Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Corinthians · About this commentary
The God of All Comfort
2 Corinthians 1:3-7
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, · WEB
One word appears ten times in five verses, and the passage describes it as something that passes through a person rather than stopping in him.
The letter does not open with the quarrel. It opens with a blessing, and with a word repeated until it cannot be missed: comfort, in one form or another, ten times in these five verses.
Two titles carry it. The Father of mercies and God of all comfort — mercies in the plural, comfort with all attached, so neither is presented as occasional.
Then verse 4 sets out the whole mechanism in one sentence, and the shape of the sentence is the argument: God comforts us in all our affliction, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, through the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.
It is a circuit rather than a gift. Comfort arrives, and the stated purpose of its arriving is that it be handed on — through the very consolation received, not through sympathy in general. Which means the qualification for the work is having needed it. A man who has not been afflicted has nothing of this to pass on, and the letter will spend eleven more chapters demonstrating that Paul is qualified.
The scale is set by a comparison in verse 5: as the sufferings of Christ abound to us, even so our comfort also abounds through Christ. Both sides increase together, and neither is capped by the other.
Verse 6 then does something harder. It assigns Paul's affliction to the readers' account: if we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation. His suffering is described as useful to people who were not present for it — and what it produces in them is not relief but capacity, the patient enduring of the same sufferings which we also suffer.
And verse 7 makes the partnership run both directions: since you are partakers of the sufferings, so you are also of the comfort. The order is fixed. Nobody in the sentence gets the second without the first, and Paul does not offer to spare them either half.
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