12:1 Paul is not done boasting. How can he be, when he has not yet gotten to the bottom purpose of his boasting? Paul is working his way toward the recounting of his thorn in the flesh and how that experience brought him to see the basic point leafed all through 2 Corinthians: God’s power interlocks with humans not as they rise up to meet him in power but at the point of their deepest weakness. God’s upside-down formula for gospel impact is not divine strength plus human strength but divine strength plus human weakness.

To drive the point home, Paul has one last boast to add. He has recounted his many weaknesses in the second half of chapter 11. His last boast is a boast in his profound weakness resulting from a “thorn . . . in the flesh” (12:7), but to set up the episode of the thorn Paul must explain the precipitating experience of God’s giving him this thorn: an experience of being caught up into the heavens. Recounting this experience does not profit Paul personally (“there is nothing to be gained by it”). He is not out to impress. But it will profit the Corinthians. Their well-being remains his overriding concern.

12:2–3 Paul reaches back to an experience fourteen years prior, before he had written any of his letters found in our NT and perhaps ten years after Jesus had been crucified. It is a moment so sacred that Paul hardly knows how to describe it. One senses his sheepishness in his holding himself at a distance from the episode, speaking of himself in the third person (“I know a man” [v. 2]; “this man” [vv. 3, 5]; that it is he himself in view becomes clear in vv. 5–7).

While God knows the exact nature of the experience, Paul does not know if his experience was “in the body or out of the body.” He repeats this in verse 3, presumably to drive home the point to the Corinthians that it is really immaterial what precisely was happening physiologically to Paul. It is salutary to remember here that the church in Corinth was particularly prone to misunderstanding human anthropology and the relationship between the spirit and the body (e.g., 1 Cor. 2:11–16; 3:16–17; 6:12–19; 7:2–5; 8:8–9; 9:4–5; 11:21–22; 12:1; 15:35–49; 2 Cor. 4:16–18; 5:1–5; 6:14–7:1). Paul wants to prevent any distraction. Do not worry about the specific psychosomatic nature of this experience, he basically says. To do so would be to miss the point.

Paul says he was “caught up to the third heaven.” The number three is a number of wholeness or completion. Perhaps beyond this Paul also considered heaven to have three “levels” according to a cosmology inspired by OT texts that speak of “heaven, even the highest heaven,” that is, “heaven and the heaven of heaven” (cf. Deut. 10:14; 1 Kings 8:27; 2 Chron. 2:6; 6:18; Neh. 9:6). The point is that the apostle entered the very heart of heaven and thus the sublime presence of God himself. Paul gives one other descriptor of heaven: “paradise” (2 Cor. 12:3), a word (Gk. paradeisos) used just two other times in the NT, in Jesus’ word to the thief that he would be with him that day “in paradise” (Luke 23:43) and in a reference to the “paradise of God” in the next life (Rev. 2:7).

The word “caught up” here (harpazō) is a strong one, occurring fourteen times in the NT and often denoting being “snatched up” (e.g., John 10:28), even forcefully (e.g., Matt. 11:12). Paul did not climb a spiritual ladder to get there. He was divinely transported.

12:4 Strikingly, it was not what Paul saw but what he heard that he focuses on as unrepeatable. He heard arrēta rhēmata, “un-word-able words.” What he heard could not be replicated by mortal mouths. Not only this, but what he heard should not be repeated, either. It was not right. The word underneath “may” (Gk. exestin) in the phrase “may not utter” refers to something (not) lawful (e.g., Matt. 12:2).

This is far more than a “you had to be there” moment. Paul had been given an actual foretaste, a premature experience, of the unspeakable wonder and radiant resplendence and shining glory and sublime calm and ineffable beauty of God himself—unmediated. How was he not incinerated? How did he not go into instant meltdown on account of the flood of awe and joy that would have engulfed him? Only because he was safely “in Christ” (2 Cor. 12:2).

D. L. Moody famously experienced the love of God to such a degree while in New York City that he had to “ask God to stay his hand,” describing the whole event as “almost too sacred an experience to name.”82 If that was the case for someone on earth, what must it have been like to be transported to heaven?

12:5 At first glance it may appear that Paul is demonstrably proving himself not to be the man caught up into heaven. Paul expresses willingness to boast “on behalf of this man,” but not on his own behalf. But he goes on to acknowledge “the revelations” as his own (v. 7), so verse 5 must be understood differently: Paul is seeking to maintain a healthy distance from the experience as related. One can sense his discomfort in identifying the experience as his, so he works around to acknowledging it as his own only when he must. For now he continues to hold the episode at arm’s length. Put differently, Paul’s instincts have been turned inside out by the gospel. While those outside of Christ long to boast in their strengths and hold their weaknesses at arm’s length, Paul longs to boast in his weaknesses and hold his strengths at arm’s length.

12:6 It would be completely unobjectionable for Paul to boast in his heavenly experience. He would simply “be speaking the truth.” Paul had acknowledged in chapter 11 that his boasting in weakness would undoubtedly render him a “fool” (Gk. aphrōn) to unthinking Corinthians (11:16, 19), but, had he boasted in his transportation into heaven’s throne room, he would have faced no such danger (“I would not be a fool [aphrōn]”).

But Paul refuses to boast in what the flesh loves to exult in. He does not want to do what so many leaders do today, even in the church—cultivate a certain persona, build a “platform,” craft a public figure, present oneself in a carefully circumscribed way to put oneself in the best possible light. Leaders know who they really are, but when it comes to presenting oneself publicly, the temptation is to project the parts of oneself that one wishes to be seen and known. Paul goes in precisely the other direction. He wants the real Paul, the whole Paul, to be what others see and know. He is not painting a portrait of himself he wants the Corinthians to see. There is too much at stake for that: the welfare of Corinthian souls and the glory of the living Christ, who redeems all, not part, of who we are.

12:7–8 With these verses we enter into a four-verse passage of profoundly hope-giving and humbling reorientation for every generation of followers of Christ. Few texts in all the Bible speak more richly of the objective side of God’s redeeming work than does 2 Corinthians 5, and few texts speak more richly of the subjective side of God’s redeeming work than does 2 Corinthians 12. Divine reconciliation; divine power. Authentic Christianity is both, with the former fueling the latter.

Here Paul introduces the thorn in the flesh that afflicted him in the wake of his heavenly experience. We today might picture a small rosebush thorn, but the term used (Gk. skolops) could designate objects as large as a stake on which one might be impaled. The thorn generated more than mere annoyance; it generated agony corresponding to the glory of what Paul had seen in the highest heaven. Though the thorn was (presumably) introduced into Paul’s life fourteen years prior, verses 8–10 give every indication that it is still a present reality and thus represents a prolonged, sustained pain. But what was the thorn? Speculation does us no good. We do not know. And that is just as well, lest those whose afflictions are of a different nature than Paul’s feel disqualified from applying his teaching to their own hearts. Probably Paul was intentionally vague, not only for maximal application but also to prevent spotlighting his own life any more than necessary. Paul’s point is not the content of the thorn but its intent.

And what is that intent? Paul’s humility: “to keep me from becoming conceited.” The verb here (Gk. hyperairōmai) means to be lifted up. The thorn’s purpose is to deflate the certainty that Paul would quietly become puffed up over his indescribable experience of heaven. And who would not, without a thorn to burst that bubble? And so the Lord lovingly, gently, sovereignly afflicts his dear apostle. Or was it the Lord? Does the text not ascribe the thorn to Satan or one of his emissaries? Indeed. The thorn was given to “harass” Paul—surely the work of the Devil. Yet surrounding this desire to harass is a purpose to humble Paul, mentioned twice, once at the beginning of the verse and once at the end. Satan’s purpose is sandwiched within God’s. In a mysterious overlay of divine sovereignty and evil, even satanic activity falls within the scope of God’s sovereign purposes. God is not the author of evil in such a way that renders him morally culpable. He is incapable of doing anything that is morally tainted. Yet even the evilest act of human history was ordained by God (Acts 2:23; 4:27–28). So too with lesser evils.

So Paul did in 2 Corinthians 12:8 what any of us would do: he asked for the thorn to be removed. Just as the “third” heaven (v. 2) likely refers to the heaven of heavens, the heart of heaven, so “three times” likely means Paul pleaded with the Lord to exhaustion. He did not make the request more than twice but fewer than four times. Rather, it was a complete, comprehensive, full request. He did not ask timidly or passingly. The very verb he uses, “I pleaded” (using parakaleō), not simply “I asked,” already makes this clear. That Paul pled with the Lord to have the thorn removed is further proof that the Lord was the one providentially behind the giving of the thorn.

12:9 Paul saw two ways forward. The Lord could (1) remove the thorn, and Paul could get on with life and ministry, or (2) leave the thorn, and Paul would be forever crippled and slowed in life and ministry. The Lord responded with yet a third option: leave the thorn, but give Paul grace. And for Paul’s life and ministry, this would net out as taking Paul places in terms of divine power he could never have attained otherwise. This is God’s secret strategy for his people. This is the surprising way into power from on high.

God’s “grace” here is not primarily objective, forgiving grace (as in, say, Rom. 3:24). Rather, Paul is using “grace” more broadly as shorthand for the presence of God—sustaining, empowering, calming, supporting, comforting, emboldening, satisfying. “My grace is sufficient for you” means “I am sufficient for you.” Why, then, use the word “grace”? Because the Lord sought to reassure Paul that he need not earn or deserve God’s presence. It is of grace. This grace is further clarified by the next clause: “for my power is made perfect in weakness.” It is a grace that channels divine power. The presence of God will sustain Paul; the power of God will strengthen him. What we must not miss is that it is not Paul’s strength but God’s. Paul’s contribution is weakness. But this is not a concession; it is precisely what God needs. This is the mystery, the wonder, the glory, of apostolic Christianity: our weakness attracts, not repels, God’s own power. Our lowness and incapacities, which we naturally fear and flee, are precisely where God loves to dwell.

As a result, Paul’s pursuits are flipped upside down. He had been given a revelation of heaven in 2 Corinthians 12:1–6. But he has been given a revelation of how heaven intersects with fallen sinners in verses 7–10, namely, through human weakness. The first revelation brought him way up high; the second, way down low (perhaps Paul had his heavenly vision and his thorn in the flesh in mind when he said in Romans 8:39 that neither “height nor depth” can “separate us from the love of God in Christ”). And this second revelation has inverted his source of boasting. Instead of building his identity on his areas of strength, he builds his identity on the very weakness the world and the flesh eschew. Competence is not where God’s power lies. Frailty is. Feebleness. For there God’s grace ignites. There God himself dwells.

Indeed, Paul uses ancient language to speak of God’s power as resting upon him. The verb for “rest” (Gk. episkēnoō) is built on the root word for tabernacle, the portable temple in which alone God’s presence dwelt in times of old. But while God’s power was once cordoned off from all weak and defiled sinners, now it is precisely the weakness of sinners that draws in the power of God. Once more we see Paul quietly indicating that the new age has dawned in Christ. And in this new age, God’s power does not operate the way we expect.

12:10 Paul comes to his triumphant conclusion to his thorn experience. This is also probably the high point of the entire letter. This verse crystallizes and illuminates Paul’s entire argument in 2 Corinthians. Having seen now the secret to the power of Christ tabernacling upon him, Paul fills out what he means in verse 9 by “I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses.” What kind of weaknesses? Paul answers with a list of five categories of increasing intensity of difficulty:

(1)  Weaknesses (Gk. astheneiai; also 11:30; 12:9 [2x]): the general, summarizing category, denoting all fallen human incapacities

(2)  Insults (Gk. hybreis): mistreatment by others, whether with words or actions

(3)  Hardships (Gk. anankai): experiences that squeeze Paul, forcing him to uncomfortable limits

(4)  Persecutions (Gk. diōgmoi): afflictions at the hands of hostile enemies

(5)  Calamities (Gk. stenochōriai): truly overwhelming experiences, devastating circumstances

Paul says that he is “content with” (Gk. eudokeō) these things, but the Greek verb is stronger than that. It means to “be well pleased with” or to “delight in” something and is used, for example, of the Father’s being “well pleased” with the Son in Matthew 3:17. Paul is not saying he is merely “content” with every mortal weakness that renders him frail and seemingly vulnerable. He steps into them. He embraces them. This is a tone not of resignation but of eagerness. To be clear, this is not masochism. Paul does not delight in the weaknesses in themselves. This is clarified by his addition of “for the sake of Christ.” Paul delights in weakness because it opens him up to heaven’s blessings and strength. His spiritual power surges forward.

And so, to sum up: “When I am weak, then I am strong.” Paul refers not simply to isolated and occasional experiences of weakness, in which case strength ignites. The Greek word here rendered “when” (hotan) suggests that he has in mind a perpetual state of weakness, and thus a perpetual state of receiving divine strength. Paul saw now that his weakness was not an obstacle to but the gateway for God’s strength.