2 Cor.13:4 – For though He was crucified in weakness, yet He lives by the power of God. For we also are weak in Him, but we shall live with Him by the power of God toward you.
This passage is a great description of what we could call God’s upside down world. What am I even talking about? How could a perfect God be perceived as upside down? That’s because we are so accustomed to evaluating everything with our secular mindset that we can’t really see the glory of God when it appears right in front of us in weakness. For example, Isaiah said that Jesus had nothing physical in His appearance that caused Him to stand out,
Isaiah 53:2,3 – “He has no form or comeliness;
And when we see Him,
There is no beauty that we should desire Him.
He is despised and rejected by men,
A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him;
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.”
Jesus came cloaked in the weakness of a common man from Nazareth but He was the power of God cloaked in that weakness. He appeared as weak at the cross but it was the weakness of His death that ultimately unleashed God’s power on earth. Here is how Chrysostom describes this.
“This is a difficult passage which causes problems for many people. What is meant here by “weakness”? In Scripture weakness can refer to bodily illness, and it can also mean not being securely grounded in faith. But there is a third possibility, and that is what we find here. Weakness can mean persecutions, trials, plottings and the like. Christ was not weak in body or in spirit, but he was persecuted and put to death. It was not because of any inherent weakness that he went to the cross; on the contrary, he chose to die in that way in order to give us life in the power of God.”
Paul saw the power of God displayed in his life through his own weakness. Like Jesus, Paul was despised and rejected often ridiculed, beaten, and imprisoned. It was in these moments that God’s glory was clearly seen. Paul said death was working in Him but God’s life would be working in those he ministered to. This suffering and weakness is not popular but it is through weakness that God’s power changes our world.
