HUMAN CHRIST-EPISTLES by John Owen Corliss

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Feb 17, 1914

HUMAN CHRIST-EPISTLES

By John Owen Corliss

It is not known that Christ ever penned an ink epistle to any one. He did at one time write a message in the sand to a company of pharisaic hypocrites, so condemnatory of their lives that, one by one, they slunk in shame from His presence. John 8:11. The text of that writing, however, has never been divulged, and probably never will be this side of the great Judgment. That was sand-engraved composition, perishable in nature, and quickly obliterated. But the Saviour has chosen to leave behind Him living epistles, to be read and understood by all who care to investigate their contents.

An epistle, or letter, is the expression, through written words or by symbolical figures, of thought power. Human action was chosen by Christ to be the indicator of His mind while personally removed from earth, because that is an intervening substance entirely open to all observers. But as out of the abundance of the heart, or mind, of the human instrument issue its words and deeds of life power (Matt. 12:35), so the very seat of life must have become the tablet of Christ's mind strokes, before its pulsations can express the divine mind through outward action.

It was this daily experience, this mind writing of Christ, which gave the apostle Paul his Christian life walk. Gal. 2:20. Through this alone he was able to bear in his flesh the afflictions of Christ, which pressed him from every side so that he always carried about in his body the dying of the Lord Jesus, and so to manifest the life of Christ in mortal flesh. 2 Cor. 4:8-11. His life was therefore the open expression — the epistle — of Christ to all the world.

Bearing thus distinctly in himself the mind of Christ, the apostle could well afford to ask the church at Corinth if he needed letters of commendation to make his anticipated visit acceptable to them. He knew surely that they already recognized his oneness of mind with the Master, and he therefore declared that they themselves were his epistles, known to every one, since they were also declared to be the epistles of Christ, ministered by him to them. 2 Cor. 3:2, 3.

The apostle having brought to them the grace of God's peace — the gift of Christ — and they having followed him as he followed Christ, the hearts of teacher and learners were united in the great problem of letting their life actions express the mind of Christ to the world, not by letters of ink written on parchment, but by that which Divinity had written on the fleshly tables of their hearts. Such are truly living epistles of heavenly impulse, appealing to the inner selves of the world's toilers to yield their hearts and souls to Him who died for them.

J. O. C.