Day Twelve
Movement IV — The Proportion
Springs
Paul asked three times. That detail is easy to read past, and it should not be. Three times means he asked, waited, and asked again — and asked again after that.
He does not tell us what the thorn was. He tells us he wanted it gone and that it was not removed. What he got instead was a sentence.
And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. 2 Corinthians 12:9, KJV
Notice that the answer is not no. It is also not yes. It is a statement about what is already true, offered in place of the thing he asked for.
And Paul, who did not get what he prayed for three times, calls the answer enough.
Today’s morsel
“My grace is sufficient.”
Present tense. Not will be. Say it as of this hour.
Wells
Three words in this verse repay the effort of learning them.
My grace is sufficient translates arkei, a present indicative. Is. Not will be when the thorn is dealt with. Not was, back when things were easier. A standing, current condition, true at the moment of speaking and true again at the next moment.
Which is a promise you cannot draw on in advance and cannot exhaust. Remember that when Movement VI puts you in front of bread that would not keep overnight. The two doctrines are the same doctrine.
“Made perfect” renders a verb meaning to bring to its end, to finish, to complete. The claim is stronger than God helps you when you are weak. It is that the power reaches its intended completion in the weakness — that weakness is the condition under which the thing finally does what it was for.
That is not a consolation prize. It is a statement that the strong version of you was never the point.
And the last clause, which the King James renders may rest upon me, is a tent word. Episkēnoō — to spread a tabernacle over. The same root as the tent that stood in the wilderness with the glory inside it.
So Paul’s picture is not power poured into a weak man to shore him up. It is power camped on top of him, the way the glory camped on a tent in a desert. The weakness is the ground it pitches on.
This is the high-water mark of the case. Everything you were told in Movement I, everything Isaiah grounded in Movement II, everything David walked in Movement III, and everything Paul has counted in Movement IV stands here at full height.
Tomorrow the book turns, and it turns on purpose.
Aquifer
A textual variant behind “made perfect.” The Textus Receptus, which stands behind the King James, reads teleioutai (from teleioō, G5048). The critical texts read teleitai (from teleō, G5055), and Thayer records that present passive form at this verse, noting it as equivalent to teleioō here. Both roots come from telos, an end or goal, and the sense is unaffected either way: the power is brought to completion. Worth knowing because a reader comparing the KJV against a modern translation’s footnotes will find the two Strong’s numbers and wonder which is right. The answer is that it does not change the meaning.
The thorn. Paul calls it a thorn in the flesh and a messenger of Satan sent to buffet him, and then declines to identify it. Proposals across the centuries have included an eye ailment (read Galatians 4:15 and 6:11), recurrent malaria, epilepsy, a speech impediment, and human opponents dogging his work. There is no way to settle it, and the reticence looks deliberate: an unnamed thorn belongs to every reader.
Three times. Set the threefold prayer beside Gethsemane, where the Lord also asked three times and also was not given the removal. Both prayers were answered; neither was granted. That pattern is worth sitting with before Movement V, because it establishes that an unanswered request and an unheard one are different things.