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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadEzekiel, Jonah, and Pastoral Epistles by Patrick Fairbairn - 2 Timothy 2:6 - 2:6
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Ver. 6. The toiling; ( êïðéῶíôá , hard-working) husbandman must first partake of the fruits, or, must be first in partaking of them; his very character as a man of hard labour gives him in this respect a precedence and superiority over others: he first partakes, partakes even while he works, somewhat like the ox who might eat while in the act of treading the corn (1Ti_5:18). So, the apostle means to say, it is in the Lord’s husbandry. There is here also a compensation; for they who grudge not the hardship, the present sacrifice involved in doing God’s work, have a blessing which others know not—they reap, in a measure, while they labour, having an immediate satisfaction in the fruits which they have been enabled to gather. Such appears to be the precise import of the apostle’s statement; and it is one quite suited to the connection, though we would rather, perhaps, have expected him to put it somewhat differently, so as to express the idea that the husbandman must first labour if he is to partake of the fruits, or labour before he can do so. This is, indeed, what many commentators have actually extracted from his words, with so exact a scholar as Winer to countenance the exposition as grammatically tenable (Gr. § 61, 5, f). But it is without support from any properly parallel passages, and manifestly does violence to the natural order and meaning of the words. The object of the apostle in using the illustration was not, seemingly, to mark the distinction between the active and the idle husbandman: he assumes that Timothy would not be exactly idle, that he would be a worker in the Lord’s vineyard; but he would have him to be a worker in the stricter sense, like the husbandman who labours hard, who toils at his employment, and so reaps the first and fullest recompense. This is so clearly the preferable sense of the passage, that it is needless to recount other interpretations, and equally needless to go into the various applications which have been made of it by the Fathers and others in later times. Some of these are fanciful enough. We must keep hold of the great principle which the statement is brought to establish—that the most willing and hard labourer is the most speedily and richly blessed. This holds good in the spiritual as in the natural sphere; and only those things which can be called real exemplifications of such a principle are fair applications of the apostle’s similitude.