“Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you? — unless indeed you fail to meet the test!”
— 2 Corinthians 13:5
Context & Key Themes
Chapter 13 closes the letter. Paul announces that he is coming to Corinth for the third time, and the tone he sets is sober. The warnings he has issued through chapters 10 through 12 now come due. He will not spare. When he arrives, the sin he has been addressing at a distance will be addressed in person, and the authority he carries will be exercised openly if the repentance proves incomplete. But the warning is paired with a hope: Paul writes ahead of time precisely so that he will not have to be severe when he arrives. The letter is itself a final invitation to repentance that avoids the painful visit his arrival would otherwise require.
The theological pivot in the chapter is the imperative Paul presses on the Corinthians: examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. After three chapters in which the Corinthians have been evaluating Paul’s apostleship — weighing him against the super-apostles, asking whether his authority is genuine, measuring him by external metrics — Paul turns the examination around. The question is not whether Paul has passed the Corinthians’ test. The question is whether the Corinthians have passed Christ’s. The presence of Christ within them is the only credential that finally matters, and that presence is testable. If it is real, it will show. If it is not real, no amount of church attendance or nominal affiliation will substitute for it.
The chapter ends on what is almost certainly the oldest preserved trinitarian blessing in the New Testament. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. This formula, spoken in churches for nearly two thousand years as the final benediction of the gathered assembly, was written at the close of a letter to a congregation that had broken Paul’s heart and nearly broken with him altogether. It is significant that Paul closes this particular letter — the most contentious pastoral correspondence in the New Testament — with the fullest expression of triune blessing he ever wrote. Whatever the Corinthians had done, and whatever would still require resolution in person, Paul was asking the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit to dwell with them. The benediction is itself evidence of where his heart finally rested.
Summary
Paul opens the chapter by announcing that this will be his third visit. He invokes the Deuteronomy 19 principle: every charge must be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. His previous visits and his letters have served as the earlier witnesses. The third visit will be the final one, the one at which the matter is settled. He warned those who sinned before and all the others when he was with them the second time, and he warns them now while absent, that if he comes again he will not spare.
The Corinthians, he says, are seeking proof that Christ is speaking in him. Christ, he answers, is not weak in dealing with them but is powerful among them. For Christ was crucified in weakness but lives by the power of God. In the same way, Paul is weak in him, but in dealing with them he will live with him by the power of God. The parallel is pointed: the Lord who appeared weak in crucifixion yet now lives in resurrection power is the same Lord whose ministry Paul carries, and Paul’s own weakness will give way to the same power when the moment requires it.
Then the imperative. Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. The verbs Paul uses — peirazete (test) and dokimazete (examine) — are the language of precious metal assay, the careful process by which gold or silver was tested for purity. Paul asks the Corinthians to apply that same care to themselves. Do they not realize that Jesus Christ is in them? Unless they fail the test. The conditional is not decoration. Paul is allowing the possibility that some who count themselves among the Corinthian believers are not in fact in Christ at all, and he wants them to consider it seriously enough to be certain.
Paul hopes they will find that he and his companions have not failed the test. But he prays to God that they may not do wrong — not so that Paul and his companions may appear to have met the test, but so that the Corinthians may do what is right, even if it makes Paul himself appear to have failed. The pastoral priority is visible: Paul is not interested in his own vindication. He is interested in their faithfulness. He will gladly look weaker than he is if the Corinthians end up stronger than they were. The reason is simple: we cannot do anything against the truth, but only for the truth. The truth will win out regardless of how the authority question between Paul and the super-apostles is decided in the eyes of men. Paul wants the truth to win, and he is willing to disappear into the truth’s victory.
He closes the letter with a cascade of final exhortations and blessings. He rejoices when he is weak and they are strong. What he prays for is their restoration — the Greek word katartisin, the setting of a broken bone or the mending of a torn net, the making of something broken into something whole again. This is why he writes these things while still absent, he says, so that when present he may not have to be severe in using the authority the Lord gave him for building up and not for tearing down.
Then the final blessings: Finally, brothers, rejoice. Aim for restoration. Comfort one another. Agree with one another. Live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. And then the benediction that has carried the letter into every century since: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
Reflection
The call to self-examination in verse 5 is one of the most important pastoral imperatives in the New Testament, and it is one of the most commonly evaded. The Corinthians had spent a great deal of energy examining Paul. They had weighed his apostleship, scrutinized his methods, compared him unfavorably to the super-apostles, and passed judgment on his presence and his speech. Paul turns the question around. The examination that matters is not the examination of apostles by congregations; it is the examination of congregations — and individuals within them — by the test that Christ himself applies. Is the faith real? Is Christ actually present? The test is not a matter of feelings but of the consistent marks of the Spirit’s work visible in a life over time. Faith that never produces fruit, affiliation that never shapes character, participation that never touches the heart — these are not the faith Paul has been preaching. Christ dwells in those who are his. Where the dwelling is real, the dwelling shows.
Paul’s willingness to appear weak if it means the Corinthians turn out strong is one of the quieter marks of his character in this letter, and it deserves attention. He has spent three chapters defending his apostleship against false teachers. He could easily have been invested in the Corinthians’ affirmation of him as the proof that his ministry was genuine. But when he prays for them in this final chapter, he prays that they will do what is right even if it makes him look like a failure. The super-apostles were interested in their own reputation. Paul is interested in the Corinthians’ faithfulness. That is the difference between a servant of Christ and a servant of himself, and it is detectable in exactly the moment when the two interests diverge.
The phrase we cannot do anything against the truth, but only for the truth is one of the most quietly confident statements in Paul’s letters. He is not saying that no one ever resists the truth — his whole ministry has been a battle against those who do. He is saying that he and his companions cannot act against the truth, because the truth is what they are for. If the truth requires that Paul appear weaker than he is, so be it. If the truth requires that he appear stronger than he is, so be it. His role is not to manage perceptions of himself but to serve the truth that is not his to bend. This is what free ministry looks like — ministry in which the minister has so thoroughly handed his reputation over to the Lord that he cannot be manipulated by what people think of him in any direction. The super-apostles could be manipulated precisely because their reputations were their own concern. Paul had given his away.
The final benediction is theologically staggering and easy to miss after so many centuries of liturgical use. Paul names three sources of divine blessing and distributes a distinct gift from each. From the Lord Jesus Christ: grace, the unearned favor that has been the foundation of everything he has said about the gospel. From God: love, the Father’s agape that initiated the entire work of redemption before the world began. From the Holy Spirit: fellowship, the koinonia that binds believers into the communion of saints and binds the saints into communion with God. The three persons of the Godhead are named with three distinct but inseparable gifts, and the three gifts are asked upon the entire congregation. This is not a systematic doctrine of the Trinity — that will take the church several more centuries to articulate — but the trinitarian pattern of Christian prayer is already fully present here, at the close of a letter written around AD 56. The church that later confessed Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as one God in three persons did not invent the doctrine; it articulated what had already been the shape of Christian worship from the beginning.
And there is one more thing worth saying about where this blessing lands. Paul is praying it over a congregation that had questioned him, tolerated teachers who slandered him, nearly broken with him entirely, and still has not fully resolved every issue that required the severe letter. This blessing is not reserved for the spiritually advanced. It is not withheld until the church has proved itself worthy. Paul speaks it over a church that is still in the process of being mended, and he speaks it over them precisely because they need it. That is the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit — not a reward for achievement but the only source of the strength by which a fragile church becomes a strong one. Paul closes the letter by placing the Corinthians, still unfinished, entirely in the care of the triune God who alone can finish what he has begun in them.