The first chapter of 2 Corinthians can be justifiably reckoned as the Bible’s greatest passage on comfort. The word “comfort” appears ten times in both noun and verb forms in verses 3-7, one third of all 31 occurrences in the New Testament. And what gives this focus on comfort such resonance to this day is the reality of grievous afflictions so common in this life. And the Apostle Paul knew a great deal about both. Indeed, Paul writes more about affliction and comfort than any other single author in the Bible.

In this passage Paul used the familiar “Apostolic We” as a way to refer not only to himself but to the other apostles and, in the case of this letter, to Timothy. He wants the churches to know that the apostles’ suffering was for the sake of Christ, that through them the Lord might extend his comfort to the churches. The Corinthian church had been captivated by so-called “super apostles,” who can rightly be compared to today’s prosperity preachers. They attacked Paul, denying that he was an apostle on the basis of his suffering. So Paul was jealous to establish that not only was suffering not inconsistent with being an apostle but was an essential mark of genuine apostleship.

It is not only the apostles who were appointed to follow Christ in his affliction. Paul notes that all Christians will in one way or another be called upon to “patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer” (vs. 6). But this is so that a blessed cycle of comfort may work its way through the churches. As the apostles suffer affliction so too will they experience the comfort of God. They, in turn, will then pass that comfort along to the churches as they suffer affliction of all sorts. It is a kind of circulatory system of God’s comfort which pulses through the church.

This was not mere theory for Paul who himself had repeatedly known the comfort of God in Christ throughout his manifold afflictions, much of which is catalogued in 2 Corinthians. He had come to his present state of peace through the hard won experience of affliction. As one commentator observes, “The experience of God’s deliverance in the past and the corresponding surety of his deliverance in the future is the ‘comfort’ of his people in the present” (Hafemann, 61).