1. “The God of peace” (Rom_15:33; Rom_16:20; Php_4:9; 1Th_5:23; Heb_13:20) wills to give to men something not altogether unlike the tranquillity which He Himself possesses. The hope seems altogether beyond the conditions of creatural life, which is tossed to and fro amidst changes and agitations. How can the finite, whose very law of life is change, whose nature is open to the disturbances of external solicitations, and the agitations of inward emotions—how can he ever, in this respect, approximate to the repose of God? Yet, analogous, if not similar, tranquillity may fill our hearts. Surely He who dwells in His own indisturbance and desires that His children should be partakers of His stable blessedness, is able, as well as willing, to steady the soul that is knit to Him with somewhat of His own steadiness and calm.
What is it that breaks human peace? Is it emotion, change, or any of the necessary conditions of our earthly life? By no means. It is possible to carry an unflickering flame through the wildest tempests, if only there be a sheltering hand round it. And it is possible that my agitated and tremulous nature, blown upon by all the winds of heaven, may still burn straight upwards, undeviating from its steady aspiration, if only the hand of the Lord be about me. Precisely because God is the God of peace, it must be His desire to impart His own tranquillity to us.
In Kensington Gardens Matthew Arnold contrasts the peace of the quiet meadows, trees, and water with the impious and raving uproar of men, the sound of which he vaguely hears. Here is quietude, always new; the sheep, the birds, the flowers, the children sleep. Calm soul of all things, he cries, give me
The will to neither strive nor cry,
The power to feel with others give;
Calm, calm me more; nor let me die
Before I have begun to live.
Peace! Like Dante, but without his power, Arnold sought for peace. Could he now have loved more, could he have more fulfilled his prayer to feel with others more than with himself, could he have not had that foolish desire to know himself—the utmost thing the Pagan reached—he would soon have gained it. “Know thyself,” said Socrates, and man, because this dictum flattered his pride, thought it the ultimate wisdom. It is rather the ultimate foolishness. The true thing to say is this—“Know Nature, man, and God; get outside of thyself into their glory and beauty. Only then, thou canst begin to justly know thyself; only then, at union through love with all that is without thee, lost in joy, beyond self-disturbance, self-inquiry, canst thou, in humility, attain to peace.” [Note: Stopford A. Brooke, Four Poets, 78. ]
2. But when we venture to speak of God’s peace in any connection with ourselves, we know that we are asking for what God cannot give to the selfish, to the worldly, to the effortless, the unfaithful, the slow of heart, or blind of spirit. We are not asking for what God could give without our co-operation—for happiness, for pleasures, for quiet days and nights, for exemption from pain and trouble, and mortal weariness and the burden of great cares. We are asking for courage, for fortitude, for self-forgetfulness, for the heart of Christ, for the fellowship of God, and to be worthy to suffer for their sakes. We are not asking to be saved from the Cross, but to have it laid upon us and to bear it well. We are asking for souls to which God can come and make His abode with them; and we know that great hopes cannot be given to mean, unenterprising men; nor foretastes of Heaven to the earthly, the sensual, the uncharitable, the unforgiving; nor the strength of the Lord to those who do not strive upon His side.
It lies not on the sunlit hill
Nor on the sunlit plain:
Nor ever on any running stream
Nor on the unclouded main.
But sometimes, through the Soul of Man,
Slow moving o’er his pain,
The moonlight of a perfect peace
Floods heart and brain. [Note: William Sharp, “The White Peace.”]
3. What do we receive from the God of peace when we receive this gift which is called the peace of God?
(1) We receive mercy. This is the first element that enters into the constitution of “the peace of God” (Php_4:7; Col_3:15 ) in man. It is mercy meeting man as a sinner, providing and revealing the ground of forgiveness, presenting it to the apprehension, and urging it on the acceptance of faith; it is man believing the testimony, confiding in the object set forth; using it in the way and for the purposes prescribed; and experiencing as the result the promised blessedness: the “blessedness of the man whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered, and to whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity” (Psa_32:1). “There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.” There is peace for him, when “the wicked forsakes his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and turns unto the Lord, who can abundantly pardon” (Isa_48:22).
Isaiah was disturbed and agitated by what revealed to him the glory and purity of the Divine nature, and the corruption and offensiveness of his own; “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips” (Isa_6:5); but he was calmed and tranquillized and became the partaker of a Divine peace when a live coal from the altar of sacrifice was laid upon his mouth, and the voice of the seraphim was heard saying, “Lo! this has touched thy lips; thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin is purged” (Isa_6:7). No angelic voice in vivid dream, nor waking vision, is to be expected now, announcing to the sinner the forgiveness of his sins; but there may be such a certainty of the truth of the Gospel, such a persuasion of the fidelity of God, such a perception of the nature and appropriateness of His mode of merciful intervention in Christ, such a consciousness of contrition and faith, and such an indescribable realization of peace, hope, love, and joy, that the penitent and believing man may be able neither to doubt the fact of His forgiveness nor to resist the feeling of deep, calm, sober blessedness which the humble persuasion of the fact brings with it.
(2) Another gift we receive is harmony with God. Very beautifully does St. Paul say that He who seeks to sanctify us wholly, seeks it as “the God of peace.” He wants to give us thereby a peace that is divinely full, a “perfect peace”: and He can do this in no other way than by bringing us into a complete and glad conformity to His will in everything. “Great peace have they that love thy law” is a saying that means “great peace have they that joyfully set God upon the throne of heart and life, and dare not attempt to put Him off with any lower place.”
“And His Will is our Peace” — “E la sua voluntade a nostra pace.” This is, as I view it, the most pregnant line in all the Commedia.” It enwraps all Dante’s teaching, and from it, with patience and with reverence, we can unroll it all. It gives the key to the old Bible story of the Fall of Man and to that other story of the Fall of Lucifer. It explains in seven words the whole Christian theory of human aberration, and makes obedience “sweet reasonableness.” It is spoken by one who is in bliss, and at length knows fully the secret of bliss. The speaker, Piccarda, now realizes that there is nothing of slavery or base subordination in the absolute submission of the lesser to the greater, of the created to the Creator—nay, more, she sees that “it is essential to this blest existence to keep itself within the will divine,” that the fruit of disobedience, if general, must be anarchy, whence Chaos, destroying Cosmos. Piccarda’s bliss is perfect—perfect as that of the very Seraphim above her, because she sees that she is where the eternal fitness of things has placed her in the realms of bliss. [Note: H. B. Garrod, Dante, Goeth’s Faust, and Other Lectures, 64.]
(3) Harmony with God is the condition of harmony with self and of the whole work of sanctifying. This also is the gift of the God of peace: “The very God of peace,” says St. Paul, “sanctify you wholly” (1Th_5:23). Elsewhere the work is attributed to Christ Himself; “who is made of God unto us, wisdom, righteousness, sanctification” (1Co_1:30); and who, it was predicted, should “sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and purify the sons of Levi, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness” (Mal_3:3). In other places, however, the work is attributed to the Holy Spirit as His special work. We are saved, so we read, “by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost” (Tit_3:5). “Ye are washed, ye are sanctified,” we are told again, “in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1Co_6:11).
(4) Another gift is keeping. Sanctifying within; keeping without. For the peace of God is a sentinel. “The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall guard your hearts and thoughts in Christ Jesus” (Php_4:7). The soul is no longer an arena, but a garrison ringed by battlements, posted within some high yet not impregnable castle. The sentry at the castle gates keeps watch. Who is he? Is he some warrior spirit, grey and storm-beat, with face and form scarred with wounds? Is he some veteran, grim and terrible of mien, with an iron will and an iron heart? No, he bears no warrior’s name. His name suggests no weapon and no strife. His name is—peace! Yes, peace is the protector spirit, the alert guardian, the watchman of our souls. Clad not in dinted armour but in white robes, mystic, wonderful, is this heavenly sentinel, the peace of God.
At the close of a sermon on the words, “The peace of God which passeth all understanding shall keep (Gr. shall keep as by soldiers in a fortress) your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus,” (Php_4:7) he came up to the preacher with his own summary of the text, clinching it with his sharp, incisive “What?”—his constant mode of eliciting assent to a sentence which in his own judgment was both justly conceived and rightly worded. His beautiful paraphrase of the text was this: “Christ Jesus is the garrison and Peace is the sentinel.” [Note: A. Moody Stuart, Recollections of the Late John Duncan, LL.D., 218. ]
We are kept above the storms of life, although we are spectators of them. In his book, Forty-One Years in India, Lord Roberts says that on one occasion he and Lady Roberts went for a march from Simla across the hills to Chakrata. “When passing along the ridge of a very high hill one afternoon, we witnessed rather a curious sight—a violent thunderstorm was going on in the valley below us, while we ourselves remained in the mildest, most serene atmosphere, enjoying bright sunshine and a blue sky. Dense black clouds filled up the valley a thousand feet beneath us, the thunder roared, the lightning flashed, and soon we could hear the rush of waters in the streams below from the torrents of rain which the clouds were discharging.” [Note: Lord Roberts, Forty-One Years in India, 309.]
(5) The peace of. God’s presence is power. It is the manifestation of strength. There is no peace unless there is the possibility of the opposite of peace, although now restrained and controlled.
You do not speak of the peace of a grain of sand, because it cannot be otherwise than merely insignificant, and at rest. You do not speak of the peace of a mere pond; you speak of the peace of the sea, because there is the opposite of peace implied, there is power and strength. And this is the real character of the peace in the mind and soul of man. We make a great mistake when we say there is strength in passion, in the exhibition of emotion. Passion and emotion, and all those outward manifestations, prove, not strength, but weakness. If the passions of a man are strong, it proves the man himself is weak, if he cannot restrain or control his passions. The real strength and majesty of the soul of man is calmness, the manifestation of strength; “the peace of God ” ruling; the word of Christ saying to the inward storms “Peace” and there is a great calm.
Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.
Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm ;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still small voice of calm! [Note: J. G. Whittier.]
(6) Thus God, who is the God of peace, in giving us peace does but give His presence is peace, Hence our Lord, in the same discourse in which He promised His disciples peace, promised also that He would come and manifest Himself unto them, that He and His Father would come to them, and make Their abode with them.
Now he who will in love give his whole diligence and might thereto, will verily come to know that true eternal peace which is God Himself, as far as that is possible to a creature; insomuch that what was bitter to him before shall become sweet, and his heart shall remain unmoved under all changes, at all times, and after this life he shall attain unto everlasting peace. [Note: Theologia Germanica.]
What I had possessed some years before, in the period of my spiritual enjoyment, was consolation, peace—the gift of God rather than the Giver; but now, I was brought into such harmony with the will of God that I might now be said to possess not merely consolation, but the God of consolation; not merely peace, but the God of peace. [Note: T. C. Upham, The Life of Madame Guyon, 26.]
Long days and nights upon this restless bed
Of daily, nightly weariness and pain!—
Yet Thou art here, my ever-gracious Lord,
Thy well-known voice speaks not to me in vain:—
“In Me ye shall have peace”
The darkness seemeth long, and even the light
No respite brings with it, no soothing rest
For this worn frame; yet in the midst of all
Thy love revives. Father, Thy will is best.
“In Me ye shall have peace! [Note: Horatius Bonar.]
