The peace which Christ purchased by His precious blood is the peace of a quiet conscience. Sin as disobedience always leads to enmity between God and man. The essence of sin is self-assertion, and this always places a barrier between the soul and God. Towards wilful sin God must ever manifest the attitude of perfect holiness and therefore of perfect antipathy. It is thus not difficult to understand the deep and fundamental need of peace, the peace of a conscience from which the condemnation of sin has been removed by forgiveness, the quiet conscience from which guilt has been removed by justification. There are many people who know forgiveness, who are perfectly certain about their deliverance from condemnation, but who are not by any means so sure that they have been delivered from guilt. And yet, while there is a close connection, there is also a very clear distinction between forgiveness and justification. Forgiveness is an act and a succession of acts: justification is an act which issues in a permanent attitude. Forgiveness is negative, removing condemnation; justification is also positive, removing guilt and bestowing a perfect position of righteousness before God. Forgiveness is like being stripped; justification is like being clothed. So that the Christian is not merely a pardoned criminal, he is a perfectly righteous man in the eyes of God’s law. The King of England can pardon a man, and the man can come out of prison with condemnation removed; but the King cannot remove his guilt; he has broken the law. Our God not only removes the condemnation, but reinstates us as though we had never broken the law. That is justification. And the peace of a quiet conscience includes this as well as forgiveness.
1. In order to have peace of conscience we must be at one with our own past. We recall all we have been and done, and of how little in past years can an instructed conscience approve. Life’s golden dawn dimmed by folly, stained by excess, gifts of understanding, health, position, culture, influence, run to waste; the fruits of primal years only things of which “we are now ashamed”; the pure delights of the mind bartered for indulgences whose remembrance is a sigh; the great meaning of existence utterly missed; the eloquence of reason and conscience drowned in sensual excitements and vain pursuits; the grace of God resisted and extinguished; so much that was flagrantly, shamefully wrong; so much that was fair in seeming false in essence: such is the heart-breaking retrospect.
O! the dark days of vanity! while here,
How tasteless! and how terrible, when gone!
There can be no rational peace until we are freed from this dead, accusing past; until the antagonism of conscience and history ends in some worthy pacification. Here Christ becomes most precious to all who believe. We cannot live the past over again; we cannot undo its misdoings; we cannot restore the wasted wealth of life and grace, we cannot atone for our foolishness and wickedness; and therefore when we are crushed under the burden of our sin and sorrow, He who of His own free grace bore our curse and shame speaks forgiveness and peace into the contrite soul. This peace in Christ is of the noblest. The law of heaven is not relaxed one jot or tittle. Neither is the tone of conscience lowered to ensure us peace, but, on the contrary, He who gives us a new heart gives us a new conscience; conscience in evangelical penitence becomes more acute and authoritative than ever, and yet in its utmost majesty and tenderness is satisfied with God’s reconciling work and word in Jesus Christ.
Dr. Buchsel tells of an old man under strong conviction of sin who could not find peace. “I met him once weeping in the fields; and when I asked him whether he could not believe that the blood of the Lord Jesus had power enough to save him, he replied: ‘Yes, I do believe it; but the lost years cry out behind me, the lost years, the lost years!’ ”
2. We must be at peace with our present. This harmony is disturbed, to a certain extent, by the plain facts of every human life—to an immense extent by the facts of most human lives. If conscience, the inward observer and recorder, is at all alive, it registers, day by day, almost hour by hour, thoughts, words, acts, which are in contradiction to what we know about the will of our Maker, about the ideal of life which He has placed before us. Of course, people can drug their consciences. Man may create a false conscience which may make him comfortable so long as it lasts, just as we can play tricks with a watch so as to make it tell us, not the real time, but something that will fall in with our inclination or convenience. But a false conscience, considered as administering a cordial to a diseased soul, cannot in any case be depended on for long. It is an illusion, and it is liable to dissolve at any moment, and to leave us face to face with the reality which it has only helped to make worse than before. Conscience, then, by its very activity, like the law in the Epistle to the Romans—conscience, when it is honest and energetic—destroys peace, because it discovers a want of harmony between life and our highest knowledge. “I delight in the law of God,” was an Apostle’s confession, “after the inward man, but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members” (Rom_7:22-23).
And here, too, our risen Lord is the Giver of peace. What we cannot achieve, left to ourselves, we do achieve in and through Him. We hold out to Him the hand of faith: He reaches forward to us His inexhaustible merits, His word of life, the sacraments of His Gospel: we become one with Him. Our personality is, by that act, in the sight of heaven, merged in His. We, in all our sinfulness and weakness, are incorporated with the moral being of the Holy One. We are, in the sight of the Father, covered with His robe of righteousness: and the inner discord is silenced as our life blends with the Divine life of the Redeemer thus graciously communicated to us, as we become members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones. Whatever remains of the old sin is more and more in us, like a foreign element, relegated to the surface of the regenerated constitution, but not breaking up the unity of its life; and thus we are accepted, not on our own merits (God forbid), but, as the Apostle says, “in the Beloved.” We live, yet not we, but Christ liveth in us, and “He is our peace” (Eph_2:18). And thus “the work of His righteousness is peace,” and its effect on us is “quietness and assurance for ever” (Isa_32:17). Having been “justified by faith, we have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom_5:1).
3. We must be at peace with the future. And that is ours assuredly. As for the present our duty is at war with pleasure that is wrong, and our will is divided against itself. That which, in an hour of high resolve, we sacrifice to God, an hour of wild passion brings back again. Love of place, or love of gold, makes us do the very guilt we most hate or fear. The love we give to man for Christ’s sake we give back to ourselves for our own sake. We are pitiably beaten to and fro. Nor can we keep one single aim running straight to its goal. This impulse leads us to one desire, another to an opposite desire. Our energies are dissipated over a hundred aims, and warring wills and scattered powers permit not the peace of Christ. We can but wait and trust His promise, and, trusting it, never relax our effort towards that peace which shall be ours when we shall have but one aim—to do the will of God. We must never cease to strive, so that when death draws near we may have the peace which can say, looking back on a life which, through much failure, has never been quite faithless, “My Father, fulfil in Thyself what was wanting in my life. Let me say—in Thee, and Thee alone—I have finished the work Thou gayest me to do.”
It sounds paradoxical, and yet it is the truth, that there is no peace like that which is to be found in suffering, in moral suffering, when it has reached its climax, when the whole being, mind, heart and soul, through strength of will, or, more truly, through the absolute submission to the will of God, accepts the past, loves the present, and does not fear the future. [Note: Count de Mauny, The Peace of Suffering, 59.]
It is the heart that looks out towards the future and hopes without fear. In the roll-call of faith in Hebrews 11 faith is associated with two things—“things hoped for,” that is, things future; and “things unseen,” that is, things present. And the illustrations of faith throughout the chapter are connected either with “things hoped for” in the future, or with “things unseen” in the present. Every illustration, Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, right to the end, comes under one or other of those elements—things hoped for, or things unseen. The peace of God in the heart enables us to front the future fearlessly, and to feel assured that whilst “we do not know what is in the future, yet that the Lord is in the future and we are in the Lord.” It is an old story, but worth repeating by way of illustration, of a man in great depression, as we all sometimes are, who, with a sad face, was saying to a friend, “Things are awfully hard with me, very dark and forbidding.” “My dear fellow,” said the other man, “you should look on the bright side.” “But,” was the answer, “I have no bright side.” “Well, then,” rejoined the friend, “polish up the dark side.” Those are fine words of the prophet in Isa_50:7 : “The Lord God will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded.” We can almost realise the man steeling himself, as he adds, “Therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed.” That is peace. [Note: W. H. Griffith Thomas, The Power of Peace, 20.]
“Peace, perfect peace, our future all unknown?
Jesus we know, and He is on the throne.”
There is a glory in the setting sun,
That far surpasses morning’s paler hues; It speaks of rest, when day’s toil is done,
And in our wearied hearts it hope renews.
Long since, in childhood’s happier days, methought,
Our Father, pleased with tasks accomplish’d right, Had drawn the fleecy curtains back, that naught
Might hide the Better Country from our sight.
Ah! oft in fancy did those eyes behold
The pearly gates, with angel-figures nigh; Anon the crystal sea, or streets of gold,
All clearly outlin’d in the evening sky.
Fancy’s bright edges lose their golden sheen, They tarnish, bare the sombre tint below, Till naught remains of beauty, all is seen
Just as it is, but seem’d not, long ago.
Though life is sadder now than in the past,
God grants His lov’d ones peace at eventide, Till He Himself the veil aside shall cast,
Shall bid us pass beyond, and there abide. [Note: Una, In Life’s Garden, M]
