2 Corinthians 4:4

4. Blinded is aoristic, and would seem to refer specially to the time when Jesus was personally visible to men on earth. The perishing things would, in the specific case of the Judaists, be the Mosaic ritual and traditions, through adhering to which Christ is either rejected or reduced to mere humanity. The same process, however, of blindness from the god of this world, is constantly recurring from perishing mundane things of every kind.

God of this world It is hardly wonderful that the Marcionites, or ultra-Paulines, who rejected not only the ritual and circumcision of the Old Testament, but even its Jehovah as an evil deity, quoted this as a chief proof-text. The ablest of the patristical commentators, Tertullian, Augustine, Chrysostom, and others, refuted them, as Alford remarks, by a violation of grammar, referring god to the true God, and translating unbelievers of this world. The process by which the god of this world blinds men is described by Jesus in John 5:44.

Them which believe not This blinding is not the antecedent but the consequent of their free unbelief. Evidence was at first ample; faith was in their full power; the rejection of Christ was free and voluntary, and the yielding to the blinding sway of the god of this world which followed was a self-surrender to falsehood and wickedness of the most guilty kind. This was the exact history of the Jewish rejection of Christ as recorded in the gospels. At first the Jews paused and deliberated; they then rejected; and then, to them, blinded by the god of this world, the gospel was vailed, and they were given over to crucify Him whom they had rejected. The phrase god of this world was not, perhaps, unknown in Jewish literature. Olshausen quotes from Schoettgen the words of Jalkut Ruberic: “God the first is God the living, god the second is Sammael.” In John’s gospel Satan is thrice called “Prince of this world,” John 12:31; John 14:30; John 16:11.

World, in John, is κοσμος the space world; in the present text it is αιων , or time-world; the dispensation extending to the second advent.

Lest The error of the Jews, and of Paul’s Judaistic-Christian opponents, was the ignoring the divine in Christ; the former utterly rejecting him as an impostor, the latter accepting him as a mere human continuator of Mosaicism. St. Paul now shows them what a divinity they rejected.

The light… Christ Literally, the illumination of the gospel of the glory of Christ. Compare note on 2 Corinthians 3:18. The god of this world, blinding their eyes, shuts out the incoming rays from the gospel, or glad news of Christ’s glory. How great that glory is, St. Paul now declares.

Image… God As our bodily eyes behold the image of the firmament, with the sun or, perhaps, the stars, reflected in the clear surface of a placid lake, so does the image of God, viz., Christ, disclose itself in the gospel. From that image pours a light of glory; but upon these seared eyes in vain. The god of this world has glazed their retinas, and that glaze is a vail upon the gospel. To the eye of a hardened unbelief, the true Christ is invisible.