War and Peace 3 - No war any more! ...

Friday, March 26, 2010. There is a clear perspective of Christian thinking: peace. As people who got to know the eternal God and saviour, we do not want war any more! We have already found peace in Jesus. With and in him God has torn down the walls between him and mankind. Here, true peace is not a fiction. Peace is reality.

When we want to learn to live in peace in our world, we first need to find a firm ground of peace for ourselves. We need to learn how God thinks about peace. Today, we want to pick up one particular feature of this peace: it is global and changes our nature and reality.

The biblical vision of peace

Already in the Old Testament, in the book of the prophet Isaiah, there is God's vision of peace, pictured in strong and lasting images. God's peace is so strong that it will even completely change nature.

17 “Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. […] The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, but dust will be the serpent’s food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain,” says the Lord. (Isaiah 65: 25 ff)

The full impact of peace

Peace has a deep impact. Sometimes, people think that the peace of Christian faith is some light “let's not talk about it”. But it is all but not that. The peace Jesus reaches deeply into my soul. It heals and reconciles. It touches deep wounds and guilt. It will be able to clean up on a level which I would never be able to completely understand on my own. And it affects all areas of my life and even the whole creation. It is God's great peace, the peace of the living creator, who calls himself “the truth”, “the life”, “love”, “justice”, “mercy”.

The various highlights which reflect God's peace as described by the bible are absolutely fantastic. There will be no war any more, no tears, no suffering. We cannot fully comprehend what this means. God is going much further than just answering some of our prayers. He is changing creation - and he has already started this with Jesus, the firstborn of a new humanity. By his spirit he started to work on this - not by power or force. Living faith is the exciting adventure to explore his peace more and more, day by day. ... more texts