2 Corinthians 6:18 — a promise made to a king, opened to a congregation
18Then I will accept you. And I will be a Father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.”
The closing line of a collage of Old Testament citations. In this edition the sentence opens with acceptance and only then moves to kinship, which puts the welcome before the title.
Short answer
In 2 Corinthians 6:18 Paul closes an appeal built out of Old Testament citations. The promise God made to the line of David is redirected to the community at Corinth and widened to sons and daughters. What is promised is family standing with God, not prosperity and not shelter from hardship.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 3 min read
The passage running from 6:14 to 6:18 is assembled almost entirely out of Old Testament citations, stitched together to ask the Corinthian community to step away from the civic worship around them.
This is the final stitch, and the material comes from the promise made to David in 2 Samuel 7:14, where God promises to act as father to the king’s son. Corinth was a port city, and much of the community was made up of artisans, traders and slaves.
The original promise was dynastic and had exactly one addressee: the heir to the throne. Here it is redirected to an ordinary congregation, and widened in a way the Samuel text did not have, since it names daughters alongside sons.
What is promised is kinship, and nothing beyond that in the sentence. There is no guarantee of goods, of health, or of victory over opponents. Anyone arriving at this verse for security of circumstance leaves empty-handed; anyone arriving for belonging finds precisely that.
The line tends to weigh most on people who grew up without a father nearby, or who carry the sense of being one person too many at every table. It does not erase that history. What it offers is a declared place, with a family name attached, that was not earned by performance — and therefore is not lost by it either.
Where this verse appears
The passage running from 6:14 to 6:18 is assembled almost entirely out of Old Testament citations, stitched together to ask the Corinthian community to step away from the civic worship around them.
This is the final stitch, and the material comes from the promise made to David in 2 Samuel 7:14, where God promises to act as father to the king’s son. Corinth was a port city, and much of the community was made up of artisans, traders and slaves.
What it says
The original promise was dynastic and had exactly one addressee: the heir to the throne. Here it is redirected to an ordinary congregation, and widened in a way the Samuel text did not have, since it names daughters alongside sons.
What is promised is kinship, and nothing beyond that in the sentence. There is no guarantee of goods, of health, or of victory over opponents. Anyone arriving at this verse for security of circumstance leaves empty-handed; anyone arriving for belonging finds precisely that.
What to do with it today
The line tends to weigh most on people who grew up without a father nearby, or who carry the sense of being one person too many at every table. It does not erase that history. What it offers is a declared place, with a family name attached, that was not earned by performance — and therefore is not lost by it either.
A prayer to carry with you
Father, this is how your word names you, and this is how I want to learn to name you. Teach me to live as someone with a place here, not as someone passing through. Amen.