The Thorn in the Flesh, or

Next Part The Thorn in the Flesh, or 2

The Thorn in the Flesh, or Strength Made Perfect in Weakness

And he said unto me, "My grace is sufficient for you– for my strength is made perfect in weakness." Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 2 Cor. 12:9

The servants of God are often much tried by slanders being cast upon their character, or suspicions entertained of their sincerity, or doubts expressed of their call by grace or of their call to the ministry. But need we wonder that it should be so, when we see that one of the most eminent saints and servants of God that ever breathed was assailed by similar suspicions, and was the object of equally injurious doubts? The Corinthians, for instance, to whom Paul had been so abundantly blessed, the very people to whom he could say, "In Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel," misled by the crafty insinuations of designing preachers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ (2 Cor. 11:13), evidently entertained very strong suspicions whether he was not altogether a reprobate; for in allusion to what had reached his ears upon this point, he says, "I trust that you shall know that we are not reprobates" (2 Cor. 13:6), language which he could not and would not have made use of unless some such opinion of him had been expressed by them.

Yet these suspicions, unjust as they were, induced him, as if in necessary self-defense, to bring forward an experience which had lain hidden in his bosom for fourteen years. As some of his own spiritual children disclaimed him as their father, even at the risk of proclaiming thereby their own bastardy, he felt himself imperatively called upon to speak of the revelations of the Lord with which he had been favored and blessed; and thus the very suspicions entertained against him by the Corinthians, the very doubts cast by them upon his call by grace, and his call to the ministry, were made the means of bringing out of his bosom an experience of the Lord's grace and power, which might have lain forever buried there, and which but for these suspicions the church of God would have utterly lost.

To this, therefore, I shall now direct your attention, as being closely and intimately connected with our text. He tells us, then, in the beginning of this chapter (2 Cor. 12.), that he "knew a man in Christ"– doubtless himself– "who fourteen years ago, (whether in the body," he says, "I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell; God knows); such an one caught up to the third heaven. And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell– God knows;) how he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter." How unspeakably great, how divinely ravishing, must this manifestation of Christ have been to his soul, when it so overcame his bodily and mental faculties that he could not tell whether he was in the body or out of the body; in other words, whether, leaving his body here below, he was caught up in his spirit into the third heaven, there to behold unspeakable sights and there to hear unutterable words, or whether body and soul were both alike borne aloft into the paradise of God. This he leaves as matter of uncertainty; for it was not clear to his own mind, though the reality and blessedness of the revelation were as certain to him as his own existence.

But he does not stop there– and as he had spoken of the blessedness of the manifestation, he lets us see also what was its sequel, which is as important a part on the other side of the question– the dark and gloomy side– as the revelation itself on the happy, bright, and glorious side. He would not hold himself up before the Corinthian church as a saint so highly favored without showing them the counterpoise which God gave him in the opposite scale. He therefore adds, "And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure." He, like ourselves, was still in the flesh; his heart, like yours and mine, was "still deceitful above all things and desperately wicked;" and such being the case, his corrupt nature would have availed itself even of the grace of God to lift him up with spiritual pride; for, as Deer truly says, that vile monster, "The heart uplifts with God's own gifts, and makes even a grace snare."

The Lord, therefore, saw it needful, as he had given him a high sail, to load his ship with proportionate ballast, that he might sail the more steadily, and not capsize under the first heavy gale. As then he had exalted him with his own hand to the heights of heaven, so he thought fit to depress him to the very gates of hell, that he might have in his bosom a daily counterpoise to those liftings up of spiritual pride which would otherwise have swelled his heart to his own injury, and the marring of his usefulness and acceptance among the saints of God, if there had been no such check to counteract its workings.

But though most profitable, yet this dispensation was most painful; so that being scarcely able to live under the burden of this distressing temptation, thrice he besought the Lord, that is, upon three special occasions when the Lord favored him with access to his throne of grace, that it might depart from him, the pressure of it being too great to bear. But instead of hearing his prayer in the way he desired and taking it away, the Lord gave him those words which form the first part of our text, and from which, in connection with what immediately follows, I shall hope, with God's blessing, to speak this morning– "And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for you– for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me."

Now as we have not the abundance of Paul's revelations, so we may not have the abundance of Paul's temptations; for these two things for the most part stand in proportionate relation to each other. Still we may have a thorn in the flesh, if not so large and sharp as Paul's; still we may have a messenger of Satan to buffet us, if not armed with equal malice– or if he does, not assail us with equal fury. If, then, we have in our flesh this rankling thorn and this buffeting messenger of Satan, we shall need what Paul needed; if not in equal measure, yet at least according to our degree. We shall need the grace of Christ and the strength of Christ; and not only so, but we shall have to prove each for himself that Christ's grace is sufficient for us whatever the thorn may be, and that Christ's strength is made perfect in our weakness whether that weakness be much or little.

If, then, we have a thorn and find the grace; if we experience the weakness and realize the strength, we shall be able also with the apostle to glory even in our infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon us. It is in this experimental way that the word of truth is opened up with divine light and life to our souls, and that we understand the scriptures as realizing in our own hearts both the pain and the pleasure, the sorrow and the joy, the temptation and the deliverance, the trial and the blessing, which are the invariable lot of those who are led by the blessed Spirit into the truth of God.

With God's blessing, therefore, in opening up our subject, I shall–

I. First, drop a few remarks upon the thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan which was sent to buffet the apostle.

II. Secondly, show how the Lord's grace is sufficient for every trial and temptation which may befall his family.

III. Thirdly, that Christ's strength is alone made perfect in our weakness.

IV. And lastly, that this gives occasion to every tried and tempted Christian to glory in his infirmities; not as glorying in them for their own sake, but in order that the power of Christ may rest upon him.

I. The thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satanwhich was sent to buffet the apostle. There have been many conjectures, and some very foolish ones, as to the nature of this thorn in the flesh which was given to Paul. Men who know nothing of spiritual things, in their own experience, are as unable to understand and explain matters of this kind as I would be to write a treatise upon astronomy or to publish a grammar in Arabic. Thus some have said that it was the colic, others the gout; some have thought that it was a pain in the ear; others the gravel or the stone; and others the headache; some have explained it that it was a fit of stammering that he was seized with when he went to preach; and others that it was an attack upon his nerves which distorted his face. I have named these ridiculous interpretations to show how wildly and foolishly men can write who have no experience to teach them better; for I am well assured that unless preachers and commentators know something of spiritual things in their own soul, they must needs be bad interpreters of the word of God, and can only betray to a discerning eye their ignorance and folly when they attempt to explain what can only be understood by personal experience. Guided by this light, let us now look at the words as they stand before us, and let us seek to penetrate into their hidden signification, when we have first laid bare the meaning of the figure as it stands in the letter.

A. Take, then, the simple idea of– "a thorn in the flesh!" What thoughts does that emblem present to your mind? It is an experience of which we all know something literally, for we can scarcely gather a rose-bud or put our hand into the hedge to pick a violet without knowing something of a thorn sticking into our hand. But what would be your first feeling if such a misfortune happened to you? Would it not be that of pain?For the moment that a thorn enters the flesh, pain is the first intimation of the presence of so unwelcome an intruder.

1. Paul's thorn then must have been something attended with pain and suffering.

2. But take another idea connected with the sticking of a thorn into the flesh. Would it not immediately hamper our movements? If a thorn sticks into our foot, it lames us, we cannot walk without feeling it; if a thorn sticks into our hand, we cannot grasp an object as before; and thus for a time both hand and foot are rendered useless. In gathering up then the meaning of the figure, as indicating the experience of Paul, you must take, beside that of pain, the idea of something crippling and hamperingevery spiritual movement.

3. Take another thought, that naturally springs out of the same figure– we are restless until the thorn is extracted. The pain is so great, especially if the thorn is large and deep-seated, and every movement is so hampered thereby, that there is no rest to body or mind until it is removed. And I may here observe that the word translated "thorn" means in the original one of no common magnitude, and signifies rather a "stake" than a thorn.

4. But take a fourth idea– if the thorn is not extracted, the flesh rankles and festers. The entrance of the thorn does not merely cause momentary pain, like a cut with a knife, but the wound it makes gets worse and worse by the thorn continuing in it, and must do so until it be removed.

No painful feeling, then, no experience, however deep, can be called "a thorn in the flesh" unless it produce or be accompanied by those four circumstances it must be painful; it must hamper and cripple all spiritual movements; it must make the soul restless until extracted; and if left to rankle, it cannot but produce a festering wound.

B. But let us not stop here. Let us look a little further still into the experience of the apostle, after he had been caught up into the third heaven. Something was given him, whatever it was, not merely as a thorn in the flesh to distress and pain him, but as a messenger of Satan,an emissary of the devil, to harass and buffet him.And what makes this dispensation more mysterious, it is spoken of as arising out of the express will of God. Looking, then, at the words of the apostle in all their naked strength, without seeking to diminish or explain away their force, it was evidently something that God permitted Satan violently to do, and which came, if I may use the expression, rushing upon him hot from hell. You may wonder, and that naturally, that so holy and godly a man as Paul could have been subject, and that by the express will of God, to these infernal buffetings.

But consider his case. Satan does not appear to have tempted our apostle in the ordinary way whereby he allures men to sin. He would have been armored against such common, what I may call such vulgar, temptations as covetousness, drunkenness, fleshly lust, love of the world, and peddling ambition– temptations whereby Satan now ensnares men as easily as a poacher ensnares a rabbit. There was no use therefore in Satan trying to entangle him with such temptations, as Paul would have broken through them, as Samson snapped asunder the green ropes, or as Behemoth "pierces through snares." (Job 40:24.)

Satan knows well both how to allure and how to attack; for he can crawl like a serpent, and he can roar like a lion. He has snares whereby he entangles, and fiery darts whereby he impales. Most men are easily led by him captive at his will, ensnared without the least difficulty in the traps that he lays for their feet, for they are as ready to be caught as he is to catch them. Why would Satan need to roar against them as a lion, if he can wind himself around them and bite them as a serpent? But a man like Paul, or to go higher still, like our blessed Lord in the days of his flesh, was protected against all the serpentine wiles of Satan. Paul, therefore, says of himself that "he was not ignorant of Satan's devices" (2 Cor. 2:11).

Though he might transform himself into an angel of light, Paul's penetrating eye, as touched by an unction from above, could see through his subtlety and be upon his guard against him. As Satan, then, despaired of success in attempting to entangle him, as he too often entangles us, he assailed him with all the power of hell, rushed upon him as a roaring lion, attacking his soul with all his blasphemies and all his rebellion, as though he would fill him with all his own infernal malice, and breathe into him all his own damnable spirit. As this was permitted by the Lord, for without his permission Satan could have had no power over him, the apostle speaks of this "messenger of Satan" as being "given" to him. The Lord did not set Satan on Paul, but did not hold him back. We see this in the case of Job. Satan could not touch Job at first, because God "had set a hedge about him." But, when, for Job's good, the hedge was removed, then Satan burst in upon him. In the same way, by removing the hedge, the Lord allowed "the messenger of Satan" to break in upon and "buffet" our apostle. But let us apply this a little to our own experience, for it is there that we shall find the best and surest key to open the wards of this intricate lock.

If, then, you or I know anything of the temptations of Satan, and what he can do if allowed of God, we may be able in some faint measure to enter into the experience of our blessed apostle, as having a thorn in our flesh, and as having a messenger of Satan to buffet us. And even if our temptations do not amount to 'thorns', they may be 'prickles' sharp enough and painful enough to give us a taste of what Paul felt. If, too, they are not driven very deep into our flesh, for the word in the original, as I have intimated, literally means "a stake," yet they may be of sufficient depth to cause much pain and much annoyance, to cripple and hamper our movements, to rankle and fester in our carnal mind, though the suffering may not be a tenth or a hundredth part of that experienced by him who had been in the third heaven; for indeed without his blessings we could not endure his trials, without his heaven we could not bear his hell.

C. But you will observe that the apostle speaks of the thorn being "in the flesh."It was not struck by the hand of Satan into the 'new man of grace'; it did not fester and rankle in that new spirit born of the Spirit which is perfectly holy, as being created after the image of God in righteousness and true holiness. But it was in the flesh, the old man, the unrenewed part which is the seat of all sin; for there, and there only, Satan could plant it. He has no access to the new man of grace– that is wholly under God's guardianship, kept as the apple of his eye, and safe from all the attacks of sin and Satan. But the flesh is akin to Satan– it is sinful as he is; rebellious as he is; and blasphemous as he is. I mean not to the same extent, but in the same manner. Through this avenue, then, Satan has access to us to drive a thorn into the flesh, as he, with God's permission, could smite the flesh of Job with boils. But he has no access to drive it into the spirit, for that is sacred ground, out of which the Holy Spirit keeps him, as God kept Job's life. If we had no flesh, there would be no place for Satan to plant the thorn. Angels above have no place for it; glorified spirits in heaven have no place for it; and if the saint of God here below were perfectly free from a body of sin and death; if he had no carnal, corrupt nature, no flesh, Satan might go round and round about him, as the enemies of Zion went round about her, marking her towers and bulwarks, and seek in vain to plant a thorn, as they sought in vain to plant their scaling ladders against the walls of Zion.

But we, having flesh, I may indeed say such a mass of flesh in us, round us, and all about us, and this flesh being thoroughly, as it were, akin to Satan, as being tainted and infected with his sin through the fall, he has not far to go to find a spot in which to drive in the thorn.

Let him hurl one of his fiery darts, it cannot well miss so broad a target as our carnal MIND. Have you not found sometimes a sudden thought spring up in your mind that your very soul abhorred, and which made your inmost conscience tremble? Infidelity, for instance, has that never pestered you– the very concentrated essence of unbelief rushing through your mind as a bomb against a bombarded town? Have you not sometimes had strange ideas working in your mind about the inspiration of the Scriptures; about the deity and eternal Sonship of the Lord Jesus; about the personality and work of the Holy Spirit; and indeed I may say every truth revealed in the word and made known to the heart by the power of God? When you have read these truths in the Scripture and in the writings of good men, when you have heard them preached by ministers, or spoken of by the people of God, have you not had floating thoughts, painful suggestions, infidel objections, and grievous workings about their truths and reality, which have much tried and distressed your mind? These were thorns that Satan planted in your flesh, and, as he struck them in, you found they were just as I described a thorn to be; painful, crippling, robbing you of all rest and ease, and inflicting rankling, festering wounds.

Have you not also at times had very rebellious thoughts against God such as you would not dare to breathe into the ear of your nearest friend, and which I am sure I will not utter or even more than hint at; for many things pass through our minds which we dare not speak with our lips. But if you have known anything of such rebellious feelings, you are not a stranger to my meaning, nor to my prudence in hesitating to give it utterance. That was a thorn in your flesh. And have you not been tempted even to curse and swear– though not only contrary to your religious but even your moral feeling, and it may be that you have never actually sworn an oath in your life? I think I may say I have not sworn an oath for more than thirty years, and yet I feel at times as if the devil filled my wicked heart with all kinds of them. I have heard of tender females who have been brought up with the greatest strictness and delicacy and whose inmost mind abhorred the very thought, and yet when called by grace have been so tempted that nothing but the power of God has been able to keep them from giving vent to the vile language that was boiling up in their heart. Was not this a grievous thorn, and what a rankling wound must it have made?

And have you not had sometimes very wicked thoughts, to say no more; for on such points I dare only hint, about our blessed Lord? and have not those vile imaginations not only pained and distressed your mind, but made you fear that there was not a spark of grace in your soul? What are these trials and temptations but a thorn in the flesh?

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