1 From: Sha’ul, by God’s will an emissary of the Messiah Yeshua, and brother Timothy

To: God’s Messianic community in Corinth, along with all God’s people throughout Achaia:

² Grace to you and shalom from God our Father and the Lord Yeshua the Messiah.

³ Praised be God, Father of our Lord Yeshua the Messiah, compassionate Father, God of all encouragement and comfort; ⁴ who encourages us in all our trials, so that we can encourage others in whatever trials they may be undergoing with the encouragement we ourselves have received from God.

⁵ For just as the Messiah’s sufferings overflow into us, so through the Messiah our encouragement also overflows. ⁶ So if we undergo trials, it is for your encouragement and deliverance; and if we are encouraged, that should encourage you when you have to endure sufferings like those we are experiencing. ⁷ Moreover, our hope for you remains staunch, because we know that as you share in the sufferings, you will also share in the encouragement.

⁸ For, brothers, we want you to know about the trials we have undergone in the province of Asia. The burden laid on us was so far beyond what we could bear that we even despaired of living through it. ⁹ In our hearts we felt we were under sentence of death. However, this was to get us to rely not on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead! ¹⁰ He rescued us from such deadly peril, and he will rescue us again! The one in whom we have placed our hope will indeed continue to rescue us. ¹¹ And you must add your help by praying for us; for the more people there are praying, the more people there will be to give thanks when their prayer for us is answered.

¹² For we take pride in this: that our conscience assures us that in our dealings with the world, and especially with you, we have conducted ourselves with frankness and godly pureness of motive — not by worldly wisdom but by God-given grace. ¹³ There are no hidden meanings in our letters other than what you can read and understand; and my hope is that you will understand fully, ¹⁴ as indeed you have already understood us in part; so that on the Day of our Lord Yeshua you can be as proud of us as we are of you.

¹⁵ So sure was I of this that I had planned to come and see you, so that you might have the benefit of a second visit. ¹⁶ I wanted to visit you on my way to Macedonia, visit you again on my way back from Macedonia, and then have you send me on my way to Y’hudah.

¹⁷ Did I make these plans lightly? Or do I make plans the way a worldly man does, ready to say, “Yes, yes,” and “No, no,” in the same breath? ¹⁸ As surely as God is trustworthy, we don’t say “Yes” when we mean “No.” ¹⁹ For the Son of God, the Messiah Yeshua, who was proclaimed among you through us — that is, through me and Sila and Timothy — was not a yes-and-no man; on the contrary, with him it is always “Yes!” ²⁰ For however many promises God has made, they all find their “Yes” in connection with him; that is why it is through him that we say the “Amen” when we give glory to God. ²¹ Moreover, it is God who sets both us and you in firm union with the Messiah; he has anointed us, ²² put his seal on us, and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee for the future.

²³ I call God to witness — he knows what my life is like — that the reason I held back from coming to Corinth was out of consideration for you! ²⁴ We are not trying to dictate how you must live out your trust in the Messiah, for in your trust you are standing firm. Rather, we are working with you for your own happiness.

2 So I made up my mind that I would not pay you another painful visit. ² For if I cause you pain, who is left to make me happy except the people I have pained? ³ Indeed, this is why I wrote as I did — so that when I came, I would not have to be pained by those who ought to be making me happy; for I had enough confidence in all of you to believe that unless I could be happy, none of you could be happy either. ⁴ I wrote to you with a greatly distressed and anguished heart, and with many tears, not in order to cause you pain, but to get you to realize how very much I love you.

⁵ Now if someone has been a cause of pain, it is not I whom he has pained, but, in some measure — I don’t want to overstate it — all of you. ⁶ For such a person the punishment already imposed on him by the majority is sufficient, ⁷ so that now you should do the opposite — forgive him, encourage him, comfort him. Otherwise such a person might be swallowed up in overwhelming depression. ⁸ So I urge you to show that you really do love him. ⁹ The reason I wrote you was to see if you would pass the test, to see if you would fully obey me. ¹⁰ Anyone you forgive, I forgive too. For indeed, whatever I have forgiven, if there has been anything to forgive, has been for your sake in the presence of the Messiah ¹¹ so that we will not be taken advantage of by the Adversary — for we are quite aware of his schemes!

¹² Now when I went to Troas to proclaim the Good News of the Messiah, since a door had been opened for me by the Lord, ¹³ I could not rest, because I failed to find my brother Titus. So I left the people there and went on to Macedonia.

¹⁴ But thanks be to God, who in the Messiah constantly leads us in a triumphal procession and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of what it means to know him! ¹⁵ For to God we are the aroma of the Messiah, both among those being saved and among those being lost; ¹⁶ to the latter, we are the smell of death leading only to more death; but to the former, we are the sweet smell of life leading to more life. Who is equal to such a task? ¹⁷ For we are not like a lot of folks who go about huckstering God’s message for a fee; on the contrary, we speak out of a sincere heart, as people sent by God, standing in God’s presence, living in union with the Messiah.

3 Are we starting to recommend ourselves again? Or do we, like some, need letters of recommendation either to you or from you? ² You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. ³ You make it clear that you are a letter from the Messiah placed in our care, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on stone tablets but on human hearts.

⁴ Such is the confidence we have through the Messiah toward God. ⁵ It is not that we are competent in ourselves to count anything as having come from us; on the contrary, our competence is from God. ⁶ He has even made us competent to be workers serving a New Covenant, the essence of which is not a written text but the Spirit. For the written text brings death, but the Spirit gives life.

⁷ Now if that which worked death, by means of a written text engraved on stone tablets, came with glory — such glory that the people of Isra’el could not stand to look at Moshe’s face because of its brightness, even though that brightness was already fading away — ⁸ won’t the working of the Spirit be accompanied by even greater glory? ⁹ For if there was glory in what worked to declare people guilty, how much more must the glory abound in what works to declare people innocent! ¹⁰ In fact, by comparison with this greater glory, what was made glorious before has no glory now. ¹¹ For if there was glory in what faded away, how much more glory must there be in what lasts.

¹² Therefore, with a hope like this, we are very open — ¹³ unlike Moshe, who put a veil over his face, so that the people of Isra’el would not see the fading brightness come to an end.

¹⁴ What is more, their minds were made stonelike; for to this day the same veil remains over them when they read the Old Covenant; it has not been unveiled, because only by the Messiah is the veil taken away. ¹⁵ Yes, till today, whenever Moshe is read, a veil lies over their heart. ¹⁶ “But,” says the Torah, “whenever someone turns to Adonai, the veil is taken away.”^{[a] 17} Now, “Adonai” in this text means the Spirit. And where the Spirit of Adonai is, there is freedom. ¹⁸ So all of us, with faces unveiled, see as in a mirror the glory of the Lord; and we are being changed into his very image, from one degree of glory to the next, by Adonai the Spirit.

4 God has shown us such mercy that we do not lose courage as we do the work he has given us. ² Indeed, we refuse to make use of shameful underhanded methods, employing deception or distorting God’s message. On the contrary, by making very clear what the truth is, we commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God. ³ So if indeed our Good News is veiled, it is veiled only to those in the process of being lost. ⁴ They do not come to trust because the god of the ‘olam hazeh has blinded their minds, in order to prevent them from seeing the light shining from the Good News about the glory of the Messiah, who is the image of God. ⁵ For what we are proclaiming is not ourselves, but the Messiah Yeshua as Lord, with ourselves as slaves for you because of Yeshua. ⁶ For it is the God who once said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has made his light shine in our hearts, the light of the knowledge of God’s glory shining in the face of the Messiah Yeshua.

⁷ But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it will be evident that such overwhelming power comes from God and not from us. ⁸ We have all kinds of troubles, but we are not crushed; we are perplexed, yet not in despair; ⁹ persecuted, yet not abandoned; knocked down, yet not destroyed. ¹⁰ We always carry in our bodies the dying of Yeshua, so that the life of Yeshua may be manifested in our bodies too. ¹¹ For we who are alive are always being handed over to death for Yeshua’s sake, so that Yeshua’s life also might be manifested in our mortal bodies. ¹² Thus death is at work in us but life in you.

¹³ The Tanakh says, “I trusted, therefore I spoke.”^[b] Since we have that same Spirit who enables us to trust, we also trust and therefore speak; ¹⁴ because we know that he who raised the Lord Yeshua will also raise us with Yeshua and bring us along with you into his presence. ¹⁵ All this is for your sakes, so that as grace flows out to more and more people, it may cause thanksgiving to overflow and bring glory to God.

¹⁶ This is why we do not lose courage. Though our outer self is heading for decay, our inner self is being renewed daily. ¹⁷ For our light and transient troubles are achieving for us an everlasting glory whose weight is beyond description. ¹⁸ We concentrate not on what is seen but on what is not seen, since things seen are temporary, but things not seen are eternal.