“To Timothy, my true child in the faith: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.”
1 Timothy 1:2 ESV
This is a familiar greeting from Paul. In Romans 1:7 we read:
“To all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
We read it again in 1 Corinthians 1:3, 2 Corinthians 1:2, Galatians 1:3, Ephesians 1:2, Philippians 1:2, Colossians 1:2, 1 Thessalonians 1:1, 2 Thessalonians 1:2, 1 Timothy 1:2, 2 Timothy 1:2, Titus 1:4, and Philemon 3. This isn’t a throw away line. It’s not a mindless utterance that slipped into Scripture. It’s a distinctly Christian greeting. It rests upon the work of Jesus Christ and there’s a clear logic to it, indeed.
Our text includes the extra – mercy, that’s omitted from the other openings but the principle is the same. A way of seeing the impact of the idea is to reverse the order. Peace, that is, deep and abiding tranquility that wells up from the soul of a redeemed person, is the state of those in Christ. The greeting is something like this, “brother, it’s good to see you…hopefully your circumstances are well but even if they aren’t, let’s not forget that we are in Christ and saved by His grace as a gift.”
Another way to say it would be, “brother, we are family – brothers and sisters in Christ…in the hustle and bustle of our days, and in the stress, in the worries and doubt, and our struggle against the world, the flesh and the Devil, let us always remember that we stand in the state of grace.”
The work of Jesus Christ is presumed in our greeting and upon it (our redemption through faith alone) we gain true peace. Again, it’s not a line used to increase the Holy Spirit’s word count. Peace in Christ isn’t the mere absence of strife but the inner calm and deep spiritual well-being that comes from the spiritual restoration that is Christian salvation. In America today 1 in 6 adults takes some form of psychiatric medication – most being antidepressants. You’d think, taking a historical perspective, that being such a privileged generation that isn’t worried about dying of hunger, exposure, or war would yield higher levels of tranquility. Former heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, upon coming into the limelight when he defeated Jess Willard in 1919 to win the coveted title, was astonished that he could now afford to eat three times a day. Nowadays some of us go out to eat that many times in a day! Indeed, no culture has ever been so wealthy as to have obesity be a public health problem. In modern America even the poorest among us are overweight.
So, no matter how wealthy we are, no matter how much leisure and entertainment we have, no matter how big our TV screen, nor how blazing fast our computer is, we are still unhappy on the deepest level. All of these things, the frustrations and restlessness, as well as the open challenges, are meant to bring us to the Lord. Why? The math is simple: we were made by Him and for Him, so unless and until our soul finds rest in Him we are inwardly lost.
Thirty years ago when I moved to the South from New York I don’t remember a single yoga studio. Now they’re as popular as regular gyms. For some it’s just a matter of stretching and being healthy. For others, the call to “spiritual balance” is alluring. In a culture that’s grown increasingly hostile to Christ it shouldn’t surprise us that, being made in God’s image, we yearn deeply for meaning. Nothing is more catastrophic for the human heart than to think nothing – including self – ultimately matters. The obliteration of personal worth and meaning due to secular humanism being the dominant religion (and it is a religion) is morally insane. The embrace of yoga has been for many an escape from a worldview of meaningless. The problem is that yoga offers a false peace.
The “peace” of yoga, whether in the Hindu or Buddhist tradition, is a retreat into the void. Buddha practiced yoga and the dominant belief is that reality distracts and distorts the truth. The quest is to achieve stillness and quiet of the mind, to retreat into oneself in order to find peace. This peace is the peace of death and meaningless too, though. It posits a rejection of logic that’s fatal to one’s mind. It teaches that all of life is one so, therefore, the goal is to, in effect, disappear into that void of oneness. Logically this means that one’s personal life is to be sacrificed for integration and that distinctions are but folly and hindrances to peace.
But this is God’s world and He is the ultimate. The distinctions of self and life are real, not illusions, and they’re good, not evil. What’s evil is the rejection of God and His word. Since Christ is both a person and the ultimate we have a logical reconciliation of that tension we all experience in our hearts – that of mind-body or theory/practice. Christ is both ultimate and personal so this means that both the material world and the world within us – our consciousness – are real. Brahman or the Void won’t redeem us and save us from death, nor will they personally wipe away every tear. The peace offered by the false gods of the East is the peace of irrationality and nothingness and an attempt to escape the responsibility of reconciling life’s demands with spirituality. In Christ, on the other hand, we have a Savior who came in the flesh – meaning that He entered human history like us and as our representative. His punishment and death at the hands of the religious and political powers of His day was a cosmic event.
Christ dying wasn’t a single fact in an ocean of history; it was the fact of humanity because without it man has no hope of meaning. If what is ultimate isn’t personal than our individual lives have no ultimate meaning whatsoever. And if Christ didn’t come back from the grave as a sign of His triumph over it, we have nothing beyond death no matter how fervently we say “namaste”. It’s all escapism. Thus, peace – logical and effective – comes only upon the foundation of Jesus Christ and you can tell this because the alternatives are logically absurd. In all things the impossibility of the contrary to make sense of life’s basics proves the Christian philosophy is true.
The hedonistic approach to peace isn’t working. It fixes nothing. The pursuit of happiness/pleasure on our own terms always yield more and more trouble anyway. And ultimately, men and women are still depressed. The pantheistic approach to peace (most popularized in the West through yoga) yields a mind-numbing and mind-denying attempt to escape the real world. Christian peace is real and effective, though, because Christ, the ultimate Person, died personally for your sin. This is the true and effectual delivery from meaninglessness and death. It is peace of the soul. In this world we will still have struggles and suffering, yes, but the spiritual discipline is dealing with them in faith, to the glory of God as we await the ultimate victory of God in the Age to come. This isn’t illogical nor a contradiction, but a mystery to us in that we don’t have a frame of reference for it…yet. Scientific materialism, humanism, and pantheism are all illogical and, therefore, philosophical/spiritual dead-ends. Christ brings us beautiful paradox, not contradiction. He brings us to the place of wondrous mystery, not irrationality. He brings us to ourselves at last – with the promise of actualization of our true potential rather than the meaningless and hedonism of the false gods.
Peace. Sweet peace at last.
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