SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 5/23/2020
12:22 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “What is the Meaning of Peace”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew 5:9
Message of the
verse: “Blessed
are the peacemakers, For they shall be called sons of God.”
The
peace that Jesus is teaching about here is not just the absence of conflict and
strife, as it is the presence of righteousness.
We think for a moment of what happened in the Garden of Eden when
everything was perfect and Adam and Eve had a perfect relationship with the Lord. Then we come to chapter three and all of that
is done because of sin and so everyone born of Adam has that sin nature, the
flesh, that is passed on by Adam.
Mankind has to have righteousness before they can be at the kind of
peace that Jesus is speaking of here and that can only come through faith in
the Lord Jesus Christ, the work that He completed when He died for sin, was
buried, and then rose again on the third day.
Let us look for a moment at 1 Corinthian 15:1-4 “1 Now I make known to
you, brethren, the gospel
which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, 2 by
which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you,
unless you believed in vain. 3 For I delivered to you as of first importance
what I also received, that
Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the
Scriptures.” First comes
repentance and then once that happens comes faith in Jesus Christ who took our
sins away and then we become a believer and with that comes the righteousness
of Jesus Christ imputed to our account.
God is satisfied. Propitiation’s
meaning in the Greek of the days of the Apostles meant the satisfaction of an
angry god, as they had many gods during that time period. God is satisfied with what Christ did on the
cross for us and that is how the word propitiation comes into play for us.
“Men
can stop fighting with righteousness, but they cannot live peaceably without
righteousness. Righteousness not only
puts an end to harm, but it administers the healing of love” writes John
MacArthur.
So
as we look at God’s peace we see that it not only stops war but replaces it
with the righteousness that brings harmony and also true well-being. MacArthur adds “Peace is a creative,
aggressive force for goodness. The
Jewish greeting shalom wishes ‘peace’
and expresses the desire that the one who is greeted will have all the
righteousness and goodness God can give.
The deepest meaning of the term is ‘God’s highest good to you.’”
In the history of our world we have seen many of
man’s offering of peace and that is with a truce, which is a temporary
cessation of hostilities. This can
happen between two people of two nations, but most of the time in the end it
will fail. A short 22 years after WWI
ended WWII began, so the peace that happened at the end of the first war was
very short lived. After WWII a cold war
began. However God’s peace not only
stops the hostilities but it settles the issues and brings the parties together
in mutual love and harmony.
I
will close this SD with a short story that many of you may have heard, and that
is a story about a contest. There was a prize
for the one who could paint the best picture of peace and it came down to three
different pictures. The one that won was
a picture of a bird on her nest on a branch that was over a waterfall. Seems strange but the little birds had peace
as the mother bird was protecting them in what could be described as a storm of
danger. God does that to those who
belong to Him as there is not an absence of conflict but the presence of the
peace that passes all understand that will guard your hearts in Christ Jesus.
5/23/2020 12:47 PM
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