1. In closing the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians St. Paul utters this prayer: “Now the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times in all ways” (2Th_3:16). The prayer is remarkable in more respects than one.
(1) There is the place given to peace as the supreme blessing. This is rather rare in the New Testament, apart from the salutations and benedictions, which however are numerous. But in the Old Testament it is quite frequent, and is spoken of as if it were the fullest and final blessing of the Messiah’s time.
(2) Next, the range of the gift of peace—“at all times in all ways” (2Th_3:16)—is remarkable. That means that just as Christ’s own peace is perpetual and multiform, unbroken, and presenting itself in all the aspects in which tranquillity is possible for a human spirit, so there may be in our hearts a deep tranquillity, over which disasters, calamities, sorrows, losses, need have no power. There is no necessity why, when my outward life is troubled, my inward life should be perturbed. There may be light in the dwellings of Goshen, while darkness lies over all the land of Egypt.
(3) Then there is the striking title applied to Christ, “the Lord of peace.” It is a title which is clearly intended to recognize the divine power of Christ. In order to see that, we have but to bring it into proximity with the title “God of peace” which St. Paul alone uses.
The word “peace” was not, indeed, a new one; but it had been baptized into Christ, like many another, and become a new creation.
Newman said that when he passed out of the Church of England into the Church of Rome all the Christian ideas were, so to speak, magnified; everything appeared on a vaster scale. This is a very good description, at all events, of what one sees on passing from natural morality to the New Testament, from writers so great even as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius to the Apostles. All the moral and spiritual ideas are magnified—sin, holiness, peace, repentance, love, hope, God, man, attain to new dimensions. Peace, in particular, was freighted to a Christian with a weight of meaning which no pagan could conceive. It brought to mind what Christ had done for man, He who had made peace by the blood of His Cross; it gave that assurance of God’s love, that consciousness of reconciliation, which alone goes to the bottom of the soul’s unrest. It brought to mind also what Christ had been. It recalled that life which had faced all man’s experience, and had borne through all a heart untroubled by doubts of God’s goodness. It recalled that solemn bequest: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.” In every sense and in every way it was connected with Christ; it could neither be conceived nor possessed apart from Him; He was Himself the Lord of the Christian peace.
2. Christ is the Lord of peace because of that peace which possessed and possesses His own soul, but the title, “the Lord of Peace,” (2Th_3:16) is used in order to express His power and readiness to grant peace to others. He is the giver of that of which He alone is in perfection the possessor. “My peace I give unto you” (Joh_14:27).
What then is this peace of which Christ is the giver? It will not differ from the peace which we receive from the God of peace. It will be that peace of God which passeth understanding. But it will have its own special characteristics, being won for us in a special and wonderful way.
(1) It is knowledge of God.—A more true and full knowledge of God is the cure for every phase of human unrest. Spiritual disquiet lies outside of God. He who does not know God as He is at all, lies open to every incursion of religious disquietude; whether through superstitious fear, or through conscience, or through doubt, or through passion, or through discontent, or through any other of the numberless and sometimes nameless alleys by which disturbance is for ever assailing the souls of men. On the other hand, the more truly and the more fully any one knows by acquaintance the personal God, the more is he rid of sources of inward dispeace; and the nearer, as such acquaintance with God grows, will he come to that envied state in which nothing can any longer ruffle or cloud the deep serenity of a soul at rest, which, being pure, sees God’s pure face, and, being calm, reflects His calmness. “Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace” (Job_13:21).
Now the knowledge of God which gives us peace is the knowledge of God as He is revealed in the Gospel. And that is the knowledge of the unity of God, the recognition of Him as our Father, and the sense of reconciliation with Him in Christ.
(a) It is the knowledge of the Unity of God. The consciousness of one all-powerful, all-comprehensive, presiding will is the first stage. Without unity there can be no harmony, and therefore no peace. The polytheist’s religion was necessarily distraction. With one god of the hills, and another of the plains, with one god of strength, and another of beauty, and another of wisdom, and another of vengeance, and another of so-called love, with the necessity of appeasing this and not offending that, peace was impossible. His religion was but the reflex of his worldly life, his conflicting passions, his changing moods, his distracting cares.
(b) It is the knowledge of God as our Father. We have earthly parents, to whom we are bound by the closest ties. We obey, reverence, love them. When they are taken away, we realize (some of us for the first time) how much they have been to us. We feel a vacuity, a sense of loss, an overpowering loneliness, which no time can repair. And yet even the relation between father and son, or between mother and daughter, does not satisfy all our yearnings after parental love and parental guidance. The feelings and interests of one generation are not the feelings and interests of the next. There is always some interposing barrier, some reserve, some drawback to unrestrained mutual confidence, to entire communion of heart and spirit. Only when we have learnt to throw ourselves unconditionally on the all-embracing love of our Father in Heaven shall we find that complete satisfaction, that perfect peace which passeth all understanding.
(c) It is the knowledge of God through the Incarnation of the Son. Christ is not so much the realization, as the manifestation, of the Father’s love, for that love was perfect even from the beginning. God taught us His love in the life and teaching of Christ; God sealed for us His love in the Cross and Passion and Resurrection of Christ. Henceforth it is written in large letters, written right across the scroll of this world’s history, so that men cannot choose but read. Christ has drawn us to the Father; has reconciled us to
Him; has folded us in the arms of His infinite love. Here alone our deepest yearnings are satisfied; here alone we find repose for our weary spirits; repose from distraction and anxiety and temptation; repose “in all time of our tribulation, in all time of our wealth, in the hour of death, and in the day of judgment.”
Lo, to the soul that looked for peace on earth,
And lost her yearning with the barren years,
There dawns the Star that lit the Saviour’s Birth—
Broadens, until four-square,
Gem-built and jewelled fair,
As once to John, the Peace of God appears.
Nay, but the veriest sinner in his sin
Seeks but to clasp the life he knows is there,
Driv’n reckless by the power of God within:—
Yet he may rise and gain
Some harvest of his pain,
As Peter rose to pardon through despair.
Ah, God is good, Who writes His glory plain
Above thee, and about thee at thy side,—
Bids thee look upward from that blinding pain,
And, ere thy longing tires,
Kindles His sudden fires.
Look, and let all thy soul be satisfied! [Note: R. H. Benson, Poems, 48.]
(2) The gift of peace is the gift of Christ Himself—It is in Christ that all the fulness of the Godhead dwells. It is through Him that the reconciliation is made. It is in Him that acceptance and new life are realized. The knowledge of God is “in the face of Jesus Christ” (2Co_4:6).
You cannot separate Christ’s gifts from Christ. The only way to get anything that He gives is to get Him. It is His presence that does everything. If He is with me, the world’s annoyances will seem very small. If I hold His hand I shall not be much troubled. If I can only nestle close to His side, and come under His cloak, He will shield me from the cold blast, from whatever part it blows. If my heart is twined around Him it will partake of the stability and calm of the great heart on which it rests.
When our risen Lord said, in the upper chamber, “Peace be unto you,” He made His great and precious blessing an actual gift. He presented Himself, risen from the tomb, inaccessible to the assaults of death, in His human as in His Divine nature, as an object of exhaustless affection to the human heart. What every human heart longs for at bottom is beauty, whether it be beauty of this order or of that—whether it be merely physical or moral. And Jesus is the highest beauty. “Thou art fairer than the children of men. Full of grace are thy lips, because God hath blest thee for ever” (Psa_45:2). All that commands awe, all that provokes tenderness, all that bids us reverence, and all that obliges us to love, meets in Him; and thus for eighteen centuries He has commanded the affection—the pure, yet strong, affection—of millions upon millions of human hearts. And along with this affection which He has so wonderfully inspired, He has bestowed as its accompaniment, His great and blessed gift of peace. He has stayed the wasting fever of the heart by presenting Himself to the human heart as its one really legitimate object. But this has only been when He has been sought, as Scripture expresses it, with the whole heart. A second object of all but supreme affection creates a schism within the soul, and is fatal to peace. “A double-minded man,” says St. James—a man with two souls (to render him quite literally)—“is unstable in all his ways” (Jam_1:8). Peace can only be insured when the heart is given, in the first place and supremely, to a single object, and sits easily to all besides.
Your letter today was especially comforting and delightful to me. “Peace I leave with you” (Joh_14:27) has always seemed to me nearly the most lovely and blessed sentence in the New Testament, our Lord’s own word in the highest and fullest sense. That it should be peace itself—not peace if our state of mind is fit to receive it, but the gift of the state of mind—is very divine. It seems Christ giving Himself (indeed it must be this) is our Peace. [Note: Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, i, 497. ]
The end came peacefully on the 29th of April and, kneeling by her, Marie saw steal over her face “a look of peace beyond any that I have known or imagined, so that in a passion of love and awe I clasped my hands, crying, Oh, how lovely! This is His Peace.” “Later, looking on the dead face, she was startled by its charm. “It was that of a woman of twenty-eight or thirty, with an absolutely radiant and triumphant happiness mingled with its ineffable repose.” [Note: Lanoe Falconer, 249.]
Oh, incommunicably sweet!
No longer aching and apart, As rain upon the tender wheat,
You pour upon my thirsty heart; As scent is bound up in the rose, Your love within my bosom glows.
Unseen, untouched, unheard, unknown, You take possession of your bride; I lose myself to live alone
In you, who once were crucified For me, that now would die in you, As in the sun a drop of dew. [Note: Mathilde Blind, Poems, 2.]
