Peace. It is a word that is often used and seldom
understood. Even more rarely is it experienced. Usually when we hear this word
in our culture, it is in the context of something that is absent. In some
cultures it is used as a way of saying “hello,” and “goodbye,” as if to wish
one another peace as we come and go. That was the way it was used in ancient
Hebrew. The Hebrew word “Shalom” had connotations that extend far beyond merely
“the absence of conflict,” though it includes that. It means a state of
completeness or satisfaction that is found when all is well. It speaks of one’s
physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being. It speaks of being in
right relationship with God, for only in that blessed state can it truly be
said that all is well. Therefore, true peace comes only from God. The ancient
Hebrews spoke the word as a prayer for one another that all things might be
well under God for the other person. Early Christians adopted this word as a
greeting and spoke of it, not as the wish for something as yet unattained, but
as a reminder that this peace was available and had been secured for us in the
Person and work of Jesus Christ. That is why, on the eve of His crucifixion,
Jesus could say to His followers, “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to
you.”
Only Jesus could speak of “His peace” in the midst of
circumstances like He was in at the time. One of His companions had already
gone out to betray Him, and He knew that He was moments away from being arrested,
tortured, and killed. But He could speak of His peace in the midst of such a
raging storm. And He could speak of giving this peace to His followers, who
were undergoing a raging storm of their own. Their Teacher, Master, Lord, and
Friend was about to be taken away from them, and their own safety and security
was in peril. Emotionally anguished, mentally tormented, with no sense of
certainty about their physical well-being, Jesus says that He will give them
His peace so that they may have it, even as He does. And He offers His peace to
all of us who follow Him by faith. He does not guarantee us that we will escape
all turmoil and tribulation, but He promises us that, come what may, we can
live safeguarded by His peace. In the words that Jesus speaks to His disciples
here in our text today, He describes this peace and how it effects us. So, let
us look at these “principles of His peace” and ask the Lord to deepen our
understanding and experience of the peace of Christ in our lives.
I. Jesus does not give His peace as the world gives (v27a)
There’s a lot that goes into the giving of a gift. There’s
the gift itself, and then the giver of the gift, the motivation behind the
gift, the occasion of the gift, and the manner in which it is given. We think
that receiving a gift is always a good thing, but if we stop and think about
it, sometimes it is not. Sometimes the gift or the occasion it is given makes
us uncomfortable or embarrassed. Think of the time you received underwear for
Christmas. Sometimes gifts are given with strings attached. Once someone
offered me a “gift” of a very costly item that required an annual fee to be
paid for it to be used. The annual fee was going to be my responsibility, and
frankly it was more than I could afford. Awkwardly, I had to decline the gift.
But the best gifts are those which are what we need or want, given out of the
purest motives on the best of occasions, in the context of a genuine love
relationship with the giver. All of the best and most perfect gifts ultimately
come from God Himself, and are given this way. James says, “Every good thing
given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of
lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow” (Jas 1:17). This is
how Jesus has given us the gift of His peace.
He says, “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you;
not as the world gives do I give to you.” The world gives gifts a far different
way than God gives them. Sometimes the world gives gifts insincerely, scantily,
under compulsion, with selfish motives, with strings attached. Moreover, often
the world gives a gift only to take it away again. And sometimes when the world
offers a gift, it offers far more than it can deliver. So it is when the world
offers us peace. When two parties sit down to negotiate peace on the world’s
terms, often one or more parties is not genuinely interested in real and
lasting peace. Often one or the other party is only interested in doing what is
minimally required to attain peace, and at as little expense as possible.
Typically, this kind of negotiation is never entered into willingly, but
because some other entity is requiring or compelling it. Seldom is it a win-win
arrangement, and more often it is lose-lose. And the kind of peace that the
world affords is never permanent.
During the reign of Augustus Caesar most of the known world
was experiencing a time that Augustus had inaugurated and named the Pax Romana (the Peace of Rome). During
this time, vast regions of the world were allegiant to the Roman
Empire and there was no conflict to speak of in any of these
lands. It was perhaps the longest and most thoroughgoing time of peace in the
history of the world. However, it must be remembered that this peace was
effected by the militant conquest of these lands and the swift action of Rome to quell all
uprisings with severe force. One conquered ruler remarked that in view of the
plunder, butchery, and robbery that the Romans performed in his land, “they
make a wasteland and call it peace.”[1] This
is how the world gives peace … with a sword to the neck. Jesus said that He was
not giving peace like this. Though many expected the Messiah to come wielding
the sword, Jesus came to effect peace by receiving the blows of violence, not
striking them. On the eve of His crucifixion, He can say that He gives His
followers His peace, because this peace was secured for us in His death and
resurrection. He does not compel us by force to enter into His peace, with
strings and conditions attached. He does not offer us His peace with
self-centered motives, or with escape clauses that may entail Him revoking this
peace from us in the future. He gives us His peace by His grace and for His
glory, in an act of unconditional, eternal, covenant love. We do not deserve
it, we cannot earn it, and because of our sins, we should not have it. But
Jesus has accomplished this peace for us in His suffering and death for our
sins as our substitute under the wrath of God. He took the judgment we deserve,
so we could have the peace that is rightly His in eternal fellowship with God
the Father.
Jesus alone can offer us real
and lasting peace. It is His peace. He has it, He can give it. It
is peace with God, and it is the
peace of God. In Romans 5, Paul says,
“Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus
Christ.” Justification by faith speaks of that act of God by which He removes
our sin and imputes to us the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Prior to coming to
Christ by faith, we were enemies at war with God in our sins. We could not make
peace with God on our own terms. But through Jesus Christ, we have peace with
God. The war is over, and we have been rescued, redeemed, and reconciled to Him
in peace.
Since we have peace with
God, we can also experience the peace of
God. In Philippians 4:6-7, we are told to not be anxious about anything,
but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, to let our
requests be made known to God, “and the peace of God, which surpasses all
comprehension will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” The peace
of God comes from knowing that He is sovereign and in control over all of our
circumstances, and that ultimately our future is secure in His hands. But, this
kind of peace cannot be manufactured by our self-effort. It is an element of
the “fruit of the Spirit” that Paul describes in Galatians 5. The Holy Spirit’s
presence and power is manifested in our lives by these attributes, such as
love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. This peace of God that
Jesus has made available to us comes only as we yield ourselves to the Spirit’s
control in our lives. The Holy Spirit has come to us because of Christ’s death,
resurrection, and ascension, and in Him, we can have this peace guarding our
hearts and minds, even when the circumstances of our lives are far from
peaceful.
This brings us to the second principle of Christ’s peace
here in our text.
II. The peace of Christ replaces fear and trouble with love
and joy (vv27b-28)
You will recall, perhaps, that the first words Jesus spoke
in this extended discourse in the Upper Room were “Do not let your heart be
troubled.” Here He says it again: “Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let
it be afraid.” Let’s face it: there was plenty for them to be troubled and
afraid about. Jesus has told them what is coming, from the betrayal, to the
arrest, to the falling away of the disciples themselves, to the horrors of the
Cross and His impending death. They were troubled and afraid! If they weren’t,
something would be wrong with them! And if they weren’t, Jesus wouldn’t have to
tell them to not let their hearts be in that state. Like them, we often have
plenty of reasons to be troubled and afraid. Over the next several chapters,
Jesus will promise His followers that they will be hated by the world (15:18),
that they will have tribulation in the world (16:33), and He prays that the
Father would not take them out of this world (17:15). This world is not a safe
place to live, and yet it is where we have to live! Senseless acts of violence,
tragic accidents, and sudden crises erupt all around us every day, not to
mention the fact that we live in bodies that are constantly falling apart. I
recall hearing John Piper talking about a day several years ago in which he
distinctly remembered someone asking him, “How are you doing?”, and he said,
“I’m fine.” Then he went to the doctor that afternoon and found out he had
cancer. He said he learned a valuable lesson that day. “Now, when people ask
me, ‘How’s your health?’ I say, ‘I feel fine. And the doctors are pleased.’
Which, being translated, means: ‘I don’t know how I am; only God knows.’”[2] If
we ponder long on any of these circumstances that could arise with no
forewarning, we are greatly troubled and afraid! But Jesus says that His peace
can drive that fear and trouble out and replace it with something greater.
What had the disciples troubled was the announcement that
Jesus was going away. Clearly they understood that He was speaking of His death.
So troubled and fearful were they, that they seem to have missed, or at least
greatly misunderstood that He had also said that He would come to them again.
But here Jesus is trying to redirect their hearts from fear and trouble to love
and joy. He says, “If you loved Me, you would have rejoiced.” Did they love
Jesus? Surely in some sense they did, but Jesus seems to suggest here that in
some other sense, their love for Him was lacking. “If you loved Me,” seems to
imply that they don’t love Him, at least not in the sense that He is speaking
of love. If they understood the peace that He was making possible for them
through His impending suffering and death, then their love for Him would grow
exponentially and qualitatively. But as it is, all they can think of is
themselves and what they are losing – not of Christ, what He is gaining, and
what He is accomplishing for them. If they could think of those things instead
of themselves, in love for Christ, there would be joy in their hearts instead
of fear and trouble.
So, there is this subtle rebuke here. “If you loved Me, you
would have rejoiced because I go to the Father.” Unless Jesus goes to the
Father, His disciples (including us today) cannot have the peace that He
promises. We cannot have peace with God or the peace of God that His indwelling
Spirit produces unless He goes to the Father by way of His death and
resurrection. Jesus is returning to His Father, and to the glory that He had
with the Father before the world began, and before He came to dwell among us in
the veiled glory of His flesh. This is a cause for rejoicing if we love Him.
But not only do we rejoice for Him, we also rejoice for us. Because He is
overcoming sin and death on our behalf, we know that we too have the promise of
death not being the end. If we love the Lord Jesus and trust Him as our Lord
and Savior, death is not a descent into the abyss of the unknown, a ceasing of
existence, or a hopeless eternity apart from Him. We too have the promise that
we will go to the Father. So, we do not have to fear or be troubled by the
hardships and sufferings we face in this world. We can have joy in spite of our
circumstances, through the love of Jesus Christ and the peace that He has given
us. When we have His peace safeguarding our hearts and minds, every discomfort
and disaster that we encounter in the world only causes our love for Him to
deepen and our joy in Him to increase, because we know that He has overcome
this world, and we share in His victory. Trouble and fear are replaced by love
and joy as we rest in the peace of Christ.
Before we move on to the final principle of peace here in
the text, we need to just give some explanation to the rather awkward phrase
that Jesus says here: “For the Father is greater than I.” This verse has for
centuries been latched onto by those who seek to teach that Jesus is somehow less than fully God. But, in many other
passages, Jesus has unequivocally taught that He is one with the Father and of
the same divine essence as the Father. One of the foundational rules of good
biblical interpretation is that we use the clear passages to explain the
difficult ones. If we do that here, we conclude that Jesus cannot mean that He
is of an inferior nature to God the Father. So, what does it mean? There are at
least two certain truths that relate to this statement. First has to do with
the eternal role of Jesus as the Son of God, or God the Son. The mystery of the
Trinity is complex, and we will never completely fathom all that it entails
with our finite minds. What we know is that there is one God, who exists
eternally in three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And within
the perfect unity of the Triune Godhead, there is an ordering of function, not
nature. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all coeternal and coequal in glory
and deity, but each has a unique functional role. The Father is ever and always
the One who commands and sends. The Son is ever the One who is sent and who
obeys the Father. And the Spirit is the One who is sent by both the Father and the
Spirit, and who functions in obedience to the will of the Father and the Son.
Ontologically, that is, in the nature of their being, One is not greater or
more important than the other. But functionally, their roles differ. As the One
who is sent, and the One who obeys, Jesus can say that the Father is greater in
function than He is.
There is another reason Jesus can say that the Father is
greater. The disciples have enjoyed the indescribable blessing of knowing Jesus
in His flesh. But, the point was never for them to just have an earthly
relationship with an earth-bound Jesus. Jesus is making it possible, by His
return to the Father, for His followers to truly know God in all of His
splendor and glory. It is greater for them that they have an eternal relationship
with God through Him than for their
experience to be limited to a temporal relationship with Jesus in His flesh on
the earth. All that Jesus had done to this point, and all that He would do, had
the aim and purpose of bringing them into a relationship with the Father. As Paul
says in 2 Corinthians 5:19, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to
Himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” We may be tempted to
think that it would have been better to live in the first century, and have the
opportunity to meet Jesus as He walked and talked on the earth. But because of
what Jesus has done in His life, death, and resurrection, we have something
even better. We have a relationship with God through Him.
As we move back onto our primary theme of having Christ’s
peace, we have seen that He alone can give us this peace – peace with God and
the peace of God. It has not been given to us as the world gives. It has been
secured for us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for our sins,
and imparted to us by the Holy Spirit whom Christ has sent to indwell those who
receive Him by faith as Lord and Savior. And this peace is able to replace the
fear and troubles of our hearts in this fallen world with increased and greater
love for Christ and joy in Him. But there is a final principle of His peace
that we need to see here in the text.
III. The peace of Christ produces confidence in His word
(vv29-31)
One of the ways Jesus continually produces peace in the
hearts of His followers is through the promises of His word. And it works like
a cycle. His promises produce peace, and His peace increases our confidence in
His word. When we find ourselves in anxiety rather than resting in His peace,
chances are we have forgotten or begun to doubt His promises. So the peace
produces this confidence and this confidence reinforces the peace. It is kind
of a chicken and egg kind of relationship – which comes first? Well, the two
are so closely related that it is impossible to separate them. But as Jesus promises
His peace to His disciples, He does so in the context of bolstering their
confidence in His Word.
Thus far, Jesus has told them about the things which are
going to transpire in both the immediate and distant future. He has told them
what would happen over the next several days – He would die and rise again. He
has told them what would happen over the next several weeks – the Holy Spirit
would come to dwell within them. And He says here, “I have told you before it
happens, so that when it happens you may believe.” Of course, these men already
believed, but Jesus is calling them
to a deeper confidence in His word: a confidence that is produced by His peace.
When these events begin to happen – His arrest, His trial, His torture, and His
death, they can rest in the peace that He promised them, and grow in their
confidence that His every word is truth.
Let’s face it … from a mere earthly perspective, the events
that will transpire over the coming day will appear to be utter chaos and
mayhem. If any circumstances could ever be described as “hell on earth,” then
the crucifixion of Jesus and the events surrounding it certainly meet that
description. Jesus says, “I will not speak much more with you.” But there would
be no need for Him to. As the great hymn says, “What more can He say than to
you He has said?” They will not suffer for lack of information. Their challenge
will be to remain steadfast in confidence of what He has already said.
The reason He will speak no more with them is that “the
ruler of the world is coming.” Who is the ruler of the world? Isn’t God the
ruler of the world? Well, in the ultimate sense, yes, He is. But remember that
when God created human beings in His image, He gave to mankind dominion over
the whole earth. Man was to be God’s regent, ruling the world in His stead and
on His behalf. But Adam squandered this trust that God had given him when he
yielded his allegiance to Satan in the garden. In Adam’s sin, the dominion of
the world passed into the hands of the devil. He continues to operate under
God’s ultimate authority, but the operations of the world are under Satan’s
domain. And in the events leading up to and including the cross, Satan was
trying to accomplish his ultimate will and desire – to murder God and be freed
from His sovereignty. He had been trying to accomplish this since the
beginning, but now he pulls out all the stops and goes full force into the
fray. The ruler of the world is coming, Jesus said, and with unprecedented evil
to murder the Messiah.
But, Jesus says, “He has nothing in Me.” In other words, “He
has no hold (or claim) on me.” This phrase was used in Jewish legal contexts
when someone had a rightful charge to bring against another in a court of law.
But Jesus says here that Satan has no rightful charge over Him. Jesus had not
sinned, and had lived in complete and perfect obedience to His Father’s will. So, though the enemy
believed that he would be the victor in this battle, Jesus says, “So that the
world may know that I love the Father, I do exactly as the Father commanded
Me.” His death was not ultimately the result of a satanic plot; it was the
result of a sovereign plan. The death of Jesus was the reason He came into the
world in the first place. Satan believed his plan was advancing, but all that he
was doing fell under the purpose and plan of God to reconcile the world to
Himself through the suffering and death of this righteous substitute for
sinners. What appeared to be a victory for Satan was ultimately his defeat, as
Jesus, in love for His Father, obeyed His will all the way to the cross where
sinners are saved from Satan’s dominion and power. Even in this, Jesus seeks
that all the world would have increased confidence that His word is truth.
With
the peace of Christ safeguarding their hearts, the disciples could rest in the
confidence that Jesus was carrying out that which He had declared. He was
saving the world in His death on the cross. But they could not ultimately rest
in that peace until the Holy Spirit came upon them at Pentecost. But after that
moment, as they reflected on what had transpired in the cross of Jesus Christ,
His peace gave them the confidence that all that Jesus had said was true. In
speaking of the cross at Pentecost, Peter said, “This Man (Jesus),
delivered over by the predetermined plan
and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men
and put Him to death” (Ac
2:23). And notice how this affected the peace that
they had and the increased confidence that they had in God’s Word as
circumstances began to grow worse for themselves. In Acts 4, they prayed, “For
truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant
Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the
Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever Your hand and Your purpose
predestined to occur.
And now, Lord, take note of their threats, and grant that Your bond-servants may speak Your word with all confidence” (Ac 4:27-29).
And now, Lord, take note of their threats, and grant that Your bond-servants may speak Your word with all confidence” (Ac 4:27-29).
So, like them, we ourselves can rest in the peace that
Christ has given to us, and in confidence in His word when our circumstances
are threatening and unpleasant. Knowing that nothing ever happened to Jesus
apart from the Father’s perfect purpose assures us that the same is true for
us. His Spirit gives us peace in the midst of our trials and tribulations, and
in His peace, we find confidence in the truth of His Word, which deepens the
peace all the more.
Jesus has given you His peace. But you cannot experience the
peace of God until you have peace with God. And Jesus offers you this also.
Because He took your sins, your death, and your condemnation upon Himself in
the cross, you can be reconciled to God and saved from the powers of sin and
Satan. And having peace with God, you can enjoy the peace of God in Christ which
is ours because of the Holy Spirit who indwells all who trust in Him. He has
not given His peace to us as the world would give. He has given it
unconditionally, graciously, and eternally. As you rest in His peace, the
troubles and fears of your heart give way to renewed and increased love for Him
and joy in the salvation that He has accomplished for you. And as you rest in
this peace, your confidence in His word grows, further settling that peace in
your heart that all is well, regardless of how things look or feel. If you are
in Christ, there is peace – peace that passes all understanding; peace that
only Christ can provide; peace that guards us from anxiety; and peace that
rests in knowing that all is well. Isaiah the prophet said, “Thou wilt keep him
in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee”
(Isa 26:3, KJV).
No comments:
Post a Comment