The analogy is often made that the Bible is a letter from God and this metaphor works in many ways, although it’s not actually found in the Bible itself.  But the Bible does make a clear analogy about a letter from God that is often overlooked.  That analogy is found in the apostle Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians:

“You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (2 Corinthians 3:2-3).
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In this passage Paul uses the analogy of believers being a letter in a particularly interesting way. First, he tells the Corinthians that “You … are our letter, written on our hearts … known and read by everyone” –  meaning that they functioned as a “letter” representing the visible results of Paul and his co-workers’ labors to all who knew them.

Paul extends the analogy of the believers being a letter from God in several ways.  While the NIV translates his words to say the Corinthian believers were “the result of our ministry” (vs. 3), many other versions translate more literally that this letter was  “delivered by us” (RSV, CSB, NET, ESV, etc.) meaning that Paul and his co-workers acted as the letter carriers for the message. 

In New Testament times, letters were commonly written on parchment with some form of pigment mixed with oil, or on papyrus, or even pottery fragments. Less commonly, letters were carved or written on tablets of wood.  Paul tells us this letter from Christ was written “on our hearts … with the Spirit of the living God” –  stressing the living nature of the medium as well as the message, and also showing that this “letter” was the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies that God would write his laws on people’s hearts with his Spirit (Jeremiah 31:33; Ezekiel 11:19; 36:26).  

The letter, Paul tells us, is a letter of recommendation: “Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, like some people, letters of recommendation to you or from you? You yourselves are our letter…” (vss. 1-2).  While Paul had made use of letters of recommendation before his conversion (Acts 9:2; 22:5) and often wrote letters of recommendation for others (Romans 16:1-2; 1 Corinthians 4:17; 2 Corinthians 8:16-24; etc.), he himself now needed and carried no such letters.  Yet, he says, the Corinthians who had heeded his teaching were a letter of recommendation for him to anyone who needed such a letter.

So, Paul’s analogy of the believer as representing a letter from God is one that he develops in some detail, and it is an analogy that we can think about.   Although Paul was writing specifically to the Corinthian church, what he says obviously could apply to any believer.  In a very real sense, we are all “letters” from God to those around us – either recommending Christianity or failing in this regard.

We can, in fact, extend the analogy to ourselves in a number of meaningful ways.  We can ask if we, too, are “known and read by everyone,” or is the message God desires to impart through us obscured in some way – just like a letter that has become smudged and illegible?  All wrongdoing not only makes marks on our own characters, but also makes “blots” on the letter that God desires to send through us. 

Being a “letter from God” is a wonderful but a very sobering responsibility.  Whatever we do in life and whatever kind of father, mother, employer, employee, friend, or co-worker – or even stranger – we are to those around us becomes an inseparable part of the message that is sent through us.  Fortunately, the letter is not written by us, but by God.  Yet we must do our part to be made into the kind of message he wants to give others, or we degrade the message and it may appear more like “junk mail.”
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A little later in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul states his point directly: “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us … “ (2 Corinthians 5:20).  In the analogy he uses earlier, those chosen by God are called to be a letter from God – a concept that we can all profit from.  The Bible may be regarded as a “letter from God,” but – to paraphrase a well-known quote – we may be the only “letter” from God that many people ever read. 

“… But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger.  When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground” (John 8:6-8).

The story of the woman caught in adultery and brought before Jesus in the temple courtyard by the scribes and the Pharisees is found in John 8:2-11.  The teachers of the law hoped to trap Jesus and so, after reminding him that the law of Moses demanded that an adulterer be stoned to death (Leviticus 20:10), they asked him how he would judge her.  This was obviously a well-thought-out trap.  If Jesus concurred with the biblical law, the Pharisees could report him, as it was illegal for the Jews to execute anyone under the Roman occupation.  On the other hand, if Jesus said she should be spared, his enemies could use the fact as evidence that he did not follow biblical teachings.

It was at this point that Jesus stooped down and began to write in the dust in the temple courtyard. This prompts two obvious questions: Why did he write in the dust (as opposed to simply speaking or writing what he wanted to write on some parchment or other writing surface), and what was it that Jesus wrote?

We can answer the first question with some certainty.  The event described by John seems to have taken place on a Sabbath day (John 9:1) in which all the many Sabbath laws made by the Jews were in force. Although the biblical requirement for keeping the Sabbath law was simply to refrain from work (Exodus 20:8-11), the Jewish theologians defined many activities as “work,” including the activity of writing.  But these human religious leaders also determined that “writing” was making any permanent mark such as writing with ink on parchment. According to them, writing in the dust was permissible on the Sabbath, however, because the writing was not permanent and would soon disappear.   This law was first recorded in the Jewish Mishnah around AD 200, but it was doubtless in effect well before that and probably followed in Jesus’ day. 

The strict application of the Sabbath law to writing in this era certainly provides the most likely explanation of why Jesus wrote in the dust of the temple court, but what about what he wrote?  We cannot be certain in this area and scholars have long argued various explanations.  But two possibilities stand out.

Whatever Jesus wrote, it had the immediate effect of piercing the consciences of the woman’s accusers and causing them “… to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there” (John 8:9).  It is often said that what Jesus wrote consisted of laws that the accusers themselves had broken –  perhaps a list of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20), or even a single all-encompassing law such as “… [you shall] love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).  Jesus frequently responded to questions using scriptures, so it is very possible that he answered here with a scriptural summary of the law.

The main problem with this idea is that the self-righteous Pharisees and other accusers of the woman could well have justified their own sins and not been moved by such scriptures.    Perhaps an even more likely possibility is that Jesus wrote down one of the numerous biblical statements stressing that everyone has sinned (Psalm 143:2, Ecclesiastes 7:20, etc.).  To then immediately state, after writing such a verse: “… Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7) might well have placed the woman’s accusers in an impossible situation.

Another possibility often suggested is that Jesus actually wrote down the names of the individuals accusing the woman along with their sins.  A verse in Jeremiah is often quoted in this regard: “Lord, you are the hope of Israel; all who forsake you will be put to shame. Those who turn away from you will be written in the dust because they have forsaken the Lord” (Jeremiah 17:13). The point here is that by writing down the names and sins of the accusers Jesus put them to shame, and they could not then cast the stones of judgment.  While this possibility may be a little less likely than that which we considered above, we should note that Jesus wrote not once, but twice (John 8:8), so it is possible that after writing a verse stressing that all have sinned he then proceeded to “name names.”  

Ultimately, of course, we cannot know with any certainty what Jesus wrote on the ground, and had it been necessary to know in order to understand the story the words written would doubtless have been recorded.  Nevertheless, we do have a very likely reason why Jesus wrote on the dusty ground, and of the possibilities considered it may be most likely that his writing consisted of a verse or verses of scripture that affirmed “…there is no one who does not sin” (1 Kings 8:46).

By forcing the self-righteous Pharisees and teachers of the law to accept their own guilt and to drop their charges, Jesus was able to show mercy to the adulterous woman while still telling her “Go now and leave your life of sin” (John 8:11).