Day Ten
Movement IV — The Proportion
Springs
The Corinthians had a problem with Paul, and the problem was that he suffered too much.
Their reasoning was not stupid. If a man carries God’s authority, why does he keep getting beaten, jailed, shipwrecked, and run out of town? Rival teachers had arrived with better letters and smoother platforms, and the comparison did not flatter him.
So Paul opens the letter. And instead of explaining his troubles away, or minimising them, or apologising for them, he does arithmetic.
For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also aboundeth by Christ. 2 Corinthians 1:5, KJV
As … so. A ratio, in the fifth verse of a letter, from a man defending his ministry by pointing at his scars.
Today’s morsel
“So our consolation aboundeth.”
Say it twice. Then say the first half of the verse and let the as…so hold.
Wells
Both halves of the verse use the same verb, and it is a striking one: perisseuō, to overflow, to exceed, to be more than enough. It is the word for the twelve baskets left over after five thousand men had eaten all they wanted.
So the sentence is not suffering is met by comfort. It is the suffering runs over, and so does the comfort. Two floods, and Paul puts them in proportion.
If you have ever come out of something hard convinced that you found something down there you could not have found on level ground — that the consolation had a weight to it you had never felt in easier years — this verse is not indulging you. It is Paul saying the same thing first.
The proportion is real. It is apostolic. It is stated without hedging. Hold it at full strength for three days.
One qualifier is doing enormous work, and losing it turns the verse into something Paul never wrote. It is not as suffering abounds. It is as the sufferings of Christ abound in us.
Ta pathēmata tou Christou. The proportion is not a general law of the universe by which pain converts to consolation at a fixed rate. It is a statement about participation — about what happens when a man’s afflictions are bound up with Christ’s own.
That distinction will look like a technicality today. In Movement V it will be the difference between a doctrine that holds and one that shatters, because not all suffering is that suffering, and Scripture knows it.
Aquifer
Where honest readers disagree: whose sufferings? Three readings of the sufferings of Christ are in play. First, sufferings Christ himself endured, now shared by those in him — union language. Second, sufferings endured for Christ’s sake, a genitive of cause. Third, the “messianic woes” of Jewish expectation, a fixed measure of tribulation preceding the end. The first has the widest support and fits Paul’s union-with-Christ vocabulary elsewhere; the second is the plainest reading of the context, since Paul’s troubles came from preaching. They are not mutually exclusive.
What it does not mean. Neither this verse nor Colossians 1:24 suggests that Christ’s atoning work was incomplete and needs topping up. The sufferings in view are the afflictions of the body of Christ in the world, not the satisfaction made at the cross. Hebrews 10:14 settles the question in one clause.
Read the overflow word elsewhere. Perisseuō in John 6:12–13 (the leftover fragments), Romans 5:20 (grace superabounding where sin abounded), and Philippians 4:12 (Paul knowing how to abound and how to be abased). The word carries excess in every case, which is why the two clauses of 2 Corinthians 1:5 are both about too much rather than just enough.