The God of Peace

Few people desire strife, and those who love to stir up contention tend not to have many friends. This is because human beings have a deep hunger for peace. Certainly, sin has twisted men and women such that we get in the way of true and lasting peace, often engaging in unnecessary fights and sabotaging any attempts to bring people into accord with one another. Nevertheless, peace remains a goal that we strive for, even if imperfectly and haphazardly. Human beings desire harmony with one another even though we cannot achieve any lasting peace ourselves because we are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27), and God is the God of peace, as Paul notes in Romans 15:33.

Our Creator’s being the God of peace falls under the heading of divine goodness. After all, peace is a positive—when it is based on truth, of course. We remember that in the original creation, man and woman were at peace with one another, with God, and with the animals (Gen. 2). When our Maker pronounced creation “very good” (1:31), He made the declaration over a universe not yet at war with Him and with itself. Since the fall, the world has yearned for the restoration of this peace, and God’s prophets have predicted its return (Isa. 32:17; Rom. 8:23).

When we consider God as the God of peace, we must think of divine peace in two ways. First, there is God’s “inner peace,” or the reality that the Lord is always perfectly at peace and not subject to emotional turmoil or the emotional highs and lows that we experience. Scripture refers to the Lord with emotional language at times, stating that He may be grieved (e.g., see Gen. 6:6). We recognize, however, that we are not to take such descriptions literally, as if the Lord experienced mood swings or could grow sad or depressed as we can. If He did, He would be subject to change and thus not immutable. But the Lord does not change (Mal. 3:6).

Second, God is the God of peace because He is the ultimate source of any peace in the world. Creation was originally at peace with Him and with itself because that is how He established it. Now that the world is fallen and at war with itself and with its Creator, only God can bring peace again. This He has definitively accomplished through the sacrifice of Christ, who offered Himself to reconcile the elect to God, and the consummation of His work will be a world at harmony with itself and with the Lord again (Col. 1:15–23).