We are those who are loved by God, and as such are called to be His saints. This means that we are set apart for His purposes. We need to appreciate this. If we look at our lives and try to understand them in the world’s terms we will end up confused. There will be times when it makes sense, for we will receive God’s blessing and things will be going well, but at others it will make no sense at all. For there will be times when we are hated by the world and we will suffer for Christ.
We now come to the blessing and it is similar to the blessing Paul uses in most of his letters. “Peace” was equivalent to the Jewish blessing of “shalom”. The common greetings would invoke a blessing in the name of a deity, so Paul invoking his blessing in the name of “God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ” is highly significant, for it shows that Paul considered the Father and the Son to be on equal terms. Moreover, the term “lord” as used by Paul is equivalent to saying Jesus is God. There are those who say that “lord” was just a common term of respect and does not imply deity, but such arguments ignore the context of usage of the term by Paul.
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