'Casting down imaginations, and every high thing
that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and
bringing every thought into captivity to the
obedience of Christ; and being in readiness to
avenge all disobedience, when your obedience shall
be fulfilled.'--2 COR. x. 5 and 6 (R.V.).
None of Paul's letters are so full of personal feeling as this one is.
It is written, for the most part, at a white heat; he had heard from his
trusted Titus tidings which on one hand filled him with a thankfulness
of which the first half of the letter is the expression; but there had
also been tidings of a very different kind, and from this point onwards
the letter is seething with the feelings which these had produced. There
was in the Corinthian Church a party, probably Judaisers, which denied
his authority and said bitter things about his character. They
apparently had contrasted the force of his letters and the feebleness of
his 'bodily presence' and speech. They insinuated that his 'bark was
worse than his bite.' Their language put into plain English would be
something like this, 'Ah! He is very bold at a distance, let him come
and face us and we shall see a difference. Vapouring in his letters, he
will be meek enough when he is here.'
These slanderers seem to have thought of Paul as if he 'warred according
to flesh,' and it is this charge, that he was actuated in his opposition
to the evils in Corinth by selfish considerations and worldly interests,
which seems to have set the Apostle on fire. In answer he pours out
quick, indignant questionings, sharp irony, vehement self-vindication,
passionate remonstrances, flashes of wrath, sudden jets of tenderness.
What a position for him to have to say, 'I am not a low schemer; I am
not working for myself.' Yet it is the common lot of all such men to be
misread by little, crawling creatures who cannot believe in heroic
self-forgetfulness. He answers the taunt that he 'walked according to
the flesh' in the context by saying, 'Yes, I live in the flesh, my
outward life is like that of other men, but I do not go a-soldiering
_according_ to the flesh. It is not for my own sinful self that I get
the rules of my life's battle, neither do I get my weapons from the
flesh. They could not do what they do if that were their origin: they
are of God and therefore mighty.' Then the metaphor as it were catches
fire, and in our text he expands the figure of a warfare and sets before
us the destruction of fortresses, the capture of their garrisons, and
the leading of them away into another land, the stern punishment of the
rebels who still hold out, and the merciful delay in administering it.
It has been suggested that there is an allusion in our text to the
extermination of the pirates in Paul's native Cilicia which happened
some fifty or sixty years before his birth and ended in destroying their
robber-holds and taking some thousands of prisoners. Whether that be so
or no, the Apostle's kindled imagination sets forth here great truths as
to the effects which his message is meant to produce and, thank God, has
produced.