2 Corinthians 3:1–6
3 Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you, or from you? 2 You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our1 hearts, to be known and read by all. 3 And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.2
4 Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. 5 Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, 6 who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
1 Some manuscripts your 2 Greek fleshly hearts
Section Overview: Sufficiency through Insufficiency
Paul has just been speaking of the triumphant ministry he and his companions are stewarding, a ministry of eternal consequence. Perhaps it might sound as if he were elevating himself in a self-aggrandizing way. To head off this misunderstanding Paul offers two pieces of evidence that he is only speaking truly and appropriately of his gospel ministry. The first is the Corinthians themselves. The second is their God-given sufficiency, which establishes them as servants of the long-awaited new covenant, the age of the Spirit.
Section Outline
II.C. Paul’s Ministry as a Ministry of True Glory (3:1–4:6)
1. Paul’s Sufficiency Attested by the Corinthians (3:1–3)
a. A Question (3:1)
b. An Answer (3:2)
c. A Proof of the Answer (3:3)
2. Paul’s Sufficiency Attested by the Spirit (3:4–6)
a. Paul’s Confidence (3:4)
b. The General Reason for Paul’s Confidence (3:5)
c. The Specific Reasons for Paul’s Confidence (3:6)
(1) Ministers of the New Covenant (3:6a)
(2) Ministers of the Spirit, Not the Letter (3:6b)
(3) Ministers of Life, Not Death (3:6c)
Response
The fundamental battle as we roll out of bed each day is to settle in our hearts the deeply counterintuitive truth of 2 Corinthians 3:1–6: Our “okay-ness,” our “enough-ness,” our sufficiency, is a gift to be received, not a prize to be earned. This is true of all believers; it is especially true, and most immediately true here in 2 Corinthians 3, of God’s undershepherds. As Luther said when preaching 2 Corinthians 3:5, “We have confidence that God has qualified us. If he does so, that’s all that matters. If the world does not consider us qualified, so be it!”
What does it look like to move through life aloof to this truth? Frantic, anxious, overworked, judgmental, burdened, insecure, easily threatened, easily hurt, darting eyes. What does it look like to move through life in sync with “Our sufficiency is from God” (v. 5)? Calm, relaxed, encouraging of others, cheerful, impervious to criticism, all with childlike wondering at the full and free mercy of God and his remarkable condescension to sinners such as us. And ultimately only this kind of life will prove spiritually fruitful, for it will be living and serving out of the deep resources of the Spirit of God (cf. Gal. 5:16–26), not the impotence of a heart attempting to satisfy the demands of the letter on its own steam.
Some manuscripts your
Greek fleshly hearts
3:1 Paul opens with two questions. Neither is explicitly answered, but the implied answer in both cases is no.
The first question—“Are we beginning to commend ourselves again?”—is picked up in 5:12, where it is explicitly denied that Paul and his cohorts are commending themselves. It is clear throughout the letter that the Corinthians are at one and the same time put off both by Paul’s apparent unimpressiveness and by any hint of Paul’s putting himself forward. With regard to the latter, here he denies self-generated commendation. But why “again”? Evidently this is not the first time Paul has had to defend his apostolic legitimacy. And so, as he has claimed in the present letter “godly sincerity” (1:12) and divine anointing (1:21) and triumphal preaching with eternal significance, it is no wonder that he feels a need to head off the objection that he is presenting to the Corinthians an inflated sense of himself.
If Paul is not commending himself, who is? The Corinthians? Yes and no. No, the Corinthians are not the final arbiters of Paul’s sufficiency. Paul will clarify in 3:5 what he has already claimed in 1:21–22: it is God himself who ratifies Paul’s ministry. But first Paul considers whether in any sense the Corinthians confirm Paul in his ministry. They do indeed, but not in the sense they themselves might expect. Paul does not need “letters of recommendation” to be written by them or to them (“recommendation” has the same root as “commend” in 3:1)—a letter that would formally introduce a traveler to a potential host on behalf of the sender. The very question would have stung the spiritually sensitive in Corinth. Would a father need a commendatory letter to stay at his own son’s house? Yet this is what Paul is to the Corinthians, spiritually: he is their father. Warm filial love and esteem ought not to question one’s own father’s leadership and integrity.
3:2 Paul implicitly denies the need for commendatory letters to justify his leadership, but the answer he gives to the second question of verse 1 is not that no letters at all are needed but rather not that kind of letter.
The commendatory letter that confirms Paul’s ministry among the Corinthians is not a piece of parchment but the Corinthians themselves. The Greek is emphatic, rightly rendered with “you yourselves.” Vindication of Paul’s ministry (to put it in modern-day language) is found by looking not in the mailbox but in the mirror.
Paul then speaks of an internal reality and an external reality. The internal reality is that the Corinthians, as epistles themselves, have indeed been written—but, again, not that kind of writing. This is a writing on the heart. The Corinthians are indelibly etched into the very core of who Paul is (remembering that the “heart” in biblical terms is a matter not of emotions only but of the entire animating center of a person).
The external reality is that these living epistles are not limited to be read only by some but are openly visible to all. A literal commendatory letter would have been passed around, read only by one person at a time unless read aloud. Not so the Corinthians-as-letters. Their own community’s entrance into eternal life through Paul’s paternal preaching of the gospel to them, and the transformation they are enjoying (3:18), renders Paul’s ministerial legitimacy beyond reproach. They are the letters of recommendation. They just need to look around at one another.
3:3 Paul continues the metaphor of the Corinthians as living epistles proving Paul’s ministry. In Greek, verse 3 continues with a present participle the sentence that began in verse 2: “known and read by all, showing that . . .” Paul has just claimed that the Corinthians are openly visible as living letters to all. But what exactly do people see? Here Paul gives the answer. They observe an “epistle of Christ” (probably “from” Christ, though there is no such preposition in the Greek). The living Christ himself, not Paul, is the ultimate source of the Corinthians’ transformation.
But with what did Christ write? Not ink but the Spirit. Here Paul references the Spirit for the first time in what will be a flurry of occurrences (3:3, 6 [2x], 8, 17 [2x], 18) as he develops his argument about his new covenant ministry (the only previous reference to the Spirit was at 1:22, referencing the Spirit as the eschatological down payment). Paul’s Trinitarian theology is nowhere explicitly taught but everywhere implicitly assumed. Here all three persons are mentioned (cf. 13:14).
Paul mentions the heart (Gk. kardia) again, as he just has in 3:2. The picture is therefore complete (table 3.2).
TABLE 3.2: Paul’s Metaphor of the Corinthians as a Letter
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Corinthians
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Letter
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Christ
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Author of the letter
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Paul
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Deliverer of the letter
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Spirit
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Ink of the letter
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Human heart
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Tablet on which the letter is written
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But at this point Paul is doing more than simply referring to the Corinthians as his living letters of ministerial justification. He is placing his ministry among the Corinthians in the context of the full sweep of redemptive history. In describing the Corinthians as letters Paul is not only saying, Do you not know what you are? He is also saying, Do you not know when you are? Do you not recognize the era of world history in which you find yourselves?
With his cascade of metaphors for describing the Corinthians as living letters, Paul is drawing on a constellation of key OT texts and signifying their fulfillment in this messy, cantankerous church in Corinth (as elsewhere). The OT anticipated a day in which God would establish a “new covenant” (Jer. 31:31; cf. 2 Cor. 3:6) with his people, promising them he would “put my law within them, and . . . write it on their hearts” (Jer. 31:33; cf. 2 Cor. 3:2–3). This widespread internalization of God’s redemptive work is even clearer in Ezekiel, where God promised he would give his people “a new heart, and a new spirit . . . within you” and would “remove the heart of stone . . . and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek. 36:26; cf. Ezek. 11:19; 2 Cor. 3:2–3). The tablets of stone on which the Ten Commandments were etched would be replaced as the Spirit himself wrote on the hearts of God’s people.
God had always indicated that internal transformation was needed (Deut. 10:16; Prov. 7:3; Jer. 4:4), yet even from early times he also indicated that he knew he would have to take matters into his own hands to execute this (Deut. 30:6). Now, after centuries of failure on the part of his people, he is mercifully doing so. He is no longer merely commanding them from the outside; he is transforming them from the inside. Paul will continue to draw on these whole-Bible categories as he moves into 2 Corinthians 3:4–6.
3:4 The first word of verse 4 in the Greek is pepoithēsis, meaning “persuasion” or “confidence.” This word occurs six times in the NT, four of these coming in 2 Corinthians (1:15; 3:4; 8:22; 10:2; cf. Eph. 3:12; Phil. 3:4). The other three uses refer to confidence in other humans—not surprisingly, given the renewal of mutual confidence Paul is seeking to build with the Corinthians throughout 2 Corinthians. But here the reference is vertical. It is a confidence directed not out but up.
Consider what Paul is doing. He is grounding his ultimate settledness as to the integrity of his ministry and his motives in God. If God is for him, it does not finally matter whether the Corinthians are convinced by his letter. He longs for them to embrace his ministry. But he has been freed from the need for human acceptance (cf. Gal. 1:10). He does not even assess himself (cf. 1 Cor. 4:5). It is by God that he has been commissioned, before God that he is approved, and to God that his confidence is directed.
Why? Because it is a confidence “through Christ.” Left to his own resources, even the indefatigable and sincere apostle Paul would fall short. But his confidence is of one united invincibly to Christ the Mediator.
3:5 Paul now makes sure the Corinthians understand just why he is fully confident in his ministry. He makes explicit what he does not mean by the confidence he claims in verse 4. This confidence arises not from a self-resourced “sufficiency” (note the three instances of this word root in vv. 5–6).
Indeed, Paul dares not “claim anything as coming from us.” Throughout his letters Paul consistently frames his ministry not as Christ and him but as Christ in him: “I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me” (Col. 1:29). “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Cor. 15:10; cf. Phil. 2:12–13). Is it Christ or Paul doing the work of ministry? Yes—and in that order. Christ in Paul. Paul is not a robot, passively being acted on by God. But God so works through Paul that it would be unconscionable for Paul to claim anything as his own self-generated fruit. The word translated “claim” (Gk. logizomai) generally means to consider, reckon, account, think. This is not so much a reference to an outward claim but a realization that even the merest internal thought does not arrogate anything to his own credit. This is humbling, but it is also deeply liberating.
Rather, “our sufficiency is from God.” Given the eternal realities at stake in gospel ministry, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by one’s shortcomings and foibles. Indeed, if we never feel such insufficiency, we are not in touch with the profound nature of that to which we have been called. Here Paul takes us into the only satisfying salve to such keenly felt “not-enough-ness”: not generating adequacy ourselves but receiving an adequacy from God.
3:6 Continuing the sentence begun in verse 5, Paul drills more deeply into this God-given sufficiency. Paul has said that his sufficiency is from God in verse 5. Now he explains why; that is, to what purpose. God has, to render the text woodenly, “sufficiented us” as ministers (or servants, using diakonoi) of a new covenant. God has not simply rendered Paul and his co-laborers sufficient for ministry in a general way. More specifically, God has established them as heralds of the long-awaited latter days in which the Messiah would come, the Spirit be poured out, and the people of God restored. They are stewards and proclaimers of the “new covenant”—a time foretold in the OT in which all God’s promises reach their zenith. (We remember that Paul has already claimed that “all the promises of God” find fulfillment in Christ in 1:20.)
While here Paul refers to a “new covenant,” in two chapters he will speak of a “new creation” (5:17). In such places the subterranean structure to all of Paul’s thought briefly surfaces, everywhere implicit if only at times explicit—that of inaugurated eschatology. Informing Paul’s entire outlook is the understanding that in the first coming of Christ the eschaton, the new age of latter-day blessing, dawned. What was expected to erupt at the end of history has erupted in the middle of history. At his second coming Christ will bring final completion to the new age launched at his first coming, bringing to an end the presence of the old age, which continues steamrolling right alongside the new age (hence the language of the “overlap of the ages”).
Paul explains the new covenant ministry as being “not of the letter but of the Spirit.” And why? “For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” Returning to the Spirit (cf. 3:3), the supreme sign that the eschaton has dawned, Paul sets letter and Spirit over against each other as distinct aeons in redemptive history, the latter having eclipsed the former in the coming of Christ and the descent of the Spirit. “Letter” stands in for the entire ministry age of Moses and what Paul will call in verse 14 the “old covenant” in contrast to the new (cf. Heb. 8:6, 13). Paul has just spoken in 2 Corinthians 3:3 of “tablets of stone” as a way of referring to the OT law and especially the Ten Commandments, so “letter” in verse 6 is likely a gloss for the way in which God’s workings with his people in the OT were mediated through a written code (cf. Rom. 2:25–29; 7:6). The letter is outside in; the Spirit is inside out.
But what then is the basic difference between the letter and the Spirit? “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” One Greek verb renders “gives life”; it means “makes alive.” This is resurrection language. The letter can only kill, because God’s command plus the human heart left to its own devices yields only death and condemnation. The letter bounces off of hard human hearts, deflected, impotent. But what if God himself were to get inside the human heart, soften it, melt it—in short, make it alive? What if God were to bring life where only death reigned? This ancient hope is what Paul claims has transpired in his ministry to the Corinthians. The end-time resurrection long anticipated by God’s people has broken in on this death-dominated world. Those in Christ are “made alive” by the Spirit now, and this spiritual resurrection will one day receive its inevitable consummation: physical and invincible resurrection.