Saint Paul

Pav, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, according to the promise of life which is in Christ Jesus, to Timothy, my dearly beloved son: Grace, mercy, and peace, from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. A.V.

Paul, apostle of Christ Jesus, through the will of God, according to the promise of the life which is in Christ Jesus, to Timothy, beloved child, grace, mercy, peace, from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.

So begins this most wonderful of farewells. We seem to see the two figures in the twilight of the Roman vault, Paul as he dictates and Luke as he writes down the words on the papyrus sheet before him. For this Letter assuredly, if any of the apostle’s messages, was dictated; what else could he do in that half-darkness, with eyes probably never strong and now more than ever dim with use and grief? Once more, yet this once more, he will employ his old skill and set his secretary to work. Once more the familiar opening syllables shall be spoken and written, and the communication in due form begun.

We moderns close our letters with our signed names. In the old days it was the other way; the sender’s name was the first word written. I notice this now only to remind the reader that such an opening then was as little formal as are our endings

Saint Paul

now. To us the style reads somewhat official and 2 Tim. i. distant : — ‘Paul, Apostle.’ It recalls to us documents I, 2. of the legal and ceremonial order in which potentates

and dignitaries address us from aloft, gravely reciting their names and styles. It is worth while accordingly to recollect that, when St. Paul lived and wrote, the most familiar correspondence would open in this way. ‘True, he cannot help imparting

to his writing a solemn dignity proper to the messenger and the friend of Jnsus; but for all this

the writing is cast in a form which is the absolutely natural expression of the heart of the loving father

to his own dear child.

As we pause a moment over that wonderful name The name of PAUvt, let us once more thank God that it does as P@¥! a fact denote for us just this — so deep, so vivid, so human a personality. Who of all the saints of the Bible is more the living man to us than this same Paul? He is to us as if we had seen his face, and touched his hand, and caught the accent of his voice, and detected the tears in his tired eyes. We have come to feel that we know him in his splendid strength; in his strength of nature, shewn in an intellect, a will, a love, an indignation, of the highest kind; in his strength of grace, ‘the power of Christ overarching him’ (2 Cor. xii. 9); ‘Christ magnified in his body’ (Phil. i. 20); so that indeed the Lord looked from his eyes, spoke from his lips, moved and acted in his behaviour; ‘not he, but Christ’ (Gal. ii. 20). We have come also to feel that we know St. Paul through the heart-moving attraction of his weaknesses; his bodily weaknesses,

2 ims 1,
I, 2.

Revelation through Personality. so often alluded to by himself or by others, and which seem sometimes to have taken forms and degrees of even agonizing distress; and then also those weaknesses of the soul, if weaknesses they can be called, which laid open his deep sensibilities to every blow inflicted by his own sorrows and anxieties, and by those of others. This is the Paun who now once more sets down his personal name at the head of a letter, a letter which is to utter all his heart.

What has this reflection to say to us? Surely this at least, that it is a peculiar and precious feature of the New Testament revelation, not to speak now of that of the Old, that it comes to us so largely through the sacred channel of the human heart, the human personality. It does not descend in oracular thunder from the clouds. It is conveyed in great measure through a series of Letters, signed with men’s names, and speaking in the dialect of man’s soul, and now particularly in the dialect of this man’s soul, a soul so deeply capacious of grief, of hope, of weariness, of eagerness, of longing and of love.

Let us approach such a section of the Book of Truth with no less reverence and submission for this thought; for we reflect that this man, who bears this dear familiar name, is the ‘Chosen Vessel,’ the actual Delegate of the Christ of God. But let our submission be made at once all the tenderer and all the stronger by the thought that the Christ of God used that Chosen Vessel as no mere mechanical vehicle. He took and employed for His sacred purpose the whole wonderful nature,

Saint Paul

the whole living and radiating personality. He2 Tim. i. wielded for us the whole complex world of His I, 2. servant’s deep experiences of toil and pain. He spoke to us not through His servant’s lips only but through his heart, aye, through his suffering, broken, yet believing heart.

How long the saint has rested now from all that was sorrowful in that use and service! How fully he rejoices now in the mighty privilege of having been so employed, even to the most sensitive depth of his being, for that beloved Lord!

Shall we not ask that we too, in our little measure, may be willing from the soul to be likewise at the service of that same Possessor, till we too rest and are ‘comforted’ in His presence above?

Christianity
and the
Person.