_FAREWELL._
"Now the Lord of peace Himself give you peace at all times in all
ways. The Lord be with you all.
"The salutation of me Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in
every epistle: so I write. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with
you all."--2 THESS. iii. 16-18 (R.V.).
The first verse of this short passage is taken by some as in close
connection with what goes before. In the exercise of Christian
discipline, such as it has been described by the Apostle, there may be
occasions of friction or even of conflict in the Church; it is this
which he would obviate by the prayer, "The Lord of peace Himself give
you peace always." The contrast is somewhat forced and disproportioned;
and it is certainly better to take this prayer, standing as it does at
the close of the letter, in the very widest sense. Not merely freedom
from strife, but peace in its largest Christian meaning, is the burden
of his petition.
The Lord of peace Himself is Christ. He is the Author and Originator
of all that goes by that name in the Christian communion. The word
"peace" was not, indeed, a new one; but it had been baptized into
Christ, like many another, and become a new creation. Newman said that
when he passed out of the Church of England into the Church of Rome,
all the Christian ideas, were so to speak, magnified; everything
appeared on a vaster scale. This is a very good description, at all
events, of what one sees on passing from natural morality to the New
Testament, from writers so great even as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius
to the Apostles. All the moral and spiritual ideas are magnified--sin,
holiness, peace, repentance, love, hope, God, man, attain to new
dimensions. Peace, in particular, was freighted to a Christian with a
weight of meaning which no pagan could conceive. It brought to mind
what Christ had done for man, He who had made peace by the blood of
His Cross; it gave that assurance of God's love, that consciousness of
reconciliation, which alone goes to the bottom of the soul's unrest.
It brought to mind also what Christ had been. It recalled that life
which had faced all man's experience, and had borne through all a
heart untroubled by doubts of God's goodness. It recalled that solemn
bequest: "Peace I leave with you; My peace I give unto you." In every
sense and in every way it was connected with Christ; it could neither
be conceived nor possessed apart from Him; He was Himself the Lord of
the Christian peace.
The Apostle shows his sense of the comprehensiveness of this blessing
by the adjuncts of his prayer. He asks the Lord to give it to the
Thessalonians uninterruptedly and in all the modes of its
manifestation. Peace may be lost. There may be times at which the
consciousness of reconciliation passes away, and the heart cannot
assure itself before God; these are the times in which we have somehow
lost Christ, and only through Him can we have our peace with God
restored. "Uninterruptedly" we must count upon Him for this first and
fundamental blessing; He is the Lord of Reconciling Love, whose blood
cleanses from all sin, and makes peace between earth and Heaven for
ever. Or there may be times at which the troubles and vexations of
life become too trying for us; and instead of peace within, we are
full of care and fear. What resource have we then but in Christ, and
in the love of God revealed to us in Him? His life is at once a
pattern and an inspiration; His great sacrifice is the assurance that
the love of God to man is immeasurable, and that all things work
together for good to them that love Him. When the Apostle prayed this
prayer, he no doubt thought of the life which lay before the
Thessalonians. He remembered the persecutions they had already
undergone at the hands of the Jews; the similar troubles that awaited
them; the grief of those who were mourning for their dead; the deeper
pain of those on whose hearts rushed suddenly, from time to time, the
memory of days and years wasted in sin; the moral perplexities that
were already rising among them,--he remembered all these things, and
because of them he prayed, "The Lord of peace Himself give you peace
at all times in every way." For there are many ways in which peace may
be possessed; as many ways as there are disquieting situations in
man's life. It may come as penitent trust in God's mercy; it may come
as composure in times of excitement and danger; as meekness and
patience under suffering; as hope when the world would despair; it may
come as unselfishness, and the power to think of others, because we
know God is taking thought for us,--as "a heart at leisure from
itself, to soothe and sympathise." All these are peace. Such peace as
this--so deep and so comprehensive, so reassuring and so
emancipating--is the gift of Christ alone. He can give it without
interruption; He can give it with virtues as manifold as the trials of
the life without or the life within.
Here, properly speaking, the letter ends. The Apostle has communicated
his mind to the Thessalonians as fully as their situation required;
and might end, as he did in the First Epistle, with his benediction.
But he remembers the unpleasant incident, mentioned in the beginning
of ch. ii., of a letter purporting to be from him, though not really
his; and he takes care to prevent such a mistake for the future. This
Epistle, like almost all the rest, had been written by some one to the
Apostle's dictation; but as a guarantee of genuineness, he closes it
with a line or two in his own hand. "The salutation of me Paul with
mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle: so I write." What
does "so I write" mean? Apparently, "You see the character of my
writing; it is a hand quite recognisable as mine; a few lines in this
hand will authenticate every letter that comes from me."
Perhaps "every letter" only means every one which he would afterwards
write to Thessalonica; certainly attention is not called in all the
Epistles to this autographic close. It is found in only two
others--1st Corinthians (xvi. 21) and Colossians (iv. 18)--exactly as
it stands here, "The salutation of me Paul with mine own hand"; in
others it may have been thought unnecessary, either because, like
Galatians, they were written throughout in his own hand; or, like 2nd
Corinthians and Philemon, were conveyed by persons equally known and
trusted by the Apostle and the recipients. The great Epistle to the
Romans, to judge from its various conclusions, seems to have been from
the very beginning a sort of circular letter; and the personal
character, made prominent by the autograph signature, was less in
place then. The same remark applies to the Epistle to the Ephesians.
As for the pastoral Epistles, to Timothy and Titus, they may have been
autographic throughout; in any case, neither Timothy nor Titus was
likely to be imposed upon by a letter falsely claiming to be Paul's.
They knew their master too well.
If it was possible to make a mistake in the Apostle's lifetime, and to
take as his an Epistle which he never wrote, is it impossible to be
similarly imposed upon now? Have we reasonable grounds for believing
that the thirteen Epistles in the New Testament, which bear his name
upon their front, really came from his hand? That is a question which
in the last hundred years, and especially in the last fifty, has been
examined with the amplest learning and the most minute and searching
care. Nothing that could possibly be alleged against the authenticity
of any of these Epistles, however destitute of plausibility, has been
kept back. The references to them in early Christian writers, their
reception in the early Church, the character of their contents, their
style, their vocabulary, their temper, their mutual relations, have
been the subject of the most thorough investigation. Nothing has ever
been more carefully tested than the historical judgment of the Church
in receiving them; and though it would be far from true to say that
there were no difficulties, or no divergence of opinion, it is the
simple truth that the consent of historical critics in the great
ecclesiastical tradition becomes more simple and decided. The Church
did not act at random in forming the apostolic canon. It exercised a
sound mind in embodying in the New Testament of our Lord and Saviour
the books which it did embody, and no other. Speaking of Paul in
particular, one ought to say that the only writings ascribed to him,
in regard to which there is any body of doubtful opinion, are the
Epistles to Timothy and Titus. Many seem to feel, in regard to these,
that they are on a lower key than the undoubtedly Pauline letters;
there is less spirit in them, less of the native originality of the
gospel, a nearer approach to moral commonplace; they are not unlike a
half-way house between the apostolic and the post-apostolic age. These
are very dubious grounds to go upon; they will impress different minds
very differently; and when we come to look at the outward evidence for
these letters, they are almost better attested, in early Christian
writers, than anything else in the New Testament. Their semi-legal
character, and the positive rules with which they abound, inferior as
they make them in intellectual and spiritual interest to high works of
inspiration like Romans and Colossians, seem to have enabled simple
Christian people to get hold of them, and to work them out in their
congregations and their homes. All that Paul wrote need not have been
on one level; and it is almost impossible to understand the authority
which these Epistles immediately and universally obtained, if they
were not what they claimed to be. Only a very accomplished scholar
could appreciate the historical arguments for and against them; yet I
do not think it is unfair to say that even here the traditional
opinion is in the way, not of being reversed, but of being confirmed.
The very existence of such questions, however, warns us against
mistaken estimates of Scripture. People sometimes say, if there be one
point uncertain, our Bible is gone. Well, there _are_ points
uncertain; there are points, too, in regard to which an ordinary
Christian can only have a kind of second-hand assurance; and this of
the genuineness of the pastoral Epistles is one. There is no doubt a
very good case to be made out for them by a scholar; but not a case
which makes doubt impossible. Yet our Bible is not taken away. The
uncertainty touches, at most, the merest fringe of apostolic teaching;
nothing that Paul thought of any consequence, or that is of any
consequence to us, but is abundantly unfolded in documents which are
beyond the reach of doubt. It is not the letter, even of the New
Testament, which quickens, but the Spirit; and the Spirit exerts its
power through these Christian documents as a whole, as it does through
no other documents in the world. When we are perplexed as to whether
an apostle wrote this or that, let us consider that the most important
books in the Bible--the Gospels and the Psalms--do not name their
authors at all. What in the Old Testament can compare with the
Psalter? Yet these sweet songs are practically anonymous. What can be
more certain than that the Gospels bring us into contact with a real
character--the Son of Man, the Saviour of sinners? Yet we know their
authors only through a tradition, a tradition indeed of weight and
unanimity that can hardly be over-estimated; but simply a tradition,
and not an inward mark such as Paul here sets on his letter for the
Thessalonians. "The Church's one Foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord;"
as long as we are actually brought into connection with Him through
Scripture, we must be content to put up with the minor uncertainties
which are inseparable from a religion which has had a birth and a
history.
But to return to the text. The Epistle closes, as the Apostle's custom
is, with a benediction: "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with
you all." Grace is pre-eminently a Pauline word; it is found alike in
the salutations with which Paul addresses his churches, and in the
benedictions with which he bids them farewell; it is the beginning and
the end of his gospel; the element in which Christians live, and move,
and have their being. He excludes no one from his blessing; not even
those who had been walking disorderly, and setting at nought the
tradition they had received from him; their need is the greatest of
all. If we had imagination enough to bring vividly before us the
condition of one of these early churches, we would see how much is
involved in a blessing like this, and what sublime confidence it
displays in the goodness and faithfulness of our Lord. The
Thessalonians, a few months ago, had been heathens; they had known
nothing of God and His Son; they were living still in the midst of a
heathen population, under the pressure of heathen influences both on
thought and conduct, beset by numberless temptations; and if they were
mindful of the country from which they had come forth, not without
opportunity to return. Paul would willingly have stayed with them to
be their pastor and teacher, their guide and their defender, but his
missionary calling made this impossible. After the merest introduction
to the gospel, and to the new life to which it calls those who receive
it, they had to be left to themselves. Who should keep them from
falling? Who should open their eyes to understand the ideal which the
Christian is summoned to work out in his life? Amid their many
enemies, where could they look for a sufficient and ever-present ally?
The Apostle answers these questions when he writes, "The grace of our
Lord Jesus Christ be with you all." Although he has left them, they
are not really alone. The free love of God, which visited them at
first uncalled, will be with them still, to perfect the work it has
begun. It will beset them behind and before; it will be a sun and a
shield to them, a light and a defence. In all their temptations, in
all their sufferings, in all their moral perplexities, in all their
despondencies, it will be sufficient for them. There is not any kind
of succour which a Christian needs which is not to be found in the
grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Here, then, we bring to a close our study of the two earliest Epistles
of St. Paul. They have given us a picture of the primitive apostolic
preaching, and of the primitive Christian Church. That preaching
embodied revelations, and it was the acceptance of these revelations
that created the new society. The Apostle and his fellow-evangelists
came to Thessalonica telling of Jesus, who had died and risen again,
and who was about to return to judge the living and the dead. They
told of the impending wrath of God, that wrath which was revealed
already against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, and was to
be revealed in all its terrors when the Lord came. They preached Jesus
as the Deliverer from the coming wrath, and gathered, through faith in
Him, a Church living in God the Father and in the Lord Jesus Christ.
To an uninterested spectator, the work of Paul and his companions
would have seemed a very little thing; he would not have discovered
its originality and promise; he would hardly have counted upon its
permanence. In reality, it was the greatest and most original thing
ever seen in the world. That handful of men and women in Thessalonica
was a new phenomenon in history; life had attained to new dimensions
in them; it had heights and depths in it, a glory and a gloom, of
which the world had never dreamed before; all moral ideas were
magnified, as it were, a thousandfold; an intensity of moral life was
called into being, an ardent passion for goodness, a spiritual fear
and hope, which made them capable of all things. The immediate
effects, indeed, were not unmixed; in some minds not only was the
centre of gravity shifted, but the balance utterly upset; the future
and unseen became so real to them, or were asserted to be so real,
that the present and its duties were totally neglected. But with all
misapprehensions and moral disorders, there was a new experience; a
change so complete and profound that it can only be described as a new
creation. Possessed by Christian faith, the soul discovered new powers
and capacities; it could combine "much affliction" with "joy of the
Holy Ghost"; it could believe in inexorable judgment and in infinite
mercy; it could see into the depths of death and life; it could endure
suffering for Christ's sake with brave patience; it had been lost, but
had found itself again. The life that had once been low, dull, vile,
hopeless, uninteresting, became lofty, vast, intense. Old things had
passed away; behold, all things had become new.
The Church is much older now than when this Epistle was written; time
has taught her many things; Christian men have learned to compose
their minds and to curb their imaginations; we do not lose our heads
nowadays, and neglect our common duties, in dreaming on the world to
come. Let us say that this is gain; and can we say further that we
have lost nothing which goes some way to counterbalance it? Are the
new things of the gospel as real to us, and as commanding in their
originality, as they were at the first? Do the revelations which are
the sum and substance of the gospel message, the warp and woof of
apostolic preaching, bulk in our minds as they bulk in this letter? Do
they enlarge our thoughts, widen our spiritual horizon, lift to their
own high level, and expand to their own scale, our ideas about God and
man, life and death, sin and holiness, things visible and invisible?
Are we deeply impressed by the coming wrath and by the glory of
Christ? Have we entered into the liberty of those whom the revelation
of the world to come enabled to emancipate themselves from this? These
are the questions that rise in our minds as we try to reproduce the
experience of an early Christian church. In those days, everything was
of inspiration; now, so much is of routine. The words that thrilled
the soul then have become trite and inexpressive; the ideas that gave
new life to thought appear worn and commonplace. But that is only
because we dwell on the surface of them, and keep their real import at
a distance from the mind. Let us accept the apostolic message in all
its simplicity and compass; let us believe, and not merely say or
imagine we believe, that there is a life beyond death, revealed in the
Resurrection, a judgment to come, a wrath of God, a heavenly glory;
let us believe in the infinite significance, and in the infinite
difference, of right and wrong, of holiness and sin; let us realise
the love of Christ, who died for our sins, who calls us to fellowship
with God, who is our Deliverer from the coming wrath; let these truths
fill, inspire, and dominate our minds, and for us, too, faith in
Christ will be a passing from death unto life.