2 Corinthians 4:1–6
4 Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God,1 we do not lose heart. 2 But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice2 cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God. 3 And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. 4 In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 5 For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants3 for Jesus’ sake. 6 For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
1 Greek having this ministry as we have received mercy 2 Greek to walk in 3 Or slaves (for the contextual rendering of the Greek word doulos, see Preface)
Section Overview: Ministry through Self-Renunciation
Continuing themes from the preceding context (such as ministry, veiling, glory, and image), Paul turns to focus on his own gospel ministry in light of the new age in which believers find themselves. He explains that even though he (and by implication all true Christian ministers) conveys the gospel in sincerity and integrity, the Devil blinds sinners to the gospel. What is needed is nothing less than for God himself to open sinners’ eyes, an act of new creation. The subtext continues to be that God is bringing about an entirely new order of reality through Jesus Christ. The long-anticipated new age has quietly descended—for those who have eyes to see.
Section Outline
II.C. Paul’s Ministry as a Ministry of True Glory (3:1–4:6) . . .
5. Gospel Ministry (4:1–2)
a. The Source of Gospel Ministry (4:1)
b. The Method of Gospel Ministry (4:2)
6. The Reason for Unbelief (4:3–4)
a. The Veil (4:3)
b. The Devil (4:4)
7. The Reason for Belief (4:5–6)
a. Christ, Not Us, the Message (4:5)
b. God, Not Us, the Illuminator (4:6)
Response
Are you a Christian? Ponder what has washed over you. In spite of all your resistance, when you wanted nothing to do with God, when, left to yourself, you would only run from him, in all your darkness and misery, God did something even more omnipotent than creating the universe: he caused light to shine forth in your very heart. This sovereign softening cannot be manufactured by human-wrought strategies—no slippery scheming (2 Cor. 4:2) or self-proclaiming (v. 5). By his own good pleasure he opened your eyes. All you contributed was your need and guilt.
As a result, you are a permanent citizen of the new day that dawned on world history when Jesus Christ walked out of the tomb. Sin and sickness still cling. Despair and death still threaten. But we belong to the new creation that quietly broke open two thousand years ago. As we welcome others into that light, we do so in a way that accords with the life of the new creation: with sincerity and integrity, setting forth the whole truth of the gospel, and spotlighting Jesus, not ourselves.
Greek having this ministry as we have received mercy
Greek to walk in
Or slaves (for the contextual rendering of the Greek word doulos, see Preface)
4:1 Paul opens by speaking of the “ministry” (Gk. diakonia) he has received, picking up the language of the “ministry [diakonia] of the Spirit” (3:8) and the “ministry [diakonia] of righteousness” (3:9) that define the new age that has dawned.
How does he have this ministry? “By the mercy of God.” Or more specifically, as the ESV footnote suggests, “as we have received mercy.” That is, Paul has inherited this grand new-age ministry—a ministry that far eclipses the glory of even so esteemed a figure as Moses—not through any virtue on Paul’s part. It has been all mercy. The Puritans would speak of Christians as those who are “bemercied.” For Paul, as for all gospel ministers, this is true not only at the level of salvation (cf. 1 Tim. 1:13, 16, which uses the same verb) but also at the level of ministry. The calling to bring the gospel to the world is as undeserved as his salvation.
The natural outflow of a ministry due entirely to divine mercy is to never become daunted or discouraged at the greatness of the task. The word for “lose heart” (enkakeō; also 2 Cor. 4:16) means to “lose one’s motivation in continuing a desirable pattern of conduct or activity” (BDAG). The inner logic here is that if we bring nothing to the ministry to begin with, then the ongoing fruitfulness and power of our ministries continues to depend entirely on God’s blessing and fructification. He alone has given us the ministry. He alone will sustain it.
4:2 There would be ample reason to lose heart if there were things to be ashamed of in ministry. But Paul has left all of this behind (cf. Rom. 1:16). Returning to the theme of ministerial integrity (cf. 2 Cor. 1:12; 2:17), Paul asserts categorically that he has utterly rejected and abandoned once and for all any clever cutesiness that communicates aspects of the gospel while withholding anything that might cause us to lose face. To do so would be to “practice [lit., “walk in”] cunning”—craftiness, deceitfulness, trickery. Moreover, it would be a tampering with God’s Word: handling the message of the gospel in a way out of accord with that very message. The gospel is a message of truth, an honest assessment of our sinful condition and a clear and forthright declaration of how freely to be put right with God. To handle this straightforward message with slipperiness is inherently contradictory. Perhaps Paul is referring to the false apostles here, whom he will address at length in chapters 10–13.
Instead of such duplicity—note the verse’s switch at “but by” from what he does not do to what he does do—Paul’s settled modus operandi is to preach openly, transparently, honestly. What one hears from Paul’s mouth is precisely what he is thinking in his heart. There is no gamesmanship here. He is not bending his message to spare himself rejection or win himself human applause. There is no “swollen bombast” here, as Calvin puts it, but the “pure and innate comeliness of the gospel.” Paul is laying out the gospel message in all its contours, holding nothing back, twisting nothing, and letting his hearers (“everyone’s conscience”) and ultimately God himself (“in the sight of God”) see and judge Paul’s message and motives.
4:3 And yet, not all those who hear it, open and transparent as it is, receive it. Many deflect it, even with hostility. Paul said in 3:14–15 that those who reject Christ have a veil over their hearts. There is a spiritual blockage to the right apprehension of Christ, the bringer of the new age of superlative glory. They remain in the old age. Paul continues this theme of the veiling of unbelievers here in 4:3. He is heading off an objection that might arise from verse 2: If your ministry is so transparent and honest, Paul, then why are so many continuing to resist it? Paul’s answer is that the reception of the gospel is affected not only by the integrity of the speaker but also by the spiritual state of the hearer. The “perishing” are those whose “minds” are “hardened” (3:14). They are on a settled trajectory toward eternal destruction. God has not opened their eyes with new creational heart sight (4:6).
4:4 The Greek text here continues the sentence begun in 4:3, and the grammar of the text makes clear that Paul continues to unpack the reality at play among “those who are perishing.”
Paul had spoken of unbelievers’ minds (Gk. noēma) being hardened in 3:14, but now he speaks of their minds (again, noēma) being blinded. This fits with the running metaphor of the veil and its natural corollary, the sense of sight. And who does this blinding? According to this text, “the god of this world”—that is, Satan, already mentioned in 2:11. The text literally reads “god of this age [aiōn, not kosmos],” reminding us that Paul has in mind the two great ages of world history, the old and the new. While the new has dawned, the old continues, with Satan as its ruler (cf. Eph. 2:2).
Does this mean God himself has nothing to do with this blinding? No; we must understand that even when Satan blinds, God himself is the even deeper reality overseeing all things. Without emptying human culpability, and without himself sinning, God hardens and blinds, as is clear from the whole biblical testimony (e.g., Ex. 4:21; 7:3; Deut. 2:30; Josh. 11:20; John 12:40; Rom. 9:18). We will see in 2 Corinthians 12:7 that whereas Satan gave Paul his thorn in the flesh, Paul says its purpose was his humility—and therefore its ultimate source was God.
Paul tells us explicitly what unbelievers are blinded from seeing: “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” “Glory” has been raised in 3:7–18 and “image” in 3:18, encouraging us to read 4:4 accordingly. Paul is saying that to become a believer is to be led into the bright pasture of the new age, in wonder at the brilliant luminosity of the good news of what the last Adam has done. This “glory of Christ” is surpassingly superior to the glory of the Mosaic age (cf. 3:7–11) because it is the glory predicated on “the gospel,” the good news of the “ministry of righteousness” (3:9). Sinners can be restored to their hearts’ deepest desire, restored communion with God, by virtue of what Christ has done on their behalf. Where Adam, the first one made in God’s image, failed, the last Adam, the true “image of God,” has triumphed.
4:5 Time and again throughout these early chapters of 2 Corinthians, Paul returns to the matter of the integrity of his ministry, most recently in 4:2. Here he does so again. Having just spoken movingly of the magnificent gospel he proclaims—“the gospel of the glory of Christ, . . . the image of God”—Paul seeks to immediately make crystal clear that none of this gospel’s glory comes from its mediators. The content of the message (Christ) and the communicator of the message (Paul) are kept completely separate in terms of efficacy and glory. Paul is merely, as he will say a few verses later, a fragile and empty jar.
Thus authentic gospel ministers spotlight not themselves but Christ. The only putting forward of themselves is the putting forward of themselves as servants. Fraudulent gospel ministry quietly twists Paul’s statement here, foregrounding the self and backgrounding Christ. True ministry foregrounds Christ and backgrounds the self.
4:6 Paul has recounted the ministry of Moses, who saw God and whose outer countenance shone with glory. Paul now turns this inside out in speaking of new covenant glory. Whereas Mosaic glory was outside in, gospel glory is inside out. Divine light has shone not on our faces but on our hearts. Paul reaches all the way back to the creation narrative of Genesis 1 to describe this illumination, making a parallel between the darkness of the cosmos and the darkness of the unregenerate human heart. In both cases it takes nothing less than an act of divinely wrought illumination to bring light where only darkness would otherwise be.
But Paul is drawing on Genesis 1 for a deeper reason. It is not merely a convenient analogy. Salvation in Christ is in actuality the entrance of a sinner into the cosmic new creation long anticipated throughout the OT. While continuing to live and move within the old order, the believer’s fundamental identity has been transplanted into the inaugurated new order of “the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:8) and “righteousness” (3:9), which is “permanent” (3:11) and entails “freedom” (3:17).
The closing phrase describing this new creational light (“the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”) transparently parallels the closing phrase of 4:4 (“the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God”). Moses asked to see God’s glory, but he could not look God in the face and live (Ex. 33:18–23). Believers today get to do what Moses could not, for God has come down in the person of his Son, in the flesh. We see God’s glory “in the face of Jesus Christ.” In him, we behold glory (cf. John 1:14). In beholding this glory we come into a depth of knowledge of God. Our souls come home. We perceive him for who he is—“a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” (Ex. 34:6)—proven in Jesus Christ. Gazing at him, our deepest longings are met.