3. And his good wishes for them he sums up in the terms 'Grace and peace in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.' Grace is that free and unmerited favour or good-will of God towards man which takes shape in a continuous outflow of the very riches of God's inmost being and spirit into the life of man through Christ; and peace of heart, Godward and manward, 'central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation' is that by the possession and bestowal of which Christianity best gives assurance of its divine origin.
We notice that these divine gifts are ascribed to 'God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.' St. Paul does not generally call Christ by the title God, partly, no doubt, from long engrained habit of language, but partly also because nothing was more important than that no language should be used in the first propagation of Christianity which could give excuse for confusing the Christian belief in the threefold Name with the worship of many gods. But, from the first, Christ, in St. Paul's language, is exalted as Lord into a simply divine supremacy, and associated most intimately with all the most exclusively divine operations in the world without, and in the heart of man within. Moreover, St. Paul refuses absolutely to tolerate any association of other, however exalted, beings with Christ in lordship or mediatorship, all created beings whatever being simply the work of His hands[[8]]. There remains, therefore, no room to question that St. Paul believed Christ to be strictly divine: to be Himself no creature, no highest archangel, but one who, with the Holy Spirit alone, is truly proper and essential to the divine being; and it affords us, therefore, no manner of surprise that from time to time St. Paul actually calls Christ God, as in the Epistle to the Romans 'who is over all, God blessed for ever[[9]],' and probably in the Epistle to Titus 'our great God and saviour Jesus Christ[[10]].'
[[1]] 2 Cor. viii. 23.
[[2]] 1 Cor. ix. 1.
[[3]] 1 Cor. xv. 8.
[[4]] 2 Cor. xii. 11.
[[5]] Gal. i. 1.
[[6]] Tertullian, de An. 39, rightly interprets 1 Cor. vii. 14, 'now are they [the children of whose parents one was a Christian] holy,' as meaning, now are they already consecrated and marked out for baptismal sanctification by the prerogative of their birth.
[[7]] Acts ix. 13, 33.
[[8]] Cf. 1 Cor. viii. 6; Col. i. 16.