Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
2 Corinthians 11:4–6
“If someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough” (v. 4).
Continuing his response to the false teachers in Corinth, Paul is setting up what has been called his Fool’s Speech (2 Cor. 11:16–12:10), wherein he will boast of his weaknesses in order to contrast his boasting against his opponents’ boasting in their strengths. He has already asked the Corinthians to put up with his “foolishness” because he is engaging in it out of a desire to prepare them for meeting Christ face-to-face, and so he does not want them to be deceived (11:1–3). In today’s passage, he appeals to his history with the Corinthian church. Paul notes in 2 Corinthians 11:4 that they readily put up with someone who preaches another Jesus—a reference to the false apostles and their message. By implication, if they are willing to put up with that spiritually destructive foolishness, they certainly ought to be willing to hear Paul’s “foolishness” given that the Jesus in whom they first believed was the Jesus preached by the Apostle, their father in the faith (see 1 Cor. 4:14; 2 Cor. 6:13).
Paul speaks of “another Jesus . . . a different spirit [and] . . . a different gospel” associated with the false teachers (2 Cor. 11:4). Given the Apostle’s theology of the gospel and the Holy Spirit more clearly presented in texts such as Galatians 3, “spirit” in today’s passage must refer to a spirit not from God. The true gospel preaches the authentic Jesus, and those who believe God’s message of salvation receive the Holy Spirit. Because the Apostle refers to the false apostles as preaching something different from this, we must conclude that in addition to criticizing Paul, his opponents were also proclaiming an erroneous gospel to the Corinthian believers. It is difficult to be sure exactly how they were perverting the truth. However, since they seem to have taken special pride in their Jewish heritage (v. 22), it is not groundless speculation to conclude that the false teachers probably taught something akin to the Judaizing heresy that Paul fought in Galatia. In other words, the false apostles in Corinth likely were trying to add the works of the Mosaic law to faith in Christ as a condition for salvation. This fits well with the Corinthian false teachers’ tendency to boast, a problem also with the Galatian heretics (see 2 Cor. 10; Gal. 6:13).
In 2 Corinthians 11:5, Paul says that the Corinthians should put up with his upcoming Fool’s Speech because he is not less than the “super-apostles”—a pejorative term for the false teachers. Indeed, he has sufficient knowledge to combat them (v. 6).
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
In our churches, we may not often find ourselves hearing from false teachers. Yet, we live in a world that is constantly telling us lies. If we have to endure this regularly, how much more should we listen to the truth of God? Indeed, let us all be doing as much as we can to spend time in the Word of God and to listen to sound teaching.
For Further Study
- Psalm 119:41–48
- Proverbs 15:31
- Galatians 1:6–7
- James 1:18