What Does 2 Corinthians 13:5 Mean?

(5) **Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves.**—The position of “yourselves” in the Greek (before the verb in both clauses) shows that that is the word on which stress is emphatically laid, and the thought grows out of what had been said in 2Corinthians 13:3 : “You seek a test of my power. Apply a test to *yourselves.* Try *yourselves* whether you are living and moving in that faith in Christ which you profess” (the objective and subjective senses of faith melting into one without any formal distinction). “Subject *yourselves* to the scrutiny of your own conscience.” The latter word had been used in a like sense in 1Corinthians 11:28. So far as we can distinguish between it and the Greek for “examine,” the one suggests the idea of a special test, the other a general scrutiny. **How that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?**—On the last word see Notes on Romans 1:28; 1Corinthians 9:27. Here its exact meaning is defined by the context as that of failing to pass the scrutiny to which he calls them: “Christ is in you” (the central thought of the Apostle’s teaching; Galatians 1:16; Ephesians 2:22; Ephesians 3:17; Colossians 1:27), “unless the sentence, after an impartial scrutiny by yourselves, or by a judge gifted with spiritual discernment, is that there are no tokens of His presence.” The ideas which Calvinistic theology has attached to the word “reprobate” are, it need hardly be said, foreign to the true meaning of the word, both here and elsewhere.