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"Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered
of a child when she was past age . . . . . therefore sprang there even of one, and him as
good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude . . . . ." (Heb. 11: 11, 12).
This power operated too in the willingness to sacrifice Isaac, the child of promise
(Heb. 11: 17-19). No other N.T. writer treats of this matter.
Paul's Sign Manual.
One of the ways the enemy of truth was seeking to hinder the progress of the Gospel
was by circulating spurious epistles purporting to come from the Apostle:
"Now we beseech you, brethren, . . . . . that ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be
troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of the
Lord is at hand" (II Thess. 2: 1, 2 revised text).
In order to guard against this, Paul decided to end all his letters in one special way, in
his own handwriting:
"The salutation of Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle: so I
write" (II Thess. 3: 17),
and then follows a reference to the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, this, so fitting, coming
from one who was predominantly the Apostle of grace. This is the way that all the
thirteen epistles associated with his name ends. Not one of the other epistles concludes in
such a way, and it must surely be obvious that if anyone else used the same formula, its
use as a guarantee of genuineness would have been null and void. But the epistle to the
Hebrews ends with it and this is another definite link with the Apostle Paul and his
writings.
"Grace be with you all. Amen" (Heb. 13: 25).
Not only this, but there are remarkable doctrinal parallels between Philippians and
Hebrews, as Charles H. Welch has shown in his Alphabetical Analysis, Part Two, p.108.
These cannot be ignored by anyone who is studying this subject with an unbiased mind.
We now exhibit them.