The apostolic blessing.
This takes its colour from the tenor of the Epistle. Consider—
I. THE AUTHORITATIVE RULE FOR CHRISTIAN GUIDANCE. "As many as walk according to this rule."
1. Christians are not lawless in their obedience. They walk according to rule, and are never so free as within the limits of rule.
2. The rule is evidently that expressed in the previous verse—that what is outward in religion is nothing, and what is inward is everything; that the new creation is the whole of religion. If this position were rightly recognized, to be a Jew would be no privilege, to be a Gentile would be no barrier.
II. THE BENEDICTION. "Peace be on them, and mercy." The two greatest blessings of the covenant. Peace is the distinctive theocratic gift—" Peace shall be upon Israel" (Psalms 125:5); mercy is the blessing in which peace finds at once its origin and support.
III. THE OBJECTS OF THE BLESSING. Those "who walk according to this rule" and "the Israel of God." The first class was not Gentile believers as such, and the second Jewish believers as such. The blessing is for the entire number who walk according to this rule, but the apostle finds among them a class whom he describes with a tender and suggestive fitness as "the Israel of God." He had been all along proving that the true Israel was "of faith," but he evidently thinks of his countrymen as standing apart from their Judaistic perverters in the glorious eminence of "the Israel of God." It is a peculiar expression, still more distinctive even than "Israel after the Spirit," and emphasizes the Divine ownership in those who are "the circumcision, who worship God in the Spirit, who rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh" (Philippians 3:3).