1. PEACE is sometimes misunderstood. It is sought for as if it were the end of toil, the absence of struggle, and removal of temptation. But such peace as that is wholly foreign to the teaching and to the life of Jesus. When one turns to Jesus for relief from any of the developing experiences of life, one will always be disappointed. What He offers is not a substitute for human development; it is a means to that development. If we keep firm hold of this fact, a great many of the popular objections to the gospel, as if it were merely a means of forgiveness and escape, and a system of reconciliation by some kind of forensic expedient, fall away of themselves, and a great many of the popular blunders that Christian people make fall away too.
It is ignoble to say, “Anything for a quiet life,” and “What does it all matter?” To say this is to yield the inner citadel. There is the war within—the law of sin in the members conflicting with the law of the mind. It is a stern combat, ever renewing itself, and even for the best and bravest darkened by frequent defeats. Ideals are far away; aspirations remain unsatisfied. Shall we abandon the quest, shall we sink into the lower life and climb no more? Shall we cease to lift up our eyes and our hearts to the hills and rivet our gaze on earth? Shall we pay the price of forfeiting a fellowship with the saints and a place on God’s holy mountain, so that the jarring and fretting of the spirit may cease? That is a price we can never pay. Even if it is paid it brings no true peace, no rest for the spirit that must be restless till it rests in God.
Spiritual peace and security rest upon spiritual convictions of eternal truths; and convictions are assured knowledge, or what passes as such, whether it comes by the way of the head or the heart, as a result of feeling or of reason. Moreover it is an error to speak of spiritual security as if it were a confidence that has ceased to reassure itself, or a peace beyond strife; as in a region where questions are no longer raised, and there are no more duties to be done. Such a peace is not the peace of spirit, nor is it even happiness. There is an amplitude of activity in happiness, and spirit rests only on the wing. The soul of man, like everything that lives, lives by constant reaffirmation of itself, both against and by means of its environment: and in a very real sense it constantly recreates both itself and its world, carrying its past into its present, making every achievement a new starting-point, and in this way always going on into a new country. The soul that does not achieve is dying. [Note: Sir H. Jones, in Ethical and Religious Problems of the War, 26.]
Progress is
The law of life; man is not man as yet,
Nor shall I deem his object served, his end
Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth,
While only here and there a star dispels
The darkness, here and there a towering mind
O’erlooks its prostrate fellows; when the host
Is out at once to the despair of night,
When all mankind alike is perfected,
Equal in full-blown powers—then, not till then,
I say, begins man’s general infancy.
2. Instead of the rest of absence from toil and conflict we must expect the personal experience of peace to give us something of more worth, namely, an equanimity in toil and a repose in conflict. The peace of Jesus is the equanimity and the repose which enables one to do efficiently the work of life and to meet victoriously the temptations of life.
The gospel announced by Jesus Christ has furnished a new measure for things. It has made possible for anybody and everybody an entire revolution in his natural ideas and common estimates. It glorifies human weakness and poverty and humbleness, because it explains how such things may be transmuted more easily than their opposites into power with God. It demonstrates that from a spiritual standpoint the poet’s guess is true, that death may be life, and life death. In a word, it turns men’s notions upside down, and reverses men’s verdicts; and among other like things it declares a state of spiritual battle to be not only compatible with perfect spiritual peace but even to be essential to its existence. Take up any one of the gospels and read it through at a sitting; it will leave upon the mind in a strong and vivid impression the consistency of a life of hardship and suffering with the most serene spiritual tranquillity. It will prove indeed that life is a field of battle, but it will furnish at the same time an armament so strong and reliable that there can be no cause for doubting the issue of the combat. [Note: W. G. Rutherford, The Key of Knowledge, 153.]
3. Certainly this peace will make the toil apparently less arduous, and the temptations seemingly less strenuous. The man of mental equipoise can always accomplish a given task with much less effort than that needed by the irritable, impatient man; and he who meets temptation with an inner repose, in the assurance of God-empowered victory, must ever, by this sure armour of defence, diminish the force of the temptation. It is a terrible thing for any man to have no work to do in the world; and no enemy could wish a man any greater harm than the removal from his life of all temptation. But it is a splendid thing for any man to be able to do his work easily; and the best friend of that man can wish him no greater blessing than the power to resist. Peace creates the ability to perform with comparative ease the hardest tasks. It creates the power to resist the severest temptation. Surely no single equipment for efficient life can be worth more to its possessor than Christian peace in the heart.
4. The peace, then, which is promised to us is a “peace in Christ”; that is, a peace to be realized by growing through communion with Him to be like Him in His whole manifestation on earth—alike in the cross and in the crown, in the long passion which ended on Calvary and the eternal exaltation of which the Ascension was the entrance. Accordingly it is the peace, first of continual work for God and man, next of advance, even through tribulation, to sure and certain victory. Its strength is in the declaration, “I have overcome the world” (Joh_16:33), a declaration belonging primarily to our Lord, but secondarily to us; its blessing, as the messages to the Seven Churches show again and again, is to “him that overcometh” (Rev_2:7; Rev_2:17; Rev_3:12; Rev_3:21).
The wall breaks asunder, light, like divine laughter, bursts in.
Victory, O Light !
The heart of the night is pierced
With your flashing sword cut in twain the tangle of doubt and feeble desires !
Victory !
Come, Implacable !
Come, you who are terrible in your whiteness.
O Light, your drum sounds in the march of fire, and the red torch is held on high; death dies in a burst of splendour! [Note: Rabindranath Tagore, “Fruitgathering.”]
