2 Corinthians 5:14

14. Love of Christ Christ’s love to us, not ours to him; his love sublimely displayed in his death for us. Ephesians 3:19; Romans 8:35; Romans 8:37.

Constraineth us Compels me by compression, as if it were the powerful pressure of a physical force. The madness which these Jew-Christians charge upon me is the powerful pressure of the love of Christ impelling me, by the power of his death, to a complete devotion to your salvation. And this charge of madness is the keynote to the entire passage, (2 Corinthians 5:13 to 2 Corinthians 6:11,) showing the intense power of the theme that made Paul’s life one long impulse of grand excitement.

Thus judge The judgment comprehends 2 Corinthians 5:14-15. If Omitted by the best authorities. Read, we thus judge that one died for all, therefore all died. How it is here that all died commentators differ. We think the correct reference is to that death which all died in Adam, (Romans 5:15,) for which Christ’s death is a divine substitute. St. Paul assumes Christ’s death as proof that all died, by sin, from the life of God; a death beginning in spiritual death, and reaching to bodily death and second death. That, literally and historically, this complete death has not yet been completed of our whole race, nor, in fact, of any of our race, and will not be completed till the second death is inflicted, is true. But then conceptually St. Paul views that great death, being in process of accomplishment through ages, as one great accomplished fact. Yet is it not so accomplished but that the death of Christ may take its place, and so forestall and supersede its literal accomplishment. Paul’s reasoning is, that nothing less than our death could require Christ’s death. If he died, it was because we all died. The rendering, were all dead, is justified by Colossians 3:3, where the same tense is used.

Another interpretation, adopted by Alford, is, Christ died for all, therefore all died, too, to sin; and thence is deduced that all must live the new life. But died and live are here used so repeatedly of literal death and life that it appears arbitrary not so to interpret this clause. That the all here for whom Christ died means the entire race is plain, unless we deny that the whole human race died in Adam.