On the promise of peace

"And he shall stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they shall dwell secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth. And he shall be their peace." Micah 5:4-5

Many of the eschatological visions of the Bible involve a promise of peace. Peace, for all of us, is mostly promise, seldom reality. For the world at large, for the nations, for the people of the earth, it is not a valid descriptor of life on the planet earth. But for the Christian, it is a descriptor of life as it shall be.

In American Christianity, we think of everything in terms of the personal. So we think of peace almost exclusively as personal peace, or peace in the heart. World peace is for the glorious future, but personal peace in the heart is our downpayment now, so the thinking seems to go.

While this personal peace seems at least occasionally achievable, world peace is a fantasy. What I am saying is that when we hear or read a Biblical passage about peace (like the quotation above from the Prophet Micah) we hope to claim it for ourselves, to believe it for ourselves and perhaps for our family. But we seldom think in terms of actual widespread, person-to-person, nation-to-nation, peace. But God's vision is not only longer but wider than ours. He has a world in mind.

In some church services, there is a place for the giving of peace. "Peace be with you," says the leader, and the congregation responds, "and also with you." Perhaps we tend to formalize those promises of God that seem most remote. In other words, a people who truly knew peace experientially would hardly need to utter this formal exchange. We would be celebrating!

But Micah says the Shepherd is going to return, and He is going to usher in a reign of peace throughout the world. All warring will cease, and the instruments of war will be destroyed. Until that day, all war-making is resistance to the coming kingdom, and any attempt to justify war-making is going to seem, to those in whom the Spirit of God dwells, like nothing more than worldly sophistry. To take corollary example: since we know that thieves shall not inherit the kingdom of God (1Cor 6:10), we shouldn't attempt to justify thieving now, in the meantime, with some sort of "realistic" appraisal about the necessity for thievery until the kingdom comes. The same holds true for murder, and for war. Any apologetic for war is a worldly attempt to make excuses for what we want to do now even though it may have nothing to do with our calling as Christians. It's just a jumped-up intellectual attempt to justify widespread, goverment-imposed, sin. It is to put ourselves cross-wise with the coming kingdom.