Is Your Peace Real?
Everybody wants peace; and if they can't find it, they'll get a substitute.
For many people, their substitute is popping pills. But the catatonic, zombie-like behaviors tranquilizers produce hardly resembles God's peace.
Among the many substitutes or counterfeits to God's peace is the peace of stoicism. No other generation has opted for this kind of peace as much as our generation has. Rollo May once observed that we live in a schizoid culture; we defend ourselves by refusing to feel.
Intent on avoiding hurt, we decide to become detached, to deliberately keep our distance, to thrust a stiff arm into any relationship that might result in intimacy.
The peace of stoicism will throw cold water on the fires of feeling, attempting to extinguish all emotions, even positive emotions; because to desire anything, is to risk the pain of loss.
Another counterfeit peace is the peace of optimism. This peace minimizes the coming winter and, by design, knows nothing of scandal, or terror, or tragedy but only knows a sugarcoated positivism dripping with sweetness and fun.
“Divert yourself,” says the gospel of optimism. “Escape, relax, take your ease. Why weigh yourself down with the problems of heaven and hell when you can block the negative, seek the positive, and as the song says, ‘put on a happy face’?”
But by indulging ease, Dr. Jowett warned, “our couch has almost become our tomb.” The American theologian Dr. Lewis Sperry said, “Much of our religious activity is nothing more than a cheap anesthetic to deaden the pain of an empty life.”
The optimism that lulls people into a false sense of security and drugs them into a dreadful slumber is really an enemy to the gospel. Too much Mantovani can medicate us into an intoxicating bliss.
Jesus warned against this type of optimism when he referred to the days of Noah and the days of Lot.
Interestingly, the words that followed said nothing about the evil of that day—only that they ate, they drank, they worked, they married, all the good and routine things of day-to-day life.
But then one day—and, oh, what a day! —a swift and terrifying judgment came, consuming everyone in their spiritual neglect.
It all happened so suddenly, too! Why, just moments before the disaster there were broad smiles, words of cheer, and the kindest sentiments expressed about some transaction of the day.
A third counterfeit of peace is a little stranger than the rest—we may call this the peace of pessimism.
The pessimist sees the reigns of the universe flying in the wind. To the pessimist, life is but a blind game of dice, an aimless journey into the unknown. If today is good, tomorrow will be worse! If happiness comes, trouble will chase it away!
Now, one might think there’s no peace possible with this mindset, but there is. By expecting the worst, these people won’t even bother to raise their puny defenses against it.
No struggle at all is required! Only the nursing of pity, the caressing of despair, and that resulting numbness that comes once stronger emotions have played themselves out.
It’s warped! It’s wacky! But more than a few are familiar with it—the peace of pessimism.
An irritable father comes home and snaps at his rambunctious children, “I want peace!” But what he really wants is quiet.
There is a difference between quiet and peace. Even though no sound can be heard, peace may be nowhere around.
Some have erroneously viewed peace as the absence of trouble. To them, if the road is smooth and the circumstances are pleasant, then (for a brief while anyway) there can be some semblance of peace.
Biblical peace, however, isn’t based on circumstance; it’s based on “inner stance.”
Jesus said, “In the world you will have tribulation (John 16:33). Moreover, Paul reminded Timothy that the godly “shall suffer persecution” (II Timothy 3:12 KJV). Yet, even when the world does its worst, God's peace is still there, neither disturbed nor dislodged.
The mistaken thinking that assumes persecution was true only for that day is premised on the notion that the world has changed!
But the world hasn’t changed. All one has to do to incur the world’s wrath today is simply to speak like Jesus, act like Jesus, and love like Jesus—and once again this world will erupt into a vituperative rage (Psalm 2:1).
You must dismiss the delusion that Jesus was killed by some unusually brutal men, a remnant of barbarism that has long since passed away. To the contrary, Jesus was killed by the highest expression of culture and religion known in that day.
While the poet Tennyson envisioned man “moving forward and upward, letting ape and tiger die,” history proves that the tiger in man has refused to die, for he is as much a warmonger today as he ever was.
What this combination of guided missiles and misguided men is leading us to is an alarming thought to consider! But this much is sure: The warpath will benefit far less than the peace path will.
War and Peace, the much-acclaimed novel by Tolstoy, features dynamics more personal than novel in the lives of many people today. Are you happy about how your story deals with these dynamics?
The war zone, we know; it has been clearly marked out.
Off limits to moral people, and certainly to Christians, are anger, hatred, malice and murder. We know that. So we avoid these behaviors.
There have been attitudes we've tolerated at times that do have linkage to the harsh and hellish forbidden by God. But even these, for us, are more rare than regular.
More troublesome to us is that which isn't marked off so well, peace. And where this has eluded us the most has nothing to do with a buffer to war. The buffer we constructed has to do with—can you guess? —not war, but love.
Does this surprise you? Let me explain.
Real love makes us susceptible to deep hurt. So to get through our day with less pain, we chose a counterfeit peace where we love less, give less, and care less.
Yes, we love … sort of, kind of, with a measure of genuine feelings. But the small soul we settled for was by design.
“No, no, no, that's just my temperament,” we may protest.
Is it? Well, yes and no.
We must remember that God transforms temperaments! But we didn't allow that; and no one thought lesser of us for remaining as we are.
Yet, we would have to admit that on those rare occasions when we were in the company of a Christian who loves in a deep, godly way and suffers for it, we were uncomfortable.
Maybe this person was interceding for someone's salvation—and, oh, the agony in that voice!
Or maybe we witnessed a yearning to help a person we found easy to overlook. The contrast was vivid: their caring, our complacency.
Despite the praise we later voiced for this super saint, we were inwardly glad when it came time to say good-bye.
Why? Because what we saw shamed us.
So, breathing a sigh of relief when departure occurred, we could hardly wait to retreat into our existential bubble where emotions subside, calmness prevails, the heart isn't stretched, claims on our time are reduced, and courage isn't much needed.
Are you starting to feel unmasked?
This issue of peace is a major one.
And it just may be that the peace we chose doesn't look all that good once the light of God shines on it.
