What does Paul mean when he talks about peace? What does Jesus have to say about peacemakers? Is peace a feeling or an action or both? To learn about this we will have to travel all the way from Galilee to Galatia and then to Rome.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
Well, we’ve been going through the Fruit of the Spirit backward for a while now, learning to be like Jesus and if you need a reminder, Paul tells us that the Fruit of the Spirit (aka what we become as we grow to be more and more like Jesus) is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And we have talked a lot about how those words often don’t do a very good job of describing what that meant to people who lived at the same time as Jesus. Like faithfulness is more like being trustworthy and also trusting Jesus no matter what, and goodness has a lot to do with being generous. But what about peace? What does peace mean? Well, let me tell you what it doesn’t mean because a whole lot of grownups (me included) were taught a pretty wrong-headed way of thinking about it. I mean, gosh, I was taught that peace is just something you feel on the inside and especially when God is happy with the decisions we are making but that is a really dangerous way to look at it because evil people from the beginning of time, when they honestly believe what they are doing isn’t actually wrong, can feel good and confident about their choices no matter how horrible they are! Do we think Hitler thought he was a bad guy or that he was doing God’s will when he was killing the Jews, Gypsies, disabled, and whoever else he hated? And a whole lot of people followed him and they thought they were right too. Most of them even went to church and read their Bibles but their teachers were twisting up the words to make them about hate instead of about God’s love for the world. All the world. All types of people. And how about the Klu Klux Klan here in America? They would go to church on Sundays and burn crosses on peoples’ lawns at night and even worse, they would kill and lynch black men right after church at picnics. And they must have had peace about what they were doing and were thinking it was right. By peace, I mean they were confident and felt good about what they were doing. In their hearts, meaning in their thoughts, they honestly thought they were right even though it seems absolutely evil and crazy to us today. And slaveholders and the people who went out and killed the Native Americans and stole from them believed they were right to do so. The prophet Jeremiah said that our hearts are wicked and can’t be trusted and this sort of thing is what he was talking about. Throughout all of history, from the pograms against the Jews to the crusades to the inquisition and even up to today, people who say they love God have felt good and right about doing the worst things imaginable. They aren’t up at night thinking, “Boy am I a terrible person.” They are thinking, “I am a hero doing what has to be done.”
In the book series, The Hunger Games, it is just shocking what people are okay with but history has shown how good we all are at thinking we are good when we are actually bad. The Harry Potter books (but not the movies) show how used the “pure bloods” are to the enslavement of elves and how far they are willing to go to kill people whom they don’t think measure up to their own standards. In fact, if you look at some of the most popular books of all time, you will see this common theme—people who are villains usually don’t know it. President Snow believes he is doing what has to be done to protect his culture and Lord Voldemort thinks that there isn’t any good or evil at all but just power. We were created to have a conscience, which is that voice or feeling inside us that tells us what we are doing is wrong or right but if we don’t listen to it for long enough then we will stop hearing it entirely. And sometimes we get taught from the time we are little that wrong is actually right, so when our consciences tell us we are wrong, we might not listen—we might even make the mistake of thinking that it’s Satan trying to trick us. That’s a big reason why it is so important to know about Jesus and everything He did and said and to pay close attention and not ignore Him. Everything Jesus says is right and good and perfect and shows us what God is really like in person—even though God isn’t a person, right? People are created, God isn’t. People are male and female, men and women, boys and girls, but God has no body at all. What we can know about God isn’t what He looks like but who and how He is, what is good and bad in His eyes, and how He wants us to be as His images in the earth—showing the world what He is like.
So, if peace is a feeling, then we are going to be trusting in what we feel instead of paying close attention to what is actually good and bad, and if we do that we’ll be going by our own opinions. You know, I once heard about a gal who said she believed in God but she also was proud to say that she cursed her own grandma to death. She felt totally good about the idea that she had done that. She had peace that it was God telling her to do it. Um, I don’t think so! Don’t you think that if she was that bad and that God actually wanted her dead, that he would do it some other way. God doesn’t tell us the murder people we hate with our words and thoughts, right? But she thought she was right because she felt good about it. Somehow I think that God stopped yelling at her to stop so long before her grandma died that she just assumed she was right because He wasn’t trying to stop her anymore. We are really good at feeling good about doing the stuff we want to do, going where we want to go, and taking what we want to take. But it isn’t God’s job to nag us all the time. It’s our responsibility to want to hear what He has to say, especially through the words of Jesus and through the Holy Spirit, and not just to hear but to listen. Do you remember the Shema prayer? We are supposed to listen to what He says and to do it too. And when we are reading the Bible and God tells one person to do something, we had better make sure not to assume that we are supposed to do the same thing. That’s gotten a lot of people into a lot of trouble when they go through the Bible trying to find a verse that gives them permission to do something really awful. I once read a book that talked about a preacher who believed that he had permission to do every bad thing that Abraham, David, and others did so that he would be the perfect leader. Like, heck no! Are you kidding me????
So, now that we know we can feel good and peaceful when we should be too embarrassed to even get out of bed in the morning, let’s see what Jesus had to say about what kind of peace He was talking about. There are actually two kinds and one of them actually is about how we feel. Let’s talk about that one first. I don’t want you to think your emotions and feelings are bad because they aren’t. God gave us emotions and feelings and they can be so wonderful. I remember holding my baby boys when they were just born and how amazing that felt—they turned 24 over the weekend but I can still remember how they smelled and how they felt and how happy I was after so many years without children. Being afraid can tell us that something is wrong, or at least that we think something is wrong. Worrying about something or someone might be God telling us to pray and to get closer to Him. Anger can be bad if we use it to hurt people but good when we use it to do what is right to help others. Emotions are useful and without them, life would be pretty yucky and boring. The Bible even tells us that God has emotions and feelings.
But one of the interesting things about emotions is how they can change as we grow to trust God more and more and to listen to Him. Without God, the world can be a super scary place and we can even become hopeless that things won’t ever get anything better and that we totally doomed. People might hurt us and seem to get away with it forever—that’s really frustrating. Or maybe they say bad things about us that aren’t true and we’re afraid no one will ever trust us again—how awful would that be? But the strange thing about the Holy Spirit is that we can grow into people who have seen what God does enough times that even when things are terrible at the moment, we have hope that God will make things right again. I have been through some really scary, frustrating things and I know what it is like to believe that things will always be bad but as I have gotten to know God better and better it’s easier and easier for me to trust Him and when I trust Him, I feel a lot better. I know it’s not the end of the world even though I am miserable today. That’s the sort of peace we can trust in, that when we are suffering because someone else has done something bad, God will make things right eventually. When we know it and truly believe it, then our lives change a lot. We become the sorts of people who don’t need to get even or get revenge. We can trust God to handle things and I have seen it happen many times in my life. When you are a teacher, sometimes people don’t like what you say at all and try to get people to not listen and sometimes they have to lie to do it. Sometimes it works for a while, and it is scary and sad when it happens, but I have learned that I can have peace about it because if God wants someone to listen to me, they will no matter what anyone else does to hurt me. I don’t have to hurt them. It’s nice not to have the responsibility to make sure everything turns out okay. That’s God’s job. But when I see something wrong happening to someone else, it’s my job to do something to make it right as long as I do it in the right ways. We can do that when we have what the Apostle Paul calls, “the peace of God that goes beyond anything we can understand.” That means what we feel and know in our hearts from God just makes no sense compared to what we can see around us. Like Daniel in the lion’s den or Shadrach, Mischach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace or David on the run from King Saul. We might say they were crazy not to be scared out of their wits and panicking but they trusted God when nothing and no one else could be trusted. So, if you have a good feeling about God making things right whenever everything around you is going crazy, you can trust that feeling.
What did Jesus have to say about the peace of the Kingdom of Heaven? It sounds so crazy that people call the Kingdom of God the upside-down Kingdom because nothing Jesus tells us to do to make God happy seems like it should work in our world. And especially about peace! We like having big armies and government power and lots of money because we think that those things keep us safe but Jesus says that only God can keep us safe and we show people who He is by living as though His Kingdom is all here already. Jesus said that it is better for us to be meek (gentle and humble servants instead of powerful tyrants), merciful (taking pity on people instead of getting revenge or taking advantage of people who are weaker), and peacemakers. Jesus said all of that to people who had no army, no money, and no power. They were ruled over by cruel leaders who sent cruel soldiers to hurt them and cruel tax collectors to take too much of their money and cruel religious leaders who were taking advantage of the poor. Some of them wanted to get even with the evil Roman Empire, but that never turned out well. Jesus told them that acting like the Romans was the opposite of acting like God’s people and it was better for them to have nothing at all than to be a rich Roman taking advantage of the weak and powerless. The Romans had all of the honor in their world, all of the power and bling and reputation, but Jesus was telling the people that those people were at the very bottom in God’s opinion and acting like that was the worst way to live. In fact, if we say that God’s Kingdom is normal, then the Romans were doing everything upside-down. The way the Romans lived was the opposite of being peacemakers, even though they claimed they were bringing peace to the world.
It’s super crazy but the Romans really believed and said that they were making the world a much more peaceful place. They called it Pax Romana, which means Roman Peace. They took their huge armies and went all over Asia Minor, Africa and Europe killing people and taking over their countries and stealing all of their food and they called it peace. They tortured people and took all of their money and said they were doing it to bring peace on earth. In fact, they said the same things about their Emperor, Caesar Augustus, that the Bible says about Jesus—that the birth of Augustus was good news for the world and that he was bringing peace to the whole world. Of course, Augustus’s peace killed a whole lot of people and when Tiberius Caesar was the ruler of the Roman Empire, Roman peace even killed Jesus! But before that, when Jesus was preaching to His Jewish followers and disciples, He was telling them that everything the Romans did to make themselves rich and powerful and comfortable was the absolute wrong way of living. You can’t be truly blessed when you go around killing people and taking their stuff. You can’t be blessed when you are making people in other countries work hard for nothing so that you can have a lot of stuff practically for free. You can’t be blessed when people are working as slaves. Do you remember when we talked about what blessing meant when it was used to talk about Abraham and God? Blessing means a nearness to God, meaning He is near and not far away. Abraham was near to God, and so was Moses, and God told Abraham that through Jesus, the whole world could be near to God and blessed. There isn’t anything on this earth better than being close to God and knowing Him and having Him know you. Not power or money or having a lot of cool stuff. Without God, it isn’t a blessing at all. It’s just stuff that will disappear when we die, or maybe long before we die. God is the one thing that no one can take away from us. Even if everyone hates you for no reason, they can’t make God hate you. No one can make God believe lies about you or convince Him to give up on you.
The Romans had all of that power and money and stuff but they only knew gods that were carved out of stone! The people who were turning to Jesus as the Messiah, the true King of the World forever, had every good thing that can’t ever be taken away even if they were the poorest of the poor, or slaves. If you have God, then you have everything and without Him, you have nothing worth having. Jesus was saying, “all that stuff, they have because they hurt people and they go on hurting people and they see nothing wrong with it. They are rich, cruel, powerful, and if you make them mad they will get even with you but they don’t have God or God’s truth so they have nothing. In the end, they will have absolutely nothing and it will do them no good. But you will have God and eternal life forever with Him and with me here on earth. You will have everything because you didn’t believe everything you saw. They look blessed but they are cursed without God. You look cursed right now but if you live the way everyone will live in the Kingdom of Heaven when I am King here over all the Kingdoms of the world, you have everything worth having. And you can have it without hating, killing, stealing, getting revenge, or anything like that. You are going to look pathetic, weak, and maybe even crazy to some folks and even most religious people won’t understand, but you will be showing people what the true Kingdom of the only real God looks like and you will be rewarded because you trusted God enough to live that way.”
That’s what it looks like to be an image bearer in this world, to be real human beings who look like the real God in how they love one another and in how they live their lives. That’s why peace is so important. Jesus said that the peacemakers would actually be called the sons of God. WHOA!! People who try to make peace instead of war, instead of getting revenge, instead of breaking the world into little groups that are always fighting over this and that—they are the ones acting like God is their father. In fact, God told David that he couldn’t build God a Temple because he had too much blood on his hands. David wasn’t only a warrior and the head of the army but also a murderer because he wanted what wasn’t his. Solomon built God a Temple when he was young, having never fought a war, but later taxed his people and all the countries around him so he could pay for temples for the false gods of all his foreign wives and for his over the top wealthy lifestyle. Rehoboam’s selfishness and cruelty split the Kingdom of Israel into two different countries. Even Hezekiah, one of the best kings, got his country into trouble by showing off all his stuff to the Babylonians who decided it would be a great idea to come and take it. When we look at the kings of David’s family, we see a bunch of guys who were guilty of not acting like the sons of God in one way or another even though God told David that they would be His sons. None of them was even close to perfect and every single one was doing something that the Romans were also guilty of—and sometimes everything they were guilty of and worse because at least the Romans weren’t sacrificing their children. The Jews had no perfect example of a King. Neither did anyone else for that matter! That’s why Jesus was teaching the Jews another way and many listened and believed and followed Him. But the Bible says that the ones who loved power and money hated Him.
The world tells us that if we don’t have money and power and stuff, that we are nothing. But Jesus tells us that if we have God, then we have absolutely everything. We can’t buy God with money, or capture Him in a war, or impress Him with our power and influence. The Kingdom of Heaven isn’t a Kingdom of stuff, money or power and someday those things won’t be important to us anymore. Anything that won’t be important to us when Jesus is here with us as King, really shouldn’t be part of our goals now. We can’t be peacemakers if we aren’t loving our neighbors, and loving our neighbors means that we do what is in their best interest—seeing to their needs and being good examples of God’s love for them.
When we love people, we want them to have what they need, to be healthy, and to know God. We want people to be good to one another and we want to be good to them. We want to be fair with them, and to make sure they are treated fairly and that they get justice when something bad has happened to them. We cry when they are crying and laugh when they are celebrating something good. We aren’t jealous of them or looking for ways to get even when they make us angry. Truth is, that when we truly love others, we won’t be quick to fight or to insult them or lash out when we get angry. The Kingdom of God is a Kingdom of absolute peace ruled over by the Prince of Peace, Jesus, who can always be trusted because He is patient, generous, kind, trustworthy, gentle, and never loses His temper with us even when we have a major time-out coming.
Paul said something important to the churches in Rome, the very place where the evil emperors lived and ruled and planned their wars. He said, “For however much it depends on you, make sure you are living in peace with everyone around you.” That means that although we can’t do anything about the ways people treat us, we need to be good to them instead of treating them the way they treat us. Because when we do that, it confuses them. When we can fight, but choose not to, it gives Satan nothing to work with and oftentimes, people will give up going after us because they don’t want to look bad. Of course, there are always bullies who don’t care if we don’t fight back and boy oh boy are they annoying. We don’t want to be anything like them because if the people who are peacemakers are called the sons of God then the bullies are definitely called something else entirely. Even if they go to church. Even if they are teachers and preachers at church. If they are bullies then they are the opposite of peacemakers.
There are always going to be people who are weird and annoying and different and if you want to be called a son of God then you had better not bully them. Be at peace with them, no fighting. They probably need a kind example so they can see what Jesus is like. Everyone already knows what Satan is like so you don’t need to be a bully to show them that. There are always plenty of people behaving badly and picking fights without us joining in. Being a bully is easy, being like Jesus is hard. But being a bully, even if it feels good sometimes, is a trap that hurts them and hurts us. Being a bully is proof that we aren’t like Jesus and don’t even want to be like Jesus. There are plenty of bullies in the Bible and in our history books and on television but even most people who don’t know Jesus or follow Him don’t like bullies and know in their hearts that being violent and hurtful with words or hands is the opposite of being a son of God.
The kings of Israel and Judah, they were all powerful and wealthy and had all the stuff but in the end, all any of them ever did was show us that we need a different kind of King. Jesus didn’t have power in the government, or money, or stuff and a lot of folks even hated Him. Even his brothers didn’t want to have anything to do with Him before He came back from the dead. Jesus called Himself humble and gentle, so it is safe to listen to Him and follow Him and when we do that, we can find rest for our whole selves instead of the stress that comes from trying to get power and money and stuff from other people.
I love you. I am praying for you. What is it like when you are with people you know won’t hurt you, lie about you, steal from you, or trick you? It’s easy to relax, right? You don’t want to fight, right? Well, that’s how Jesus wants us to feel with Him and how He wants other people to feel when they are with us.