​Peace, on whose terms?

Isaiah 2
2 Now it will come about that in the last days The Mountain of the house of the LORD Will be established as the chief of the mountains, and will be raised above the hills; and all the nations will stream to it.
3 And many peoples will come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; That He may teach us concerning His ways And that we may walk in His paths.” For the law will go forth from Zion and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
4 And He will judge between the nations, and will render decisions for many peoples; and they will hammer their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, and never again will they learn war.
5 Come, house of Jacob, and let us walk in the light of the LORD.

There is a lot of meaning in the above verses, which I would like to exposit for you as your spiritual manna (Exo 16:15/Luke 22:19), out of my love for the Lord Jesus (John 21:15-17). Verse 2 needs to be understood in the context of Dan 2:45 & Heb 8:10-11, which in the light of Col 1:16-20 says that God is going to increase His righteousness upon the earth with time, till all the earth is filled with the knowledge of God (Hab 2:14) and unbelief will be an insignificant minority. Verse 3 needs to be looked at in the context of Rev 22:17 and Mat 28:18-20, which speaks about the Holy Spirit calling the people to hear the preaching and the teaching of the Gospel. Speaking about Law, we ought to understand that there are three aspects of Law i.e. Judicial Law, Ceremonial Law and Moral Law. The Judicial Law is what is given the State to maintain Law and Order in society, while the Ceremonial Law was given the Old Testament Church as pointing to the redemptive work of Christ, while the Moral Law is the standard given every believer to live by. Today, very few Churches have such an understanding of Law, for most Churches in holding to Christ and rightfully doing away with the Ceremonial Law (Heb 10:1-7), they unwittingly reject the Moral Law and the authority of the State concerning the Judicial Law as well, owing to their poor understanding of the Bible. The Moral Law is the very character of God, as described in Psalm 119, which goes from Alef to Tav (Old Testament Hebrew)… like the Alpha and the Omega (New Testament Greek) we are familiar with in ascribing to the Lord Jesus (Rev 1:8). When the Law goes forth in verse 3 i.e. God’s word goes forth from Zion, we know that those who receive Jesus as Lord and Saviour shall glorify His grace and mercy (John 3:16) but those who refuse Him shall glorify His wrath and justice (John 3:18/Rom 2:12) because God’s Word shall not return to Him void (Isaiah 55:11). Every believer taken from the family of Adam and grafted to the Church, inherits this nature of God in being conformed to the likeness of Jesus (Rom 8:29). This is the very purpose of every human being, who are all made in the image of God, broken in Adam but restored to all godly fullness in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is from here we understand that if there is to be peace in the world, it can only be on God’s terms and never our own but this peace is what God is going to bring about by His might because nothing in creation exist which does not serve His righteous purpose and so as the Church is given to walk by faith and not mere sight (2Cor 5:7), we learn from verse 5 to walk in the light of His promise concerning Salvation because Salvation is not based on merits of depraved men (Psalm 49:7-15) but on the saving merits of the righteous Jesus Christ (Rev 5:7-12).

Psalms 37
4 Delight yourself in the LORD; And He will give you the desires of your heart.

Mat 5
9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

John 1 (in reference to Jesus)
12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name,
13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

Concerning our adoption into the family of God, we understand from scripture that this is according to the will of God. If believing in the Lord Jesus Christ was something established purely on a person’s free will then that person would never be a new creation in Christ (2Cor 5:17) and could never conform to the likeness of Christ nature unless there is a complete change in the orientation of his/her desires, where a person no longer delights in pleasing himself/herself but his/her delight is in the Lord, which is what being born from above is all about (John 3:3). If we understand the implications of the fall of Adam and Original Sin, we then recognize that the reason each person is self-serving naturally from birth is because each person is a law to themselves. Thankfully the Sovereign will of God presides over our free will and so we have institutions like the State in place, which is given to function by the Judicial Law and this is what keeps unbelievers in check from the fear of being apprehended by the Law but as for the believer, he/she is given the very Moral law of God as his/her own nature/character and so he has nothing to fear from the Judicial Law because unlike the world fallen in Adam (1Tim 1:8-9), his/her desire is not sin in pleasing of self at all costs but his/her desire is God in exercising the righteousness of God.

Mat 10
34 “Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.
35 “For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
36 and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.
37 “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.
38 “And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me.
39 “He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it.

The Moral Law as taught to us in Exodus 20:1-17 and Mat 22:36-40 says we ought to love God first and second love our neighbour at par with ourselves. However, the citizens of the world in their unbelief do not see God as first but themselves and so everything else and every other person is nothing more than the means they use to serve themselves. We ought to understand that people in their unbelief are incapacitated from finding security in God, instead people find security in the masses and so they are ok doing wrong and believing in a bunch of lies as long as they have many people with them doing the same thing. These fools are not accountable to God, they are unreasonably accountable to only themselves and that is why they live as they please. Take the instance of the Parable of the Vine-growers (Mark 12:1-12), the defaulting tenants here are the unbelievers who go about life with their poor stewardship over the earth, as coming from their refusal of God and when the real stewards show up these defaulting tenants give in to their destructive nature and act maliciously towards the adopted sons of God who are the real heirs of the earth, because Adam’s failed stewardship upon the earth is restored to only those who are in Christ.

John 15
18 “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. 19 If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. 20 Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. 21 They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the one who sent me. 22 If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin.

As much as a thief hates being called a thief and a homosexual likes being called gay, we ought to understand that the world hates the truth about themselves but will God cease to exist so as to allow the world to continue living by their foolish lies just as they so please, that will verily not happen and so we ought to understand that the world hates the Church & God, only because we reveal to them that they are on the highway to hell. So peace can never be on the terms of every individual in this world because they are each a law to themselves in their broken communion with God i.e. their righteousness of self is not the righteousness of God thanks to the fall to Adam, who relieved himself of the righteousness of God to receive to himself and for his posterity a righteousness of their own (Gen 3:1-6). The reason God put the Judicial Law in place (1Tim 1:8-9), is because from the world’s self-righteousness comes the world’s desire for anarchy and death. It is no wonder that the people of the world are fascinated with substance-abuse which throws them out of the control while near-death experiences proves to be their entertainment because it feeds their appetite for death and anarchy with such a godless rush. It is for reasons such as these that peace can never be on the terms of self-seeking men/women who sabotage what is good; on the contrary peace is on the terms of God’s righteousness and so for peace to exists there is need for truth and revelation of God, which is where the Word of God comes in (Rom 10:17), in tutoring us about the saving merits of the Lord Jesus Christ (John 14:26).

Hebrews 4
12 For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
13 And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.

2Tim 3
16 All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness;
17 so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.

To conclude, we know from John 1:1-18 that the Word of God, is God i.e. Jesus Christ. We also know from John 4:24 that God is Spirit and from 2Tim 3:16-17 that scripture is God breathed, meaning it is the very life-giving breath of God that gives every believer life in Christ (John 20:22), which was formerly lost for all in Adam (Gen 2:7,17). So I would close by echoing the fact that this peace of God, which am talking about is not going to be brought by the willingness of men but by the mighty nature of God. This peace that God is going to usher into this world is metaphorically described in Isaiah 11: 1-11, which I would strongly advise you to read. The Stump of Jesse or the Root of Jesse in Isaiah 11 bears reference to the Lord Jesus Christ (since the Messiah was prophesied to come from the lineage of David), while the Mountain of the Lord bears reference to the people of God i.e. His Church, which will be firmly established in that day. For those who have a gloomy disposition concerning the end of the world, I would like to tell you that that gloomy disposition only reflects your unbelief because unbelief is never constructive in nature but destructive and God does not share in that fallen nature. It is for this reason when we look at Isaiah 60:20-22 and 1Pet 3:1-13 in the light of Ezek 36:27, we understand that the Lord by His sovereign will shall move His people to delightfully hasten righteousness in world, so as to hasten His coming because the ending is going to be a happy one.

Peace (Luke 10:5-6)!