“If I must boast, I will boast in the things which concern my infirmity.” (2 Cor 11:30, NKJV)
We are still discussing the manner in which the arch-father Jacob obtained a Godly nature, outlined in Gen. 32. In the previous teaching we tried to disentangle the epoch-changing event where Jacob wrestled with the Almighty. The importance of the Name Almighty has led to wondrous revelations about the nature of God’s character and how it is demonstrated in Jesus in absolute terms, especially in the choice Jesus made to be poured out. His submission, His complete obedience – and that His power ironically lies within that.
With this as background Paul’s words in 2 Cor. 11:30 make much more sense: “If I must boast, I will boast in the things which concern my infirmity.” Paul was a man with a formidable curriculum vitae – it would indeed impress any Israelite, even any heathen. In Rom. 11:1 he spells it out as follows: “I say then, has God cast away His people? Certainly not! For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.” He then continues in Phil. 3:5-6: “… circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews; concerning the law, a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the church; concerning the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.” In Acts 22:3 he suggests the following: “I am indeed a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, taught according to the strictness of our fathers’ law, and was zealous toward God as you all are today.”
Fausset’s Bible Dictionary says the following of him: “Thus the three elements of the world’s culture met in him: Roman citizenship, Grecian culture, Hebrew religion.” His knowledge, revelation and wisdom, how well-read he was, brings Deissmann to conclude, in his outstanding study St. Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History, that Paul was “a religious genius” (p. 6).
Perhaps we should just spend a moment reflecting about the wondrous sign that Paul was to the church of the ages, especially since the entire understanding of the revelation of who Jesus the Christ is, was explicitly offered for the first time through Paul (Eph. 3:3-5), the “the revelation of the mystery kept secret since the world began” (Rom. 16:25). This would also aid us in understanding the gravitas of his convictions concerning himself, as it is offered in the Scripture we opened this teaching with.
When Paul then offers the following defence in Acts 22: 28 (Ampl.): “I was born [Roman]!”, it is an indication of the fact that his Roman citizenship was his passport to the rest of the world. In his book St. Paul the Traveler, Ramsay outlines it as follows: “Paul stood above the common herd. He ranked with the aristocracy in any provincial town.” (p. 31). In another of Ramsay’s books, Cities of St. Paul, he explains the importance of the city Tarshish during the rule of August, when Paul was studying in the city: “the one example known in history of a state ruled by a university acting through its successive principals”. This specific intellectual climate that shaped Paul as a person, could only be found in Tarshish: “it was the one city which was suited by its equipoise between the Asiatic and the Western spirit to mold the character of the great Hellenist Jew” (p. 235). Also, based on the cosmopolitan culture of the city and its amalgamated society, “the city gave him a schooling in his social, political, intellectual, moral, and religious life …” This brought about the fact that the city could be a womb which could “educate and mold the mind of him who would in due time make the religion of the Jewish race intelligible to the Greek-Roman world” (p. 88). More than any other place on the entire earth, Tarshish was the place that could grant Paul the integrated exposure which would make him a world citizen.
According to Deissmann, in his book Light from the Ancient East, Paul learnt Greek as a street language, yet managed to speak it with an allure that perhaps only the doctor Luke, and the unknown writer of the book of Hebrews could rival. “He has a poet’s mastery of language.” (p. 239).
It is also interesting to note that Paul clearly had some understanding of the philosophical voices of his day. Dr. James Adam, in his The Religious Teachers of Greece, for instance points out, in absolutely valid terms, “the real kinship of thought between Plato and Paul” (p. 360). There are for instance also so many similarities between Paul and the philosopher Seneca’s thoughts and way of thinking that certain experts consider that they must have thought about certain things together. (See for instance Lightfoot’s essay ‘St. Paul and Seneca’ in his Commentary on Philippians, and Alexander’s Ethics of St. Paul, specifically pp. 49-55.)
It’s not necessary to heap accolades upon Paul, but in summary there are two statements about this spiritual giant that encapsulate what was offered above. Garvie, in his Studies in Paul and His Gospel, thus makes clear: “He was a scholar, a sage, a statesman, a seer, a saint.” (p. 84). And then Findlay, in his Epistles of Paul the Apostle: “All these qualities and powers went to the making of Jesus Christ’s apostle to the nations, the master-builder of the universal church and of Christian theology.”
In the light of all of this it is understandable that Paul can rightly say: “though I also might have confidence in the flesh. If anyone else thinks he may have confidence in the flesh, I more so.” (Phil. 3:4). But he qualifies it very clearly in 1 Cor. 15:10: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.”
But then he spells it out in Phil. 3:7-9, that “what things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ”, and considers it as “any refuse, as the excrement of animals, offscourings, rubbish, dregs … of things worthless and detestable” (Thayer); Job 20:7 says dung perish forever).
And then, in 2 Cor. 12:7-10, the crux of the seeming disparity between Paul’s excellent references on the one hand, and his seeming denial of it on the other: “And lest I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I be exalted above measure. Concerning this thing I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
Even though Paul had the most pure religious heritage, uncontaminated blood, the real spiritual contacts and public credibility, the most legitimate education, even though he had lived in the most sophisticated theological, philosophical and literary circles, he considers all of this absolutely worthless, because he had a deeply rooted understanding of Jacob’s Jabbok, and Jesus’s Gethsemane, the place of emptying, the place of the oil press, and grabbed onto it with everything he had, with everything he was.
- Selah: Explain 2 Cor. 13:9 to someone.
- Read: 1-2; John 18-19; Ps. 22
- Memorise: 19:11
