Paul knows how his choice could be heard. He took help from Macedonia but would take nothing from Corinth, and some could conclude that he simply did not care for them. So he asks the question for them. "Wherefore?" asks why he holds so firmly to this course. "Because I love you not?" names the hurtful answer someone might give. Barnes says plainly, "This he solemnly denies."

Paul answers at once: "God knoweth." He calls God as witness to his love. Then he gives the real reason for refusing their money: "that I may cut off occasion from them which desire occasion; that wherein they glory, they may be found even as we" (2 Corinthians 11:12). He goes on to name those rivals as "false apostles, deceitful workers" (2 Corinthians 11:13).

Gill calls "God knoweth" another form of an oath, "a solemn appeal to God, the searcher of hearts, who knows all things." Paul makes the same kind of appeal later in this chapter: God "knoweth that I lie not" (2 Corinthians 11:31). Barnes explains that Paul's refusal was not from pride; he writes in Paul's voice, "I have a deep and tender attachment to you." The rivals at Corinth were looking for any "occasion" to discredit Paul (2 Corinthians 11:12), and his free service took that occasion away.

Here the question rests on God's knowledge. Paul cannot open his heart for the Corinthians to inspect, but he can say "God knoweth." The God who sees the heart is the final witness to what love really is. Elsewhere in this letter Paul tells them he wrote "with many tears" so that they "might know the love which I have more abundantly unto you" (2 Corinthians 2:4), and "our heart is enlarged" toward them (2 Corinthians 6:11).

The question also shows that love sometimes takes a form that can be misread. Paul's "no" to their money was a way of protecting them and the gospel from those who wanted to exploit them (2 Corinthians 11:12, 20).