Thoughts on 2 Corinthians 1

Today's reading: Exodus 11; 2 Corinthians 1

There are some things that I take for granted when I write these posts. I don’t write them to be commentaries on the passages, or teaching outlines or anything like that. They tend to just be musings on some particular aspect of the reading that stuck out to me that morning, and the whole reason for posting them is to maybe help others draw a little closer to God through His scriptures and to come to a deeper love and enjoyment of Him and His word.

That said, the end of 2 Corinthians 1 brings up the single most important assumption I tend to make about whoever might be reading these, and I felt like God was pointing me to that section this morning to call it out explicitly.

The Gospel

Paul says, near the end of 2 Corinthians 1, “For all the promises of God find their yes in [Jesus].”

What is so important to understand is that all God’s promises do not find their yes in you. Or in me. Or in anyone else other than Jesus for that matter. 

Jesus is unique. He is God incarnate; the God of creation having put on human flesh and humbled himself to be born into the world He created. He was from the line of Abraham, so all the promises God made to Abraham about blessing the world through his offspring apply to Jesus. He was from the line of David, so all the promises God made to David about establishing his throne for eternity under a righteous king from among his descendants apply to Jesus. And he was perfect, so all God’s promises and intentions for humanity from the very beginning apply to Him, because He never turned from God in sin.

God declared from the beginning that the penalty for sin is death. He told Adam in the Garden of Eden that he was not to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or else in that day he would die. And when Adam and Eve chose against God, they did die, spiritually, and the result is that every person born since then has been born in that same state of spiritual death. We are born sinful; separated from God by our own rebellious hearts.

The big problem here is that, no matter what people may say to make themselves feel better about themselves, there is no such thing as being good enough to restore our relationship with God. God is perfect, and to get into heaven on our own merits requires the same sinless perfection that is found in God alone. This is why James can say that if anyone keeps the whole law but fails in one point, he is guilty of all of it. It only takes a single sin over our entire lifetime to mar perfection and break our relationship with God, and not a single one of us can go an hour without sin, let alone a lifetime.

But this is the good news (what the New Testament writers call the gospel).

God created us, from the beginning, to be in relationship with Himself, but He also knows that there is nothing we can do, in ourselves, to restore the relationship we broke trough our sin. This is why Jesus came as He did. He put on human flesh, was born, and lived the perfect, sinless life we could never live, and then He allowed Himself to be hung on a cross and killed. Jesus had no need to die because He was sinless, and death is the payment due for our sin, but He allowed Himself to be killed for us. Because He did not have any of His own sins to pay for, Jesus’s death is able to pay for the sins of another, but because He is God, and God is infinite, His death is able to pay for an infinite amount of sin.

And this is the clear and consistent teaching of Scripture. We are sinful,  we will always be sinful as long as we live in this life, and we cannot get back to God on our own. But Jesus, through the cross, has made a way for us to come back and be restored in relationship to God. As Paul says in Romans, “If you believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord and confess with your mouth that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” That’s it. That’s all it takes. A faith decision in your heart to place your trust in Christ’s death as the payment for your sins, and you will be saved.

And when we make that choice, we are placed into Christ, and all the promises that apply to Jesus suddenly apply to us as well. We become part of God’s family, part of His chosen people. And as Paul says back in our passage at the end of 2 Corinthians 1, we are sealed in Him, and God sends His Spirit to live in our hearts as a guarantee.

When your faith is in Christ, and not your own good works, for forgiveness of sins and relationship with God, you are sealed eternally in that relationship and can know, with complete certainty, that when you die in this life, you will be raised with Christ to eternity in our Father’s presence.

This is why Paul can say that all the promises of God find their yes in Jesus, because He is the only one worthy of those promises, and it is only through and in Him that we become partakers of those same promises.

Praise God for His glorious gift!