For Paul, suffering was not the result of sin. It was armor against sin. God knew that the humiliation of suffering was necessary to protect Paul against a form of self-aggrandizement to which he might otherwise have been tempted. Paul needed the kind of shield that only suffering could supply, and so God granted it to him.

The apostle Paul was not given to self-aggrandizement. He understood himself to be the chief of sinners, rescued only by God’s grace. Only when forced to defend his ministry and apostleship was he willing to talk about his gifts and attainments—and even then he spoke with a kind of wry embarrassment.

Nowhere did Paul talk about himself more than he did in 2 Corinthians. Under attack by the “super apostles,” he adopted the tactic of ironically measuring himself against their claims. They held letters of recommendation from the most important figures; Paul saw the Corinthians themselves as his living letters of recommendation (2 Cor 3:1-3). They invited people to look at their appearance; Paul invited people to look at his heart (2 Cor 5:12). They were admired for their height; Paul told his readers to measure his height by the miles he traveled to take the gospel to them (2 Cor 10:12-13). They were eloquent orators; Paul responded that even if he wasn’t an orator, he actually knew what he was talking about (2 Cor 11:5-6).

At the apex of these comparisons Paul came to visions and revelations of the Lord. False teachers like the “super apostles” typically claimed some sort of advanced revelation to which only they had access. At this point, however, Paul deployed a secret weapon—an event that he had never talked about before. Indeed, even now he refused to discuss it as his own experience, narrating it transparently in the third person. Undoubtedly, however, Paul was speaking of his own past.

Read More