Let Down and Caught Up

Simon Attwood

During Paul’s first missionary journey, he and Barnabas preached the gospel at Lystra in Lycaonia (modern south-central Turkey). When he healed a man who had been lame from birth, the people of the city said they were gods and the local priest of Jupiter tried to sacrifice to them. As they did all they could to prevent this, antagonistic Jews from nearby Antioch and Iconium, where they had preached previously, took advantage of the situation by inciting the people to turn against them. They ‘stoned Paul, [and] drew him out of the city, supposing him to have died. But while the disciples encircled him, he rose up and entered into the city’ (Acts 14:19–20).

Paul’s autobiographical words in 2 Corinthians, ‘I know a man in Christ, fourteen years ago … caught up to the third heaven’ (12:2), may refer to him as he lay on the ground outside Lystra after being stoned. Scripture does not give a chronology of the events of his life, but a comparison of the book of Acts and his letters suggests that he visited Lystra for the first time in the mid-AD 40s and wrote 2 Corinthians in the late 50s, which allows for an interval of 14 years. Added to this, the phrase omitted from the quotation above, ‘whether in the body I know not, or out of the body I know not, God knows’ — could refer to him hanging between life and death, which would agree with his persecutors ‘supposing him to have died’.

However, Scripture does not explicitly connect the two passages: Acts 14 records Paul’s stoning but not his being caught up; 2 Corinthians 12 recalls the latter but not the former. Each teaches its own lesson: first, God can preserve His servants in great extremity (cf. Heb. 13:6); second, His heavenly blessings are available to us all, even in the most adverse earthly circumstances (Paul refers to himself caught up as ‘a man in Christ’ rather than as an apostle). But if the passages refer to the same event, there is a beautiful correlation in our Lord’s dealings with Paul: He preserved him for further service despite being stoned and during the trauma enabled him to experience in a special way the heavenly blessings he would minister to others as part of that service. The words ‘a man in Christ’ put in a nutshell each believer’s title to the blessings he will write about later to the Ephesians (1:3).

But why does Paul write to the Corinthians now about being caught up to heaven? To prepare them for a visit he is about to make to them. In chapter 1 he explains why he did not visit them as he said he would in his first letter (vs. 15–19; 1 Cor. 16:5–7). It was not vacillation. He wrote that letter with tears (2 Cor. 2:4) because of the depths to which they had gone, which made the corrective ministry it contained so necessary. If they had not accepted this and he had visited them, he would have had to discipline them — something that would have been a grief to him (vs. 1–2). But now that Titus has told him about the change God has wrought in them as a company (7:5–16), he is free to visit them. But he does not want his joy spoilt by finding they have not got ready the gift they had promised a year earlier for the saints in Jerusalem (chs. 8–9) or because some of them are still resisting his authority. It is particularly in relation to the latter issue that he writes chapters 10 to 13 (see 12:20–21). 

He does this in the light of his new covenant ministry (3:6; 5:17), which he presents from chapter 2:14 to 7:4: grace working through weakness to bring spiritual blessing. What a contrast to the spirit in which he had gone to Damascus with authority from the Jewish high priest to persecute the disciples there (Acts 9:2, 14; 22:5). But the Lord Jesus intervened from glory, and he was led through its gate by the hand because he could not see. Fasting and praying in the house in Straight Street, he needed the ministry of Ananias — ‘a man in Christ’ — who laid his hands upon him and said, ‘Saul, brother, the Lord has sent me, Jesus that appeared to thee in the way in which thou camest, that thou mightest see, and be filled with the Holy Spirit’ (Acts 9:17). The submissive spirit that marked Paul there would mark his departure from the city: ‘In Damascus the ethnarch of Aretas the king kept the city of the Damascenes shut up, wishing to take me; and through a window in a basket I was let down by the wall, and escaped his hands’ (2 Cor. 11:30–33; see also Acts 9:25). This is how he would proceed in future: felt weakness and dependence, as witnessed by subsequent incidents in his life and service (see 2 Cor. 11:22–29).

The false teachers of that time — like those of today — did not behave in this way. Paul writes, ‘we dare not class ourselves or compare ourselves with some who commend themselves; but these, measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves with themselves, are not intelligent’ (2 Cor. 10:12). His concern was what God thought of his service: ‘he that boasts, let him boast in the Lord. For not he that commends himself is approved, but whom the Lord commends’ (vs. 17–18). No doubt he had entered Lystra 14 years earlier with that very conviction, and his dependence on God had given him the insight to see faith in the lame man and the power to say to him, ‘Rise up straight upon thy feet’, so that ‘he sprang up and walked’ (Acts 14:9–10). But he was also ready to go lower than he did in Damascus — he almost lost his life. 

He was also concerned about the Corinthians’ spiritual welfare: ‘I am jealous as to you with a jealousy which is of God; for I have espoused you unto one man, to present you a chaste virgin to Christ’ (2 Cor. 11:2). He feared that Satan, appealing to their natural minds, might pervert their thoughts from ‘simplicity as to the Christ’. They might well tolerate ‘another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or … get a different Spirit, which ye have not got, or a different glad tidings, which ye have not received’ (vs. 3–4). He himself avoided anything that had the potential to mislead them, to the point he forwent the financial support he might have expected from them (v. 9). But some even reproached him for this because they were more impressed by the self-seeking ways of the false teachers: ‘ye bear if any one bring you into bondage, if any one devour you, if any one get your money, if any one exalt himself, if any one beat you on the face’ (v. 20). 

After then writing about being ‘let down’ at the end of chapter 11, Paul reluctantly refers to his course of life and, particularly, his experience of being caught up to the third heaven. A false teacher would have claimed personal credit for this had it happened to him, boasting about it at every opportunity; Paul recalls it only as ‘a man in Christ’, and only after ‘fourteen years’. Nonetheless ‘such a one [had been] caught up to the third heaven’, and he can say ‘I know such a man’ (2 Cor. 12:2–3), where ‘know’ means he is inwardly conscious of him, even if he adds again, ‘whether in the body or out of the body I know not, God knows’. But the fact is: ‘he was caught up into paradise’ — the very presence of God — ‘and heard unspeakable things said which it is not allowed to man to utter’ (v. 4). This experience surely proves that the man who was let down from the wall of Damascus as he embarked on his apostolic service has moral authority and power from God to exercise any necessary discipline when he visits Corinth (see 13:1–2). It also demonstrates God’s pleasure in him. 

Although he writes, ‘of such a one’ — that is, ‘a man in Christ’ — ‘I will boast, but of myself I will not boast’ (2 Cor. 12:5), the flesh — the sinful nature — is still in him, as it is in us all down here. This will take credit whenever it can for whatever God in His grace works out in any of us. So the man who was caught up to heaven one day 14 years earlier is given ‘a thorn for the flesh, a messenger of Satan’ (v. 7) for the two decades or so of service that follow. This stake pummels his flesh to prevent his being ‘exalted by the exceeding greatness of the revelations’. There is no hint at all of regret, but evidently the thorn has a disabling effect on his work as he ‘thrice besought the Lord that it might depart from [him]’ (v. 8). The answer he receives is all of a piece with his new covenant ministry: ‘My grace suffices thee; for my power is perfected in weakness’. He accepts this fully: ‘Most gladly therefore will I rather boast in my weaknesses, that the power of the Christ may dwell upon me. Wherefore I take pleasure in weaknesses, in insults, in necessities, in persecutions, in straits, for Christ: for when I am weak, then I am powerful’ (vs. 9–10). Coming from Satan, the messenger might break him, but in the Lord’s loving hands it preserves His servant.

This shows we should not boast in ourselves or put a premium on surface qualities (see also Phil. 2:3–4). As is often said, God has more to do in us than with us because He desires us to become more like His Son (2 Cor. 3:18). But what Paul recalls in chapter 12:2–4 was a wonderful experience, although the fact that he mentions it here, 14 years later, shows it was exceptional even for him. At the same time, it reflects something which is possible for every ‘man in Christ’. We may not go as low or as high as Paul did at Lystra but in the measure we submit to Christ in our lives, we shall enjoy the blessing of being here for Him as He was for His Father. Paul writes to the Philippians of his ‘earnest expectation and hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but in all boldness, as always, now also Christ shall be magnified in my body whether by life or by death’ (1:20). May this be our prayer too while we wait to be ‘caught up’ — spirit, soul and body — ‘together with them’ (all who have died in Christ) ‘in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air’ (1 Thess. 4:17).

From: Truth and Testimony, 2023