Grace, Mercy, and Peace.
We have here a very unusual form of the apostolic salutation. "Grace, mercy, and peace" are put together in this fashion only in Paul's two epistles to Timothy and in this the present instance; and all reference to the Holy Spirit as an agent in the benediction is, as there, omitted. The three main words, "Grace, mercy, and peace," stand related to each other in a very interesting manner. The Apostle starts, as it were, from the fountain-head, and slowly traces the course of the blessing down to its lodgment in the heart of man. There is the fountain, and the stream, and, if I may so say, the great still lake in the soul into which its waters flow, and which the flowing waters make; there is the sun, and the beam, and the brightness grows deep in the heart of God: grace, referring solely to the Divine attitude and thought; mercy, the manifestation of grace in act, referring to the workings of that great Godhead in its relation to humanity; and peace, which is the issue in the soul of the fluttering down upon it of the mercy which is the activity of the grace. So these three come down, as it were, a great, solemn marble staircase from the heights of the Divine mind, one step at a time, to the level of earth; and blessings are shed along the earth. Such is the order. All begins with grace; and the end and purpose of grace, when it flashes into deed and becomes mercy, is to fill my soul with quiet repose, and shed across all the turbulent sea of human love a great calm, a beam of sunshine that gilds, and miraculously stills while it gilds, the waves.
I. The first thing, then, that strikes me in it is how the text exults in that great thought that there is no reason whatsoever for God's love except God's will. The very foundation and notion of the word "grace" is a free, undeserved, unsolicited, self-prompted, and altogether gratuitous bestowment, a love that is its own reason, as indeed the whole of the Divine acts are. Just as we say of Him that He draws His being from Himself, so the whole motive for His action and the whole reason for His heart of tenderness to us lies in Himself.
II. And then there lies in this great word, which in itself is a gospel, the preaching that God's love, though it be not turned away by, is made tender by, our sin. Grace is love extended to a person that might reasonably expect, because he deserves, something very different; and when there is laid as the foundation of everything "the grace of our Father and of the Son of the Father," it is but packing into one word that great truth which we all of us, saints and sinners, need a sign that God's love is love that deals with our transgressions and shortcomings, flows forth perfectly conscious of them, and manifests itself in taking them away, both in their guilt, punishment, and peril. God's grace softens itself into mercy, and all His dealings with us men must be on the footing that we are not only sinful, but weak and wretched, and so fit subjects for a compassion which is the strangest paradox of a perfect and Divine heart. The mercy of God is the outcome of His grace.
III. And as is the fountain and the stream, so is the great lake into which it spreads itself when it is received into a human heart. Peace comes, the all-sufficient summing up of everything that God can give and that men can need, from His loving-kindness and from their needs. The world is too wide to be narrowed to any single aspect of the various discords and disharmonies which trouble men. Peace with God; peace in this anarchic kingdom within me, where conscience and will, hopes and fears, duty and passion, sorrows and joys, cares and confidence, are ever fighting one another, where we are torn asunder by conflicting aims and rival claims, and wherever any part of our nature asserting itself against another leads to intestine warfare, and troubles the poor soul. All that is harmonised, and quieted down, and made concordant and cooperative to one great end when the grace and the mercy have flowed silently into our spirits and harmonised aims and desires.
A. Maclaren, British Weekly Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 99.