In Times of Anti-Peace

For in him all the. Fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

Colossians 1: 19, 20

 

God created the heavens and the earth with it all existing in a state of peace, and God has promised to restore Creation to that same perfect and unbroken peaceful state. What happens in between those two periods of time is not very peaceful. We are living in that between time, and we experience the restlessness of God’s peace on a daily basis. It happens in our world as forces both great and small collide and cause drama to fill our ears with their rhetoric of angry posturing and hateful name calling. This is the small-time end of the spectrum where anti-peace dwells as the other extreme of this same condition is filled with violence and death as oppression is worked upon people around the globe. All of this mirrors the rebellion that Satan led in Heaven and that he has continued to prosecute here on earth.

 

God answered that heavenly rebellion, and He responds to all of ours in a manner that is fully engaged with bringing about the restoration of our relationship with Him while it brings conclusion to all rebellion and the elimination of all that is broken by sin in our world. The peace that follows this final removal of sin will be won through great effort, and it will come about after a conflict of a type and with intensity that is far greater than any that our world has seen before. Christ’s peace is deep and it is dense, but those who oppose God will not readily or willingly accept it. Although we live in a time where that same peace is available to us through the acceptance of Christ, we can observe daily the tenuous and the fragile nature of peace’s presence in our world as every corner of it has the potential to erupt into a human or a nature caused battleground.

 

The peace that we can know today came about through His sacrifice that was carried out under conditions that were extremely violent. Christ bled so that we could be restored to a form of peaceful intimacy with God that is the perfect expression of God’s heartfelt desire. The Father and Creator of all wants to dwell in close connection with the entirety of His Creation, and He will bring about that renewal of perfection in His own time. Until then, we reside in a world that knows both peace and conflict on an ongoing and a continual basis. So, the peace that Christ has won for us and that He grants to each of His people is a state of being that settles deep into the soul and that fills us with its calm voice and its gift of deep truth. It is often hard to listen and to truly hear these words of grace and love when the loud voice of turmoil and distress is shouting into our ears, but Christ’s hard-earned peace is ours if we will listen as our first priority to Him and to His words of life throughout each and every day.

 

The Transformed Cross

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

Colossians 1: 19, 20

 

My mind has a hard time connecting the idea of peacemaking and the image of the cross. Sure, we wear crosses around our necks, carry them with us, and hang them on our walls, and all of these uses are comfortably harmless as they don’t come close to suggesting the pain, torture, and violence that is the nature of the real thing. In the Roman world where Jesus lived the cross was an instrument of terror. The death that ensued for its victims was drawn out and brutal, and the Romans set up these scenes of execution drama in the most public of places so that no one could miss their intended message which was one of domination and power mixed with a swift and merciless response to any opposition.

 

The violence of the Roman cross is a striking reflection of the nature of evil itself and that nature is the image of its author, Satan. This is the same evil energy that boils up in the rampages of destruction that seem to be a constant part of our world’s narrative. It is also on view in the oppression, hatred, and greed that people engage in with each other. These are some of the more overt expressions of Satan’s animosity toward God that we can observe and that have a powerful impact upon all inhabitants of the earth. There are many other such manifestations of the endless war that Satan is waging against God. Most of them are considerably more subtle that the cross, itself.

 

All of the damage, the destruction, and the pain that come about in our lives exist as a result of this elemental conflict between the righteous and the profane. However, Christ has changed both the outcome and the nature of this conflict. There never was a moment when God and His righteousness were not the victors, but Christ clearly defined God’s method for bringing about that result, and He has set into unceasing motion that final and absolute defeat of Satan. In the sacrifice of Jesus, the spotless Son, on that cross, God transformed the hour of execution and that instrument of torture and shame into the moment and the location where God’s mercy and grace were poured out in that final act of reconciliation so that all who come to Christ are enfolded into the perfect peace that is the air that we breath in God’s kingdom.