2 Corinthians 13:14

2 Corinthians 13:14. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. [1]

[1] The amen is not genuine here.

Remarkable it is that an Epistle written under a tempest of conflicting emotions, breathing in some places indignation, reproach, and sadness, at being driven to self-vindication against worthless detractors who should never have been listened to that precisely this Epistle is the one that closes with the richest and most comprehensive of all the benedictions in the New Testament, the one which the Christian Church in every land and of every age has found, and will find as long as the world lasts, the most available for public use, as a close to its worship. Nor does it except any one class in that Church, but embraces all alike in one common benediction. For, with all his complaints, he regards them as right-hearted but unwary, imposed upon, like the Galatian churches, by unprincipled zealots for a Judaized Christianity, destructive of the whole grace of the Gospel.

Observe the characteristic features in the agency of each of the Persons in the Godhead as here assigned them. “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ” stands first, because it is by it (as Bengel says) that “the love of God” reaches us. “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us... full of grace and truth;” “and of His grace have we all received, and grace for grace” (John 1:14; John 1:16). “Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). In two of his Epistles our apostle deems it enough to invoke “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ” on those he wrote, as summing up all he could wish for them (Galatians 6:18; Philemon 1:25); for had not his Lord said to himself, “My grace is sufficient for thee?” (2 Corinthians 12:8) and the love of God that deep and exhaustless Fountain whence flows all “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.” For “God is love” (1 John 4:8). And “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son,” etc. (John 3:16). See also Romans 5:8; 1 John 4:9-10, and the communion of the Holy Ghost not communion with the Spirit, but that “communion with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:3), as also with all that are His (Philippians 2:1), which through His special agency is alone produced and maintained. From this subjective character of the Spirit's agency in the economy of grace, it probably arises that the objective departments in that economy, which are assigned by Divine arrangement to the Father and the Son, have almost exclusive prominence in the statements of the New Testament; although nothing can be more clear than that, according to New Testament teaching, the same Personality and Divinity which are the properties of the Father and the Son belong also to the Holy Spirit; that the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ here invoked is conveyed into the souls of men, and works out in them the fruits of righteousness, only through the operation of the Holy Spirit; and that all the blessed interchanges of aspiration and love and consecration on our part, with all the fulness of love and grace in return on the part of the Father and the Son, are carried on exclusively through His special Agency. This is that “communion of the Holy Ghost” which is here invoked. And this is that which alone explains those wonderful words of our Lord Himself, in His great Intercessory Prayer, that “they may all be one, even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us” (John 17:21). In view of this, the Fathers driven, by assaults in every form on the doctrine of the Trinity, to meditate deeply on all the aspects of the subject which the New Testament presents held that “the communion of the Holy Ghost” in the work of redemption is but a reflection and reproduction of the same communion in the Godhead itself; in other words, that all the interchanges of ineffable love between the Father and the Son are carried on by the active Agency of the Holy Ghost that He is the life, in short, of the Divine Life. It may be so; and the thought is certainly beautiful, and at least innocent. But the line between the “secret things which belong unto the Lord our God,” and the “things which are revealed” which “belong unto us and to our children,” is easily crossed and never with safety. On such a subject, therefore, speculation should be very reverent and cautious.

One word more. As Christ's own parting command ere He ascended up where He was before, was that His disciples should be baptized into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost comprehending all that the Father sent the Son to bring down and the Spirit to convey into the souls of fallen men so the benediction which closes this Epistle invokes all this upon all the saints that are in Christ Jesus; and the writer humbly echoes it.