Strength in Weakness

Reading these passages

The best known verse on this page is the answer to a prayer that was turned down.

Paul had something wrong with him. He never says what — the phrase is a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, and guesses have ranged over eye disease, malaria, epilepsy, a persistent opponent and chronic pain. What he does record is the request and the refusal: For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me.

Three times, and the answer was no. What he got instead was a sentence: My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. That is the origin of the most quoted line about strength in the New Testament, and it arrives as a consolation prize for an unanswered prayer.

A sentence that does not resolve

My strength is made perfect in weakness is not a paradox that clarifies on inspection. It stays contradictory, and Paul makes no attempt to explain the mechanism.

Made perfect translates teleitai — brought to completion, finished, carried to its intended end. So the claim is that divine strength reaches its full expression in a context of human inability, which means the weakness is not the obstacle the strength overcomes. It is the condition under which the strength becomes visible.

Paul draws the conclusion in the flattest possible terms: when I am weak, then am I strong. Four words and four words, with nothing between them to soften the collision. And the sentence before it lists what he means by weak — infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses — which is not a spiritual posture but a catalogue of things that had actually happened to him.

It is worth being clear about what the passage does not say. It does not say the thorn was good, or that Paul stopped wanting it gone, or that suffering is to be sought. He asked three times. The text records the asking without embarrassment, and the refusal without explanation.

Given to the empty

Isaiah states the same principle as a matter of supply, and the two halves of the verse are addressed to people with nothing left: He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.

Read the second clause carefully. To them that have no might, he increaseth strength — an increase applied to zero, which is either sloppy writing or the point. Hebrew poetry works by restating, and the restatement here escalates rather than repeats: the first half has someone faint, the second has someone with nothing at all.

The psalm makes the same arithmetic personal and does not flinch from the first half of it: My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.

The failure is stated as fact, in the present tense, with no suggestion that it is temporary or that the psalmist expects it to reverse. What follows the but is not a correction of the first clause. It is a second thing that is also true, and the verse holds both without reconciling them — which is how most of the psalms handle this and why they wear better than encouragement usually does.

Borrowed, in every case

Look at the grammar across the page and one pattern runs through all of it. The Lord is my strength and my shield. God is the strength of my heart. He giveth power to the faint. Be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might.

In not one of these is strength a property the person has. It is either a possession of God's being loaned, or God himself named as the thing. Even the imperative is constructed to prevent the other reading — Paul does not write "be strong", full stop. He writes be strong in the Lord, and then, as though that were still not sufficiently outside the reader, and in the power of his might, stacking two more words that both belong to somebody else.

The Greek verb in that instruction is passive in form: endynamousthe, be strengthened. It is not an order to summon something. It is an order to receive it, which is a strange thing to command and the reason the sentence reads oddly if you slow down on it.

A supply, not a reserve

I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.

The grammar of the last clause is the part worth slowing down for. Where the King James has which strengtheneth me, the Greek runs closer to "in the one strengthening me", and the participle endynamounti is present tense. Not the one who strengthened me, and not the one who will. The one currently doing it.

That rules out a reading the sentence otherwise invites: that a person is issued with a quantity of strength which they then spend. What the participle describes is a supply arriving continuously, which is a different arrangement and has a different failure mode. A reserve can run low. A supply can only be disconnected from.

It also fits the rest of the page. Every other verse here has strength belonging to somebody else and being handed over, and none of them describes a transfer that completes. Isaiah's is an increase applied to someone who has nothing; the psalmist's flesh is failing in the present tense while God is his portion; Paul's grace was declared sufficient without the thorn being removed.

Eat the fat

The most quoted half-sentence on this page has an oddly domestic instruction attached to it, and the instruction almost never travels with the quotation.

Then he said unto them, Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared: for this day is holy unto our Lord: neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the Lord is your strength.

The famous clause is at the end, and everything before it is about food. The people had just heard the Law read aloud, understood how far short they had fallen, and started weeping. The response is not a theological argument. They are told to go and eat something rich, drink something good, and make sure a portion reaches the people who have nothing to cook.

That is a striking thing to prescribe for a crowd in tears, and it is the whole context of the line about strength. Whatever the sentence means, it was offered as a reason to stop grieving and go to dinner — and the dinner included provisioning strangers, which makes the remedy communal rather than private. The verse is not a slogan about attitude. It is the justification for a meal.

Waiting counts as strength

Two verses on this page make endurance and strength the same thing, and one of them puts the emphasis somewhere unexpected: Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.

The repetition at the end is not padding. The psalm says it, adds two clauses, and then says it again, as though anticipating that the reader will have moved on. And the Hebrew qavah carries a sense of tension rather than passivity — the root has to do with twisting strands into a cord, so the waiting described is under strain rather than idle.

Paul says the same thing agriculturally: And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. The condition is attached at the end and it is the whole difficulty. Not if we succeed, and not if it works — if we do not stop. Whatever strength means across these ten verses, a good deal of it turns out to be the capacity to still be there later.