DECLARED TO BE EPISTLES

The unthinkable was happening. Men were suggesting to the assembly at Corinth that Paul did not have the credentials of an apostle. They had come with letters of commendation! Where was Paul’s?

With humility and great reluctance, Paul reminds the saints that they were his letter of commendation. He had come to pagan Corinth and been used by God to effect a life­changing transformation in people who were once carried away after dumb idols, 1 Cor. 12. 2. So mighty was the evi­dence of God having worked there, that the ‘signs of an apostle were wrought among … (them) in all patience, in signs, and wonders, and mighty deeds’, 2 Cor. 12. 12. As he had written earlier, ‘the seal of mine apostleship are ye in the Lord’, 1 Cor. 9. 2. Paul needed no letter to the assembly which owed its existence to his apostolic labours.

Far from a hard and cold defence, Paul is marked by deep love for them. So dear were they to him that they were an epistle written upon his heart for all men to see. But they are also referred to as an ‘epistle of Christ’. With this imagery, the emphasis changes slightly. No longer is it merely a matter of Paul’s apostleship, but Christ has written a letter for all men to read. That writing was on tables of the heart which are flesh, not on stone. It was written, not with ink but by the Spirit of God. The transformation the gospel had brought about through the power of the Spirit had so wrought among them that all men were able to see that this is what the gospel could do. Here was an assembly which was to be a testimony to Christ’s power, and also to His person. Perhaps Paul had in mind the writing which God spoke of through Jeremiah when He promised to write a new covenant on the hearts of His people, Jer. 31. 33, 34.

As Denney has so aptly expressed, A congregation which is not in its very existence and in all its works and ways a legible epistle, an unmistakable message from Christ to man, does not answer to the New Testament ideal’. Is the assembly with which I am associated an ‘epistle of Christ’, His faithful message to the neighbourhood, society, and to the world?