James Nisbet Commentary - 2 Corinthians 4:5 - 4:5

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James Nisbet Commentary - 2 Corinthians 4:5 - 4:5


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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:

CHRIST FIRST

‘We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord.’

2Co_4:5

The Apostle not satisfied with convincing his countrymen and others that Jesus Christ of Nazareth was a good man, nor with enforcing the lessons of heavenly wisdom which proceeded out of His mouth. The Gospel he preached went further and deeper than all this.

It was the Gospel of salvation from sin; the Gospel of a loving, living Saviour and Lord. He preached Christ Jesus as Lord for the perfecting of man in body, soul, and spirit.

I. What is meant by preaching Christ Jesus as Lord?—Isaac Barrow declares that Jesus Christ is Lord:—

(a) In the highest sense of Godhead, Lord Jehovah, as one with the Father in His Divine nature;

(b) As being Master and supreme Controller, and especially Lord of the whole family in heaven and earth who are named of Him;

(c) As Lord of all, especially Lord of all who believe in Him as their Redeemer; and

(d) As having received power over all flesh.

It was upon this fact and truth that the Apostle constructed the Christian system of morals, of obedience to rulers and nations, of liberty and civilisation; everything was to be done ‘as unto the Lord.’ What a changed world this would become were this principle actuating the lives of all now.

—
Rev. Canon Emery.

Illustration

‘The wrong order of right things is often the most serious of evils. Disproportionate truth is the worst of errors. Therefore we are told that one feature of the restored world will be that “the last shall be first and the first last.” This is one of the great ends which the Gospel is labouring to carry out: to re-establish the series; to show us which should be first and which should be second; to place things in the foreground which sin has put in the rear, and to put at a distance as secondary what man has been accustomed to put foremost as primary. Christian, see that Christ is first.’



YOUR SERVANTS FOR JESUS’ SAKE

‘We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake.’

2Co_4:5

Such is this great clergyman’s central and ultimate conception of the Christian ministry. He has much to say about it, elsewhere, from other sides; about its commission and authority, and about the moral dignity of its idea. But here he lays his hand upon its very heart, and gives us the central glory of the thing.

I. The words denote the most absolute antithesis possible to every thought of an ecclesiastical assumption, to all such self-exaltation of a ministerial class or order as can harden it into that far different thing, for which the Christianity of the Apostles has no place, a hierarchical caste. The words delightfully negative all that is connoted by that term of mournful omen, as of mournful history, clericalism. They present to us, in short, a conception not magisterial, but altogether ministerial.

II. He lives to make Christ Jesus great to human hearts.—He lives ‘that Christ may be magnified in his body,’ that Christ may look out at the windows of his life, and may beckon from its doors, that his word alike and his example may persuade men, with an indefinable but strong attraction, to ‘taste and see how gracious the Lord is,’ and never so gracious as when He is most absolutely Lord. To this man all interests are subordinated to these; he rises up with this aim in the morning, and he lies down with it at night. His life is manifold in its contents; he is a man, ‘a man in Christ,’ and therefore all the more a man; nothing that is essentially human is alien to his sympathies.

III. He begins to know for himself that ‘to be ministered unto’ is infinitely less like the regal greatness of the King of Saints than ‘to minister,’ to ‘love and serve.’ He begins to see what he will experience perfectly in the life of glory, that our finite being can never expand and sun itself fully into the fair ideal of power and beauty for which it was created, and for which now it is redeemed, till it goes out and upward from the bondage of self-seeking into the large and holy freedom of a self-sacrificing love for God, and for man in Him. Therefore he is bent upon the enterprise of ‘making Jesus King’ in the souls of others too. He knows that it is the absolute right of his Redeemer that He should reign in them wholly and for ever.

To that end the minister is their bond-servant. He exists for them, he belongs to them, he is at command for them, that they may yield themselves to Jesus Christ, for this world and the world to come, and so may live indeed.

—
Bishop H. C. G. Moule.

Illustration

‘To the Corinthians, whom he loved, and who loved him well, yet perplexed and grieved him too, he presents his whole self, without even the thinnest artificial veil. Affection, hope, disappointment, indignation, irony, bitter rebuke, tenderest entreaty—all comes out precisely as it is felt, in the utterance of a devotion to them which has nothing to conceal. To be sure, all is dominated by a purpose. The Second Epistle to the Corinthians is no fitful rhapsody of troubled feeling. All bears upon the rescue of the disciples back from misbeliefs to the eternal truth, from confusion to a strong cohesion in the Lord, from themselves to Christ, to holiness, to heaven. But into the line of that great purpose the Apostle pours not his reasonings only, nor even his entreaties, but himself. He spends upon his converts his own innermost being. He gives to them his soul.’