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"I cannot overemphasize the need of more simplicity in getting out the Word of God. So many of our young preachers are the products of seminaries which are trying to train intellectuals. I was listening to one of these men the other day, and I couldn’t tell what he was talking about. After about fifteen minutes, I was convinced that he didn’t know what he was talking about. They try to be so intellectual that they end up saying nothing. What he needed to do was give out the Word of God. Oh, the simplicity that is in Christ Jesus!

Paul is still making an appeal to that minority group which had stirred up trouble against him and was trying to discredit his ministry. He has already explained the reason he didn’t come to spend more time with them. He had not been called to be a pastor. He was an “evangelist”—literally a missionary who did not want to build on another man’s foundation. He traveled onward and he moved out to the frontier. That was his service, his ministry.

Now he wants them to know that he is an accredited apostle. He writes, “I am jealous over you with godly jealousy.” Why was Paul willing to actually make himself a fool, as it were, for them? Although he would rather speak to them about Christ than to spend the time defending himself, now it was necessary to defend himself—“So I am speaking foolishly.”

He mentions this several times in this chapter. “Would to God ye could bear with me a little in my folly: and indeed bear with me,” in verse 1. “I say again, Let no man think me a fool; if otherwise, yet as a fool receive me, that I may boast myself a little,” in verse 16. He says it is going to be necessary for him to defend himself, to speak foolishly. The Greek word which is translated “foolish” or “fool” can mean stupid or ignorant or egotistic. Literally it would be “mindlessness,” with no purpose. Paul is saying that spending time in his defense is mindless because it is not getting out the gospel. It doesn’t serve the purpose of his ministry, and yet he feels he must do it because of the opposition of this critical group in Corinth. This is why he asks them to bear with his folly, to suffer him to be foolish so that he can defend his apostleship.

We see the working of Satan in all this. At the very beginning of the early church the Devil used the method of persecution, but he found that he wasn’t stopping the spread of Christianity. The fact of the matter is that the church has never grown as it did those first one hundred years after Christ lived. It swept across the Roman Empire, and by a.d. 315 it had gone into every nook and corner of the Roman Empire. That was during a period of persecution.

When the Devil saw that persecution would not stop the church, he changed to a different tactic. He joined the church. He began to hurt the church from the inside. He still does that today. He attacks the validity of the Word of God, and he tries to discredit the gospel. If that doesn’t work, he tries to discredit the man who preaches the gospel. So he tried to discredit Paul.

Paul makes it very clear that he would rather be preaching the gospel than be spending time defending himself. He takes the time to defend himself because he is jealous over the Corinthians. He loves them. He is afraid they will be beguiled by Satan just as Eve was beguiled by his subtlety. Paul knows that Satan works “so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.”"

McGee, J. Vernon: Thru the Bible Commentary. electronic ed. Nashville : Thomas Nelson, 1997, c1981, S. 5:136-137