Trevor Laurence
Against those who suspect him of walking according to the flesh, Paul in 2 Corinthians 10:3–6 clarifies the character of his gospel ministry:
[3] For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. [4] For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. [5] We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, [6] being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete.
Paul ministers not in the flesh, but in the Spirit. He relies not on human power, but on divine power. He deploys not the weapons of typical human battle—neither the physical armaments of sword and shield nor the subtler sin-munitions of shame, appeals to pride, rhetorical and emotional manipulation, the glitz of easy glory, the leveraging of idols—but the weapons of word, sacrament, and prayer: the truth of God that destroys arguments and razes every opinion that stands against the knowledge of God in Christ; the discipline of the church that confronts unrepentant sin, removes the leaven from the lump, and withholds the Table in love for the offender and in hope of penitence (cf. 1 Cor 5; 2 Cor 2:6–9); prayer “at all times in the Spirit” (Eph 6:18) that God would dismantle the kingdom of darkness, releasing its captives for true freedom, and empower the faithful and effective proclamation and witness of God’s kingdom people in the world.
Paul’s description of his ministry in 2 Cor 10 employs an extended military metaphor to great communicative effect. The imagery punctuates the contrast between the weapons of the flesh and the weapons of the Spirit while simultaneously confirming that the weapons of the Spirit are real weapons for a real war—indeed, the most real weapons for the most real war. Scholars have offered several hypotheses for the background of Paul’s metaphor, ranging from ancient near eastern covenant lawsuits to the Greek philosophy of Antisthenes to the events of the Third Mithridatic War.1 But for a Jewish former-Pharisee like Paul, there is a source for this type of conceptualization that is far more likely: Israel’s Scriptures.
There is a biblical-theological substructure here, an implicit linking with the Old Testament narrative of redemptive history underneath the overt argument.
“When You Go Out to War”
Warfare, destroying strongholds, taking captives—this is the language of conquest.
After their exodus from bondage in Egypt into the liberty of life with God, Israel was commissioned by their covenant Lord to go into the place that he had promised them, to cleanse the land of unholiness, to drive out the idolatrous enemy, so that God’s temple-kingdom might be established in the land—so that the land might be the place of God’s royal, ruling, holy presence among his people.
“When my angel goes before you and brings you to the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, and I blot them out, you shall not bow down to their gods nor serve them, nor do as they do, but you shall utterly overthrow them and break their pillars in pieces” (Exod 23:23–24).
“Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When you pass over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you and destroy all their figured stones and destroy all their metal images and demolish all their high places. And you shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given the land to you to possess it” (Num 33:51–53).
“Hear, O Israel: you are to cross over the Jordan today, to go in to dispossess nations greater and mightier than you, cities great and fortified up to heaven” (Deut 9:1).
“When you go out to war against your enemies, and the LORD your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive…” (Deut 21:10).
Israel’s claiming of the land that God had given to be the temple-kingdom of the Lord is full of warfare and captives, strongholds and fortified cities, high places and high walls. For the land to attain its end and become the place of God’s dwelling and reigning, Israel must wage war. And if Israel forsakes her calling and takes on the image of the unholy nations she is to drive out, a reverse conquest will ensue, her strong and lofty walls will be destroyed,2 and she will be removed from the land of God’s presence: “They shall besiege you in all your towns, until your high and fortified walls, in which you trusted, come down throughout all your land” (Deut 28:52).
When Paul speaks of waging war and destroying strongholds and tearing down high things and taking captives, the apostle is describing new covenant ministry as gospel conquest. Like Israel marching into the land that God had claimed as his royal sanctuary, the church moves into the world that God has reclaimed through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in order to establish God’s temple-kingdom in the land. The church is the citizenry of the kingdom of heaven (cf. 1 Cor 6:9–11) and the temple of the living God (cf. 1 Cor 3:17; 6:19; 2 Cor 6:16–7:1)—the church is the place where God lives with and reigns over his people—and as she fills the earth in gospel witness, the world moves toward its appointed purpose as the home of God’s royal dwelling with the humanity he made for himself.
The weapons of her warfare are the ordinary means of grace: word and sacrament and prayer. The church destroys the strongholds of arguments and high opinions—idolatrous ways of thinking, conceiving, and worshiping that defend against and offer false refuge from the knowledge of the glory of God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ (cf. 2 Cor 4:6)—through the open proclamation of the truth (2 Cor 4:2) and the loving embodiment of the character of Christ’s kingdom of grace, testifying to the beauty of the Lord and putting on display the beauty of life under his soul-satisfying reign. Through her witness to the gospel, she takes as captives the thoughts, minds, imaginations, hearts of those enslaved to their own visions of freedom so that they might taste the freedom of slavery to Jesus, made happy prisoners in the train of Christ’s triumphal procession (cf. 2 Cor 2:14). The church participates in driving out the enemy from the land that God has claimed for his royal dwelling by living as ministers through whom God’s enemies become God’s sons, decimating the ranks of the kingdom of darkness by baptizing rebels into a new kingdom, and by “being ready to punish every disobedience,” exercising discipline upon the unrepentant sin in her midst so that she may be the repentantly holy temple of the holy God.3 She marches ever in prayer—”Your kingdom come!”—pleading for the conversion of the nations, the interruption of every scheme designed against God’s people and purposes, the disempowering of Satan and every spiritual foe, the consummation of creation with Christ’s glorious return.
The life of Christian witness is a prayerful war of word and sacrament, a battle with gracious weapons, a violent encounter that eschews worldly violence, a gospel conquest.
The Conquest Commission
Intriguingly, Paul is not the only New Testament figure to frame the church’s calling in these terms. Jesus himself commissions the church for gospel conquest in Matthew 28:18–20:
[18] And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. [19] Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, [20] teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
After Israel’s exodus through the waters of judgment into freedom, as she stood on the edge of Canaan, the Lord declared to Joshua, “Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the people of Israel. Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you, just as I promised to Moses…No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life. Just as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not leave you or forsake you” (Josh 1:2–3, 5). The Lord sends his people into the land with the promise of his presence to participate in making it his holy temple-kingdom.
A similar scene occurs as the Old Testament story draws to a close. In the final verse of the Hebrew canon, 2 Chron 36:23 records Cyrus’ proclamation: “Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, ‘The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the LORD his God be with him. Let him go up.’” Cyrus, granted authority over all the earth by God, is tasked to reconstruct the temple, and with an invocation for God’s presence with his people, he sends them back into the land to rebuild the house from which the Lord will reign over his temple-kingdom (cf. Ezra 1:3).
From a mountain in Galilee, after the exodus through the waters of judgment into life that was his crucifixion and resurrection (cf. Luke 9:31), Jesus speaks as God spoke to Joshua. On the edge of the new creation, Jesus commissions the Israel gathered round him in worship to go into the land that the Lord has given, driving out unholiness from among the nations so that the whole earth may be brought to its culmination as the dwelling place of God with man. The Son of Man who has been given royal authority over every nation and an everlasting kingdom that will fill the earth (cf. Dan 7:13–14; 2:44) issues a decree like Cyrus to rebuild God’s house, sending his people into the world so that they might fill his global land with the temple-kingdom of God, making it the place of God’s reigning presence. And the risen Messianic king promises as the living God, “I am with you always.”
Ever accompanied by their covenant Lord and king, the church goes to all nations, fulfilling the vocation of God’s people through the ages, battling against everything that opposes God’s temple-kingdom so that the land God has chosen may be fit for and filled with his holy ruling presence. And the way of gospel conquest is the ordinary means of grace, the prayerful ministry of word and sacrament: “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”
In word and sacrament and prayer, the church witnesses to the kingdom, preaches good news to the nations, baptizes enemies into the family of God, teaches the holy way of the king, petitions for the kingdom’s coming, and guards the fidelity, purity, and peace of God’s temple community. With the means of grace, the church wages war, destroying strongholds and taking captives, filling the earth with God’s temple-kingdom until the day when Christ returns, when loud voices sing, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” (Rev 11:15), when the whole cosmos is the temple-kingdom where the Lord lives with his family of priests and kings forever.
Trevor Laurence is the Executive Director of the Cateclesia Institute
Image: Szymon Czechowicz, Resurrection
- See the summary of proposals in Murray J. Harris, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2005), 676–7.[↩]
- The verbal resonances between Deut 28:52 and 2 Cor 10:4–5 are particularly strong. Paul speaks of “tearing down strongholds” (καθαίρεσιν ὀχυρωμάτων) and “tearing down…every height” (καθαιροῦντες πᾶν ὕψωμα) in similar terms as LXX Deut 28:52’s warning of the tearing down of Israel’s high and strong walls (καθαιρεθῶσιν τὰ τείχη σου τὰ ὑψηλὰ καὶ τὰ ὀχυρά).[↩]
- Recall the logic of 2 Cor 6:16–7:1. Paul reminds the Corinthians of their identity as the temple of the living God, appeals to the OT to confirm the purity that befits the house where God dwells, and exhorts the Corinthians in light of God’s promises to cleanse themselves of every defilement of body and spirit. Repentance is that proactive cleansing of sacred space which makes the cleansing of sacred space in church discipline (cf. 1 Cor 5:7) unnecessary.[↩]