Paul never names it, and he seems at peace with that. What the passage does make clear is what it cannot mean, which matters a great deal if you are praying through something that will not leave.
The thorn in the flesh is Paul's phrase in 2 Corinthians 12:7 for something painful and persistent that he asked the Lord three times to take away. He never tells us what it was.
The serious candidates are an eye illness, relentless opponents, a temptation or a speech difficulty. What the passage clearly teaches is that Christ's power rested on Paul in his weakness, not that God wants His people sick.
That last sentence is where most of the harm around this passage happens, so we will spend real time on it.
Paul did not write this as a quiet devotional about hard seasons. He wrote it in the middle of a fight. In 2 Corinthians 10 to 13 he is answering teachers he calls the “super-apostles,” polished speakers who had won over part of the church in Corinth by comparing credentials and running him down.
So Paul plays the fool on purpose and boasts about all the wrong things: beatings, shipwrecks, sleepless nights, a basket lowered from a window in Damascus. Then he describes a vision from fourteen years earlier, and just when he has everyone's attention, he tells them about his thorn.
A man in Christ is taken up to the third heaven, into paradise, and hears things he is not permitted to repeat.
To keep him from becoming conceited, he is given a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment him.
He pleads with the Lord three times for it to leave.
The Lord answers with grace and a promise of power in weakness, and Paul decides to boast about his weaknesses so that Christ's power may rest on him.
“Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’”
2 Corinthians 12:7 to 9Paul is not telling a story about a problem that went away. He is telling one about a problem that stayed, and a Lord who stayed with him in it.
English translations smooth over some sharp edges here. A handful of Greek words carry most of the weight.
Something pointed. In older Greek it often meant a sharpened stake, and in the everyday Greek of Paul's day it could mean a thorn or splinter. Standard lexicons such as Thayer and Abbott-Smith give both senses.
The Greek translation of the Old Testament uses the same word for the Canaanites Israel failed to drive out, who would become barbs in their eyes and thorns in their sides. There it is a picture of troublesome people.
A messenger of Satan. Angelos means messenger, and the New Testament uses it for human messengers too, like the ones John the Baptist sent to Jesus in Luke 7:24.
To torment, literally to strike with the fist. It is the word used when Jesus is beaten in Matthew 26:67 and Mark 14:65, and when Paul says the apostles are brutally treated in 1 Corinthians 4:11.
Rest on me, in verse 9. It means to pitch a tent over something and appears nowhere else in the New Testament. Christ's power settles over Paul like a tent pitched over a camp.
Whatever it was, it hurt, it came back, and Paul experienced it as opposition. The phrase “in the flesh” can mean the body, and it can also mean ordinary human life, so it does not settle by itself whether the thorn was physical.
The Greek makes the thorn sound less like an irritation and more like blows that kept landing.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
People have been guessing for centuries. Four views have real threads in the text, and each deserves to be heard at its strongest.
Galatians 4:13 to 15 says Paul first preached there because of an illness, and that the Galatians would have torn out their eyes and given them to him. Galatians 6:11 adds, “See what large letters I use.” The weak spot: offering your eyes may simply be a way of saying you would have given him anything.
Numbers 33:55 uses the same word for enemies as thorns, a messenger is usually a person, and verse 10 lists insults and persecutions. A chapter earlier Paul calls the false apostles servants of Satan. The weak spot: “in the flesh” pulls many readers toward the body.
An older line of reading, common in the medieval Western church, took it as an inner temptation, often sexual. The weak spot: Paul boasts about this weakness in verse 9, and nothing in the passage calls the thorn a sin. People do not boast about their lust.
In 2 Corinthians 10:10 his critics say that in person he is unimpressive and his speaking amounts to nothing, and some connect that to an impediment. The weak spot: that is his opponents' opinion, and Paul ties the thorn to his revelations, not his delivery.
Our honest read is that the illness view and the opponents view both have more to stand on than the other two, and they are not even mutually exclusive. We are not going to pick one and call it settled, because Paul did not. Dane Ortlund makes the same point in an excerpt from the ESV Expository Commentary published by Crossway: “Paul's point is not the content of the thorn but its intent.”
Which Old Testament verse uses the same Greek word, skolops, for people who cause trouble?
The Greek translation of Numbers 33:55 uses skolops for the peoples left in the land. That link is a main reason many readers think the thorn was his opponents.
This is the phrase that frightens people. Read quickly, “a messenger of Satan” sounds like a personal demon sent to shadow Paul and attack his body. That is how it often gets preached, and it is not what we teach.
In the Hebrew Bible, satan begins as an ordinary word for an adversary or accuser. By the New Testament, Satan names the opposition to God's purposes: accusation, deception, temptation and the pressure that tries to stop the gospel. We trace that history in who Satan is, and we explain why the fallen angel story is a later reading in are demons fallen angels.
A demonic being was assigned to Paul, attacked him, and could only be endured. God handed His apostle over to a spirit to be tormented.
Something from the side of opposition kept striking Paul, through illness, through people who slandered him and turned churches against him, or both. Paul names its source as the adversary.
The persecution reading fits this especially well. Paul had just said that the false apostles in Corinth were Satan's servants, dressed up as servants of righteousness. The adversary's messengers, in that sense, had faces and names.
One more thing needs saying carefully. Verse 7 says the thorn “was given” and does not name the giver. Paul sees a purpose in it: it kept him from becoming conceited after what he had seen. Some readers jump from there to “God sent the torment.” That does not follow. Jesus never once sent a sickness or a beating to humble somebody. What the passage shows is a God who refused to let the opposition have the last word, and who turned the very thing meant to stop Paul into the place where Christ's power rested on him.
“My grace is sufficient for you” may be the most misused sentence in this letter. It gets said over hospital beds to close the conversation, and pressed on people with chronic pain as a reason to stop asking.
We believe God heals today. The gifts of the Spirit, healing included, are active, and we lay hands on the sick and expect God to move, as we lay out in by his stripes we are healed. Paul himself saw the sick healed, at Lystra in Acts 14 and on Malta in Acts 28. Nothing in 2 Corinthians 12 cancels that.
Paul received one answer about one thorn. He never tells the Corinthians to stop praying for each other, and James 5 still tells the sick to call the elders to pray.
Paul asked three times. Asking is not weak faith. Jesus told His disciples a parable so that they would always pray and not give up.
Acts 19:11 says God did extraordinary miracles through Paul. If he could carry a thorn, a lingering illness says nothing about the size of your faith. We say more about that in Jehovah Rapha.
Look at Jesus, because He is the clearest picture of the Father we will ever have. He never told a sick person their illness was a gift to keep them humble. When a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years touched His cloak, He healed her and called her daughter, which we walk through in the woman with the issue of blood. That is who we pray to.
Sound of Heaven believes Jesus heals today, and we pray for the sick boldly and repeatedly. We also believe 2 Corinthians 12 shows that grace is present and powerful while relief has not come yet. Both are true, and we refuse to drop either one.
The teaching that uses this passage to say God wants some of His people sick is wrong. It turns one answer to one apostle into a policy, and it makes God the author of a torment Paul traced to the adversary. The teaching on the other side is wrong too, the one that says a Christian who stays sick must lack faith. Paul had faith, a thorn, and a Lord who stood with him.
Both errors land on the same people, the chronically ill, the disabled, parents of sick children. One says stop hoping. The other says it is your fault. Neither sounds like Jesus.
If you have been praying about the same thing for years, an illness, chronic pain, a condition that flares and fades, you are not doing it wrong and you are not being punished. Paul asked three times and was not ashamed to say so.
Keep asking. Keep seeing your doctors and taking the treatment that helps, because medicine is one of the ways God cares for people. And let others carry some of this with you. You can send a request any time through our prayer page, and someone will pray for you by name.
Grace in your weakness is Christ Himself with you today, and that is never a consolation prize.
Paul lands where he does because he had been looking at Jesus. A chapter later he says Christ was crucified in weakness and lives by God's power. The cross looked like the weakest moment in history and became the place of God's greatest work.
That is the good news in this passage. Pain is not good, and God is not handing it out. The good news is that nothing, not an illness, not a critic, not a pressure that keeps coming back, gets to decide how much of Christ you receive. His power pitches its tent over exactly the places you would rather hide.
So pray for healing, and pray again, and expect God to answer. Meanwhile you are not standing outside the Kingdom waiting to be let in. You are already living in it, and its King is with you.
For more on the man and the message, read who Paul was, my grace is sufficient, my power is made perfect in weakness, the cracked pot and how Paul died.
Paul never named his thorn, but he traced it to the adversary, prayed three times for it to go, and found Christ's power resting on him in the meantime, which is a promise of presence and never proof that God wants anyone sick.
Tell us what you are facing. Someone at Sound of Heaven will pray with you by name and keep praying.
Nobody knows for certain, and Paul never says. In 2 Corinthians 12:7 he calls it a thorn in the flesh and a messenger of Satan that kept striking him. The strongest suggestions are an eye illness, drawn from Galatians 4 and 6, and relentless opponents, drawn from Numbers 33:55 and Paul's fight with the false apostles in Corinth. Paul kept the details private, and his point is about grace, not diagnosis.
Messenger translates the Greek angelos, a word the New Testament also uses for human messengers. Satan means the adversary, the opposition to God's purposes. So the phrase describes opposition that kept hitting Paul, whether illness or people who slandered him. We do not read it as a personal demon assigned to follow him. A chapter earlier, Paul calls the false apostles in Corinth servants of Satan.
No. Paul received one answer about one thorn, and he never turns it into a rule for the church. He prayed for the sick and saw them healed, and James 5 still tells the sick to call the elders to pray. What this passage does teach is that God's grace and presence are real and strong while relief has not come yet. Keep praying and keep asking.
It is the Lord's answer to Paul's prayer in 2 Corinthians 12:9. Grace here is God's own strength and favor, given as a presence rather than a quick fix. The verse goes on to say that His power is made perfect in weakness, and Paul adds that Christ's power rests on him, using a word that means to pitch a tent over. Paul was never left to carry his thorn alone.
Paul simply says he pleaded with the Lord three times for it to leave. He does not explain the number. Some readers hear an echo of Jesus praying three times in Gethsemane, which is a reasonable connection but not one Paul spells out. What matters more is that he asked more than once and was not ashamed of it. Persistent prayer is not a lack of faith.