Grace be with you, mercy, peace.
Grace, mercy, and peace
Grace in Scripture comprehends all the senses that it bears, separately and apart, in our common dialects. When you say of a royal person, “How gracious he is”; when you say of a beautiful woman, “What grace there is in her”; when you speak of a man not having the grace to return a benefit that has been done to him; you indicate some aspect of that grace which the Source of all good bestows upon men; which becomes in them a comeliness answering to His from whom it is derived; which awakens the reaction that we call gratitude or thanksgiving. And this grace being manifested towards creatures who have need of daily forgiveness is inseparable from mercy, which, like it, proceeds from the nature of the being who shows it, and becomes an element in the nature of the being to whom it is showed--the merciful obtaining mercy. And this grace or mercy flowing forth towards creatures who have been alienated from their Creator, who have been at war with Him--and, being at war with Him, have been, necessarily, at war with each other and themselves--becomes peace or atonement. But that the grace, because it is royal, free, and undeserved, may not be supposed to be capricious; that the mercy may not be taken as dependent on the mercy which it calls forth; that the peace may not be judged by the results which it produces here, where oftentimes the proclamation of it is the signal of fresh fighting; they are declared to come from God the Father and from Jesus Christ the Son of the Father, in truth and love; these being the essential Godhead; these dwelling absolutely in the Father; shining forth to all in the life of the Son; while the Spirit in whom they are eternally united imparts them to the family in heaven and earth. (F. D. Maurice, M. A.)
Grace first
Our poverty wants grace, our guilt wants mercy, our misery wants peace. Let us ever keep the apostle’s order. Do not let us put peace, our feeling of peace, first. The emotionalists’ is a topsy turvy theology. Apostles do not say “peace and grace,” but “grace and peace.” (Bp. Wm. Alexander.)
The common salutation
In this short letter John does not grudge space for a salutation. It is the common salutation or benediction that might be pronounced on any Christian, whether having little more than a decent profession, or distinguished, as this lady was, by works truly good. What familiarity has made words of course to us were not words of course or empty form to John, although he must have repeated and heard them oftener than any of us. That is one thought: we should linger over the words till they get a firm grip on our hearts, till we feel their Divine meaning. And another thought is this: each individual needs the whole of this benediction. Do we not often lose ourselves in the mass? Grace, mercy, peace: the blessings stand in their due order, the first leading to the second, and the second securing the third. There is a fourth word, indeed, which includes all the three, the greatest word in any language--love. John reaches to it at the end of his sentence. But it could not have been used instead of grace and mercy. For grace expresses the Divine favour viewed as undeserved. It is the fountain of every good and perfect gift coming down from the Father of lights to us who have no claim on Him, who have nothing of our own to call forth love. Mercy, again, is more than simple grace; it is sovereign love pitying and pardoning sinners, those who positively deserve ill from God. Then peace comes in its place and order. If that peace with God, a clear and substantial reality in a crucified and interceding Mediator, then all other peace. The Elder is careful to make prominent the source from whence the supreme blessing comes. It is from God indeed, but from God in His new covenant relation to man--“from God the Father.” God was now for them not less the Creator, the Lawgiver, the Judge, but He was, in Christ, also and above all the Father. “And from the Lord Jesus Christ.” Here there is no distracting perplexity, there is only fulness and rest, when the heart, rather than the head, is engaged about grace, mercy, and peace. In John’s mind the holy mystery of the Trinity was, while none the less sublime, more a fact than a mystery, for he had beheld the Lord Jesus Christ manifesting the glory of the Father, full of grace and truth, and bearing away the sin of the world. This benediction is distinguished by the words being added, “In truth and love.” (A. M. Symington, D. D.)
Grace, mercy, and peace
“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. 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. “Grace from God the Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father.” These two, blended and yet separate, to either of whom a Christian man has a distinct relation, these two are the sources, equally, of the whole of the grace. The Scriptural idea of grace is love that stoops and that pardons and that communicates. The first thing, then, that strikes me in it, is how it 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. God’s love is like an artesian well; whensoever you strike up comes, self-impelled, gushing into light because there is such a central store of it beneath everything, the bright and flashing waters. Grace is love that is not drawn out, but that bursts out, self-originated, undeserved. And then let me remind you that there lies in this great word 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. Then, if we turn for a moment from that deep fountain to the stream, we get other blessed thoughts. The love, the grace, breaks into mercy. As grace is love which forgives, so mercy is love which pities and helps. 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 that we are 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. 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 co-operative to one great end, when the grace and the mercy have flowed silently into our spirits and harmonised aims and desires. There is peace that comes from submission; tranquillity of spirit, which is the crown and reward of obedience; repose, which is the very smile upon the face of faith, and all these things are given unto us along with the grace and mercy of our God. And as the man that possesses this is at peace with God and at peace with himself, so he may bear in his heart that singular blessing of a perfect tranquillity and quiet amidst the distractions of duty, of sorrows, of losses, and of cares. And now one word as to what this great text tells us are the conditions for a Christian man, of preserving, vivid and full, these great gifts, “Grace, mercy, and peace be unto you,” or, as the Revised Version more accurately reads, “shall be with us in truth and love.” Truth and love are, as it were, the space within which the river flows, if I may so say, the banks of the stream. Or, to get away from the metaphor, these are set forth as being the conditions abiding in which, for our parts, we shall receive this benediction--“In truth and in love.” To “abide in the truth” is to keep our selves conscientiously and habitually under the influence of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and of the Christ who is Himself the Truth. They who, keeping in Him, realising His presence, believing His word, founding their thinking about the unseen, about their relations to God, about sin and forgiveness, about righteousness and duty, and about a thousand other things, upon Christ and the revelation that He makes, these are those who shall receive “Grace, mercy, and peace.” (A. Maclaren, D. D.)