Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Corinthians · About this commentary
Servants of God
2 Corinthians 6:3-7
3 We give no occasion of stumbling in anything, that our service may not be blamed, · WEB
Nineteen credentials are strung on one thread, and the hardships and the virtues are not kept apart.
Asked for references, Paul writes the longest list in the letter, and its opening concern is not to impress anyone: we give no occasion of stumbling in anything, that our service may not be blamed.
The worry is about the work rather than the worker. A ministry can be discredited by its representative, and the first item on the list is therefore a negative — the things he has not done.
Then in everything commending ourselves as servants of God, and nineteen items follow in a single accumulating breath, held together by one repeated preposition.
The first ten are things done to him or borne by him. Great endurance heads them, and then three words for pressure with almost nothing between them: afflictions, hardships, distresses. The near-synonymy is the effect intended — the experience did not come in distinguishable categories.
The next three are specific and public: beatings, imprisonments, riots. These are matters of record; a reader in Corinth could have checked them. And three more are self-imposed or circumstantial: labors, watchings, fastings, meaning work, nights without sleep, and going without food.
Then the list changes character without a break in the grammar. Pureness, knowledge, perseverance, kindness, in the Holy Spirit, in sincere love, in the word of truth, in the power of God.
Nothing marks the transition. Beatings and kindness are strung on the same thread, and imprisonments sit four words from sincere love — as though a man's injuries and his character were the same kind of evidence, produced in answer to the same question. That is the argument the list makes by its arrangement rather than by any statement.
The nineteenth item is a picture: by the armor of righteousness on the right hand and on the left. Sword hand and shield hand, both occupied. A man equipped that way is committed on every side and has nothing free — no hand left for anything he is not already doing.
And every item has been a description of conduct or of what conduct cost. Not one of them is a title, an appointment, or a letter from anybody — which is what makes it a reply to men who arrived carrying exactly those things 2 Corinthians 3:1.
settled What this mark means