These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.
— John 16:33
Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ:
— Romans 5:1
Until the spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness be a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be counted for a forest. Then judgment shall dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness remain in the fruitful field. And the work of righteousness shall be peace; and the effect of righteousness quietness and assurance for ever.
— Isaiah 32:15-17
The LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.
— Numbers 6:26
What is Here Meant by Peace, by William Gurnall. The following contains an excerpt from Chapter Ten of his work, “The Christian in Complete Armour.”
‘Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you,’ John 14:27
DIRECTION VII.—SECOND GENERAL PART.
WHAT IS HERE MEANT BY PEACE.
The second inquiry follows, viz.—What peace is here meant that is attributed to the gospel. Peace is a comprehensive word. ‘We looked for peace,’ saith the prophet, ‘but no good came,’ Jer. 8:15. Peace brings, and carries away again with it, all good, as the sun doth light, to and from the world. When Christ would to the utmost express how well he wished his disciples, he wraps up all the happiness which his large heart could beterm them in this blessing of peace—‘Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you,’ John 14:27. Now, take peace in its greatest latitude, if not spurious, and it will be found to grow upon this gospel-root. So that we shall lay the conclusion in general terms.
DOCTRINE. True peace is the blessing of the gospel, and only of the gospel. This will appear in the several kinds of peace, which may be sorted into this FOURFOLD division:—FIRST. Peace with God which we may call peace of reconciliation. SECOND. Peace with ourselves, or peace of conscience. THIRD. Peace with one another, or peace of love and unity. FOURTH. Peace with the other creatures, even the most hurtful, which may be called a peace of indemnity and service. Let us begin, where all the others begin, with peace of reconciliation with God. For when man fell out with God, he fell out with himself, and all the world besides; and he can never come to be at peace with these, till his peace be made with God. Tranquillus Deus tranquillat omnia—a tranquil God tranquilizes all things.FIRST KIND OF PEACE. PEACE WITH GOD the blessing of the gospel.
Peace with God we may call peace of reconciliation; and peace of reconciliation with God is the blessing of the gospel. Three things are here to be done in prosecution of the point.
FIRST. I shall show you that there is a quarrel depending between God and the sons of men. SECOND. I shall show you that the gospel, and only the gospel, takes this up, and makes peace betwixt God and man; therefore called the gospel of peace. THIRD. I shall show you why God conveys this second piece of reconciliation into the world in this way, and by this method.
Need for peace with God.
FIRST. I shall show you there is a quarrel depending betwixt God and the sons of men. Open acts of hostility done by one nation against another proclaim there is a war commenced. Now, such acts of hostility pass betwixt God and man. Bullets fly quickly to and fro on either hand. Man, he lets fly against God—though, against his will, he shoots short —whole volleys of sins and impieties. The best saints acknowledge thus much of themselves, before converting grace took them off. ‘We ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures,’ Titus 3:3. Mark the last words, ‘serving lusts and pleasures.’ They were in pay to sin, willing to fight against God, and side with this his only enemy. Not a faculty of the soul or member of the body of an unconverted man which is not in arms against him. ‘The carnal mind,’ saith the apostle, ‘is enmity against God,’ Rom. 8:7. And if there be war in the mind, to be sure there can be no peace in the members—inferior faculties, I mean—of the soul, which are commanded all by it. Indeed, we are by nature worst in our best part; the enmity against God is chiefly seated in the superior faculties of the soul. As in armies, the common soldiery are wholly taken up with the booty and spoil they get by the war, without much minding one side or other, but the more principal officers, especially the princes or general, go into the field full of enmity against them that oppose them; so the inferior faculties seek only satisfaction to their sensual appetite in the booty that sin affords, but the superior faculties of the mind, these come forth more directly against God, and oppose his sovereignty; yea, if it could lay a plot effectually to take away the life of God himself, there is enmity enough in the carnal mind to put it in execution.
And as man is in arms against God, so is he against man. ‘God is angry with the wicked every day;…he hath bent his bow and made it ready; he hath also prepared for him the instruments of his death,’ Ps. 7:11-13. God hath set up his royal standard in defiance of all the sons and daughters of apostate Adam, who from his own mouth are proclaimed rebels and traitors to his crown and dignity; and as against such, he hath taken the field, as with fire and sword, to be avenged on them. Yea, he gives the world sufficient testimony of his incensed wrath, by that of it which is revealed from heaven daily in the judgements executed upon sinners, and those, many of them, but ‘of a span long’—before they can show what nature they have by actual sin—yet crushed to death by God’s righteous foot, only for the viperous kind of which they come. At every door where sin sets it foot, there the wrath of God meets us. Every faculty of soul and member of body are used as a weapon of unrighteousness against God; so every one hath its portion of wrath, even to the tip of the tongue. As man is sinful all over, so is he cursed all over; inside and outside, soul and body, written all with woes and curses so close and full, that there is not room for another to interline or add to what God hath written.
In a word, so fiery is the Lord’s wrath against sinful man, that all the creatures share with him in it. Though God takes his aim at man, and levels his arrows primarily at his very heart, yet as they go they slant upon the creature. God’s curse blasts the whole creation for man’s sake; and so he pays him some of his misery from the hand of those creatures which were primarily ordained to minister to him in his happy estate, yea, contribute some drops to the filling of his cup. As an enraged army makes spoil and havoc of all in their enemies’ land—destroys their provision, stops or poisons their waters, burns up their houses, and lets out his fury on all his hand comes at—truly thus God plagues man in every creature, not one escapes his hand. The very bread we eat, water we drink, and air we breathe in, are poisoned with the curse of God; of which they who live longest die at last. All these, however, are no more to hell than the few files of men in a forlorn to the whole body of an army. God doth but skirmish with sinners here, by some small parties of judgments, sent out to let them know they have an enemy alive, that observes their motions, takes the alarm their sins give him, and can be too hard for them when he pleaseth. But it is in hell where he falls on with his whole power. There sinners ‘shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power,’ II Thes. 1:9. And so much for the first, that there is a quarrel between God and man: the second follows.
The gospel effects the peace needed.
SECOND. I shall show you that the gospel, and only the gospel, takes this quarrel up, and makes peace between God and man:—therefore called the ‘gospel of peace.’ This will appear in two particulars. First. The gospel presents us with the articles of peace which God offers graciously to treat upon with the children of men, and this none but the gospel doth. Second. The gospel, preached and published, is the great instrument of God to effect this peace thus offered.
First. The gospel presents us with the articles of peace which God graciously offers to treat and conclude an inviolable peace upon, with rebellious man. In it we have the whole method which God laid in his own thoughts from eternity of reconciling poor sinners to himself. The gospel, what is it but God’s heart in print? The precious promises of the gospel, what are they but heaven’s court-rolls translated into the creature’s language? In them are exposed to the view of our faith all the counsels and purposes of love and mercy which were concluded on by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for the recovery of lost man by Jesus Christ, who was sent as heaven’s plenipotentiary to earth, fully empowered and enabled, not only by preaching to treat of a peace as desired on God’s part to be concluded between God and man, but by the purchase of his death to procure a peace, and by his Spirit to seal and ratify the same to all those who —believing the credential letters which God sent with him in the miracles wrought by him, and especially the testimony which the Scripture gives of him—do by a faith unfeigned receive him into their souls as their only Lord and Saviour, Gal. 3:23. This is such a notion as is not to be learned elsewhere. A deep silence we find concerning it in Aristotle and Tully. They cannot tell us how a poor sinner may be at peace with God. Nothing of this is to be spelled from the covenant God made with Adam. That shuts the sinner up in a dark dungeon of despair—bids him look for nothing but what the wrath of a just God can measure out to him. Thus the guilty creature is surrounded on every side as with a deluge of wrath —no hope nor help to be heard of—till the gospel, like the dove, brings the olive branch of peace, and tells him the tide is turned, and that flood of wrath which was poured on man for his sin is now fallen into another channel, even upon Christ, who was ‘made a curse for us,’ =and hath not only drunk of the brook that lay in the way and hindered our passage to God, but hath drunk it off; so that where a sea was now appears dry land, a safe and fair causey, called, ‘a living way,’ Heb. 10:20, by which every truly repenting and believing sinner may pass without any danger from the justice of God now appeased into the love and favor of God. ‘Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,’ Rom. 5:1. We are entirely beholden to the gospel for the discovery of this secret, which the apostle solemnly acknowledgeth, where Christ is said to bring ‘life and immortality to light by the gospel,’ II Tim. 1:10. It lay hid in the womb of God’s purpose, till the gospel arose, and let us into the knowledge of it, as the light of the sun reveals to the eye what was before, but what could not be seen without its light; and therefore, it is not only called ‘a living way,’ but ‘a new and living way which he hath consecrated for us,’ in the place forementioned—so ‘new,’ that the heart of man never was acquainted with one thought of it, till the gospel opens it, according to that of Isa. 42:16, ‘I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known.’
Second. The gospel, published and preached, is the great instrument of God to effect this peace. Before peace is concluded betwixt God and the creature, both must be agreed; as God to pardon, so the sinner to accept and embrace peace upon God’s own terms. But how shall this be done? The heart of man is so deeply rooted in its enmity against God, that it requires a strength to pluck up this equal with that which tears up mountains, and carries rocks from one place to another. The gospel preached is the instrument which God useth for the effecting of it. ‘I am not ashamed,’ saith the apostle, ‘of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation,’ Rom. 1:16. It is the chariot wherein the Spirit rides victoriously when he makes his entrance into the hearts of man—called therefore ‘the ministration of the Spirit,’ II Cor. 3:8. He fashions anew the heart, as he framed the world at first, with a word speaking. This is the day of God’s ‘power,’ wherein he makes his people ‘willing’—power indeed, to make those that had the seeds of war sown in their very natures against God willing to be friends with him. Unheard-of power! As if the beating of a drum should carry such a charm along with its sound as to make those on the enemy’s side upon the hearing of it to throw down their arms, and seek peace at his hand against whom they even now took the field with great rage and fury. Such a secret power accompanies the gospel. It strikes many times not only the sinner’s sword out of his hand while it is stretched out against God, but the enmity out of his heart, and brings the stoutest rebel upon his knee, humbly to crave the benefit of the articles of peace published in the gospel. It makes sinners so pliant and tractable to the call of God in the gospel, that they on a sudden, upon the hearing of a gospel sermon, forget their old natural affections which they have had to their beloved lusts, and leap out of their embraces with indignation, lest they should keep God and them at odds one moment longer.
https://takeupcross.com
takeupcross
Take Up the Cross 