The Thorn You Can't Remove (And Weren't Meant To)

Paul called it a thorn. English translators agreed. And for two thousand years, we've pictured something small a rose thorn, maybe, or a splinter caught under the skin. Annoying but manageable. The kind of thing you could probably remove yourself if you had good tweezers and decent lighting.

But that's not what Paul wrote.

The Greek word is skolops. And when you dig into how that word was actually used in the first century, the image shifts entirely.

Not a Thorn . A Stake

Skolops appears exactly once in the entire New Testament. 2 Corinthians 12:7. Paul's famous "thorn in the flesh" passage. But the word itself has a much longer history.

Greek writers going back to Homer used skolops for sharpened wooden stakes, the kind planted around military fortifications. If you've seen medieval movies with spiked barricades protecting castle walls, you're in the right territory. These weren't decorative thorns in a garden. They were defensive weapons. Pointed timbers meant to impale anyone who charged too close.

When you fell on a skolops, you didn't pick it out. You were wounded.

The Septuagint the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that Paul would have known, uses the same word in Numbers 33:55 and Ezekiel 28:24. In both cases, the context involves enemies who remain as constant irritants, wounding God's people. Not minor annoyances. Persistent, painful problems that won't go away.

So when Paul says something was "given" to him: a skolops in his flesh, he's not describing a splinter. He's describing something substantial. Something driven in. Something that stayed.

Why the Translation Matters

I don't think the English translators were being careless when they chose "thorn." They were probably trying to make the metaphor accessible. Everyone knows what a thorn feels like. It's relatable.

But in softening the word, we may have softened the theology.

A thorn suggests something you could handle yourself if God would just let you. A minor obstruction. An inconvenience. When we read Paul begging God three times to remove it, we might wonder why he was being so dramatic about something small.

But a stake? That changes the equation.

A stake suggests something that fundamentally limits you. Something that changes how you move through the world. Something that, every time you forget it's there, reminds you with pain.

Paul wasn't asking God to help him with a minor irritation. He was pleading for release from something that felt like it was killing him slowly.

And God said no.

The Sovereignty of Suffering

Here's where the passage gets uncomfortable.

Paul doesn't say the skolops attacked him accidentally. He says it was "given" to him. The Greek is edothē, passive voice. Something was handed over. And while Paul calls it "a messenger of Satan," he also seems to recognize that it operates within God's permission.

This is the kind of tension Scripture doesn't resolve neatly.

On one hand, the thorn is torment. It "buffets" Paul the Greek word kolaphizō means to strike with fists. This is violent language. Paul is getting beaten up by something he can't see and can't stop.

On the other hand, God allows it. Uses it, even. "To keep me from becoming conceited," Paul admits. The man who'd been caught up into the third heaven who'd seen things he wasn't permitted to describe needed something to remind him he was still human. Still limited. Still dependent.

The skolops did that.

Three Prayers and One Answer

Paul prayed three times for the stake to be removed. We don't know how long he spent asking. We don't know if the prayers were desperate or measured. But we know the answer: No.

Or more precisely: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."

That's not the response we want when we're asking for relief. It's not even the response we expect from a loving God. If someone you loved asked you three times to take away their pain, and you could do it, wouldn't you?

But God operates by a different calculus. And what Paul heard, eventually, after the refusals, was that divine power doesn't show up best when we're strong. It shows up when we're emptied out. When we've stopped pretending we can handle things ourselves. When the stake has done its work and we're finally ready to admit we need help.

"Power is made perfect in weakness."

The Greek word for "perfect" there is teleitai, completed, brought to full maturity. God's power doesn't just show up in weakness. It reaches its full expression there. It does something in emptiness that it can't do in self-sufficiency.

What We Get Wrong About Healing

I've met people who read this passage and feel guilty for still struggling. If Paul could boast in his weakness, shouldn't we be able to do the same? If sufficient grace was enough for an apostle, shouldn't it be enough for us?

But that misses the point.

Paul didn't pretend the stake didn't hurt. He asked three times for it to be removed. He called it a messenger of Satan. He said it buffeted him. The man wasn't minimizing his pain, he was holding it alongside God's response and trying to make sense of both.

That's different from spiritual bypassing. Different from "just trust God" platitudes. Paul sat in the tension: This hurts. God said no. Somehow, that no is grace.

We're allowed to wrestle with the stakes in our flesh. We're allowed to ask for them to be removed. We're allowed to be confused when the answer is something other than relief.

The passage doesn't demand that we feel good about our suffering. It suggests that suffering can become the location where we finally experience power we couldn't manufacture on our own.

The Stake You Learn to Carry

I don't know what Paul's skolops was. Scholars have debated it for centuries, eye problems, chronic illness, persecution, depression. The text doesn't tell us, and maybe that's intentional. It leaves room for everyone's stake.

What I do know is this: the word Paul chose wasn't small.

He wasn't describing a minor inconvenience that required a slight attitude adjustment. He was describing something significant enough to make him plead with God. Something that changed how he lived. Something that stayed.

And within that, somehow, mysteriously grace showed up.

Not as removal. Not as relief. As sufficiency. As power that found room to work precisely because everything else had been emptied out.

Your skolops might not be going anywhere. Mine might not either.

But if Paul is right, that doesn't mean God has abandoned us. It might mean He's doing something in the emptiness that couldn't happen any other way.

So picture that instead. Not a thorn.

A stake.