2 Corinthians 8:9

2 Corinthians 8:9. For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich. We have here an example of the apostle's beautiful practice of connecting the most familiar duties and incidents of life with the grandest and most affecting truths of the Gospel, thereby teaching Christians to see everything, and discharge every duty, in the light and under the power of those saving truths.

And not only so, but it is just where, all unexpectedly, those truths are brought in to stimulate to very familiar duties, that they are expressed with a fulness and a sublimity not elsewhere to be found. (See Ephesians 5:25-33; Titus 2:9-14; Philippians 2:4-11, etc.) Here it is confined to a single verse, but one expressing the whole scheme of redemption in the Person and work of Christ in the fewest possible words, in the most affecting form, and with a suitableness to the case in hand which has in every age given it untold practical power. Every word here must be weighed.

1. “Grace,” when used by itself in the New Testament, denotes the whole compassion and love of God to sinners of mankind in Christ Jesus, embracing His eternal purposes of salvation, and every step in the process of it from first to last. (See, for example, Romans 5:21; Ephesians 2:7-8; John 1:14; John 1:16-17.) Hence the Gospel is allied “the Gospel of the grace of God,” and “the word of His grace” (Acts 20:24; Acts 20:32; Acts 14:3). In this all-comprehensive sense it is used here.

2. When our apostle would lay peculiar stress upon anything connected with Christ, he loves to give Him His full name “Our Lord (or “The Lord”) Jesus Christ.” Out of numberless such cases (exclusive of salutations, etc.), we may refer to Acts 16:31; Romans 8:39Romans 6:23; Romans 8:39; 1 Corinthians 15:57; Galatians 6:14; Philippians 3:20. When therefore we read here of “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” we are prepared for something emphatic and impressive. Accordingly,

3. This grace is held forth as, on the part of Christ Himself, purely spontaneous. So in Acts 20:28; Galatians 1:4; Galatians 2:20; Ephesians 5:25-27, etc. Elsewhere it is represented as, on His part, the acceptance and execution of a trust committed to Him the discharge of a work given Him to do. (John 5:30; John 6:38; Luke 22:42; John 18:11.) But as if to shew how both views blend into a harmonious unity, we find our Lord Himself saying, “Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again. No one taketh it away from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have right to lay it down, and I have right to take it again. This commandment received I from my Father” (John 10:17-18).

4. Those who, with the old Socinians, deny the pre-existence of Christ, regard the period of the “riches” and the “poverty” of Christ as one and the same period. There was no transition (they hold) from the one state to the other, but His “grace” consisted in an exercise of self-denial, in that, “though rich,” He lived as one who “was poor” who, though entitled to royalty and destined to a kingdom, yet refused it when pressed upon Him by enthusiastic admirers. (So Grotius, De Wette, etc.) Even some orthodox critics (as Osiander, Philippi, etc.) so far concur in this as to hold that there is no transition here from Christ's pre-existent riches to His earthly poverty, but that the reference is to the self-denial which He exercised through all His earthly life, so veiling that fulness of the Godhead which dwelt in Him that “the world knew Him not,” and only the spiritually discerning “beheld His glory.” The criticism on the Greek word on which they found this, and our reply to it, we must throw into a footnote. [1] But the best proof that there is no reference here to any self-denial exercised by Christ during His earthly life, and while in the full possession of His riches, and that the reference is to what He surrendered or “emptied Himself” of when He became man, is one which the common sense of every one can appreciate as well as any scholar, namely, that on the former view the example of Christ would have no bearing on the case at hand. What the apostle wished the Corinthians to do was to part with some of their means, in order that by their so far “ becoming poor,” their Jewish brethren might to that extent “ become rich.” Now, would it have been any example of this to hold up Christ as, while remaining rich on earth, yet refraining from using His riches? No, surely. But by directing their thoughts back to “the glory which He had with the Father before the world was” (John 17:5), and reminding them how He “emptied Himself” of this (Philippians 2:7), and at His Incarnation assumed that “poverty” which confessedly began then, and deepened at every stage on to the last and lowest, the apostle brings before the Corinthians, and through them to Christians in all times, an example of self-sacrifice the most affecting. And the corresponding passage just referred to (Philippians 2:5-11) presents the example of Christ, with reference to every kind of sacrifice for the good of others, precisely in the same light.

[1] The verb (πτωχεύει), like other verbs of that termination, means (they say) not ‘to become poor,' but ‘to be poor,' or to do the part of one who is poor. True, but (as Kühner observes) classical writers very often use the aorist (and that is the tense here used) to denote the coming into a condition. Thus βασιλεύει, ‘I am a king;' ἐ βασίλευσα, not, ‘I was a king,' but ‘I came to be a king,' or ‘was made a king;' ἀ σθεν ῆ σαι, ‘to have become sick, in morbum incidisse (Gr, Gramm. Section 256. 4. g.). To the same effect Bern-hardy and Krüger. On this principle, why should not ἐ πτωχεύσεν here be rendered, He became poor,' unless the nature of the case and the context should forbid it? But precisely the reverse is the case, and nothing can be better than what Meyer says on the aorist here: “The aorist denotes the once-occ urring entrance into the condition of being poor, and therefore certainly the having become poor, although πτωχεύειν, as also the classical πενεσθαι, does not mean to become poor, but to be poor the aorist, however, he adds in a note, has the sense of to have become.” The reference (he again says) is not to “the whole life led by Christ in poverty and lowliness, during which He was nevertheless rich in grace, rich in inward blessedness, as Baur and others.” And again, “the apostle is not speaking of what Christ is, but of what He was, before He became man, and what He ceased to be on his self-examination in becoming man (Galatians 4:4).”

But we have only settled the general sense of the statement. Its details demand further attention. How do we measure the “grace” or goodwill of any one towards others? By four things: By the height from which he looks down on his objects; by the depth in which he finds them lying beneath him; by the sacrifices to which he submits, for their good; and by the benefits which at much cost to himself he confers upon them. Among men there are not many cases in which even one of these is found in a very large degree. few in which more than one of them are found; none, probably, in which the whole of them meet in a degree worthy of note. But it is the peerless quality of “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” not only that all these characteristics meet in it, but that each and all of them shine forth in it with surpassing lustre. Is it the height from which He had to look down upon His objects? “He was rich” in “the glory which He had with the Father before the world was,” the glory too of having created all things that are in heaven and in earth, “things visible and things invisible” (Colossians 1:16), and of “upholding all things by the word of His power” (Hebrews 1:3). Next, is it the depth in which He beheld His objects lying? “For our sakes” all was done who lay “sold under sin” (Romans 7:14), under condemnation (Romans 5:18), under the curse (Galatians 3:13), and ready to perish (John 3:16); whose life here is all strewed with the wreck of a fallen state, and full of disappointments, sufferings, sorrows, and tears; while for the future there was only “a fearful looking for of judgment” from a holy God. Into this condition of ruin and wretchedness did “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ” draw down, not His pitying eye only, but Himself. And what were the sacrifices He submitted to, to get us out of it? “For our sakes He became poor.” How poor? To become man at all was poverty to Him; but man “emptied” of his pre-existent glory (Philippians 2:7), yea, “made in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Romans 8:3); “tempted in all points like as we are” (Hebrews 4:15), living literally “poor,” though all nature was at His command; “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” and, though He “knew no sin, made sin for us,” and “bearing our sins in His own body on the tree, and made a curse for us” this was in Him a “poverty,” the depth and bitterness of which who but Himself can comprehend? And what the benefits we thereby receive? “That we through His poverty might become rich” rich in “redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins,” rich in “peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” rich in “newness of life,” in objects to live for and motives to live by; rich in mastery over ourselves, the world, and the wicked one, in joy unspeakable and full of glory: “all things are ours, and we are Christ's, and Christ is God's” (1 Corinthians 3:22-23).

And now the apostle returns to his point to stimulate his Corinthian children in the faith to large-heartedness towards their famished Jewish brethren and this he does with the same delightful ease with which he had soared, for a brief moment, into the region of Christ's matchless example, proceeding through several verses as if no such grand parenthesis had interrupted his flow of thought.