2 CORINTHIANS 1: 8-11 [GAINING PERSPECTIVE Series]
HOPE IN GOD
The hope in God which sustained Paul in his relationship with the Corinthians had to first grow and mature in his own life. Paul had an experience in Asia during a missionary Journey that had caused him to hope only in God. This danger that threatened to take his very life had brought him to the end of himself. He could not rely on himself for he could do nothing to help himself but he had to rely totally on God.
Paul knew what placing everything in God’s hands had done for Him. He wanted the Corinthians to place everything, their very existence and all its priorities and activities in God’s hands also. God proves Himself totally trustworthy to those who place their life totally in His Hands (CIM). We need to learn that it is in realizing a powerlessness within ourselves that we find dependency upon the All-Powerful God working as only He can work in us and in our circumstances.
I. DESPAIR OF LIFE; 1:8.
II. FOCUSED TRUST; 1:9.
III. FOCUSED HOPE; 1:10.
IV. PRAYER HELP; 1:11.
In verse 8 Paul describes a decimating hardship in which he received God’s comfort and empowering. “For we do not want you to be unaware, brethren, of our affliction which came to us in Asia, that we were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life;
Paul now lays down the theology of afflictions and cites a specific illustration in his own recent experience [an up-to-date report on what God was doing in his life]. Evidently the Corinthian Christians were aware of what event Paul is describing (we are not) but were not aware of the intensity of the trouble or the affliction [thlipsis]. Paul thus tells them not what it was but how it had oppressed him beyond endurance.
Paul and his traveling companions had a trial so severe that they were weighted down beyond our power. Paul was being oppressed and hemmed in by affliction of such magnitude that apart from divine intervention he could not hope to survive it. So that we despaired even of life, literally is “we had no way out of life even to live.” [Exaporth from a- no & poros - passage, meaning no out-exit passage.] They believed they would not survive this affliction.
When I was a kid, we jokingly quoted SHAKESPEARE's famous line: “To be or not to be-that is the question.” But we really didn't understand what it meant. Later I learned that Shake-speare's character Hamlet, who spoke these lines, was a depressed prince who learns that his uncle has killed his father and married his mother. The horror of this realization is so disturb¬ing that he contemplates suicide. The question for him was: "to be" -to go on living, or "not to be" -to take his own life.
At times, life's pain can become so overwhelming that we are tempted to despair. Have you ever had a trial too great for you to bear? You’re in good company. God has allowed many of His choicest servants to go through the furnace of affliction. [Paul said that his persecution in Asia was so intense he “despaired even of life.”]
II. FOCUSED TRUST (9).
There are only three possible outlooks a person can take when they come to the afflicting trials of life. If our trials are the products of “fate” or “chance,” then we may as well give up for they are unalterable. Nobody can control fate or chance. If we have to control everything ourselves, then the situation is equally as hopeless, since there are things we can’t control. But if God is in control, and we trust Him, then we can overcome circumstances through His help.
God encourages us in all our tribulations by teaching us from His Word that it is He who permits trials to come. In verse 9 we learn that God sometimes allows trials so that we might not rely on ourselves but on Him. “Indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves so that we would not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead;”
Paul was conscious within himself that he was a man upon whom humanly speaking the sentence of death had been passed but God was still on His throne and God knew exactly how much burden Paul could take and how much affliction he needed to bring about the growth outcome desired. This dreadful trial was allowed Paul in order to provide a precious spiritual lesson (12:7-10). The great lesson of this overwhelming affliction which had befallen him was that he (and all who are Christ’s) should not trust in self, but in God who raises the dead.
Paul believed they would die forcing him to admit that he could not handle the situation and must cast himself completely on God’s power to raise his life up out of death. Then the great blessing of the trail came as he transferred all his trust for this life to God [believing that even though he would die God would raise them from the dead (Acts 14:19)]. Abraham was forced to this same place when he offered up Isaac on the Altar of Sacrifice. They, and so many others, have cast all their hope for life on the God who “raises the dead.” The same God who could raise Christ from the dead could resurrect him (Paul) out of his “sentence of death.”
We too may face overwhelming peril be it serious illness, financial bankruptcy, a massive satanic attack, a major health crisis or even sever persecution. But when God’s children are in the furnace He keeps His hand on the thermostat and His eye on the thermometer (1 Cor. 10:13, 1 Pet 1:6f).
Ann Jillian was filled with terror when she discovered an irregularity in her breast. She immediately imagined the worst. CANCER! As reported in Care Notes, she stopped by her church, numb and alarmed, on her way to her appointment with her doctor. She saw these words by St. Francis de Sales inscribed above the entrance:
THE SAME EVERLASTING FATHER WHO CARES FOR YOU TODAY WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU TOMORROW AND EVERY DAY. EITHER HE WILL SHIELD YOU FROM SUFFERING, OR HE WILL GIVE YOU STRENGTH TO BEAR IT. BE AT PEACE, THEN, AND PUT ASIDE ALL ANXIOUS THOUGHTS AND IMAGINATIONS.
Those words, which she had never noticed before, helped her tremendously. “Up to that point,” she said, “everything was turbulent. Now I...released everything into God’s hands. Of course God wants me to keep on keeping on.”
Paul wasn’t facing cancer, but his troubles were so great that he “despaired even of life.” We must learn, as Paul did, where to find help when the life-threatening burden of suffering weighs us down. Despair is dispelled when you trust in God.
Affliction on the good will fall,
but God will keep us safe through all;
and though He may not spare us pain,
His strength and grace become our gain.
God used this impossible situation to prove Himself real and trustworthy. God wants us to trust Him-not our gifts, abilities, experience or our spiritual reserves or fortitude.
[The March 2, 1995, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reported and extraordinary case of self-treatment.
A plastic surgeon was repairing and examining-room lamp at a hospital and was accidently shocked. Soon he felt dizzy, and his heart was pounding. He shakily dragged himself into his operating room and hooked himself up to a heart monitor, which showed his heart was racing at 160 beats a minute. The doctor diagnosed himself as suffering atrial fibrillation, which is potentially life threatening.
His operating room was equipped with a defibrillator, which is an electronic device that applies an electric shock to restore the rhythm of the heart. But the device was not designed for self-use.
Nevertheless the forty-year-old doctor quickly grabbed a tube of petroleum jelly and smeared the jelly on his bare chest. Then he grabbed the paddles of the defibrillator and pressed them to his chest. He gave himself two shocks of 100 watt-seconds (100 joules). The jolts of electricity knocked him right off the operating table, but his normal heart rhythm was restored.
Amin Karim of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who reported this case to the Journal, said this man probably would have been better off calling for a nurse or another doctor. “What if he passed out?” said Karim. “He could have put himself into a more dangerous rhythm.”
Like this doctor, when we enter a crisis, we often want to rely on ourselves rather than call for help. But extreme independence is risky at best and dangerous at worst. Still all kinds of people are trying to help themselves instead of turning to God for deliverance.]
Have you ever read a description of THE GREAT BLACK PLAGUE that swept over London in 1665 and 1666? The wagons went down the street each morning ringing a bell as the driver announced, “Bring out your dead; bring out your dead.” There were so many dying that they had no time for funerals. They just gathered the bodies and buried them in vast common graves. In those awful and tragic days, a devastating fire destroyed London. London has fewer marks of medieval times than any of the great cities of Europe, simply because it was all destroyed and burned.
I read about the preachers during that time. Many of them fled their pulpits and churches in an attempt to escape the plague, but those who stayed were not preaching about trivialities, inconsequentialites, insignificances, and temporalities. Those preachers preached to the people about life and death, about God, about the judgment, and about how to be saved.
What is the difference between the preacher who would preach in those awful days of the Black Plague in London and the way a preacher preaches in the pulpit today? In that day death was imminent. Today it seems far removed, but it is nonetheless coming. We have the same responsibility today to point people to Christ, that they might be saved, as Christians were in the days of Paul, in the days of the Black Plague, in every generation. We are a dying people, and we need a Living God.
Raise the dead is a beautiful analogy of the Spirit’s ministry to us in our times of trouble and extreme discouragement. There are many different kinds of death-like circumstance besides physical death, and everywhere there are these forms of death His children can trust the Living Christ to come and recreate life. We simply are to cast all our hope for life on the God who “raises the dead.” Trusting that the same God who could raise Christ from the dead could resurrect us from our “sentence of death.” Though our trouble is like Calvary, God’s rescue is like Easter Sunday morning.
III. FOCUSED HOPE (10).
Verse 10 reminds us that the God who comforts can also deliver. “delivered us from so great a peril of death, and will deliver us, He on whom we have set out hope. And He will yet deliver us,”
Paul’s rescue from certain death was by God’s hand. This time God chose to deliver them by granting continued life, sometime He delivers us into eternal life. Having experienced God’s deliverance in dire situations infused Paul with confidence that the God in whom he trusted would continue to deliver him in his present and future circumstances. So Paul has learned to face the future and even death without fear for all is in God’s hand.
What about you? Do you rest in the knowledge that God will deliver you in whatever circumstances you may face because of a past great deliverance?
Reliance upon God rather than upon one’s own native ability is of fundamental importance in the Christian life, yet such an attitude does not come naturally. Very often suffering is needed to make us rely upon God. After the suffering Paul gained an entirely different perspective. He testifies that God used suffering to teach him the life lesson of complete trust in God for deliverance.
We often depend on our own skills and abilities when life seems easy, but we turn to God when we feel unable to help ourselves. Depending on God is a realization of our own powerlessness without Him and our need for His constant touch in our lives. God is our source of power, and we receive His help by staying in fellowship with Him. With this attitude of dependence, problems will drive us to God rather than away from Him.
IV. PRAYER HELP (11).
Learning how to rely on God daily takes daily prayer. In verse 11 we find that Paul’s deliverance was made possible because of the prayers of fellow believers. “You also joining in helping us through your prayers, so that thanks may be given by many persons on our behalf for the favor bestowed on us through the prayers of many.”
Paul expresses his fuller reliance upon God by admitting that he needed the prayers of God’s people on his behalf. How the prayers of the saints can in some sense move a Sovereign God is a beautiful and a mysterious truth. Though prayer is indeed a mystery, it is stressed over and over again in the Word of God as a vital prerequisite for the release and moving of God’s power. In prayer human impotence casts itself at the feet of divine omnipotence, only to rise again in God’s power to accomplish His will.
Paul’s deliverance resulted in a chorus of thanksgiving being lifted up to the Throne of Grace for the favor bestowed on all in the answering of their prayers. When the church unifies itself in prayer God moves and then much thanksgiving can go up. [Many persons is - > faces -literally many up turned faces].
God’s deliverance was in response to Paul’s faith as well as the faith of God’s praying people. Paul knew that prayer avails much before God so he requested prayer for himself and his companions as they traveled to spread God’s message. Pray for pastors, teachers, missionaries, and others who are spreading the gospel. Satan will challenge anyone making a real difference for Christ.
So if you don’t understand your difficulties, trust in God, and ask Christians to pray for you. As you yield to God He can increase your faith and strengthen your prayer life. Difficulties should draw Christians closer together, and as we share burdens and receive answers, we join our voices together to praise the God of great deliverances.
[IN CLOSING]
Let me CLOSE with an illustration from a well know trilogy that was turned into a movie. In J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional The Lord of the Rings, a¬ good-hearted hobbit by the name of Frodo Baggins is entrusted with a dangerous mission. Together with a group called the Fellowship of the Ring, he must defeat the forces of evil by returning a magic gold ring to the fires of Mount Doom from which it was forged.
Along the way, evil stalks Frodo. Battles are lost. Friends die. Reflect¬ing on such tragedies, Frodo confides in his wise friend Gandalf, "I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish that this had never happened." Gandalf wisely replies, "So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All you must decide is how to use the time that is given to you.”
In the "fellowship of the cross," the servant of Christ is also tested. Like Paul, we may feel crushed under the weight of our circumstances. The path seems too steep to climb & the burden too heavy to bear. We begin to wonder if there is a dawn beyond the darkness.
Though we may not choose our circumstances, we do choose whether to trust God (v. 9). Through the fellowship of the Son and the enablement of the Spirit, we can carry out our mission for God (1 Cor. 1: 9 ; John 16: 13). [Mart De Hann. Our Daily Bread.] God proves Himself totally trustworthy to those who place their life totally in His Hands.
Trust Him to guide you and deliver you along life’s way. Learn the lesson of dependently trusting our All-Powerful God to work as only He can work in us and in our circumstances. For those who know the fellowship of the cross, He will apply the power of resurrecting us to new spiritual life.
