What Does 2 Corinthians 1:3 Mean?

(3) **Blessed be God . . . the Father of mercies.**—The opening words are spoken out of the fulness of the Apostle’s heart. He has had a comfort which he recognises as having come from God. The nature of that comfort, as of the previous sorrow, is hardly stated definitely till we come to 2Corinthians 2:13; 2Corinthians 7:6-7. At present the memory of it leads him to something like a doxology, as being the utterance of a more exulting joy than a simple thanksgiving, such as we find in 1Corinthians 1:4; Philippians 1:3; Colossians 1:3. The same formula meets us in Ephesians 1:3, where also it expresses a jubilant adoration. Two special names of God are added under the influence of the same feeling. He is “the Father of mercies,” the genitive being possibly a Hebraism, used in place of the cognate adjective; in which case it is identical with “God, the merciful Father,” in Jewish prayers, or with the ever-recurring formula of the Koran, “Allah, the compassionate, the merciful.” It seems better, however, to take the words more literally, as stating that God is the *originator* of all mercies, the source from which they flow. So we have the “Father of lights” in James 1:17. The precise phrase does not occur elsewhere in the New Testament; but we have the same noun in “the mercies of God” in Romans 12:1. **The God of all comfort.**—The latter word, of which, taking the books of the New Testament in their chronological order, this is the earliest occurrence, includes the idea of counsel as well as consolation. (See Note on Acts 4:36.) It is used only by St. Paul, St. Luke, and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and is pre-eminently characteristic of this Epistle, in which it occurs twelve, or, with the cognate verb, twenty-eight, times. In the balanced structure of the sentence—the order of “God” and “Father” in the first clause being inverted in the second—we may trace something like an unconscious adoption of the familiar parallelism of Hebrew poetry.