings are especially to take effect. And if present suffering do not pass instead of future, much less can it procure for us favour and enjoyment. The splendours of eternity are too rare and costly to be procured out of the anguish of the sinful.
2. But if affliction do not procure for us glory through any inherent merit, it must have a working power; it must be because of the discipline which affliction exerts. Whatever was required for the pardon of our sins, was wrought out for us by our Surety. Nothing more is needed in order to our being freely forgiven and graciously received. But while all this has been done for us, there is something which remains to be done in us. This is what Scripture calls the being made meet for the inheritance of the saints in light. It were comparatively but little worth that we should be admitted into Gods presence, if there were no change rendering us capable of enjoying what is celestial and pure. To effect this work is the orifice of affliction. When you have admitted the need of refining, you must expect that the furnace of affliction will be placed in the pathway of the Christian.
3. Our text goes further. Not merely is affliction preparatory to glory, but that glory is to be increased by affliction. One Christian is evidently much more tried than another. The meekest and most devoted are often most so. Therefore we conclude that affliction produces different degrees of fitness, and that with these different degrees of fitness are proportioned different degrees of blessedness in the scale of future rewards. Upon this supposition, but on no other, that as one star differeth from another star in glory, so does one saint in heaven differ from another–can full force be ascribed to the language of our text.
II. The notices of the invisible world which we may extract from the passage.
1. That there shall be different degrees in the happiness of the saints in heaven. The dispositions and faculties of our fellow-men are almost infinitely various. If this variety did not exist a dull monotony would be introduced. Yes, religious men are cast in great varieties of mould. The lines of distinction are strongly marked between Peter and James and Paul. So one apostle was fitted for engaging in enterprises which would not have suited another. And so with all. There are no two Christians who are quite alike as Christians. One is remarkable for his humility, another for his love, a third for his faith, and a fourth for his zeal. And God places each Christian just where there is scope for his particular gifts. If there were no difference amongst Christians, the Church would lose its beauty and power. Is it, then, to be for a moment imagined that heaven alone should not consist of this wonderful diversity? Shall death produce over the whole face of humankind that uniformity against which God has now marvellously provided? This does not interfere in the remotest degree with the perfection of the happiness of every justified saint. That being is perfectly happy who has just as much happiness as he is capable of enjoying. And besides these arguments from analogy, you find in Scripture abundant reason for the opinion, that in hell the quantity of misery is not the same to all, and that in heaven the quantity of happiness is not the same to all. By being enormous in guilt, we may increase the capacity for pain; and by being eminent in piety, we may increase the capacity for pleasure. We should conclude indeed rashly if we should set down a believer more than ordinarily tried as designed for one of the highest places in heaven: for we cannot tell what training we may require for the lowest place in heaven. But putting together the simple propositions, that there are degrees of happiness above, and that affliction is one of the chief modes by which God prepares man for happiness, it follows that the sufferings we endure may have an effect in fitting us for a loftier throne, a richer crown, a nobler heritage; and thus may the apostles words most literally come true.
2. There is much material for thought in the hint that affliction at the most is light, and at the longest but for a moment. Now we can hardly expect that such verdicts will be assented to while we are on earth. The soul must be in glory before they can be pronounced with a deep feeling of their truth.
3. Observe, in order to the obtaining a better glimpse of things within the veil, that the aim of the creature has always been independence, and one great object of Gods dealings with our race has been to prove the nothingness of the creature, by placing him in a variety of estates, in none of which he is able to sustain himself. And we may well believe that the lesson thus painfully and woefully taught shall be continually in the view of the glorified multitude. Shall they not be conscious that Christ not only brought them to glory, but that Christ also supports them in glory? We find an intimation of this in a weight of glory. The Greek word is always used of something massive and hard to be borne; and it seems implied that the glory itself will be so ponderous, that the saints need help in sustaining it. In other words, they will be no more able to do without Christ in wearing their crown, than they could do without Christ in winning their crown. (H. Melvill, B. D.)
How we ought to view our afflictions
Consider–
I. The manner in which the apostle teaches Christians to view their afflictions.
1. We are apt to magnify our troubles rather than to diminish them. In the human mind there is a strong aversion to trouble of any kind. It is indeed true that affliction, in itself, is not agreeable. Now no affliction for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous. But here the apostle makes it out to be a very insignificant thing. You think it heavy–a burden greater than you can bear, but the apostle says that it is light. And, besides, you think the time of your affliction long, however short it may be, and anxiously desire its removal; but the apostle wishes you to view it even as momentary. But Paul is here speaking comparatively. His eye was full of an exceeding weight of glory which language could not express; in comparison to that his affliction was levity itself, and by faith he saw the eternity of that glory, and then it seemed contracted into a point that was invisible.
2. You cannot feel sympathy with the apostle, in this exalted view of affliction, if you remain on the low ground of this world, where you are involved in darkness. You must aspire to attain the height of the subject. You must endeavour, in some measure, to comprehend the glory to be revealed.
II. The influence of affliction in preparing Christians for future glory. Worketh for us. Affliction is part of the discipline of the covenant of grace; and it worketh the peaceable fruit of righteousness in all who are properly exercised under it.
1. Afflictions work in Christians a meetness or suitableness for glory. Naturally they are unprepared, and corruption is strong within them. But afflictions weaken the power of corruption. The mind of the Christian may be unduly set upon worldly objects. These are removed, and then the Christian seeks his enjoyment in God, and raises his mind to heaven.
2. In proportion to the extent of the affliction of Christians will be their future glory. All that you can do or suffer for Christ, in itself, is without merit, but yet it will be rewarded.
III. What this glory is. Who can describe the greatness of things eternal? We can only judge from what we see; and it must be confessed that in the visible universe there is much that impresses us with the greatness and the power of God. But we must beware of losing ourselves in generalities. We are not destitute of definite ideas on which to fix our minds.
1. This is an exceeding weight of glory; it will, in its very nature, be substantial, weighty, solid. Now this forms a striking contrast to the objects of the world, even the weightiest and most important of them. But men consider wealth weighty. It is, however, all a mistake, for riches make to themselves wings. All the riches of this world are, in comparison, less than nothing and vanity.
2. This is such a weight of glory that Christians could not sustain it if they were not prepared and strengthened by Omnipotence to do it. Even in the world men are not always able to sustain their circumstances. Some sink under the load of affliction, prosperity. Now to bear up under this weight of glory it is necessary that the soul of the Christian should be absolutely perfect, completely delivered from sin; and at the last day, when there will be a vast accession to the glory, a body fashioned like unto Christs will be necessary: thus the soul and body of the Christian will not only be adapted to each other, but they will also be adapted to the glory which is to be bestowed upon them. At the present time you could not bear this glory.
3. And what will it be? It will be all the fulness of the Deity–all the glory of God in Christ.
(1) You will be blessed with all knowledge; all mysteries, in nature, providence, and grace, will shine out clearly in your view.
(2) Immense dignity will be conferred upon us; in the presence of the greatest spirits you will be honoured by God Himself, and will be exalted to sit on the throne of Christ.
(3) Your happiness will be complete; you will experience the fulness of joy.
(4) Add to all, it will be eternal, unlike the glories of the world, which are evanescent. Now, with this prospect, will not Christians welcome all their affliction? (T. Swan.)
Affliction and its issues
In the words there is an elegant antithesis of our future estate to our present. In our future glory there is–
1. Solidity and excellency. Glory is called a weight, because the same word, chabod, which signifieth a weight, signifieth also glory, and weight addeth to the value of gold and precious things. All words are too weak to express heavens happiness, and therefore he heapeth expression upon expression.
2. Eternity. This is opposed to the momentariness of our affliction. Both properties suit with Gods infiniteness and eternity. In the other world God will give like Himself. See how the apostle doth–
I. Lessen the afflictions of our present condition, that we may not faint under them.
1. The evil expressed, our affliction. God will have all tried, and the most eminent most tried (Rev 7:14). Christ Himself was made low before He was exalted. And the members follow the head by a conformity of suffering (Act 14:22).
2. The evil lessened. The highest comfort which philosophy could afford was, that if afflictions were great, they were short; if long, light; meaning thereby, that if their afflictions were grievous, they would shorten their lives; if of long continuance, by bearing they learned the better to bear. But here both light and short, too, in respect of our glorious reward, which being infinite, maketh them light, and being eternal, makes them short.
(1) Our affliction is light, not in itself but–
(a) Comparatively, in respect of the excellency and infiniteness of the heavenly glory (Rom 8:18). The trouble is nothing to the recompense, nor the cross to the crown.
(b) Copulatively. Though affliction be not light in itself, yet by the strong support and comfort of the Spirit, God maketh it light and easy to us.
To a strong back a burden is light which crusheth the weak and faint; a man well clad may without great annoyance bear the cold of winter, which pincheth the naked (2Co 1:5; Rom 8:37). Now there is a more liberal allowance of these comforts and supports to Gods suffering servants than to those who live at ease (1Pe 4:14).
(2) It is short as well as light. If they should last for our whole lives, they are but momentary compared with eternity.
(3) To make this more evident, let us consider how the afflictions of Gods people are long and short.
(a) Concerning their length. They seem long to those that reckon by time and not by eternity. The longest time to eternity is nothing (Psa 90:4). They seem long because of the impatiency of the flesh. We love our own ease, and therefore affliction soon groweth irksome. An hour seemeth a day, and a day a week. Winter nights seem long in the passing.
(b) For their shortness; they seem short, partly because they are not so long as they might be in regard of the enemies rage (Zec 1:15).
Satan and wicked men know no bounds. Partly they are not so long as we deserve. The evil of one sin cannot be expiated in a thousand years; but God in the midst of judgment remembereth mercy (Hab 3:2). Partly they are not so long as they might be in regard of second causes and probabilities (Hab 3:2). Partly because faith will not count it long; for to the eye of faith things future and afar off are as present (Heb 11:1). Partly because love will not count it long (Gen 29:20). If we had any love to Christ, we would be willing to suffer a little while for His sake. But chiefly in regard of our eternal reward and blessedness; so it is a light affliction, that is but for a moment, like a rainy day to an everlasting sunshine.
II. Greater heavenly things. They are set forth by unwonted forms of speech, but such as you may observe an exact opposition of our happiness to our misery.
1. Affliction and glory. In our calamities we are depressed and put to shame, but whatever honour we lose in this mortal life shall be abundantly recompensed in heaven.
(1) Are you pained with sickness and weariness of the flesh? In heaven we shall have everlasting ease (Heb 4:9).
(2) Are you cast out by man? There you are received by the Lord (1Th 4:17).
(3) Have you lost the love of all men for your faithfulness? You shall everlastingly enjoy the love of God (Rom 8:39).
(4) Are you reproached, calumniated in the world? Then your faith shall be found to praise, glory, and honour (1Pe 1:7).
(5) Are you cast into prison? You will shortly be in our Fathers house (Joh 14:2)
(6) Are you reduced to sordid poverty? There you read of the riches of the glory of the inheritance of the saints in light (Eph 2:18).
(7) Have you lost children for Christ? They shall not come to you, but you shall-go to them.
(8) Must you die, and the guest be turned out of the old house? You do but leave a shed to live in a palace (2Co 5:1). If you are forced out by the violence of man, the sword is but the key to open heavens doors for you.
2. A far more exceeding weight of glory and light affliction. Things excellent we count weighty; small, light (1Jn 3:2).
3. This glory is eternal, in opposition to our momentary affliction. If we desire to prolong this life, which is obnoxious to divers calamities, how much more should that life affect us which shall be fully happy and never have end?
III. Show how the one is the fruit of the other. (T. Manton, D. D.)
Sanctified affliction, its tendency and result
Consider–
I. The manner in which affliction is to be estimated by the Christian believer. It signifies something that beats down, presses sore, and is in itself grievous and tormenting. The forms of human trial are like the lineaments of the human countenance, boundlessly diversified.
II. The beneficial tendency of affliction. The present state of man is not his ultimate condition, nor is this world his final home. While on earth his state is not only one of probation, but also of discipline and–
1. It is designed to correct and reclaim. There is in the heart of man a natural proneness to wander from God. In vain, perhaps, have been the attempts of other agencies to win the thoughtless wanderer. It is in mercy, therefore, rather than in anger, that he is smitten with affliction, that he may return to God.
2. The grace of God beats the spears of affliction into pruning-hooks, to them that are in Christ.
3. In affliction there is something which exerts a subduing influence upon the mind. It prostrates pride, subdues self, disenchants creation of its bright and fleeting colours. It is often the means of bringing the will of the Christian into a more entire subjection to the will of God.
4. It has a tendency to purify, refine, and elevate the Christian character. The trial of faith is said to be more precious than that of gold.
III. The glory for which the Christian believer is prepared by sanctified affliction.
1. The final issue of sanctified affliction will be a higher position, greater felicity, more glory in the heavenly state. The Christian would have had glory without it, but he will have more by reason of it.
2. This glory will be eternal in its duration. The highest enjoyments this world can afford are short-lived. Life itself is short. The fashion of this world passeth away. But the glory of heaven will endure for ever.
3. This glory is further spoken of under the idea of weight.
Conclusion: The design of God, in afflictions, being to prepare us for a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, let us devoutly strive to improve them.
1. By deep humility and self-abasement. When the soul is truly humbled before God, His Spirit lifts it up, and lets in upon the feelings the genial light and warmth of the Sun of righteousness.
2. By a renewed consecration of ourselves to God. (J. Lambert.)
The world of glory
I. The celestial state will impart exalted and perfect felicity to those who shall enjoy it. It will be a state of–
1. Unsullied and absolute holiness. Mourning, as now you do, over your waywardness and sinfulness, how must you exult in the prospect of being made meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light!
2. Vast intellectual illumination (1Co 13:9-12). As to the objects of celestial knowledge, we may believe them to be the Divine character and perfections; the reasons of providential government, the counsels of grace; the breadths, and lengths, and depths, and heights of the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, etc. As holiness is our moral glory, attainment of such knowledge, will be our intellectual glory, both being associated with happiness which is incomparable and supreme. The tree of knowledge, there will hide no serpent in its foliage, and instil no poison with its fruit. It shall be the tree of life, as well as the tree of knowledge, and there shall not be a leaf that adorns it, or a cluster that enriches it, that will not be found redolent with rapture, and that can decay or die. Ye who love and long for knowledge, endeavour to find your sphere in heaven; and while now, at the best, you can but collect the fragments and the crumbs, be it your high ambition to pant always for the full banquet of intelligence in immortality.
3. Delightful communion. A vast proportion of the enjoyments of the present life arises from intercourse; the more refined that intercourse, the more delightful it is; and the delights of intercourse will be found perfected amidst the purity and the expanded illumination of the skies. If man be permitted to enjoy fellowship with God, while still he bears the remains of his sinfulness, much more will he possess that fellowship when all his impurities shall be removed, and when he shall exist perfectly in the image of his God. Intercourse with God is the very life of heaven; and were that intercourse to be withdrawn, the light would wane, and the glory would be shrouded, and the music would be hushed, and the bliss would die, and the reward would be transformed into wretchedness.
4. Active and devoted employment. The rest of heaven is not synonymous with indolence; it is rest merely from corporeal languor, pain and disease, mental sorrow and foreboding. But this rest is not incompatible with employment. As Luther said, God requires servants in heaven as well as on earth. Worship, in presenting the expressions of adoration and of praise; study, in the contemplation of the grand themes of knowledge; and active employment, in promoting the high behests, which probably will be multiplied upon us by the vastness of our capacities and by the deathlessness of our existence.
5. Permanent and imperishable duration. Heaven bears over its golden portals the inscription, There shall be no more death. You read of heaven as a substance; it is a better and enduring substance. As a kingdom, it is an everlasting kingdom. As an inheritance, it is an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away. There is nought in that world of glory, which is not for ever and for ever.
II. The contemplation of the celestial state ought to produce powerful influences and effects, while we are existing in the present life.
1. We ought to embrace the one appointed method, by which alone the enjoyment of the heavenly state is to be secured. Do any of you ask what is the way to heaven? By the Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ.
2. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, if you would be saved. Bear with fortitude, in the prospect of that celestial state, the various difficulties and sorrows of the present life. In the context you see how the fortitude of the apostle and of his companions was secured by the prospect of the future.
3. There ought also to be a constant anticipation of the period when the celestial state shall be entered by ourselves. Conclusion: Let me remind you there is no middle state, no compromise between a destiny of splendour and a destiny of darkness and despair. (J. Parsons.)
Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell
Verse 17. For our light affliction, c.] Mr. Blackwall, in his sacred classics, has well illustrated this passage. I shall here produce his paraphrase as quoted by Dr. Dodd: “This is one of the most emphatic passages in all St. Paul’s writings, in which he speaks as much like an orator as he does as an apostle. The lightness of the trial is expressed by , the lightness of our affliction as if he had said, it is even levity itself in such a comparison. On the other hand, the ‘ , which we render far more exceeding, is infinitely emphatical, and cannot be fully expressed by any translation. It signifies that all hyperboles fall short of describing that weight-eternal glory, so solid and lasting, that you may pass from hyperbole to hyperbole, and yet, when you have gained the last, are infinitely below it. It is every where visible what influence St. Paul’s Hebrew had on his Greek: cabad, signifies to be heavy, and to be glorious; the apostle in his Greek unites these two significations, and says, WEIGHT of GLORY.”
St. Chrysostom’s observations on these words are in his very best manner, and are both judicious and beautiful:
, ‘ , , , ‘ – , .
“The apostle opposes things present to things future; a moment to eternity; lightness to weight; affliction to glory. Nor is he satisfied with this, but he adds another word, and doubles it, saying, ‘ . This is a magnitude excessively exceeding.” See Parkhurst, sub voce .
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
The apostle in these words wonderfully lesseneth his own, and the rest of the apostles, and all other Christians sufferings for the gospel: he calleth them
light, not that they were so in themselves, but with respect to that
weight of glory which he mentioneth in the latter part of the verse: he calleth them momentary,
but for a moment, with reference to that eternity which is mentioned. The afflictions are light, the glory will be a weight; the afflictions are but for a moment, the glory shall be eternal. And (saith the apostle) our affliction worketh for us this glory: the glory will not only be a consequent of these afflictions, but these afflictions will be a cause of it; not a meritorious cause, (for what proportion is there between momentary afflictions and eternal glory? Between light afflictions and a weight of glory, an exceeding weight of glory?) But a cause in respect of the infinite goodness and mercy of God, and in respect of the truth and faithfulness of God.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
17. which is but for a moment“OurPRESENT light (burden of)affliction” (so the Greek; compare Mt11:30), [ALFORD].Compare “now for a season . . . in heaviness” (1Pe1:6). The contrast, however, between this and the “ETERNALweight of glory” requires, I think, the translation, “Whichis but for the present passing moment.” So WAHL.”The lightness of affliction” (he does not express“burden” after “light”; the Greek is “thelight of affliction”) contrasts beautifully with the “weightof the glory.”
workethrather,”worketh out.”
a far more exceeding andrather, “in a surpassing and still more surpassingmanner” [ALFORD];”more and more exceedingly” [ELLICOTT,TRENCH, and others].Greek, “in excess and to excess.” The glory exceedsbeyond all measure the affliction.
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
For our light affliction,…. The difference between the present and future state of the saints is here expressed, the disparity between them shown, and the influence the one has upon the other. The present state is a state of “affliction”. Affliction is the common lot of the children of men, but more especially of the children of God, and is here designed by “our” affliction; for these, besides their soul trouble, meet with such in the world, and from the men of it, others do not. Afflictions are appointed for them by their heavenly Father; provision is made for them, and support under them, in the covenant of grace; they are Christ’s legacy to them, and by which they are conformed to him; they are always for their good, spiritual and eternal; and lie in their way to heaven, through which they must pass into the kingdom: now these their outward afflictions which are here meant, lie chiefly in the meanness of their outward circumstances; in poverty and distress, in disgrace, reproaches, and persecutions for their profession of Christ, and his truths: and in opposition to this their mean and despicable condition in the eyes of the world, their future state is signified by “glory”, as it often is in the word of God; and is of such a nature, that all the glories of this world, such as kingdoms, crowns, inheritances, possessions, riches, honour, and substance of every kind and degree, by all which the heavenly state is expressed, are but faint resemblances of it: it is the same glory Christ has entered into, is possessed of for, and will give to all his people; it will chiefly lie in communion with Father, Son, and Spirit, with angels, and one another; there will be a visible glory upon the bodies of the saints, which will be fashioned like to the glorious body of Christ; and their souls will be blessed with perfect knowledge and holiness. Their affliction is represented as “light” which though it is not in itself, but often very grievous and heavy to be borne, especially when any soul trouble is added to it; yet is light, when the saint is supported by the arm of the Lord, indulged with his presence, and favoured with the discoveries of his love. The afflictions of God’s people are light, when compared with their deserts, with the sufferings of Christ, the torments of the damned in hell, and the joys of heaven, which are here, by way of opposition thereunto, styled a “weight of glory”. The apostle has respect to the Hebrew word , which signifies both “weight” and “glory”, and is often used for riches, honour, and whatsoever is excellent, solid, and substantial: and here the phrase designs the weighty riches of glory, that massy crown of glory which fadeth not away, that bulky and more enduring substance, which Christ will cause them that love him to inherit. Again, the afflictions of the children of God are said to be
for a moment; they are but for a while, and that a little while; at most they are but for the present time of life, and that is but as a vapour which appears for a little while, and then vanishes away; it is but as a moment, a point of time, in comparison of eternity: but the glory the saints are chosen and called unto, that weight of it which shall be put upon them is “eternal”, it will last for ever; it will know no end: hence it is called an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, an everlasting kingdom, everlasting habitations, an incorruptible inheritance, and a crown of glory that fadeth not away. Now the present affliction of the people of God has a considerable influence upon this; it is said here, that it
worketh for us this glory. The Jews y introduce God speaking words much like these.
“Saith the holy blessed God, I have sent them chastisements in this world, , “to strengthen their arms for”, or that their arms may lay hold upon the world to come.”
Now afflictions may be said to work eternal glory for the saints, not by way of merit, for they are not worthy to be compared with the glory to be revealed; there is no proportion between them; besides, the heavenly kingdom and glory was prepared from the foundation of the world, and is a free grace gift of their heavenly Father; but they work as means of enjoying it, as the word and ordinances do; the Spirit of God makes use of them, as of the other, to work up the saints for that selfsame thing, glory: these are means of trying, exercising, and improving their graces, of weaning their hearts from this world, and drawing out their desires, hope, and expectation of another; they are the way in which believers walk to glory, and which it last issue and terminate in it; glory follows upon them, though it is not for them.
y R. Moses Kotsensis Mitzvot Torah, praecept. affirm. 17.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
Our light affliction which is for the moment ( ). Literally, “the for the moment (old adverb , here only in N.T.) lightness (old word, in N.T. only here and Mt 11:30).”
More and more exceedingly (‘ ). Like piling Pelion on Ossa, “according to excess unto excess.” See on 1Co 12:31.
Eternal weight of glory ( ). Careful balancing of words in contrast (affliction vs. glory, lightness vs. weight, for the moment vs. eternal).
Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament
Our light affliction which is but for a moment [ ] . Lit., the present light (burden) of our affliction.
Worketh [] . Works out : achieves.
A far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory [ ] . Rev., more and more exceedingly an eternal weight, etc. An expression after the form of Hebrew superlatives, in which the emphatic word is twice repeated. Lit., exceedingly unto excess. The use of such cumulative expressions is common with Paul. See, for example, Phi 1:23, lit., much more better; Rom 8:37, abundantly the conquerors; Eph 3:20, exceeding abundantly, etc. Note how the words are offset : for a moment, eternal; light, weight; affliction, glory.
Fuente: Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament
1) “For our light affliction,” (to gar elaphron tes thlipseos) For the light affliction, tribulation, trouble,” the persecutions we face and burdens we bear for Christ, Mat 5:12; Rom 8:18 – Light in degree and duration.
2) “Which is but for a moment,” (parautika) present,” temporary, which is for a moment,” in comparision with the weighty troubles of the unsaved in hell forever. 1Pe 1:6; 1Pe 5:10; Mat 5:11-12.
3) “Worketh for us,” (katergazetai hemon) “works for us,” actively, progressively, by keeping us near God on whom we may cast our cares and find relief, 1Pe 5:7; Psa 37:5.
4) “A far more exceeding,” (kath’ huperbolen eis huperbolen) “Excessively (even to) excess,” surpassing all power of human description, which eye hath not seen, ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of any! 1Co 2:9.
5) “An eternal weight of glory,” (aionion Baros dokses) an eternal glory weight;” Rom 8:17; Mat 5:11-12; 1Pe 5:10; Heb 12:10.
Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary
17. Momentary lightness. As our flesh always shrinks back from its own destruction, whatever reward may be presented to our view, and as we are influenced much more by present feeling than by the hope of heavenly blessings, Paul on that account admonishes us, that the afflictions and vexations of the pious have little or nothing of bitterness, if compared with the boundless blessings of everlasting glory. He had said, that the decay of the outward man ought to occasion us no grief, inasmuch as the renovation of the inward man springs out of it. As, however, the decay is visible, and the renovation is invisible, Paul, with the view of shaking us off from a carnal attachment to the present life, draws a comparison between present miseries and future felicity. Now this comparison is of itself abundantly sufficient for imbuing the minds of the pious with patience and moderation, that they may not give way, borne down by the burden of the cross. For whence comes it, that patience is so difficult a matter but from this, — that we are confounded on having experience of evils for a brief period, (495) and do not raise our thoughts higher? Paul, therefore, prescribes the best antidote against your sinking down under the pressure of afflictions, when he places in opposition to them that future blessedness which is laid up for thee in heaven. (Col 1:5.) For this comparison makes that light which previously seemed heavy, and makes that brief and momentary which seemed of boundless duration.
There is some degree of obscurity in Paul’s words, for as he says, With hyperbole unto hyperbole, (496) so the Old Interpreter, and Erasmus (497) have thought that in both terms the magnitude of the heavenly glory, that awaits believers is extolled; or, at least, they have connected them with the verb worketh out. To this I have no objection, but as the distinction that I have made is also not unsuitable, I leave it to my readers to make their choice.
Worketh out an eternal weight Paul does not mean, that this is the invariable effect of afflictions; for the great majority are most miserably weighed down here with evils of every kind, and yet that very circumstance is an occasion of their heavier destruction, rather than a help to their salvation. As, however, he is speaking of believers, we must restrict exclusively to them what is here stated; for this is a blessing from God that is peculiar to them — that they are prepared for a blessed resurrection by the common miseries of mankind.
As to the circumstance, however, that Papists abuse this passage, to prove that afflictions are the causes of our salvation, it is exceedingly silly; (498) unless, perhaps, you choose to take causes in the sense of means, (as they commonly speak.) We, at least, cheerfully acknowledge, that
we must through many tribulations (499) enter into the kingdom of heaven, (Act 14:22,)
and as to this there is no controversy. While, however, our doctrine is, that the momentary lightness of afflictions worketh out in us an eternal weight (500) of life, for this reason, that all the sons of God are
predestinated to be conformed to Christ, (Rom 8:29,)
in the endurance of the cross, and in this manner are prepared for the enjoyment of the heavenly inheritance, which they have through means of God’s gracious adoption; Papists, on the other hand, imagine that they are meritorious works, (501) by which the heavenly kingdom is acquired.
I shall repeat it again in a few words. We do not deny that afflictions are the path by which the heavenly kingdom is arrived at, but we deny that by afflictions we merit the inheritance, (502) which comes to us in no other way than through means of God’s gracious adoption. Papists, without consideration, seize hold of one little word, with the view of building upon it a tower of Babel, (Gen 11:9,) — that the kingdom of God is not an inheritance procured for us by Christ, but a reward that is due to our works. For a fuller solution, however, of this question, consult my Institutes. (503)
(495) “ En ce sentiment des maux qui passent tontesfois auec le temps;” — “In this feeling of evils, which nevertheless pass away with the occasion.”
(496) “ A outrance par outrance;” — “From extreme to extreme.” “It is not merely eminent, but it is eminent unto eminence; excess unto excess; a hyperbole unto hyperbole — one hyperbole heaped on another; and the expression means, that it is exceeding exceedingly glorious; glorious in the highest possible degree. The expression is the Hebrew form of denoting the highest superlative, and it means, that all hyperboles fail of expressing that external glory which remains for the just. It is infinite and boundless. You may pass from one degree to another; from one sublime height to another; but still an infinity remains beyond. Nothing can describe the uppermost height of that glory, nothing can express its infinitude.” — Barnes. Chrysostom explains the words καθ ᾿ ὑπερβολὴν εἰς ὑπερβολὴν to be equivalent to μέγεθος ὑπερβολικῶς ὑπερβολικόν — a greatness exceedingly exceeding. “The repetition having an intensitive force, (like the Hebrew מאד מאד) it may be rendered infinitely exceeding.” — Bloomfield. — Ed.
(497) The words of the Vulgate are, “ Supra modum in sublimitate;” — “Above measure in elevation.” The rendering of Erasmus is, “ Mire supra modum;” — “Wonderfully above measure.” — Ed.
(498) “ C’est vn argument trop debile;” — “It is an exceedingly weak argument.”
(499) “ Per multas tribulationes;” — “ Par beaucoup de tribulations;” — “By many tribulations.” This is the literal rendering of the original words made use of, διὰ πολλῶν θλίψεων. Wiclif (1380) renders as follows, “bi many tribulaciouns.” Rheims (1582) “by many tribulations.” — Ed.
(500) “St. Paul in this expression — βάρος δόξης — weight of glory, elegantly joins together the two senses of the Hebrews כבוד which denotes both weight and glory, i.e., shining or being irradiated with light.” — Parkhurst. — Ed.
(501) “ Que les afflictions sont oeuures meritoires;” — “That afflictions are meritorious works.”
(502) “ L’heritage eternel;” — “The everlasting inheritance.”
(503) See Institutes, volume 2. — Ed.
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
(17) For our light affliction . . .More accurately, the present lightness of our affliction. This is at once more literally in accord with the Greek, and better sustains the balanced antithesis of the clauses.
A far more exceeding . . .The Greek phrase is adverbial rather than adjectival: worketh for us exceedingly, exceedingly. After the Hebrew idiom of expressing intensity by the repetition of the same word, (used of this very word exceedingly in Gen. 7:19; Gen. 17:2), he seeks to accumulate one phrase upon another (literally, according to excess unto excess) to express his sense of the immeasurable glory which he has in view.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
17. For our light affliction Literally, the immediate lightness of our affliction.
Worketh The continuous present is working. This very affliction, while wasting, is, through the power of Christ, working out a divine result. The wonderful result is a weight of glory; a glory so massive, so solid, that it is a weight. The darkness of Egypt was so dense that it could be “felt.” The celestial glory is so dense that it can be weighed.
This weight of glory is not a transient radiance, but outlasts the sun; is eternal. It never grows any lighter or thinner. And as to amount, the apostle troubles the energies of the Greek language to express it. It is ’ , if any body knows what that is. Good scholars view this as a Hebraism, according to which intensity is expressed by repetition of the same word, as if it were aboundingly abounding. So 2Co 4:16, day by day, is in St. Paul’s Hebraized Greek, day day. So Theophylact, quoted in Bloomfield’s “Recensio Synoptica,” renders it , surpassingly surpassing. But we cannot help suspecting, though we find no suggestion of the kind in our commentators, that the idea of progression is expressed in the preposition, upon an abounding to an abounding: taking stand upon one abounding and mounting up to another. We might then freely render it, “is working out an abounding upon abounding eternal weight of glory.” The abounding does not qualify the verb, (as Meyer and Alford,) but it qualifies eternal weight, which is a unit which, so far from diminishing, is ever more and more increasing and over-swelling. It is ever abounding and superabounding. The phrase, then, if we view it correctly, suggests the idea of eternal progression in glory.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
Paul’s Hope of Glorification – In 2Co 4:17 to 2Co 5:10 we again get a glimpse of what a man looks like who is walking in a mature level of sanctification. It is important to note that this passage gives us a perspective of the role of the Godhead in bringing God’s servants into glorification after this sanctified lifestyle. We immediately see a man who has dedicated his life to Christian service. In 2Co 4:17 to 2Co 5:4 Paul weighs the troubles of this life with the eternal glory that awaits him. Such a lifestyle is manifested by a person who appears to be wasting away outwardly, but being renewed with an inner anointing day by day. Paul explains that he is looking not at things that are seen, but things that are not seen and eternal, while earnestly desiring to be with the Lord. Paul concludes this description of his divine ministry by telling the Corinthians that he labours so earnestly because we must all stand before the judgment seat of Christ and give an account of our lives (2Co 5:5-10).
2Co 4:17 For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;
2Co 4:17
Jesse Duplantis, when he was being interviewed by Benny Hinn on Trinity Broadcasting Network, said that when he was caught up in a visitation of heaven, he met Paul the apostle. Jesse tells us that in this conversation Paul told him that the Church has been misinterpreting the phrase, “which is but for a moment.” He said that the Church has been teaching that this light affliction lasts for a lifetime. Paul told Jesse to tell them that it refers only to a moment in the Christian life, and not for the entire earthly life of the believer. [60] In his book Heaven: Close Encounters of the God Kind Jesse Duplantis tells us how Paul spoke to him and emphasized the fact that our afflictions in this life are but a moment compared to the eternity that we will spend in Heaven. [61]
[60] Jesse Duplantis, interviewed by Benny Hinn, This is Your Day (Irving, Texas), on Trinity Broadcasting Network (Santa Ana, California, July 16, 2002), television program.
[61] Jesse Duplantis, Heaven Close Encounters of the God Kind (Tulsa, Oklahoma: Harrison House, 1996), 97-9.
2Co 4:17 “worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” Comments – This sentence describes as set of scales weighing this present life to eternal glory. The scale for “eternity” far outweighs the present time. This present life is lightweight. Eternity is beyond measure.
Paul uses two adjectives to compare this life’s trials to eternity:
1. light insignificant, slight.
2. for a moment – momentary. In the Greek, this phrase is an adverb with an article, which makes it an adjective.
Scripture Reference – Note a similar verse:
Rom 8:17-18, “And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together. For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.”
2Co 4:18 While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.
2Co 4:18
Rom 8:24-25, “For we are saved by hope : but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.”
Col 1:23, “If ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel , which ye have heard, and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven; whereof I Paul am made a minister;”
2Co 4:17-18 Comments Sharing in Christ’s Agony in Hopes of Future Glory – Note these insightful words from Frances J. Roberts:
“For I shall reign over kings and nations and peoples, yea, I shall be ruler over all the earth; but ye shall have a special place of honor, for thou art My prize possession. As it is written, having shared My agony, ye shall that day share My glory; having born for Me the cross, ye shall then share with Me the throne. (Know ye not that ye shall even judge angels?) Rejoice now, that ye have been chosen out and counted worthy to suffer for My sake. We share one common destiny, and we walk one single path. At this present time, it may hold sorrow and isolation; but cheer thine heart with the raptures that lie ahead. Some live now in the revelries and riches of this present world who shall that day be mourners and paupers. Will ye exchange places? Would ye desert Me now and be rejected then? Would ye ignore Me now, and be in that day rejected by Me? Nay, ye would not! Rather, ye will do as Paul: ye will glory in the midst of suffering and affliction, because ye know these things shall in that day be counter-balanced by an exceeding greater portion of joy (weight of glory).” [62]
[62] Frances J. Roberts, Come Away My Beloved (Ojai, California: King’s Farspan, Inc., 1973), 122.
Scripture References – Note a similar passage on our eternal hope in glory:
1Pe 1:6-9, “Wherein ye greatly rejoice, though now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations: That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ: Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory: Receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls.”
2Co 5:5 Comments – The “self same thing” refers to our being clothed with the resurrection body.
2Co 5:7 Comments – This walk of faith that Paul mentions in 2Co 5:7 has been illustrated in the preceding passages. Paul has just described his Christian journey as a minister of the Gospel reconciling the world unto God. Truly, it was a walk of faith.
Illustrations There are a number of illustrations in the Scriptures where people were led by their spiritual discernment more than by their five physical senses.
2Ki 6:17, “And Elisha prayed, and said, LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the LORD opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.”
The disciples failed to recognize Jesus at first in a number of recorded appearances following His resurrection until their spiritual eyes were opened (Mat 28:17, Mar 16:12, Luk 24:16; Luk 24:37, Joh 20:14; Joh 21:4).
Mat 28:17, “And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted.”
Mar 16:12, “After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into the country.”
Luk 24:16, “But their eyes were holden that they should not know him.”
Luk 24:37, “But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit.”
Joh 20:14, “And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.”
Joh 21:4, “But when the morning was now come, Jesus stood on the shore: but the disciples knew not that it was Jesus.”
Scripture References Note the following Scriptures:
1Co 2:14, “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”
2Co 5:8 We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.
2Co 5:9 2Co 5:9
2Co 5:10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.
2Co 5:10
[63] W. Harold Mare, 1 Corinthians, in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, vol. 10, eds. Frank E. Gaebelien, J. D. Douglas, and Dick Polcyn (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Pub. House, 1976-1992), in Zondervan Reference Software, v. 2.8 [CD-ROM] (Grand Rapids, MI: The Zondervan Corp., 1989-2001), “Introduction.”
Fuente: Everett’s Study Notes on the Holy Scriptures
2Co 4:17. For our light affliction, This is one of the most emphatical passages in St. Paul’s writings; in which he speaks as much like an orator as an Apostle. The lightness of the trial is expressed by , the lightness of our affliction; as if he had said, “It is even levity itself, in such a comparison.” On the other hand, the ‘ , which we render, far more exceeding, is infinitely emphatical, and cannot be fully expressed by any translation. It signifies that all hyperboles fall short of describing that weighty, eternal glory, so solid and lasting, that you may pass from one hyperbole to another, and yet when you have gained the last, it is infinitelybelow it. It is every where visible what an influence St. Paul’s Hebrew had upon his Greek: kebed, signifies to be heavy, and to be glorious; St. Paul in his Greek unites these significations, and says, weight of glory. See Blackwall’s Sacred Classics, vol. 1: p. 332. Doddridge and Locke.
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
2Co 4:17 . Ground for the furtherance of this . . from the glorious eternal result of temporal sufferin.
. . .] for the present lightness of our affliction, i.e . our momentary affliction weighing light, not heavy to be borne, . . and . . would each give a different meaning; see Hermann, ad Viger. p. 783. For examples of the very frequent adjectival use of , see Wetstein, Heindorf, ad Plat. Protag . 106 p. 620; Stallbaum, ad Plat. Rep. p. 558 A; from Xenophon in Raphel. Bengel aptly remarks: “notatur praesens breve .” The near Parousia is conceived as terminus ad quern ; comp. 1Pe 1:6 .
.] like , the horrors of war (Plato, Menex . p. 243 B), ( Rep. p. 328 E). Regarding the substantival use of the neuter adjective, whereby the idea of the adjective is brought into prominence as the chief idea, see Matthiae, p. 994; Khner, II. p. 122.
] is definition of manner and degree to ; it works in an abundant way even to abundance an eternal weight (growth) of glory. In this and how exuberant is the deeply emotional form of expression itself! lies the measureless force , and the measureless success of the . If, with Rckert, we sought to find in this an adverbial definition to (Rom 7:13 ), it could only refer to , and the notion of would make this appear as unsuitable. Rckert is further wrong in thinking that the expression does not seem to admit of a precise verbal explanation. But on . see 2Co 1:8 ; Rom 7:13 ; 1Co 12:31 ; Gal 1:13 ; Mal 3:18Mal 3:18 ; Bernhardy, p. 241; and on . comp. passages like 2Co 10:15 ; Luk 13:11 ; Eur. Hipp. 939; Lucian, D. M. 27. 9; Gymnas. 28; Tox. 12; on both expressions Valckenaer, ad Eur. Hipp. l.c.
ingeniously corresponds to the previous , and to the (comp. Plato, Timaeus , p. 63 C). There is contained, however, in [201] the quantitative greatness of the ; comp. , Plut. Alex. 48; Eur. Iph . 419; Soph. Ajax . 130, and Lobeck thereon. It is similar to the German phrase “eine schwere Menge.”
] brings about for us . The is conceived as requital for the (Mat 5:12 ; Luk 16:25 ; Rom 8:17 ; 2Ti 2:12-13 ), and in so far as its effect , the production of which is developed in the present suffering. It is not merely a spiritual and moral that is meant (Rckert, who irrelevantly appeals to Rom 3:23 ), but the whole glory , the aggregate glorious condition in the Messiah’s kingdom, Rom 8:17-18 ff.; Mat 13:43 .
. . . . .] since we do not direct our aim to that which is seen, i.e. since we have not in view, as the goal of our striving (Phi 2:4 ), the visible goods, enjoyments, etc., which belong to the pre-Messianic period ( , Phi 3:19 ); comp. Rom 8:25 . Billroth wrongly understands the resurrection-bodies to be meant, which must have been derived from what precedes, and may not be inferred from 2Co 5:1 . The participle is taken as conditioning by Calvin, Rckert, Ewald, Hofmann: it being presupposed that we , etc.; comp. Chrysostom: . The would accord with this interpretation, but does not require it; see Buttmann, neut. Gr. p. 301 f. [E. T. 351]. The former sense, specifying the reason , is not only more appropriate in general to the ideal apostolic way of regarding the Christian life (Rom 5:3-5 ; Rom 8:1 ; Rom 8:9 ; Rom 8:25 ; 2Co 4:18 ), but it is also recommended by the fact that Paul himself is meant first of all in . On the more strongly emphatic genitive absolute (instead of ), even after the governing clause, comp. Xenophon, Anab . v. 8. 13, i. 4. 12, and Khner thereon; see also Krger, xlvii. 4. 2; Stallbaum, ad Plat. Symp , p. 183 B; Winer, p. 195 [E. T. 260]. With the Greeks, however, the repetition of the subject ( ) is rare; comp. Thuc. iii. 22. 1.
] Paul did not write , because the goods and enjoyments of the Messianic kingdom are to appear from the subjective standpoint of the as something not seen. [202] See Hermann, ad Viger , p. 807; Khner, II. 715. 3. Comp. Heb 11:7 .
. . .] Reason, why we do not aim, et.
] temporary (Mat 13:21 ; Mar 4:17 ; Heb 11:25 ), namely, lasting only to the near Parousia, 1Co 7:31 ; 1Jn 2:17 .
On the whole expression, comp. Seneca, Ep. 59.
[201] is not distinguished from by the latter having always the idea of burden (Tittmann, Synon . p. 158). The notion of weight is always contained in , and in that of bulk . The idea of burdensomeness is in both words given solely by the context. Comp. on , used of abundant fulness ; Jacobs, ad Anthol. IX. p. 126.
[202] Bengel aptly observes: “Alind significat ; nam multa, quae non cernuntur, erunt visibilia , confecto itinere fidei?”
Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary
DISCOURSE: 2016
THE CHRISTIANS EXPERIENCE IN AFFLICTION
2Co 4:17-18. Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.
THE Christian in every state, whether of prosperity or adversity, differs widely from the unconverted world. While others are elated by the one and depressed by the other, he is kept in an equable frame of mind. As he does not place his happiness in earthly things, he is not much affected either with the acquisition or the loss of them. He is thankful for success, but not overjoyed, as though some great thing had happened unto him; and is patient in tribulation, knowing that in the issue it shall work for his good. To this effect the Apostle speaks in the text, in which he assigns the reason why, notwithstanding the greatness of his afflictions, he was kept from fainting under them. And his words afford us a proper occasion to consider,
I.
The disposition which the Christian cultivates
The account which St. Paul gives of himself is characteristic of every true Christian
His chief aim is to attain things that are invisible
[By the things which are seen we understand every thing which relates merely to the present world, which the Apostle comprehends under three names, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life. By the things which are not seen must he meant the love and favour of God, the renovation of our inward man, the glory and felicity of heaven. The latter of these are the objects towards which the Christian turns his principal attention. Not that he neglects the concerns of this world; this would be absurd and criminal; but his great end and aim [Note: This seems to be the import of .] is to obtain an inheritance beyond the grave: even while he is most actively employed in secular concerns, he looks through them all to this grand object, and labours incessantly to secure it.]
To this he is led by the transitoriness of earthly things
[The things of this world perish with the using. If they be not withdrawn from us, we must soon be taken away from them; nor will so much as one of them remain to be enjoyed in the future world. But spiritual things remain for ever. If we secure the love of God now, it shall abide with us to all eternity. An interest in the Redeemers merits, and a title to all the glory of heaven, shall never be taken away from us. Death, so far from terminating our enjoyments, will bring us to the full possession of that glory, of which our present foretastes are an earnest and pledge. The Christian, seeing the infinite disparity between these things, determines to make invisible things the supreme objects of his regard, and comparatively disregards all that can be offered to the eye of sense.]
In this pursuit he is aided by his afflictions, as will appear, if we consider,
II.
The privilege he enjoys
The Christian has troubles as well as others
[The very conduct he observes with respect to temporal things has a tendency to involve him in trouble. The world cannot endure to see their idols so disregarded, and their conduct so reproached. One would have supposed from the account given us of his sufferings, that Paul must have been the vilest miscreant that ever lived [Note: 2Co 11:23-27.]: but the more we resemble him in holiness, the more shall we resemble him in sufferings also. Our enemies indeed will not professedly persecute us for our holiness; they will assign some specious reason. Elijah shall be called The troubler of Israel; Paul, The man who turns the world upside down; and Christ shall be punished as a blasphemer and an enemy to civil government. But the same reason obtains with respect to all,the world cannot endure the light of their example [Note: Joh 15:19.].]
These troubles however shall work for his good
[They are not in themselves joyous, but grievous; but they tend to refine his soul, and to fit him for glory; yea, inasmuch as these sufferings constitute a part of the obedience required of him, they bring with them a correspondent reward [Note: 2Ti 2:12.]. In this view they are mentioned in the text as highly beneficial. They work for the faithful Christian a reward of glory; a weight of glory as great as his soul is able to sustain, and as durable as eternity itself. In comparison of this, the Apostle calls his troubles light and momentary, yea, not only light, but lightness itself; and intimates, that, if hyperbole were heaped upon hyperbole, it would be impossible for language to express, or for imagination to conceive, the greatness of that glory which his afflictions wrought for him [Note: This is implied in the original.].]
The preceding subjects being, to appearance, so remote from each other, it will be proper to mark,
III.
The connexion between them
Afflictions do not necessarily produce this effect
[In too many instances the effect that flows from them is altogether opposite. Instead of purifying the soul, they fill it with impatience, fretfulness, and all manner of malignant passions; and instead of working out a weight of glory for it, they serve only to prepare for it a more aggravated condemnation. The sorrow of the world, saith the Apostle, worketh death [Note: 2Co 7:10.].]
It is only where the pursuits are spiritual, that sufferings are so eminently beneficial
[If the mind be set upon carnal things, it will be cast down when it is robbed of its enjoyments; it will say, like Micah, I have lost my gods, and what have I more? But the soul that affects heavenly things will be comforted with the thought that the objects of its desire are as near as ever. While it looks at things invisible, it will be quickened in its pursuit of them: it will be made to feel more sensibly the vanity and insignificance of earthly things, and be urged more determinately to seek a kingdom which cannot be moved: every fresh trial will make it long more and more for the promised rest; and the storms which menace its existence, will thus eventually waft it with more abundant rapidity towards its desired haven.]
Infer
1.
How infatuated are the generality of mankind!
[It is but too evident that the generality of the world are seeking earthly things, while they who are pressing forward in pursuit of heavenly things are comparatively few in number. What a melancholy proof is this of mens blindness and folly! Who is there that, however much he may have gained of this world, has not found it all to be vanity and vexation of spirit? What comfort has any one derived from earthly possessions in an hour of deep affliction? And what benefit will accrue from them in the eternal world? Say, thou libertine, thou worldling, or thou false professor, what has the world done for thee? And what hast thou of all that is past, except shame and remorse in the remembrance of it? Who does not acknowledge the truth of these observations the very instant he begins to have a prospect of the eternal state? Yet, so infatuated are we, that though every successive age has seen the folly of such conduct, they have trodden the same delusive path, according to what is written, This their way is their folly, and yet their posterity approve their saying. Let us, however, awake from our slumber; let us not so regard the things that are visible and temporal, as to forget that there are things invisible and eternal; let us live and act as for eternity; let us read, and hear, and pray, as for eternity. In this way we shall remove the sting from all present afflictions, and secure an inheritance that fadeth not away.]
2.
How blessed is the true Christian!
[As there is no state, however prosperous, in which an unconverted man is not an object of pity, so there is no state, however afflictive, wherein the Christian may not be considered as a happy man. However severe or long-continued his troubles may be, they appear to him but light and momentary; and however they may be productive of present pain, he has the consolation of knowing that they work for him a weight of glory, which will infinitely overbalance all that he can endure in the body. Who then, or what, can harm him, while he continues thus a follower of that which is good? Surely, even in this present world the Christian has incomparably the best portion. What he will enjoy hereafter, when he shall come to the full possession of his inheritance, it is needless to say. We can have no doubt but that the invisible realities will be found a very sufficient recompence for all his zeal and diligence in the pursuit of them. Let us then keep those realities in view, and the nearer we come to the goal, let us be the more earnest in running the race that is set before us.]
Fuente: Charles Simeon’s Horae Homileticae (Old and New Testaments)
17 For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;
Ver. 17. For our light affliction ] Here we have an elegant antithesis, and a double hyperbole, beyond translation. For affliction, here is glory; for light affliction, a weight of glory; for momentary affliction, eternal glory.
Which is but for a moment ] For a short braid only, as that martyr said. Mourning lasteth but till morning. It is but winking, and thou shalt be in heaven presently, quoth another martyr.
Worketh unto us ] As a causa sine qua non, as the law worketh wrath, Rom 4:15 . If our dear Lord did not put these thorns into our bed, we should sleep out our lives and lose our glory: affliction calls to us as the angel to Elijah, Up, thou hast a great way to go.
A far more exceeding ] An exceeding excessive eternal weight. Or, a far more excellent eternal weight. Nec Christus nec caelum patitur hyperbolen, saith one. Here it is hard to hyperbelize. Words are too weak to express heaven’s happiness. The apostle heard wordless words, 2Co 12:4 , when he was there, and in speaking of it commonly useth a transcendent super-superlative kind of language. The Vulgate interpreter’s supra modum in sublimitare, Erasmus’ mire supra modum, Beza’s excellenter excellens, falls a far deal short of St Paul’s emphatic Grecism here. , saith Chrysostom. He could not comprise it in one single word, he doubleth it therefore, and yet attaineth not to what he aimeth at.
Weight of glory ] The apostle alludeth to the Hebrew and Chaldee words which signify both weight and glory, . Glory is such a weight, as if the body were not upheld by the power of God, it were impossible it should bear it. Joy so great, as that we must enter into it; it is too big to enter into us. “Enter into thy Master’s joy,” Mat 25:21 . Here we find that when there is great joy, the body is not able to bear it, our spirits are ready to expire; what shall it then be in heaven?
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
17, 18. ] Method of this renewal . For the present light (burden) of our affliction (the adject. use of is common with Thucyd., e.g. ii. 64, , : viii. 82, : vii. 71, , where Schol. ; and with his imitator Demosthenes, e.g. p. 72. 16, . ; see also pp. 34. 24; 215. 10: and more examples in Wetst.
as a substantive, contrasted with ; see reff.), works out for us (‘ efficit ,’ ‘is the means of bringing about’) in a surpassing and still more surpassing manner ( . . . must belong to the verb , as Meyer and De W.; for otherwise it can only qualify , the idea of which forbids such qualification, not , which is separated from it by the adjective : i.e. so as to exceed beyond all measure the tribulation) an eternal weight of glory ( opposed to ).
Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament
2Co 4:17 . . . .: for our present light burden of affliction worketh out for us more and more exceedingly an eternal heavy burden of glory; cf. , for the thought (ever full of consolation to the troubled heart), Psa 30:5 , Isa 54:7 , Mat 5:11 , Heb 12:11 , 1Pe 1:6 ; 1Pe 5:10 , and especially Rom 8:18 . does not refer (as the A.V. and R.V. would suggest) to the brief duration of temporal affliction, but only to its being present with us now , as set over against the future glory (see reff.). offers a good instance of “the most classical idiom in the language of the N.T.” (Blass) especially frequent in St. Paul according to which a neuter singular adjective is used as if it were an abstract noun; cf. chap. 2Co 8:8 , Rom 8:3 , 1Co 1:25 , Phi 3:8 , etc., for a like construction. is another Hebraism (see last verse), = “exceedingly”; it cannot qualify (as the A.V. takes it) or , but must go with , as above ( cf. Gal 1:13 ). Stanley points out that the collocation may be suggested by the fact that the Hebrew means both “to be heavy” (Gen 18:20 , Job 6:3 ) and “to be glorious” (Job 14:21 ); cf. the ambiguity in the Latin gravitas .
Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson
our light, &c. Literally the momentary lightness of our affliction.
light. Greek. elaphros. Only here and Mat 11:30. Compare “lightness”, 2Co 1:17.
affliction. Greek. thlipsis as in 2Co 1:4. Compare the verb, 2Co 4:8.
for a moment. Greek. parautika. Only here.
worketh. Greek. katergazomai. To work out. See Rom 7:8.
far more exceeding. Literally according to (Greek. kata. App-104,) excess unto (Greek. eis. App-104.) excess. The Greek for “excess” is hyperbole, as in 2Co 4:7.
eternal. Greek. aionios. App-161. B, i.
weight. Greek. baros. See Act 16:24.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
17, 18.] Method of this renewal. For the present light (burden) of our affliction (the adject. use of is common with Thucyd., e.g. ii. 64, , : viii. 82, : vii. 71, , where Schol. ;-and with his imitator Demosthenes, e.g. p. 72. 16, . ;-see also pp. 34. 24; 215. 10: and more examples in Wetst.
as a substantive, contrasted with ; see reff.), works out for us (efficit, is the means of bringing about) in a surpassing and still more surpassing manner (. . . must belong to the verb, as Meyer and De W.; for otherwise it can only qualify , the idea of which forbids such qualification, not , which is separated from it by the adjective:-i.e. so as to exceed beyond all measure the tribulation) an eternal weight of glory ( opposed to ).
Fuente: The Greek Testament
2Co 4:17. , [but for a moment]) just now: a brief present season is denoted, 1Pe 1:6 [ , a brief season now.] The antitheses are, just now, and eternal; light, and weight: affliction, and glory; which is in excessive measure, and in an exceeding degree.- , in excessive measure) Even that affliction, which is , in excessive measure, when compared with other less afflictions, 2Co 1:8, is yet light compared with the glory , in an exceeding degree. A noble Oxymoron.-) works, procures, accomplishes.
Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament
2Co 4:17
2Co 4:17
For our light affliction.-If we are diligently serving God, the afflictions and troubles of life work out for us greater honors and glories by preparing and qualifying us to enjoy the greater and higher honors God reserves for the faithful in the world to come. As compared with the glory to be gained, the sufferings to be endured are light.
which is for the moment,-As compared with the eternal life which he was to enjoy, the days of his sufferings were but a moment of time.
worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory;-The sufferings wrought out the glories of Christ. If we endure, we shall also reign with him: if we shall deny him, he also will deny us (2Ti 2:12), but insomuch as ye are partakers of Christs sufferings, rejoice; that at the revelation of his glory also ye may rejoice with exceeding joy (1Pe 4:13), and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified with him (Rom 8:17). The glory is so great, so past comprehension, he calls it an exceeding and eternal weight of glory, oppressive in its grandeur.
Fuente: Old and New Testaments Restoration Commentary
An Eternal Weight of Glory
For our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.2Co 4:17.
George Herbert, in his Country Parson, describes this Epistle as full of affections. Beyond any other of the Apostles letters it lays bare the deepest feelings of that great heart, which has been keenly wounded by sufferings more acute than the trouble that came upon him in Asia and pressed him out of measure, beyond his strength, so that he had despaired even of life. Life is still his: but he has been made to feel, as he had not felt before, the pain which can be inflicted by coldness, suspiciousness, and something like hostility on the part of those towards whom, as he says, with touching emphasis, his heart has been habitually enlarged. They have listened to malignant misconstructions, set afloat by those Judaizing teachers who made it their business to stamp out his work wherever Jewish Christians were to be found. It was bitter indeed for him who during a year and a half had been the guest of Justus, who had baptized Crispus and Gaius, and the household of Stephanas, to have to defend himself against the imputation of double-mindedness, of shifty diplomacy, and of what in modern phrase might be called priestcraft. It might well make him write warmly, and also mournfully. Much, he felt, was against him; he was hard put to it, perplexed, cast down; it was as if a process of dying had begun in him; his bodily health, continually impaired by the thorn in the flesh, had been yet further affected by the mental distress of an intensely sensitive nature. But faith comes to his aid; though the outward man be decaying, the inward man is daily renewing its strength; the momentary affliction seems light after all, when he considers that it is producing, in a manner and to an extent surpassing all thought, an eternal weight of glory; and this comes home to him when he seriously contrasts the things seen, as temporal, with the things not seen as eternal, and, at that high standpoint of illuminated reason, looks resolutely away from the former to the latter.
It is no mere poetical hyperbole which finds expression in such words as these:
We live in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs.
Or again,
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence.
Who is there, indeed, whose familiar experience has not taught him, in some ways at least, the power of thought to master time, of feeling to lend wings to the leaden hours, or, what is relatively to us the same, to render us unconscious of their flight? Absorbing employment, intense excitements, critical emergencies, things and events that deeply affect or move us, often, as we all know, make hours to vanish unnoted and unmeasured, whole days to contract almost into the brevity of hours. When the flow of composition urges the writers rapid pen, when the inspiration of a congenial subject kindles the artists mind and lends deftness to his touch, when the orator is borne onwards on the swift tide of successful speech, when the trial is proceeding on whose issue life or death is suspended, when the decisive engagement, big with the fate of nations, is being lost or wonthese, and such as these, are occasions on which time is not reckoned by physical measures, on which intensity of thought and feeling quickens the rate at which life moves.1 [Note: J. Caird, University Sermons, 361.]
I
The Weight of Affliction
1. Afflictions never seem light to those who are called upon to bear them. By some remarkable condition of things, heavy afflictions may seem light and be accounted as nothing at all, but, naturally and by themselves, we always regard our own afflictions as heavy. It is very easy for spectators to say, when they hear another complaining of sufferings, Oh! they are nothing at all, not worth a moments attention; and to be astonished that so much should be made of a little. But spectators of suffering may not be the best judges of its weight. In the first place it may be that they are not suffering themselves, and so look at things very comfortably. Then again, men differ as to their sensibility to pain. Circumstances which may be nearly unheeded by one who has but dull sensations may be agony to another more finely constituted. Or again, if both are sensitive, yet one may have a special wound or sore which the other is happily without, and then even the touch of a fly drives to madness. Therefore, when we see another in pain, it is not for us straightway to declare that there is nothing to be pained about. We are all better aware of the stress of our own sorrows than we are of those of other people, and the heart knoweth its own bitterness. Naturally we all feel our afflictions to be heavy.
St. Paul had his afflictions. He did not find the Christian life easy. He was speaking for himself and his companions when he said We are troubled on every side, perplexed, persecuted, cast down, always delivered unto death. These are not rhetorical phrases which spring to the pen of an eloquent and ready writer. They are words which tell us of hard experiences, harsh treatment, real pain and suffering. In another part of this letter he tells us something more of what he had endured as a Christian. Five times he was beaten by the Jews, thrice by the Romans. (The strokes of the whip and the rods were not make-believe.) Once he was stoned, thrice he suffered shipwreck. Everywhere perils awaited himperils of waters, perils of robbers, perils of the Jews, perils of the heathen, perils in the wilderness, perils in the city. He had endured weariness and painfulness, hunger and thirst, cold and nakedness.
2. How can afflictions, naturally heavy, come to be regarded as light? We know quite well that it is possible for the attention to be so occupied with one thing that it does not notice another. A man engaged in deep thought does not see the friend who recognizes him in the street. A philosopher like Newton may be so deeply involved in his problems as to forget the body and its want of food. In the excitement of battle men have not noticed the wound they have received, and not until they have begun to faint from loss of blood have they perceived what has happened to them. A mind intensely occupied with one thing has little to bestow upon others. We cannot be alive with the same intensity all over. Great concentration of vitality at one point lessens it at others. So that the constitution of our nature points out the direction in which the answer to our question is to be sought. If there be something else of more importance than the pain upon which the attention can be fixed, then, for every degree of such attention there is a degree less of pain; with almost complete attention upon something else, the pain will very nearly disappear; until, by absorbing devotion to some great thing, it is possible for afflictions which naturally are heavy to become graciously light.
The vision of the unseen has this power. It interprets and transforms life. In this way our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory. We are to get the clue to the mystery of life, we are to cease to be puzzled by the pain and suffering. The meaning and end of the seen are hidden in the unseen. To see with any clearness the end will help to interpret the ways by which it is reached. Light from the unseen will give an interpretative value to life and its trials, and with the vision will come the transformation. That which was a tangled puzzle will solve itself when viewed from a right standpoint. Now St. Paul was always a traveller through the seen to the unseen, where he found the Aladdins lamp which revealed the meaning of his present affliction, which, though often sore, became light, working not sores in him, but rather great glory. And so it is that here the mind of the Apostle is overwhelmed by the contrast between the seen and the unseen, and, as he rises in his flight of contemplation, the calamities of earth dwindle into insignificant smallness till there is nothing visible but glory.
Yet, strange to say, he describes the glory by an old earthly metaphor, by the very metaphor, indeed, which he used to apply to his afflictions; he calls it a weight. We speak of a weight of care, a weight of sorrow, a weight of anxiety; but a weight of glory!surely that is a startling symbol. We do not think of a man as being crushed, overwhelmed, weighed down by glory. We should have thought that the old metaphor of care would be repulsive, that it would be cast off like a worn-out garment and remembered no more for ever. But the old garment is not worn out when the glory comes, it is only transfigured; that which made our weight of care is that which makes our weight of glory. We need not a new object but a new lightto see by day what we have seen only in darkness.
What is the use of all our reading and writing and speaking and thinking about God, and His love, and His care over us, if we are to see in an affliction nothing more than the distress which it brings? There is something else in the affliction besides this distress, and that something is Gods love and eternal life. And the only use of all our reading, etc., is to fix our attention on this which is enclosed within the affliction, instead of having it engrossed by the envelopethe outward form in which God sends it.1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, i. 246.]
If from the shores of eternity we cast back our gaze over the path we have travelled in this world, which regions will shine most brightly and beautifully in the view? Not, I think, those that have seemed to be joyous in the passingnot the years of youth and health and strength and earthly happinessbut much rather the spaces that here have seemed perhaps the darkest and dreariest; for these have drawn us nearer to God, these have been fullest of prayer, on these have fallen the purest, brightest rays from the Father of lights and from Him who is the brightness of that Fathers glory and the Light of the World.2 [Note: Bishop Walsham How, Pastor in Parochi.]
II
The Duration of Affliction
1. Affliction is often life-long, as the Apostle well knew. Why then does he call it momentary? He compares it with what is unseen and eternal. He looks away from seen vicissitudes to unseen possessions. These vicissitudes may be manifold. They may be constant. There is the change from health to sickness. There is the change from wealth to poverty. There is the change from companionship to solitude. But let a man look away from them all, from the seen mutations to the unseen certitudes, and what then? Why, then he thinks of a place prepared where the inhabitant says no more, I am sick; of a treasure laid up where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal; of a friendship that neither fails nor falters, but is always faithful, always sure, and always near. Who shall separate us from the love of God? Who shall exclude us from the grace of Christ? Who shall deprive us of the communion of the Holy Ghost? These form abiding realities, which the shocks of circumstance are as powerless to change as the rocking earthquake is to ruffle the pure blue sky, or disturb the solemn marching of its silent stars. So may we all, receiving a kingdom that cannot be moved, serve God acceptably and with godly fear.
2. Although St. Paul places the emphasis on the eternal, he does not despise the present. He was far too healthy-minded a man to rail at a summer day because it does not last, or to depreciate the beautiful home in which the great God has placed us here because this, some day, has to make way for another; he was far too human to depreciate friendship or love because there are partings and families are broken up. He was not so much absorbed in the thought of death as to forget the warmth, the majesty, and the mystery of being alive at all; and therefore those completely travesty St. Pauls philosophy of life who fix their eyes so exclusively on another world that they take no interest in this, or who are so absorbed in thinking of the God whom they have not seen that they have no eyes to see and care for the brother whom they have seen. No, he calls these things, not unimportant, but temporal. And what he means evidently is this: that underneath the seen and passing things, here and now and in our midst, is a world of unseen reality; that heaven lies about us, not only, as the poet says, in our infancy, but all our days; that these unseen realities make use of the seen, but exist independently of them; that it is possible as we walk the earth day by day to have our head above the mists in heaven; that our calling is to be eternal beings in a world of time, and that the real test of the use of life is what life leaves us when it has passed away.
This valley [the Yosemite] is flanked by towering mountains, cleft for the most part right up in every variety of extraordinary summit. The rock is granite of flashing whiteness, rising into triangles, squares and domes. The feature of the valley is two gigantic domes, the one split like the half of a helmet, the other running up in a mass of rock till an entire helmet crowns its mass. Yesterday I walked to the Mirror Lake on the one fork of the valley. The pines at first by their reflection almost absorbed the view; but when you look far enough down, in quite distinct perspective you see to almost infinite depths the outline of the rocks and of the sky. Thus the transient in the glass of time captivates many; we need to look deep enough to catch the eternal.1 [Note: Life and Letters of John Cairns, 697.]
III
The End of Affliction
1. Affliction is the precursor of glory. It cannot be said that trial and suffering in themselves have power to make men holier or more heavenly. Upon many they have the very opposite effect, making them gloomy, selfish, and envious. They harden the heart instead of making it tender and sympathetic. They may come and overwhelm a man in their dark waves, and yet when their tide recedes it may leave him impure and worldly as before. Let no one think, then, that he is necessarily the better for having been tried. It is not so; and yet it is true that trial is most generally the instrument which God employs for softening the hard-hearted, for subduing the proud, for teaching endurance and patience, for expanding the sympathies, for exercising the religious affections, for refining, strengthening, and elevating the entire disposition and character. You cast the ore into the furnace in order to obtain the pure gold unalloyed with any dross; so men must pass through those fires of affliction which try every mans work of what sort it is. And no one, it has been observed, who has borne suffering aright has ever complained that he had been called on to endure too much of it. On the contrary, all the noblest of our race have learned from experience to count suffering not an evil but a privilege, and to rejoice in it as working out in them, through its purifying and perfecting power, an eternal weight of glory. St. Paul had learned to glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; in other words, that the result of trial is, or ought to be, the discipline and enlargement of the spirit.
A friend of mine, Mr. Houston of Johnstone Castle, died last week at the age of eighty-two, who had for fifty years suffered uninterruptedly from neuralgia. Many years ago he told me that for twenty years he had never been so sound asleep as to lose the consciousness of suffering. He died praising God for His tender mercies, which had led him all his journey through.1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, ii. 144.]
2. Affliction worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory. More is said here than at first appears; more than the hasty reader would observe. It is not merely asserted that we shall be relieved of pain by-and-by; it is not merely stated that they who suffer here on earth shall cease to suffer in heaven; this were no new thing to tell. But what is said is this: that pain is the forerunner of joy, as its efficient cause. Affliction is not merely followed by glory; it worketh that glory, it maketh that glory to be. Our light affliction worketh for us a weight of glory. This is a specific truth of Catholic Christianity, and one unknown to the wise and sagacious of this world.
There is nothing more characteristic of the scientific thought of to-day than the law of progress through struggle. Scientists show us that its working is found in every kingdom of the animate universe; that there is no progress apart from struggle and labour and suffering; and that in this conflict only the fittest survive, and by their survival raise their species to a higher plane. And this which philosophers of the nineteenth century claimed as the great discovery of their age is anticipated in these words of St. Paul. Our sufferings and struggles, if rightly used, lead to the development of our powers, and work for us a splendid resultthe life of glory. He shows us that in this struggle alone is spiritual progress possible, and that the result of it is the survival of the fittest, of the saints, in the kingdom of glory.
A bar of iron worth 1, when wrought into horse-shoes is worth 2. If made into needles it is worth 70. If into pen-knife blades it is worth 650. If into springs for watches it is worth 50,000. Thus the more it is hammered and pounded and polished, and brought through the fire, the more valuable it becomes. Does not this throw light upon many a perplexing providence and many a crushing sorrow? The afflictions of this present time are preparing us for service here and for glory hereafter.1 [Note: E. W. Moore, Life Transfigured, 122.]
Without, as I heard the wild winds roar,
And saw the black clouds their floods outpour,
As the lightnings flashed,
And the thunders crashed,
And the hurricanes force waxed more and more,
I said, as I looked from my window warm,
Heavn never on me send such a storm!
Then came a dark day, when fierce and fast,
Down fell on my head the blinding blast!
Yet tho sore assailed,
I nor shrank nor quailed,
For tho loud the gale raged, as twould rage its last,
The struggle I waged, as I journeyed on,
Awoke in me powers before unknown!
I felt my hot blood a-tingling flow;
With thrill of the fight my soul did glow;
And when, braced and pure,
I emerged secure
From the strife that had tried my courage so,
I said, Let Heavn send me or sun or rain,
Ill never know flinching fear again!2 [Note: T. Crawford, Horae Serenae, 17.]
3. It is Christ who makes affliction work out such glorious results. He has transformed pain and sorrow into beneficent angels. We cannot tell how it happened, but grief, through her acquaintanceship and familiarity with the Son of Man, became like a new creature; in her were seen a certain softness and pensiveness which she never had before; her form became altered and her footsteps light, until she seemed to take the air of a Sister of Mercy, and to breathe forth a wondrous benediction while she walked with Him. Doubtless it was His influence that worked the change; it was He who turned into a cross that scourge of small cords which she had carried from time immemorial, and gave to her eyes that tender look which seems to say, I do not willingly afflict nor grieve you, O children of men. Thus they went through the world hand in hand, until He went out of it by the gate of the grave, tasting death for every man. And grief has been acting ever since as one of His ministers, and representing Him, and doing the works of mercy in His Kingdom. She has given to men in these latter days more than she ever took away; she is a dispenser and not a spoiler; her hands are full of goodly gifts, and though her discipline be painful, yet it is ever merciful, and as a gentle almoner she offers and bestows, wherever faith and love dispose the heart to receive them, sure and perfect pledges of eternal blessing and glory.
I stand in one of our harbours, and see beyond its shelter the waves lift themselves mountains high; my ears are filled with the roar of the angry wind. Ignorant of vessels and of navigation, I observe a goodly ship putting forth to sea, and the conviction steals over me that she will be engulfed in the waters or cast by the wind upon the shore; but I do not know the power of the engines that propel the vessel or the skill of the captain who is in command of her. Did I realize these I should be assured that she would force her way through the waves, and in due time reach the desired port in safety. It is thus with the world. We see, we realize, the misery, the strife, the confusion that prevail; but we do not see, we cannot realize, the wisdom, the love, the power in the nature of Him who, in spite of all these, reigneth King for ever, or we should be assured that, though the kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, yet there is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved. God shall help her, and that right early.1 [Note: W. G. Horder.]
Open the door and let in more of that music, the dying man said to his weeping son. Behmen was already hearing the harpers harping with their harps, he was already taking his part in the song they sing in Heaven to him who loved them, and washed them from their sins in his own blood.
Some one will enter the pearly gate
By-and-by, by-and-by;
Taste of the glories that there await,
Shall you? Shall I?
If we are to be there, we must, like the saintly Behmen, wash our robes and make them white in the blood of the Lamb. Everlasting life begins on this side the grave, and our Heaven, like his, must begin on earth. The Life Eternal, the life in which time is as eternity and eternity as time, is the life hid with Christ in God. In the measure in which we experience it, we shall rise above earths changing scenes. Our sorrows will not crush us; our successes will not elate us; our difficulties will not daunt us; death itself will not appal us, because, taught by the great Apostle, we are beginning to appraise the events of life at their true value, we are learning, through many a painful experience, slowly but surely to look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are unseen, and we find that the things which are unseen are eternal, for Eternity is the Diamond in the Ring.1 [Note: E. W. Moore, Life Transfigured, 126.]
Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill,
Complain no more; for these, O heart,
Direct the random of the will
As rhymes direct the rage of art.
The lutes fixt fret, that runs athwart
The strain and purpose of the string,
For governance and nice consort
Doth bar his wilful wavering.
The dark hath many dear avails;
The dark distils divinest dews;
The dark is rich with nightingales,
With dreams, and with the heavenly Muse.2 [Note: Sidney Lanier.]
An Eternal Weight of Glory
Literature
Caird (J.), University Sermons, 360.
Church (R. W.), Cathedral and University Sermons, 294.
Dix (M.), Sermons Doctrinal and Practical, 65.
Finney (C. G.), The Way of Salvation, 447.
Henson (H. H.), The Creed in the Pulpit, 179.
Matheson (G.), Moments on the Mount, 62.
Maurice (F. D.), Sermons Preached in Country Churches, 250.
Moore (E. W.), Life Transfigured, 105.
Mortimer (A. G.), Studies in Holy Scripture, 258.
Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, ix. 337.
Roberts (W. P.), Reasonable Service, 66.
Shedd (W. G. T.), Sermons to the Spiritual Man, 69.
Stevenson (J. F.), God and a Future Life, 16.
Thom (J. H.), Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, 393.
Vince (C.), The Unchanging Saviour, 278.
Walker (E. M.), Signs of the Times, 40.
Watson (J.), The Inspiration of Our Faith, 348.
Welldon (J. E. C.), The Spiritual Life, 45.
Christian Age, xliv. 322 (J. Galbraith); xlvi. 404 (C. H. Parkhurst).
Christian World Pulpit, xiv. 331; xix. 204; xxiii. 266 (H. W. Beecher); xxviii. 115 (W. G. Horder).
Expositor and Current Anecdotes (Cleveland), xiv. (1913) 665 (C. C. Albertson).
Homiletic Review, New Ser., xix. 322 (W. R. Davis).
Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible
our: 2Co 11:23-28, Psa 30:5, Isa 54:8, Act 20:23, Rom 8:18, Rom 8:34, Rom 8:37, 1Pe 1:6, 1Pe 4:7, 1Pe 5:10
worketh: Psa 119:67, Psa 119:71, Mat 5:12, Rom 5:3-5, Phi 1:19, 2Th 1:4, 2Th 1:6, Heb 12:10, Heb 12:11, Jam 1:3, Jam 1:4, Jam 1:12
far: 2Co 3:18, Gen 15:1, Psa 31:19, Psa 73:24, Isa 64:4, Luk 6:23, Rom 2:7, 1Co 2:9, 1Pe 1:7, 1Pe 1:8, 1Pe 5:10, 1Jo 3:2, Jud 1:24
Reciprocal: Gen 42:36 – all these things are against me Num 5:28 – And if Deu 8:16 – to do thee Deu 23:5 – Nevertheless Jdg 14:14 – Out of the eater 2Sa 16:12 – requite Psa 16:11 – in thy Psa 34:19 – Many Psa 41:3 – strengthen Psa 84:6 – Who Psa 84:11 – the Lord Psa 94:13 – mayest Psa 111:10 – his praise Psa 119:175 – and let thy Pro 3:11 – neither Pro 12:21 – no Ecc 7:3 – by Isa 26:20 – for a Isa 28:5 – shall the Isa 38:16 – General Isa 51:11 – everlasting Isa 54:7 – a small Isa 61:7 – your shame Dan 3:23 – fell Dan 4:36 – added Mat 5:10 – are Mat 11:30 – burden Luk 4:5 – in Luk 16:9 – into Joh 2:11 – beginning Joh 15:2 – and Joh 16:7 – It Act 16:25 – sang Rom 5:2 – the glory Rom 8:30 – he justified Rom 8:35 – shall tribulation 2Co 1:6 – effectual 2Co 4:8 – yet 2Co 5:5 – wrought 2Co 6:4 – afflictions 2Co 12:10 – I take Phi 3:14 – press Phi 4:19 – glory Col 1:27 – the hope Col 3:4 – ye 2Th 1:7 – who 2Th 2:16 – everlasting 1Ti 6:6 – godliness 2Ti 2:10 – with Heb 2:10 – glory Heb 13:14 – General 1Pe 4:13 – rejoice
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
AN ESTIMATE OF SUFFERING
Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.
2Co 4:17-18
The key to this passage, with its triumphant confidence, lies in the words while we look. It was the Apostles gaze upward and onward which put the things present into their true focus. For all magnitudes are best measured by comparison. While we look at the Alps, the great cathedral at their base is dwarfed into insignificance. While we ponder on the stupendous wonders of the starry heavens, this world of ours seems but a speck. So was it with St. Paul. While he looked away from the seen and temporary and gazed at the eternal; while he turned from the trials of this brief life and thought upon the weight of glory, then the present, with its sorrows and suffering, appeared not worthy of comparison with the tremendous issues which the future disclosed.
I. St. Pauls spiritual elevation was evidently the product of certain beliefs.
(a) He believed in immortality, and in the light of that belief he measured the significance of this present life.
(b) He had the conviction that his work was given to him by God. There was a consequent touch of the eternal in it all. He knew that his everyday life was of a piece with that unseen world of perfect glory into which his Lord had entered. The effect of this was to produce magnanimity, courage, power.
II. Was St. Paul right?Can we vindicate his confidence, or was he but a dreamer? We may be quite assured that the good soldier did receive the crown of life, which to his dying eyes seemed ready to drop upon his brow. To doubt this would be to doubt God; but we have no voice from the unseen telling us it was so. Yet we may gain from other sources such proofs that his sacrifice was not in vain as may, to that extent, vindicate his splendid confidence. For had St. Paul seen what were then among the things unseen, and beheld the results which his labours and sufferings would secure even in this life; had he been able to catch the echoes which his life and work would awaken age after age, with what increased firmness would he have spoken of the lightness of his afflictions compared with the glorious consequences of his toil. For Christendom has been created by him more than by any mere man. As we look back on the two thousand years that have passed since the lonely and distressed man wrote this letter to Corinth, we can vindicate his estimate. For where are now the things seenthe wealth, pleasure, and power, for which men were then struggling after as the only things worth striving for? Verily, the things seen were indeed temporary, but the unseen world of righteousness and of Christ is eternal. If St. Pauls confidence has been vindicated even by the immortality of his work on earth, how infinitely more must it have been vindicated in that world in which he enjoys the blessedness of the saints in light!
III. This passage has much helpful teaching for ourselves, especially for those enduring suffering or sorrow. The estimate we form of these will depend on what we fix the eye upon. Our trials may be in themselves anything but light. It would be wrong to shut our eyes to their significance even if we could do so. St. Paul not only realised his trials, but he often dwells on them, and weighs them one by one as very real.
(a) The change of feeling is great when we change our point of viewor, as the Apostle puts it, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are unseen. To the Christian who rises on the wings of faith above the pressure of what is close at hand, and thinks of the eternal, the sufferings of the present fall into their right place, and he will be able to say, however falteringly, This is but for a moment; when I shall look back upon it all a thousand years hence it will appear like some passing trouble of infancy. It is also good to look at the magnitudes of existence in order to measure aright the value of our present aims and ambitions, and to consider what there is in them which will last. In that great future it will be of little consequence whether we are now rich or poor, famous or unknown. These are not the things which shall abide. But whether we are loving or selfish, pure or impure, serving God and our brother men or our own wills and our lusts and passions, these are the matters of real importance.
(b) It is only as we look upward and onward that our trials work for us an exceeding weight of glory. Difficulty and trial have as little inherent power to benefit us as the wind has to benefit the ship; everything depends on the direction in which she is being steered; and whether the things of life shall work together for our good or not similarly depends on the objects we are following. They will work together for the highest good only when we love God, and are governed by the vision of the unseen and eternal.
(c) The encouragement these verses give for nobler living. The life of faith led by St. Paul ought to sound like a trumpet note stimulating to duty in an age when there are so many temptations to exchange the spiritual for the material.
Illustrations
(1) It requires the power of the Holy Spirit to persuade the sensualist, the thoughtless trifler, the over-anxious man of business, that his pursuits are unsatisfactory and insufficient to make him happy, but there is one quality which pervades them all, which every one must acknowledge and feel to be true, they are short, they endure for a little while and then vanish away. Let this simple truth sink down into all your hearts, let the remembrance of it haunt your gayest and most thoughtless moments, and when you are eagerly pursuing your pleasures and feel your heart entwined with some earthly object, say within yourself: This is all but for a season, it is merely temporal; it may be agreeable to my earthly nature, but it may be taken from me in a moment, and then if I have loved these things that are seen, the things of this world, more than the things that are not seen, more than God and the truths of His religion, what will become of me, where shall I be?
(2) We do not admit that to live mainly for the unseen world is to inflict damageupon the whole and in the long runon mans life in this. The case is in part parallel to that which many a parent encounters in the matter of education. The parent sometimes grudges the years that are spent at school and at college, when his boy might be earning his bread and perhaps doing something for the family. But if the boy is worth his salt the delay will justify itself. The larger cultivation of the mind will bring with it in due time its full rewardin wider views of life, in keener and more practised faculties, in a power of acting with and upon other men that could not otherwise have been secured.
(SECOND OUTLINE)
THE WITNESS OF THE SAINTS
The familiarity of these words conceals their real boldness from us. They challenge our normal and unreflecting way of looking at life. The things which are seen, in the midst of which we live and move, seem to us to be vivid, substantial, real; the things which are unseen, of which we only catch rare visions, seem to be unsubstantial, unreal, illusive. Yet our deepest conscience tells us, when we think in quiet moments, that the converse is really true, that the things which are seen pass away, and that the things which are unseen endure. We know that we cannot rightly estimate human life and character in history by outward things, by visible successes, by actual results, but only by the witness which it gives to inward ideals. As to ourselves, our conscience tells us we must look, not without, but within. All my thought, all my struggle, all I could not be, all men ignored in me, is my worth to God. The one life which we know to have been true is that Life which sacrificed the things which were seen on the Cross of failure in loyal witness to the things which are unseen.
We all know of men and women who have lived, and of triumphs which have been won in the world which is seen; we know, too, of the sharing of toil and of effort of those who have themselves manifestly risen above their struggles, and it has been as if there had been a tranquil secret which had upheld and uplifted them, through their constant communion with the Unseen. Such lives are of unspeakable value; they preserve the truth of our travelling condition, that here we have no abiding city. They have been helped from making the mistake, so pitifully natural, of surrendering to the claim of the visible present their birthright to the unseen eternal.
As the years pass we have the greater need of the great memory which is thus given to us. Let me point out three ways in which the legacy of good lives points to our particular need.
I. We have need of the profound sense of reverence.Blinded by the development of material comforts, perplexed by the atmosphere of discussion and of controversy, it is hard to realise of this our life that from the great deep of God to the great deep of God it goes. It is a help to such a realisation to remember lives which were penetrated through and through with the self-abasing reverence of God.
II. We need the witness to the supreme fact of the Incarnation.All over the world the ground is clearing for a great issue between a vague Christianity, warmed by admiration for Christ, and a Christianity which is to declare that in Him was God Almighty made manifest, and through Him man was raised to communion with God. In India and China, in lands of the past and of the future, Christianity is asked to part with the doctrine of the Incarnation. Just as in the fourth century when this attack was made, when the temptation assails the Church, it will be a help to many to remember that the greatest intellect of the nineteenth century [Mr. Gladstone] resolutely placed himself with Athanasius. It was the inspiration of his politics. His faith in the honour of humanity, in the truth and the justice of the instincts of the people, sprang from the Incarnation, and it was the inspiration of his personal life that through all his desires and ambitions there was the presence and the comradeship of God in Christ.
III. There is a third lesson, and that is the stern reality of sin.What is the greatest need of the century? Mr. Gladstone was asked on one occasion. The sense of sin, he replied. Unless there is the sense of sin, the whole edifice of redeeming grace, the home of so many deep and high expectations of the human race, dissolves into a dream. Man cannot long for a Saviour without he feels the need of a Saviour, unless he feels the sense of sin. We need to remember the necessity for a realisation of sin and of the need of pardon as being the primary essential in the things which are unseen.
Deep reverence, trust in the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, humble penitence, all springing up into the ardent joy of a real faith, this is the threefold message. May we thus learn to look not on the things which are seen, but on the things which are unseen, which are eternal.
Archbishop Lang.
(THIRD OUTLINE)
PROFILE OR FULL FACE
The world is divided apparently into two hostile camps. There are those whom we may call eternalists, and there are those whom we may call temporalists, and they say, We never can meet. We must belong to either one camp or the other; we are enemies rather than friends and neighbours. And there is the mischief, there is where the harm has been done, and Christianity has been so much misunderstood, and people who do not see what we are making for have been given a distaste and a disrelish for the spiritual.
I. The profile of Christianity.
(a) The eternalists.There are the eternalists. We cannot do without them. They have seen the unseen. They have had a secret whispered to them that has altered the whole tone and meaning of their life. They are very beautiful in their lives. They have seen something of the Christ, but it is a profile and Christianity is full-faced. Therefore, too, they lack something that the temporalist can and must teach them. They become unpractical because they do not see both sides of the face of Christianity. Living in the unseen, they remind us of what we should otherwise forget. God multiply their number exceedingly, only let them learn from looking at the other side of the face of Christianity. Christianity, like the Christ, is both Divine and human, and the temporalists have something that they have seen if they are in earnest, which is necessary, that the full-faced Christ may be embraced by the individual soul.
(b) The temporalists.There are, of course, the temporalists who sneer at all that is unseen and eternal, that do not believe in the very existence of a clever Christian. The man who disbelieves and sneers at the unseen because it is unseen is scarcely worth dealing with. But there are hundreds of men and women who are facing the temporal who say, God has placed me in the temporal; I have to get my living in the temporal. The seen, it is awful, it is close, it presses upon me. Does it all belong to man, does it all belong to evil? And to the temporalist we say in the name of Christianity, Yes, you are right. You are living in the temporal. You have seen the profile of the Christ, you have seen one side of the face of Christianity, but there is more for you to see. There is something that you may learn from the eternalist, if only you will shake hands together and be friends instead of deadly foes.
II. The full face of Christianity.We say to both, There is a third camp, a third position, and it is to be found in a full-faced Christianity. It is the Christianity of the Nicene Creed, that reminds us that God is the Maker of all things, visible and invisible, the temporal and the eternal, the seen and the unseen; that God loves the temporal; that at the Incarnation He threw His mantle over the seen and the earthly, the sphere of your life and of my life. God is the God of the streets as well as of the churches. God is the God of the present as well as of the future. The temporal and the eternal were never meant to be pitted one against the other, but the temporal is like a road leading to the eternal, and we must keep the road in good repair if we would ever get to our journeys end. So, again, we would say to the eternalist, Now, do not undervalue the temporal, do not frighten people away from religion and away from Christianity by underestimating the forces of the seen, the life that God has yoked you to live in. The temporal has an ethical value of its own, and we cannot afford to lose it. And to the temporalist we say this, Look beyond. The temporal and the eternal are meant to be in apposition, not in opposition. The things that are seen and the things that are unseen both belong to God, and both find their place in a full-faced Christianity.
Rev. Canon Holmes.
Illustrations
(1) There was an old motto of Charles 5 that he was fond of in the latter part of his life as when he was in active work: Plus ultra, he would say, plus ultra, more beyond. There is more beyond the temporal, there is more beyond that which we can explain by the seen, by that which surrounds us. Plus ultra, we would say to you. Look at Christianity as a full-faced picture, both sides of the face, the eternal and the temporal, and your life will be full of meaning and it will be full of joy.
(2) This is what the English people of days gone by have set before us to-day as something to be aimed at. Take some great expression such as the Court of St. Jamess. You see how it combines the eternal and the temporal. There is the world at its height. There is the expenditure of money, of wealth, there is the Court; but there in that name we are reminded that it was held in a place dedicated to St. James, a place wherein was a hospital where lepers were cared for and tended. Still we keep the name, still must we keep the idea. Again, St. Stephens, Westminster. There is the House of Commons, there is the business of the nation transacted day by day as Parliament meets, but it is all on a spot where once there was a chapel which King Stephen dedicated to his namesake, the proto-martyr, St. Stephen, ever combining the eternal and the temporal. Or Americans may like to be reminded how their country, too, will ever preach the same lesson as the English nation preaches. Go back in thought to the day when Columbus discovered that new land. What is the first thing he does? He plants a wooden cross on the soil that he first pressed his foot upon, and there he kneels down and dedicates that new land to the holy Saviour, and in the name San Salvador, or the holy Saviour, you have the combination of an eternal truth with an earthly fact.
Fuente: Church Pulpit Commentary
2Co 4:17. Light affliction and moment are used in a comparative sense. The first can affect the outward man only (Luk 12:4-5), and the second applies to this life only. On the other hand, the glory that shall be given to the faithful will be eternal in its weight (or worth) and endless in its duration.
Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary
2Co 4:17. For our light affliction, which is but for the momentonly temporary and but momentary,worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory; while we lookthat is, not so long as we look, or provided we look, but looking as we do, or inasmuch as we looknot at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. Did we look upon our troubles in the light of things seen and temporal, they would seem not light, but heavy indeed; looked at in this light, far from momentary, they would seem distressingly protracted; and looked at in this light, instead of working for us any good, they would seem to work us only evil and that continually; but looking on them, as we do, in the light of the things that are unseen and eternal, their character is entirely changed, and instead of heavy, they seem to be light; far from tedious and protracted, they seem but for the moment, and in place of doing us any real harm, we find them working for us more and exceedingly an eternal weight of glory. O what a change does the point of view make here! But is not this the experience of every one who has been renewed in the spirit of his mind, in whom old things have passed away, and all things have become new?
Fuente: A Popular Commentary on the New Testament
Still our apostle proceeds in assigning reasons why all the afflictions which himself and others met with, were not only tolerable, but joyous; namely, because,
1. His afflictions were light:
2. Because they were short.
They were light; but how? Not considered in themselves; so they were hard and heavy: thrice he was beaten with rods, five times he received forty stripes save one: but light, compared with the glory expected.
Again, they were short; but for a moment, compared with eternity. Mark the gradation for affliction there is glory: for light affliciton, a weight of glory; and for light affliction, which is but for a moment, an eternal weight of glory.
Observe farther, The apostle doth not barely say, that glory will be the consequent of affliction, but that affliction will be the cause of glory; it worketh for us.
But how?
Not as a meritorious cause: for alas! how can our afflictions deserve this happiness! What proportion can there be betwixt light and momentary afflictions, and an eternal weight of glory?
But they work for us, as they are sanctified by God to us. His infinite mercy and goodness, his covenant truth and faithfulness, make his saints’ afflictions a whipping-post to their corruptions; they purge our iniquity, and take away our sin, if we belong to God as his covenant children. But for wicked and obdurate sinners, alas! it is much otherwise: instead of being refined from their dross, and purged from their filth, by being in the furnace of affliction, it boils their scum and impurity more into them; and like flints in the fire, they fly in the very face of God their refiner.
Fuente: Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament
For our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly [Literally, in excess unto excess: a Hebraism: a method of expressing intensity by repetition of the same word. It might well be rendered “an abounding upon an abounding,” thus suggesting the idea of progression by upward steps] an eternal weight of glory;
Fuente: McGarvey and Pendleton Commentaries (New Testament)
Verse 17
Light affliction; light in comparison with the glory which shall follow.
Fuente: Abbott’s Illustrated New Testament
4:17 For our {p} light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding [and] eternal weight of {q} glory;
(p) Afflictions are not called light, as though they were light in themselves, but because they pass away quickly, as indeed our whole life is not of very long continuance.
(q) Which remains forever firm and stable, and can never be shaken.
Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes
Paul introduced another paradox. Suffering now will result in glory later. He could consider the afflictions he had undergone as a servant of Christ as "light" only in comparison with the heavy weight of glory he would receive at Christ’s judgment seat (cf. 2Co 11:23-27).
"His choice of the expression ’the weight of glory’ may be influenced by the fact that in Hebrew ’weight’ and ’glory’ come from the same root kbd. It is because the coming ’glory’ is so ’weighty’ that the present ’affliction’ seems so ’slight’ (Gk elaphron, ’light’), just as the eternity of the coming ’glory’ makes the ’affliction’ seem ’momentary.’ It is not simply that the ’glory’ is the compensation for the ’affliction’ [cf. Rom 8:18] . . . rather, the ’glory’ is the product of the ’affliction,’ produced in measure ’beyond all comparison’ . . ." [Note: Bruce, p. 199.]
Paul spoke of the glory as something that he could increase by continuing to suffer, the result of following God faithfully. He was referring to his eternal reward.
"No more [i.e., Neither] does the Apostle mean that all suffering is productive of glory, as though it were an infallible means to this end. The history of the Church has shown that such a concept leads to an unscriptural self-interest and to a misconception of the true character of Christian suffering. Paul is concerned here with suffering for Jesus’ sake (2Co 4:11; cf. Act 9:16), which means suffering in which there cannot possibly be any self-interest. It is precisely as the ’I’ decreases that Christ increases (Joh 3:30)." [Note: Hughes, p. 157.]