Verse of the day · August 31
What does "all sufficiency in all things" mean in 2 Corinthians 9:8?
Paul had boasted to Macedonia about money the Corinthians had not yet collected.
And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work:
2 Corinthians 9:8
Corinth was the capital of Achaia, and the church there had agreed a year earlier to join a collection for poor Christians elsewhere. Paul had boasted about them to the churches of Macedonia as though the money were already gathered, using Corinth to stir Macedonia up. Now he is writing about the manner of it: bountifully; deliberately, every man according as he purposeth in his heart; freely, not grudgingly nor of necessity. And underneath the instruction sits an objection none of them has said aloud, which is that they may end up wanting the very thing they give away.
That objection is not idle. It presses hard enough, sometimes, to shut the hand before it opens, and it tends to prevent acts of charity that would otherwise have been done. What Paul sets against it, John Gill calls a new argument to move to liberality, and an antidote against the fears of want.
Adam Clarke notes that χάρις, in the connection in which Paul has been using it across these two chapters, signifies a charitable gift, and reads the promise so: God is able to give you, in his mercy, abundance of temporal good. Grace carries more than one sense, and God is able to make every one of them abound, but what it carries here is the goodness, beneficence and liberality exercised toward the poor members of Christ. What a man spends on it, Gill has, God causes to return with an increase.
Across the appeal as a whole, Matthew Henry puts the first gain somewhere other than the ledger: God loveth a cheerful giver, and God's love and favour are better than all other things, better than life itself. He affirms a material increase too, spiritual and temporal good things both. A husbandman's seed is buried and lost to sight, and God makes it spring up and bring an abundant increase; what is expended in relieving the necessities of the saints is no more thrown away than that seed, but repaid with use and interest, restored with abundance. Henry's picture of the man it happens to comes out of a psalm: he has dispersed abroad and given to the poor, his righteousness — meaning his almsgiving — endureth for ever, and he is still able to live comfortably himself and to give liberally to others.
The condition the sentence leaves the giver in is sufficiency. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown define it by what it rules out: so as not to need the help of others, having yourselves from God bread for your food. Gill fills the house in — enough for yourselves and your families, for the entertainment of your friends and the relief of the poor; enough for satisfaction and contentment, at all times, in everything necessary as to food and raiment. Henry runs the clause out to its end: God can cause us to have a sufficiency in all things, to be content with what we have, to make up what we give, and to be able to give yet more.
The next word is that, and JFB render it in order that: God's gifts are bestowed on us, not that we may have them to ourselves, but that we may the more abound in good works to others. It runs out to particulars: to all good works, and to this of beneficence in particular, and to every branch of it — feeding the hungry, clothing the naked. Every good work, in the reading of the Geneva Notes, is helping others by all means possible, doing them good in their needs.
Two verses on, Paul stops arguing and prays for them, and the same shape governs what he asks. He addresses God as the one who ministereth seed to the sower, whose providence gives such an increase that there is not only bread to eat for one year but enough to sow again.
What the sentence offers against the fear is sufficiency: bread for the giver's food and raiment, contentment with what he has, and no call on anybody else's help — which is precisely the condition the saints in the collection are not in. And the reason given for supplying him is not his comfort. It is the next hungry man, and the one after that. He was afraid of ending up on the receiving end. What he is promised is the sufficiency to keep standing at the sending end of it.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, Adam Clarke, the Geneva Bible notes and Albert Barnes.
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