Verse of the day · August 23
What does it mean to be troubled but not distressed?
The rescue reaches him on the ground, with the enemy still standing over him.
We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed;
2 Corinthians 4:8-9
The apostles were the most miserable of all men, and some of the people at Corinth reading this letter had drawn the obvious conclusion. Paul had just called it a treasure carried in earthen vessels, and their condition was darkening the gospel they carried: if the treasure is what they say, carrying it should not do this to a man. Paul's answer does not improve the picture. The treasure had been committed, of design, to weak and decaying and crumbling instruments, so that whatever sustained them in their trials would be manifest to all as God's power and not theirs. Their Master had told them they should have tribulation in the world, and they had it. Then he sets down four pairs, and in every one the bad news comes first.
The language he sets them down in was local: every fifth year the games ran at the Isthmus of Corinth. Adam Clarke, borrowing from Dr Hammond, reads all four pairs off the customs of those contests — three out of the wrestling, and the pursued runner out of the foot-race. A good wrestler, in the line from Aristotle he quotes, can grip his adversary and take him up: two skills, to grip and to throw down. The word behind troubled is thlibesthai, the grip — to be pressed down under it. The word he denies is stenochōreisthai: not able to get out of the other man's hands, or to put up any resistance — brought, in Isaiah's Greek, to such extremities that we can fight no longer.
That is what he denies. What he grants is total: on every side, in the Greek, is in every respect. Gill turns the phrase over four ways — in every place, wherever they go; or always, every day and hour; or by every sort of person, the profane and the open persecutor and the false brother — yea, some of the dear children of God, weak believers, give us trouble; or with every kind of trouble there is, inward and outward, from the world, the flesh and the devil. The qualification, when it arrives, is small and exact: not distressed does not mean not troubled. It means not hedged in, not cooped up, not straitened in our own souls, because help can still be seen in God and from God, and there is liberty of access to him. What Gill leaves standing is that access, in the ministry as well: we can go with liberty to God, and preach the Gospel boldly to you.
Perplexed is a wrestler's word too, for the man baffled by his opponent's skill: unable, in Hesychius, to do or attempt anything. Gill fills that in from the road: sometimes not knowing which way to take or what course to steer, sometimes at the utmost loss about food and raiment, and not without perplexing thoughts and fears about spiritual affairs. Matthew Henry has them often uncertain, in doubt what will become of us, and not always without anxiety in our minds on this account. The qualification does not reach any of that. Aporoumenoi becomes exaporoumenoi, the same word carried further, which JFB render not utterly perplexed. What they are not in despair of, Gill says, is the Lord's appearing and working salvation. The baffled wrestler is still upright, does not miscarry finally, and is a conqueror at the last.
The trouble turns outward here. Persecuted is being pursued with hatred and violence from place to place, as men not worthy to live. The half that answers it is not about men: good men may be forsaken of their friends as well as persecuted by their enemies, and the promise is that God will never leave them nor forsake them. Then the man goes down. Cast down is dejection, the enemy prevailing in great measure, the spirits failing, fears within as well as fightings without. B. W. Johnson leaves the enemy standing over him where he lies, and has the rescue happen there, prostrate and not destroyed. JFB hear the same division in each of them: the conceded half says what the vessel is made of, the qualifying half whose the power is.
None of those qualifications promises that the trouble will be small. Henry's summary of the four is drier than that, and addressed to everybody rather than apostles: whatever condition the children of God may be in, in this world, their case sometimes is bad, yea very bad, but not so bad as it might be. They were still preserved, and kept their heads above water.
The objection was never answered by denial. The men whose condition was being used against the gospel were afflicted for a reason: so that everyone watching could see they did not stand by any man's power but by the singular power of God, dying a thousand times and never perishing. Each of the four pairs hands the trouble the whole of its first half and argues only about where it stops. And the thing that decides where it stops is in the man, but it was never his.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, Adam Clarke, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, B. W. Johnson, the Geneva Bible notes and Albert Barnes.
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