Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Corinthians · About this commentary
Thanks Beyond Accounting
2 Corinthians 9:12-15
12 For this service of giving that you perform not only makes up for lack among the saints, but abounds also through much giving of thanks to God, · WEB
The collection is credited with three results, and only the first of them is the relief of poverty.
This service of giving that you perform not only makes up for lack among the saints, but abounds also through much giving of thanks to God.
The first result is the plain one: a shortage is met. Paul names it without inflating it — the word is simply lack, and the money covers it.
The sentence then moves past it. What the gift also produces is thanksgiving, and the two chapters have been building toward this: the transaction that began as a budget item ends as worship offered by people who never met the donors.
Verse 13 adds the second result, and it concerns reputation rather than supply: through the proof given by this service, they glorify God for the obedience of your confession to the Good News of Christ and for the generosity of your contribution.
What Jerusalem concludes from the money is that Corinth's profession is real. The gift functions as evidence — and the two things glorified are put side by side without ranking, the obedience of what they say they believe and the generosity of what they sent. A confession that cost nothing would have proved nothing.
And the reach is wider than the recipients: to them and to all.
Verse 14 gives the third result, and it is the least expected. They themselves also, with supplication on your behalf, yearn for you by reason of the exceeding grace of God in you.
The recipients begin praying for the donors and longing to see them. Two congregations separated by distance, language, and a long history of mutual suspicion are described as drawn toward each other — and the cause is named as the grace of God in you rather than the generosity itself. What Jerusalem yearns toward is what it detects behind the gift.
Then the appeal ends in four words that stop the accounting altogether: thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift!
The word means beyond describing. After two chapters of amounts, schedules, escorts, and safeguards, the last sentence names a gift that cannot be quantified — and it is not the collection. Every calculation in the appeal has been resting on something that was never calculated.
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