2 Corinthians 6

The participle synergeountes, “working together,” opens verse 1 without an explicit object, producing an interpretive question: Paul may mean that he and his coworkers labor together with God, or simply that they cooperate in the ministry just described. The appeal not to receive God’s grace “in vain” is directed to people already addressed as reconciled through Christ, so the warning concerns a response to grace that fails to reach its intended covenantal and ethical outcome rather than initial exposure to the gospel alone.

Verse 2 cites Isaiah 49:8 in wording close to the Septuagint: “At an acceptable time I heard you, and in a day of salvation I helped you.” In Isaiah the words concern the servant and the restoration of Israel; Paul rereads them within the eschatological present created by Christ and the apostolic mission. The repeated “behold, now” gives the verse its rhetorical force. “Now” is not merely chronological urgency but a theological designation of the present age as the period in which God’s promised saving action has become operative.

Second Corinthians 6 continues Paul’s appeal as an ambassador of reconciliation from 5:20-21. Verses 1-2 urge the Corinthians not to receive God’s grace “in vain,” supporting the appeal with Isaiah 49:8 and identifying the present apostolic mission as the divinely appointed time of salvation. Verses 3-13 then defend the credibility of Paul’s ministry through a catalog of hardships, virtues, and paradoxes. Rather than treating suffering as evidence against his apostleship, Paul presents endurance amid affliction as characteristic of servants of God.

Verses 14-18 shift to a forceful summons to separation from incompatible religious allegiance. A sequence of rhetorical questions contrasts righteousness and lawlessness, light and darkness, Christ and Belial, believer and unbeliever, and God’s temple and idols. Paul then assembles scriptural language chiefly from Leviticus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and 2 Samuel to describe the community as God’s dwelling. The chapter thus joins reconciliation with holiness: restored relationship with God entails both openness toward Paul’s ministry and exclusive covenant loyalty.