“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” Matthew 5:9

Jesus is called the Prince of Peace, and Christmas always feels like a magical time when we celebrate peace’s romantic kiss to earth! This year, however, the times feel different—or maybe I’m just in a funk. As when Christmas interrupted the battlefields of WWII, December 25th was, and is, only an interlude to an earth divided. The era of peace is still beyond the end of the long dark tunnel.

Let us be sober minded this Christmas! There is a war against peace in our land. We don’t have to fear it, but we do have to fight it, and wrestle for the soul of our nation.

The truth is, Jesus only established the possibility of peace with God. The choice is still up to us. And people are stilling making war with God and with one another. There will be no Peace on Earth until mankind makes peace with God, or until the God of Peace makes war with mankind. Either way, peace does not coexist with injustice.

Jesus taught, “blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God.” He did not say, “blessed are the peacekeepers.” We've assumed that peacemakers are some inert force that live in the neutrality of bipartisan efforts. Or we have mistaken the “peacemaker” blessing to be directed toward those passive men and women that make no ripples in the tank. To be sure, there are blessings for the innocent and supple souls that live in the quietness of righteousness. That blessing is the blessing of the “meek”. Yet the meek may stand idly by while some great and many horrors run loose over the population. Did the silence and surrender of the meek bring peace to the earth? Absolutely not! Truth be told, it is often the timidity and fear of the meek that has permitted societies to tolerate evil in the first place. The blessing for the “peacemaker” is entirely different. It is a blessing given to one who is a way-maker for peace.

The peacemaker is one who “makes” peace happen by force of spiritual arms. The peacemaker is active in disarming the rebel, chiseling down mountains of deception or injustice, and resisting evil at all points necessary. The peacemaker may be the salt of the earth, but not in a passive sort of way. Their active participation in society confronts the degenerative agenda of evil—even lays its own life down to establish God's justice in the earth.

The peacemaker may not employ guns or swords, but they wield an incredible amount of influence to stop wrongdoing and to catalyze right-doing. They are forces of judgment and truth in the land, voices and harbingers of activation. They war for the hearts and minds of their people. They shout at the evil in their midst. They are ceaseless in confronting it. To their credit, they swim so hard against the tide of human opinion, or consensus, that they are labeled offspring of another kind—“children of God”. A higher identity, citizenship, and prophetic power emanates through them to wield authority to stop spiritual darkness and start spiritual righteousness.

Peace never comes from a lack of authority, nor does it benefit from neutrality. Such diffidence in the face of immorality leads to anarchy, confusion, and moral darkness. Peace requires law and judgment, it necessitates the confrontation of evil, since evil is the destruction of peace. “The son of man came to destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8). There is nothing passive about the Prince of Peace, or his offspring.

Evil is the violation of law that infringes on the God-given humanity and dignity of people. Righteous authority brings protection and order to civilizations. Peacemakers battle for preventative action and judicial enforcement of justice. They seek correction for the offender and restitution to the offended. In the complex world of sin, bitterness, retaliation, slander, misinformation, ethnic cleansings, and broken covenants, God’s Word and His law untangles the web of wounding without dismissing the losses of injustice. He seeks the cessation of hatred before the cessation of arms. He casts down the evil before He casts down the person. And this is God’s promise to His peacemakers, “The God of Peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Roman 16:20).

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