The Abundance of Peace

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Dec 29, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 50.

The Abundance of Peace

MANY are longing for peace who know naught but strife. Many are prophesying peace who have no grounds for their prediction save the wish of their own hearts.

Is the longing vain? It need not be. There is not one longing in the human heart for any good thing, that God does not desire to grant. But God must do it in His own way and in His own time.

The opposite of peace is unrest or strife, and a most miserable condition it is. It brings misery to the one who possesses it, and like a fretting leprosy it spreads misery all around. Its primal cause is sin; and sin is missing the mark which God has set up, going out of God’s way, transgressing His holy law, coming short of the glory of God. 1 John 3: 4; Rom. 3: 23. In other words, it is being out of harmony with God; it is following the carnal mind. “Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.” Rom. 8: 7.

There is no rest in enmity or hate. Every one who has hated knows that. As long as the hatred or enmity is active, there is misery in the heart. The one hated may be entirely unconscious of this, but the one who hates suffers. His soul is stirred in proportion to the intensity of his enmity and hatred. Hatred preys upon his very vitals. It poisons every holy sentiment. It brutalizes all his finer sensibilities. It makes a man a demon. It is a blighting curse to all it touches; it is a deeper curse to him who cherishes it. It exists in varied forms, and always has its roots in selfishness. O, how many there are who cherish it in their heart! How many there are in whom envy and strife and evil-speaking, and the whole foul brood of evil passions, bear sway! Tossed to and fro are they continually, “like the troubled sea, when it can not rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is NO PEACE, saith my God, to the wicked.” Isa. 57: 20, 21.

And yet to you, troubled, restless soul, we bring a message of peace, “from the God of peace.” He declares, “I have seen his ways, and will heal him: I will lead him also, and restore comforts unto him and to his mourners. I create the fruit of the lips; Peace, peace to him that is far off, and to him that is near, saith the Lord; and I will heal him.” Isa. 57:18, 19. Truly, it is a comforting message to the panic-stricken, sin-poisoned, fever-tossed child of strife. Yet it is true, God’s message to such an one is the message of peace. The very ones whom He sends, His chosen servants, must have their “feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace.”

How may peace be obtained? How does the rebellious province obtain peace with the government from which it revolted? How does the disobedient child obtain peace with the righteous, faithful, yet merciful parent?—Why, they do it by surrendering, yielding. That is all. And that is all the sinner, the wicked, has to do to obtain peace. Here is God’s law which he has hated, against which he is in rebellion. Here is God’s simple plan by which he may come into complete harmony with that law. That plan is to give up all of self, to surrender self, to yield to the law’s demands, and to accept, by faith, the righteousness of that law as wrought out in Jesus Christ. You can not win peace; for you can not pay for the past rebellion nor live a righteous life of yourself in the future. It would still be strife and unrest, even as you have proved it in the past. And, friend, Jesus Christ has purchased peace for YOU. He lived that law which you could not live. He met its every requirement. Or, to put it another way, He gave up everything of Himself to God, emptying Himself, and God filled Him by the presence and fulness of the Holy Spirit; so that all the works wrought by Jesus were the works of God. Now if you will give up all your own ways, yield your sin, your evil heart, all you have, good or evil, Christ will come into your heart as God did into His. He will live the same in you that He did in Jesus of Nazareth.

HOW can He do it?—Never mind that. You can never understand just how the mighty power of God can change a heart that loves sin, to one that hates sin; from one that does evil, to one that does righteousness. Yet He is able to do it. You can not tell why and how one seed brings forth large red flowers, and how a very similar seed in appearance, planted in the same soil, warmed by the same sun, watered by the same rain, will bring forth a tiny white flower. It is the power and wisdom of God which thus transmutes soil to flower. So God will take you, all unlovely as you are in His sight, and make you “to the praise of the glory of His grace.” “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for He will ABUNDANTLY pardon.” Isa. 55: 7.

Then there is peace, isn’t there? God has naught against you. Christ died to save you.

And when you yield all to Him, when you come into agreement with Him, there is peace between you. But you do not FEEL it, you say. Never mind if you do not. Your peace with God does not depend upon your feeling, but upon God’s Word, and your acceptance of that Word. That is all. Have you unreservedly accepted of His Word, His terms of peace? Then rejoice, not for the feeling, but for the condition of peace between your soul and God; and the rest, the enjoyment, will come with the rejoicing. “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Rom. 5:1.

But Christ gives increasing peace, even as He gives more grace. “By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope; and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.” Rom. 5:2-5. The world can give peace only in the midst of quiet. But God gives peace in tribulation, in persecution, in trial. The stream of life, righteousness and peace, which flows “as a river” (Isa. 48:18), “which passeth all understanding” (Phil. 4:7), is from above, and its mighty current can be cut off only by our unbelief; it can not be turned aside by the world. In Christ we have peace; in the world, tribulation. John 16:33. Before He went away, He said: “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” John 14:27.

The strife and turmoil of the world need not destroy the peace of him who has cast all into the great, loving arms of an infinite Saviour. The world may even end our present life; it can not destroy us. Christ is Lord of life and death. He can save us from it if He will. He can save us out of it and in spite of it, if that pleases Him best. Men may wrong us; we may rest in the assurance that God will make all things right. Let us have peace in Him, perfect peace; for “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee; because he trusteth in Thee.” Isa. 26: 3. This is the assurance of the Christian; this is what God will do.

But this is not all. The “peace which passeth all understanding,” which is “as a river” in its onward flow, is but the foretaste of the peace which Jesus Christ will give to His own. While He gives peace now in the midst of the world’s unrest and strife and war, that peace is mingled with sadness of heart because of others’ unrest, misery, and wo. But there is coming a time when Christ shall reign, when all of strife, and war, and tumult, and mourning, and distress, and pain, and death, will be forever banished, because sin is no more. All tyranny, oppression, and wickedness will be blotted from the universe, and nothing shall mar God’s fair creation. Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, will have taken to Himself His great power, and reigned “from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.” Then, “in HIS days shall the righteous flourish; and ABUNDANCE OF PEACE so long as the moon endureth.” It is to this peace now and forevermore that God calls us by His grace.