1:3 Paul begins his letter proper with his gaze fixed solely on God. “Blessed be” is a typical Jewish way of praising God—but of course to relate this God to Jesus Christ the way Paul does goes well beyond any Jewish liturgy or creed. The letter that follows is filled with pathos and longing and concern and rebuke. But here at the outset Paul opens with a burst of exultation in God and celebration of his supreme lordship and compassionate fatherhood.

Paul reflects first on who God is internally or in relationship to Christ, and then on who he is externally or in relationship to believers. Internally, he is the “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The Greek suggests that “God” and “Father” both describe the Father’s relationship to Christ. We know from other Pauline texts (and the witness of all of Scripture and its faithful interpreters down through the centuries) that Paul does not mean to place Christ in a position of createdness, like other humans. Christ the Son participates in the divine identity. He is truly God. Nevertheless, in the triune God’s plan of redemption the Father orchestrates salvation, while the incarnate Son accomplishes and mediates that salvation in perfect harmony with the Father (and the Spirit applies that salvation).

Externally, or turning from facing Christ to facing believers, God is “the Father of mercies and God of all comfort.” The plural “mercies” and the adjective “all” reflect the sheer outpouring nature of God’s goodness. God’s mercy and comfort flow out abundantly from his deepest heart. The meaning is not so much that every true comfort we experience comes from God, though that is true; rather, comfort defines who he is. He is the “God of all comfort.”

1:4 Comfort is not abstractly related to who God is. The “God of all comfort” actually exercises himself for the sake of his people’s comfort: “who comforts us.” Comfort is not only an adjective describing who God is; it is a verb describing what God does. The Greek suggests an ongoing activity of comforting from God. And this divine consolation is not meant to heal some of our afflictions while bypassing others; no, he “comforts us in all our affliction.” Every time a painful affliction rises up in our lives, God’s comfort rises to meet it and calm it. We will see throughout this letter that God often does not take away the affliction itself, but he does what is needed so that we can endure and even flourish in spite of the affliction.

Why does God comfort us in our pain? So that we become a channel of divine comfort to those around us who are in pain—indeed, in “any” pain. We know from Paul’s other surviving letter to the Corinthians that he views believers as the body of Christ, with Christ as the head (1 Cor. 12:12–27). Here we see a glimpse into just how vital a reality Paul views this to be. God comforts believers largely through other believers. God comforts us directly (2 Cor. 1:4a), but also indirectly through his people (v. 4b).

1:5 How can this be? Is solace that is mediated through other believers less real or more diluted in some way than the kind of comfort Paul himself received, apparently directly from the Lord? Not at all. Consider Paul’s reasoning as he continues. The ESV justifiably begins a new sentence but there is no clear grammatical break in the Greek: God comforts those around us with the very comfort we have received—and why?—“for as the sufferings of Christ abound to us, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.”3

In the previous verse Paul spoke of being comforted by God; here he introduces Christ. There is no way to make sense of Paul’s logic without recourse to the pervasive Pauline theme of union with Christ. This is why comfort that is mediated through believers is just as real as that mediated directly by God: because believers are in Christ, to be comforted by other believers is to be comforted by Christ.

When Paul says that “the sufferings of Christ abound to us,” he means that we who are united to Christ participate in the cruciform (cross-shaped) pattern of existence Christ has experienced ahead of us. As Paul puts it in Philippians, we “share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Phil. 3:10). But as Philippians goes on to speak of thereby sharing in Christ’s resurrection (Phil. 3:10–11), so 2 Corinthians 1:5 goes on from speaking of Christ’s sufferings abounding to us to speak of comfort abounding to us.4 The Greek conjunctions make clear what could perhaps be missed in English: just as we share in Christ’s sufferings, so also—as a necessary and natural counterpart—we share in comfort through Christ.

1:6 Paul continues the theme of comfort through affliction but pivots now to make his point more personal. He looks the Corinthians in the eye. And this is for your sake, he says.

What immediately strikes the reader is that Paul aligns his sufferings and comfort as both having the same goal: the Corinthians’ comfort. The Greek construction (eite . . . eite . . . ) communicates “whether this . . . or that . . .” As he will throughout this letter, Paul drills into the heart of Christian living by speaking of a radical other-centeredness, a concern for another rather than self—in a word, love. He uses a Greek preposition (hyper with the genitive, “on behalf of”) to speak of his afflictions as “for your comfort and salvation.” That is, his afflictions are on behalf of the Corinthians. (He uses the same prepositional construction again when speaking of his comfort being “for” or “on behalf of” the Corinthians.) His great concern is not his own welfare but the Corinthians’—a selfless concern the photo negative of which is seen in the false apostles, as we will see later in this letter.

Paul ends this sentence by once again overlaying Christian suffering with comfort. He says the Corinthians’ comfort is a reality “you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer.” As the Corinthians persevere in their afflictions, a quiet reality emerges alongside and even transcends that pain—the very heartening and solace of Christ, abounding to them, as they share in his own afflictions as those united to him.

1:7 Paul reassures his friends of his confidence in their spiritual stability. He mentioned “endurance” in the previous verse, and here he speaks of “hope,” both of which speak of the future. Paul is confident they will persevere to the end. But why? Because they are participating in the fullness of Christian experience. It is difficult to know the true spiritual state of those who have only known the mountaintop but never the valley, only ease but never pain. But there is a strange encouragement in the distressing afflictions of Christian experience. This is safe ground. For this is the path Christ walked, and in finding ourselves on that path we know we are not fair-weather disciples. There are profound dysfunctions in Corinth. But Paul takes heart—at least they are suffering!

And once again he subtly refers to the solidarity he and the Corinthians share in their union with Christ. The Corinthians “share” in Paul’s sufferings, using a Greek word (koinōnos) that refers to those who share in a profound union, whether for good (8:23; Philem. 17) or for ill (1 Cor. 10:18, 20).

1:8 Paul swivels now to reflect on a particular circumstance that personally illustrates what he has just been describing in more abstract terms. The two paragraphs function in tandem; theology followed by autobiography, truth followed by demonstration.

Paul calls the Corinthians “brothers” for the first time (cf. 8:1; 13:11), drawing them in and underscoring his solidarity with them. He says he does not want the Corinthians to be unaware of this particularly intense recent affliction. Why? Is he parading his resilience before an audience he deems not tough enough? By no means. On the contrary, this kind of fleshly mindset is precisely that of the false apostles whom Paul will engage throughout the letter. Paul’s boast, he will say later, is only of his weakness, not of his toughness (11:30). True boasting is thus boasting only in the Lord rather than in oneself (10:17–18). Paul is personally identifying with the theology he has just commended. He wants them to know he practices what he preaches. He has taken the medicine he is prescribing. Paul underscores the earthiness and specificity of his recent affliction by noting its geographical location: “in Asia” (modern-day Turkey).

The first half of the verse notes the location of the affliction; the second half of the verse, its severity. The Greek text strains to communicate the depths of this affliction, captured well by the ESV’s “we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself.” The first part of this phrase literally reads “according to surpassing quality [hyperbolē] beyond power we were burdened.” The word hyperbolē means a “state of exceeding to an extraordinary degree a point on a scale of extent” (BDAG)—that is, the extraordinary quality of a thing. It will be used at other key points in the letter when Paul is grasping to communicate what can hardly be captured with words (4:7, the “surpassing” power of God manifested in jars of clay; 4:17, the “beyond all comparison” weight of glory; and 12:7, the “surpassing greatness” of Paul’s revelations when caught up to the third heaven). Like a rowboat before a tidal wave, Paul’s innate strength was completely overwhelmed by the severity of this trial. He and his companions even “despaired of life itself.” They had resigned themselves to the reality that this was the end.

1:9 Paul continues to drive home the severity of his suffering. The Greek text does not suggest that Paul simply “felt” that they had received a sentence of death but that they had, as far as they were concerned, received a death sentence. Judgment had been passed. The executioner’s sword was raised.

But why? “To make us rely not on ourselves but on God.” Paul had been brought to the end of himself, to the utter exhaustion of his human resources, his own energies and strategies, so that he had nowhere else to go but to God. Paul and his companions had been brought to see what all mature believers must: the flesh is so strong within us that we will cling to anything within us before clinging to God, depending on him, casting ourselves on him.

And not reliance on any God. This is a dead-raising God: “who raises the dead.” Paul had received a death sentence as far as humanly wrought efforts and strength were concerned. Without God, he was done. But this was the very point. God was preparing to work resurrection life in Paul; but only the dead can be resurrected (more on this in 4:7–18). Christ was killed, and raised. Paul has been “killed,” and raised. The wounded can still limp on in their own strength. Only the dead are utterly incapacitated, in need of a power wholly beyond them to breathe fresh life and raise them from the dead.

1:10 And this is what God has done. “He delivered us from such a deadly peril.” Woodenly the text reads, “who from so great a death delivered us.” It was not simply the peril or danger of death. As far as Paul was concerned, he had indeed died—in the sense that without divine intervention he had come to the end of life. But this intervention came. God “delivered” or “rescued” Paul and his companions.

More than this, Paul goes on intriguingly, “he will deliver us.” What does this mean? Paul means that this severe trial has rewired the inner mechanics of his heart in such a way that he is now moving through life knowing that this dead-raising God will always bring life out of his “end-of-his-rope” experiences. Paul now understands how a dead-raising God works. To ask whether Paul is speaking of temporal/circumstantial deliverance or eternal/spiritual deliverance misses the point. Both are included. Whatever the trial, God will infuse life. This is who he is. He raised Christ from the dead. He will raise those who come to the bottom of their resources and bank everything on him, whether a circumstantial “death” or final physical death. Thus Paul uses the verb “deliver” yet a third time in this verse: “On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.” Paul’s entire mindset has been flipped inside out. He has uprooted his hopes from anything in this unstable world and replanted his hopes squarely and entirely on God, the dead-raising God.

1:11 To this point Paul has been speaking only of the way his apostolic work has been on behalf of (Gk. hyper) the Corinthians. Now he turns it around and includes the reciprocal truth: you must do something on behalf of (again, hyper) us. What can the Corinthians do? They can join in Paul and his friends’ ministry through prayer.

The phrasing of the reason for this—“so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many”—is difficult to follow in both Greek and English. The reason for this is that Paul is laboring to intertwine the Corinthians’ work with his own. He wants to make clear the joint nature of his ministry and their prayers. The word “blessing” here (Gk. charisma) means a favor or gift that is freely or graciously rendered. It refers to the ministry of the gospel with which Paul has been entrusted. The Corinthians, through their prayers, are joining Paul in his apostolic extension of the gospel throughout the Mediterranean world in those vital early decades of the growth of the church.