2 Thessalonians 1:2 Commentary and Bible Study

And here is the greeting in verse two – ‘Grace unto you, and peace.’ You probably know that that is unique to Paul. Paul coined this greeting – Grace and peace. And you know that he uses it a lot. Why, the normal way the Greeks wrote a letter was to start it with the word, ‘Rejoice’. And the Jews when they wrote a letter, well they used the word, ‘Peace’, just that one word ‘Peace’ at the beginning of the letter. But they tended to mean by peace, prosperity. That is how they understood the word, one of the results of peace. But Paul he starts with grace. That is unique to him. And then he goes on and uses the word peace. And you soon discover he uses it in a slightly different sense, he uses it to mean reconciliation which is its strictly correct meaning.It is Paul’s own testimony. His greeting is his testimony: grace, free undeserved unmerited salvation, and peace, leading to reconciliation with God, a real walk with God. Not a nominal belief, but a real knowing of God. It is all there in those two words, brilliantly put together, grace and peace. We read them and we think nothing of them, but they are full of sense. ‘Grace unto you, and peace, from God our Father’, the ultimate source of all our blessing, the Father. ‘And the Lord Jesus Christ,’ through whom the grace and peace was procured and obtained for us. He was the member of the Godhead equal with the Father who came into our world and into our flesh and suffered in our place and by his merit purchased our salvation. What a beautiful start to a letter.