Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God
War is back in the news. After two years of wall-to-wall Covid reporting we now hear much more about “wars and rumours of war.” Russia is invading Ukraine. By this time next year the PLA may have attacked Taiwan. Fighting rages today in Chad, Palestine, Armenia, Mali, Yemen… too many places.
War is insanely wasteful, useless, and tragic. Why, like a drunk to his bottle, do we keep lurching back to it?
The Book of James gives a penetrating answer:
What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures (James 4:1-3).
War is the manifestation of a problem with our hearts.
We want things that we have don’t have and have no right to have. So we coerce, quarrel, and fight to get it. We don’t have all we want because God, who allots to each person what they need, has decided not to give us all that we want. Even if we asked God for more things he would not give them because we are motivated by greed.
If war arises from restless, selfish, and sinful hearts, then the cure for war are hearts full of peace, selfless love, and a love for God and his laws.
We are not born with hearts like that. On the contrary, we are “sinful at birth, sinful from the time our mothers conceived us” (Psalm 51:5).
When we turn from our sin to God, and we look to Jesus for forgiveness and salvation, we receive new hearts: hearts that are satisfied by God; hearts that put the needs of others first; hearts that love God and his ways.
When we put our faith in Jesus, God adopts us to be his children. We look to him as our father and know in our hearts that we are eternally safe in his loving arms.
In the end, faith in Jesus brings peace to our hearts, and makes us live in peace with God and those around us.
Faith in Jesus Christ, adoption as God’s children, peaceful hearts; these three things go perfectly and wonderfully together: like the roots, trunk, and foliage of an ancient oak. That’s why Jesus said: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”