Last week we looked at how the peace that God offers us through his Son changes how we view God and calms our soul. This week we look at one more way the peace of God changes us.
The late and great Biblical scholar John Murray said, “Peace of heart and mind proceeds from ‘peace with God’ and is the reflection in our consciousness of the relation established in his favour.” Even the most devout Christian will experience times in life when God feels far away. Though our feelings help us in many ways, they do not always send us in the right direction. While we cannot always change our emotions, and we certainly do not want to suppress them, we can condition them.
Last week we looked at how God made peace with us through the death and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ. Here we begin to explore some of the ways that receiving this peace changes us.
First, this peace changes how we view God. The late Bible scholar par excellence Robert Haldane once said: “While guilt remains in the conscience, enmity will also rankle in the heart; for so long as men look upon their sins as unpardoned and on God as the avenger of their transgressions, they must regard Him as being to them a consuming fire. But when they view God in Christ reconciling them to Himself, not imputing their iniquities to them, peace, according to the measure of faith, is established in the conscience.”
If that sounds like a lot to take in, let me say it again graphically. If a great thief knows his guilt, he will tremble on his way through the door into the courtroom. But, if he knows that everything he stole was paid back in full by the judge himself, his trembling will turn to joy. He has nothing left to fear. His heart now overflows with gratitude and joy before the judge, who paid his great debt.
Whether a Gentile or a Jew, whether you live life on the wild side or follow all the rules, whether you live and let live or look down on everyone who does not live like you do, we all have waged war against God.
How can this be? First, we all sin. We can sin in wild ways. We can also sin by condemning those who do not conform to our own moral standards. In whatever way we sin, we are telling God, through our sin, that we now claim control of this world and our lives. We are telling him that he and his ways have no claim upon us.
You could think of it like this. What happens when two parties of people claim ultimate authority over the same thing? We see this happening in Ukraine. Russia claims sovereignty over certain parts of Ukraine, which Ukraine claims as their own. When two parties say they each have ultimate control over the same thing, war breaks out. When we sin against God, we claim ultimate control over our lives and this world. We declare independence and thus wage war against God through our sin.
Consequently, God must also declare war against us. God will not let the guilty go free without reaping the consequence any more than he will allow innocent victims to go without justice forever. God cannot look at sin and evil with indifference. He must respond.
We are not able to end this war. Why? Because no mere mortal has ever figured out how to stop sinning. We all sin in unique ways, and we cannot help ourselves. Because none of us have figured out how to stop sinning, we cannot turn to God and say, “we’re cool, bro, right?” any more than Russia can say to Ukraine, “We’re cool, right?” We cannot create peace with God because we habitually break peace with God.
Therefore, only one mediator between humanity and God has ever existed: Jesus Christ. When God in Christ came to earth, he was calling a peace summit. Yet, he did not say, “If you would only stop doing this, then we can have peace.” There were no “ifs” at God’s peace summit. God simply said, “I’ll absorb the cost of the damage myself.” When Christ died on the cross, he took what was due us because of our guilt. In other words, when we receive Christ’s offer of peace born out in his death and resurrection, we are acquitted of all guilt, vindicated before the judgement throne of God, and thus have peace with God.
Unlike Peter or Mary, when John went into Jesus’ empty tomb, something incredible happened. Not only did he see all that Peter saw. He believed (John 20:8). Why did John believe before the others?
Distraught and weeping, Mary says to Peter, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” (John 20:2) Peter and another disciple immediately run to the tomb to check things out for themselves. The other disciple outran Peter. He arrived at the tomb first.
They would have cut the tomb where Jesus was laid into the rock of the Judean hillside. The entryway would have been low to the ground, so that the other disciple would have needed to bend low to peak in. As the sun had risen higher, enough light would have entered the tomb so that this other disciple could see what Mary could not have seen earlier. He sees the linen burial strips lying there. He does not go in. We can excuse him. This was, after all, someone else’s tomb. Laws prohibited, just as today, tampering with someone else’s grave.
Mary, still literally in the dark, sees the stone taken away from the tomb where her beloved friend was laid. Given the low sunlight – the sun had probably just cracked the horizon – she probably could not see into his cave-like tomb. She assumes, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb…” (John 20:1)
Mary’s assumption was reasonable enough. Imagine you were at a cemetery walking up to the grave of your loved one. You see a pile of dirt next to a hole where you know your loved one was laid to rest, but you have not yet moved close enough to peer in. What might you assume? You might assume someone took the body. Mary did. She did not know better.
The darkness, in John’s Gospel, signifies something more than the early hour. We all, like Mary, start in the dark. We all, like Mary, start with assumptions about who this Jesus really is. In John’s gospel, people have been making all sorts of assumptions about Jesus. Some called him “the Prophet (John 6:14).” Others called him the Christ without yet knowing what that title meant (for example, John 7:31). Still others said he had a demon or was insane (John 10:20).
In the wee hours of the morning Mary Magdalene went to the tomb of her recently deceased Master and friend, Jesus. The sun had not yet ruptured the horizon. When she arrived, the stone sealing the tomb, much to her surprise, had been taken away. (See John 20:1)
We know from the other gospel accounts that Mary Magdalene was not the only one there. Other women accompanied her. Yet, Mary Magdalene, in all the gospel accounts, is given center stage. Later we find out that she was also the first to meet the risen Lord.
When we take into account the culture of that time, Mary’s center stage presence at the empty tomb surprises us. A woman? Women were not even considered legally valid witnesses in a Jewish courtroom at that time. A woman like Mary Magdalene? Jesus cast seven demons out of this woman not long ago (Luke 8:2). She had a checkered past. Furthermore, if I am doing the math correctly, she was likely the youngest of this group of women who went to the tomb.
The first Palm Sunday looked like people throwing a birthday party for a birthday boy they did not know. People had high expectations on the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem, but the full meaning of the event would not make sense till later. (Read John 12:12-19)
The crowd that met Jesus on the way expected a national hero. They came out to meet Jesus thinking he was the one who would lead an insurrection against Rome and return the nation’s sovereignty back to the Jews.
Other people there on that first Palm Sunday responded in a different way. They did not lift palms or chant victory. They boiled with rage. The Jewish leaders feared an insurrection would threaten their socio-economically beneficial relationship with Rome.
One day Jesus will come as a warrior king to palm branches and shouts of victory to claim his Kingdom once and for all (Revelation 7:9-10). However, if Jesus was marching to victory on Palm Sunday, victory started with a death march to the cross.
A man might spend his whole life drinking, smoking, and eating poorly. He knows these things are killing him and that he will most likely die prematurely unless he stops. However, he loves the booze. He loves the way it numbs the pain. He loves smoking. It calms him, and he cannot imagine coping without it. He loves the fatty food. Why eat such bland food, when tastebud tantalizing food awaits? So, although he knows he will die sooner, he keeps living this way. All the while, he has no clue what life could be without his senses dulled, a wheeze in his lungs, and all that cholesterol blocking his arteries. And, though he says, “I could never live that way,” he is robbing himself of experiencing a more enjoyable life.
No other document in American history has more profoundly shaped our nation’s sense of identity than the Declaration of Independence. Not only did our founding fathers declare independence from Great Britain with it, but the reasons they gave to legitimize such a radical declaration later came to shape our nation in the years to come.
One line in that declaration holds such gravitas that we Americans find our hearts stirred anew every time we hear it: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Neither the man who originally penned those words nor many of our founders succeeded to live fully up to those words. Nevertheless, the profundity of those words helped shape governance and jurisprudence in the infant years of our country.
But where did our founders get that idea that “all men are created equal” and that this truth was “self-evident”? One well-known rabbi said: “The striking thing about this sentence is that ‘these truths’ are anything but self-evident. Most societies at most times have held as self-evidently true that we are created unequal. […] Plato held that society was stratified into three classes: guardians (philosopher-kings), auxiliaries (soldiers), and the rest; and that whether or not these distinctions were given by birth, people should be taught that they were. Aristotle believed that some people were born to be slaves. Gradations of class were written into the structure of reality. The strong, powerful, wealthy, and highborn were meant (whether by nature or by God) to exercise supremacy over others.” Neither would Nietzsche nor the Hindu caste system hold the truth that all men are created equal to be self-evident.
