Yea, and if I be offered upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy, and rejoice with you all.
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George Leo Haydock
AD 1849
And if I be made a victim upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I rejoice The sense of these obscure words seems to be: that I shall rejoice, and you also may rejoice and congratulate with me, if after having first offered up your faith and obedience to the gospel, as an acceptable sacrifice to God, I myself (or my blood, by martyrdom) be also added, and poured out as a second sacrifice upon the other. It is to be understood with an allusion to those sacrifices of the old law called libations, consisting of liquid things, as wine, oil, blood, which were poured out, or at least sprinkled, upon other victims and things sacrificed: so that he compares the shedding of his blood to these libations, and their submission to the faith of Christ to the sacrifice before offered to God. (Witham)
Yea, and if I am offered. He said not, and if I die even, nor did he when writing to Timothy, for there, too, he has made use of the same expression, For I am already being offered. 2 Timothy 4:6 He is both consoling them about his own death, and instructing them to bear gladly the death that is for Christ's sake. I have become, he says, as it were a libation and a sacrifice. O blessed soul! His bringing them to God he calls a sacrifice. It is much better to present a soul than to present oxen. If, then, over and above this offering, he says, I add myself, my death as a libation, I rejoice. For this he implies, when he says, Yea, and if I am offered upon the sacrifice and service, I joy and rejoice with you all; and in the same manner do ye also joy and rejoice with me. Why do you rejoice with them? Do you see that he shows that it is their duty to rejoice? On the one hand then, I rejoice in being made a libation; on the other, I rejoice with you, in having presented a sacrifice; and i...
He certainly affirmed that they were blessed, since to them it had been given not only to believe on Christ, but also to suffer for His sake. "Having "says he, "the same conflier which ye both saw in me, and now hear to be in me."
