1 Corinthians 1:3

“Grace and peace be unto you, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ!”

This prayer is the Christian paraphrase of two salutations, the Greek (χαίρειν, Acts 23:26) and the Hebrew (“Peace be to thee”).

Grace is the Divine good will, bending compassionately toward the sinner to pardon him; toward the reconciled child, to bless him. Peace is the profound tranquillity with which faith in this Divine love fills the believer's heart.

Paul does not say: “be to you from God by Jesus Christ,” but “from God and from Jesus Christ,” for Jesus is not in his eyes the impersonal channel of the Divine love; He loves with His own peculiar love as brother, as God loves with His love as Father.

By this prayer, the apostle invites the Corinthians to take their place ever anew under the influence of this double source of salvation, the love of the Father and the love of the Son.

We have said that in the address of Paul's letters there are already betrayed the concerns with which his mind is preoccupied at the time of writing; this is easy to establish in the Epistles to the Romans and to the Galatians, and we have seen the proof of it also in the address we have just studied. Holiness is the characteristic of the members of the Church; the relation of a common life between the particular Church and the Church universal; the dignity of Lord, as competent to Jesus only: such are the traits which distinguish this address from every other; and is it not manifest that they are dictated to the apostle by the particular circumstances of the Church of Corinth, at the time when he wrote?