to spend: to pay out or use up money and resources.
In ordinary Greek this was plain business vocabulary, the everyday word for paying out money or using up a supply of something. It fills ancient receipts, accounts, and expense claims, and the New Testament uses it in exactly that ordinary way. Its deeper root, though, reaches back to an idea of devouring, so it always leans a little further than simply handing over coins: to spend is to use something up.
That is why the same neutral word turns up in such different settings:
- a sick woman empties her whole purse on doctors and is no better (Mark 5:26),
- a younger son burns through his entire inheritance and is left with nothing (Luke 15:14),
- Paul is asked to pay the costly offerings for four men completing a vow (Acts 21:24),
- people squander on their own cravings the very things they beg God for (James 4:3),
- and Paul offers to be poured out to the last for the people he loves (2 Corinthians 12:15).
The word itself never changes; the setting around it does the moral work. On its own it is simply "to spend," and whether that spending is sensible, reckless, or sacrificial depends entirely on what is being spent and why. Paul makes the boldest move of all. Pairing it with the intensified verb ἐκδαπανάω, "to be spent right out," he takes the plainest money word in the language and turns it into a picture of love that gives everything.
Nuances
How to read Paul's second verb (the intensified form of the word) in 2 Corinthians 12:15: whether he means he will actively spend himself, or that he will be worn out and used up entirely by his ministry.
- majorityReflexive in force: "I will spend myself utterly." Paul is the active agent of his own using-up, fitting the picture of a parent spending everything for a child in the previous verse; most modern English versions follow this reading.; Murray J. Harris, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (2005); Paul Barnett, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT (1997); Margaret E. Thrall, 2 Corinthians, ICC (2000)
- minorityA true passive: "I will be entirely spent," with Paul willingly submitting to be used up by the demands of his ministry, close in spirit to being poured out as an offering in Philippians 2:17.; Victor Paul Furnish, II Corinthians, Anchor Bible (1984); Ralph P. Martin, 2 Corinthians, WBC (1986)