NOTES for Co2 10:17-18

Paul's words about the person who praises himself may at first glance appear trivial: everyone knows that boasting is foolish and meaningless, and that it leads to nothing good. But on the other hand, the question arises of what is usually called a "deserved and objective evaluation": after all, everyone would appear to have a right to it, so why can a person not give himself such an evaluation?

The most common and obvious answer is this: fallen man is generally not objective, and especially not in evaluating himself. That is indeed so, but then the evaluation of many people, the evaluation of society, can hardly be considered objective either: out of many subjective evaluations, even a very large number of them, one cannot compose an objective evaluation. Only God remains as the objective evaluator, for He knows each person as no one knows himself. Such reasoning has been known for a long time, and there would be nothing new in it either.

Were it not for one "but": Paul is speaking of Christian life, and therefore of the life of the Kingdom. In the Kingdom praise and evaluation do not play the same role as they do in the untransfigured world. In the untransfigured world, the original meaning of any evaluation is information: a person and his deeds are judged by evaluation. But in the Kingdom deeds literally speak for themselves, because there is no one and nothing there that can appear to be other than itself; there is no gap between appearance and essence. And God's evaluation in the Kingdom becomes no longer praise or censure as we understand both today, but the measure of His participation in the life and deeds for which He "praises" an inhabitant of the Kingdom.