WHEN WE FINISHED yesterday we were considering what Paul’s thorn in the flesh really was. He tells us in Galatians 4:13–15: “you know it was because of a bodily ailment that I preached the gospel to you at first; and though my condition was a trial to you, you did not scorn or despise me, but received me as an angel of God. . . . For I bear you witness that, if possible, you would have plucked out your eyes and given them to me.” This thorn in the flesh was apparently connected with his eyes; he probably had running eyes, a sore trial to a public speaker. Three times he asked God to heal him and received the reply: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul replied: “I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Cor. 12:9). When his eyesight went bad, his insight grew better.
The revelation left him with a physical infirmity which he was not to bear, but to use until the final cure in the resurrection when he would get his resurrection body. To keep Paul from being swept off his center in Christ, a thorn was given to him to make him remember, not the vision and the revelation, but the thorn and its purpose. This was a healthy unhealth. Paul could have preached the necessity of visions and revelations and could have blurred his glorious presentation of Jesus Christ had this humiliating corrective not been given. Christianity under his hand could have become a desire to peer behind the curtain—as in Spiritualism—and a desire to make Christianity a religion of signs and wonders—as in a Christian cult in India where you are not Christian if you do not see visions and revelations. All of which would have made Christians into “a congregation of the queer,” the description which a theosophist gave of his group. No, being in Christ makes you a person with deepened insight, heightened moral susceptibilities, a broader, purer love, and a growing Christlikeness.
O Jesus, Lord and Savior, save me from bypaths that take me off the way. Save me from trying to see any vision save the vision of the Face I see in the Scriptures. Cleanse me from the marginal that I may be given to the magnificent. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: May I need no thorn in the flesh as corrective, but if it comes, help me to use it!
