The Lord of Hosts and the Lord of Peace

“Now the Lord of peace Himself give you peace always by all means.”—2 Thessalonians iii. 16.

The passage: May the Lord of peace himself give you peace always, by all means.

There is another reading of this passage, which modern editors have preferred, and I think rightly. For by all means they read in every place. Our version’s wording may carry a good sense, but it sounds like a tame addition to what came before. The other reading adds a new thought and completes the prayer: may the Lord of Peace give you peace at all times and in all places. The Apostle is not content to wish that the peace be no less one year than another. He wants it to be the same whether his disciples are in Thessalonica, Athens or Rome, among friends or enemies, in a city or a desert, in a church or a prison.

Such a petition needs a deep and solid ground, and Paul assumes it as the very name of God: the Lord of Peace. His readers had all heard of a God of War. He was said to have watched over the infancy of the greatest city in the world and to have fathered its first king. Wherever the Roman Eagle had been carried, there were signs of him, and the name Thessalonica witnessed that he had been on that soil. Nor did the Scriptures Paul appealed to reject this title. They too spoke of a Lord of Hosts, and told every band of Jews that he was in its midst to strengthen it against enemies ten times as numerous. Did Paul come to insult the old faith of Greeks and Romans? Did he mean to recant the faith in which he was raised, embodied in the books he held most sacred? If he had done the first, I believe he would have robbed the heathen of a treasure instead of bringing them one. If he had done the second, he would have torn out the roots on which his faith in the Son of God grew. The Greeks had felt, by conscience and reason, that every act of courage, every great achievement, every triumph of order over brute force must be ascribed to some mysterious divine power. That faith was flickering, and since they lost their freedom it had almost died out. Paul’s business was to rekindle the sparks, not extinguish them. He believed this divine power was a righteous Being, just and without iniquity, who was warring to root evil out of his universe. For that end he made plagues, pestilences and earthquakes his instruments, and also men, formed in his image and appointed to carry on his government and execute his chastisements. They were not to shrink from that office but to believe he had called them to it, and to give him thanks if they fulfilled it rightly. This doctrine is written in sunbeams across the Old Testament, and Paul at least did not think it obsolete. He had every chance to say so. His special vocation was to teach the Gentiles. He would not let the law, ceremonial or moral, stand in the way of the Gospel. He saw clearly that everything exclusive in the Jewish polity would soon come to nothing. Yet he never said, “Our fathers were mistaken when they went out to battle in the name of the Lord, and we shall be mistaken if we imitate them.” He never said anything like it, or anything from which such an inference could legitimately be drawn.

But he did say these words: “The Lord of Peace.” He knew the heathen had never been satisfied with a God of War, however much the idea possessed them. They felt the olive was as sacred an emblem as the laurel, and that someone must be the source of which it testified. The quiet homestead, the growth of trees and flowers, the art of tillage must have an origin, as much as the feats of armies. Tempests surely did not witness to unseen power more than a still lake or a clear starlit evening. All sweet notes and their combinations told of a secret source of harmony. The heart that answered these sights and sounds demanded a Lord of Peace near, not far off. Was he a different Being from the God of War? The misery of polytheism was to believe he must be. How could such opposite effects come from one Cause? How could both be explained unless a number of powers were contending, stirring up contention in nature and in men? The only refuge from that belief was the philosophers’ dogma that the gods are untouched by human joys and sorrows, living in entire quietness, inactivity and self-concentration. The philosopher would have added “Peace,” but his conscience rebelled against using the word so. He might not see what Peace meant, but he knew that in its highest form it meant something altogether different from stupid repose and indolent selfishness.

The Jew had the blessed privilege of being taught, in direct words and by the whole course of his history, that the Lord his God was one Lord, and that the God of armies was the Lord of Peace. The acts of his power were the manifestations of his righteous will. He was the Lord God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, plenteous in mercy, and therefore he would not clear the guilty, therefore everything unmerciful and oppressive was hateful in his eyes, therefore he was pledged to destroy it. There was no contradiction in his nature. His stern face toward all that degrades the earth he made and defaces his image in his creature is one token of an inner mind that would unfold itself ever more perfectly to those who sought him and cried for wisdom as for hidden treasure. The more the holy man meditated on the fearful judgments falling on people who had broken the Everlasting Covenant, the more the righteousness of the Law and the perfect grace of the Covenant shone out to him. The more he trusted the Lord, the more certain he was that the Lord of Peace would one day show his whole being to mankind. The vision was for an appointed time and rose gradually, first on the chosen seed and still more slowly on the nations. But it came fully at last. The shepherds heard the Angels’ song, “Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, goodwill among men,” as the message of a Prince of Peace. He went preaching peace to publicans and sinners. He told his disciples, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.” At the Paschal Supper he gave them bread and wine as witnesses of peace to them and to the universe. After the Resurrection he met them with “Peace be with you” and showed them his hand and his side. He sent his Spirit of Peace to bind nations and languages in one bond. That bond was the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, the perfect Unity and complete Revelation of the Lord of Peace. It fulfilled the idea of God that prophets and lawgivers had been unfolding, and reconciled the separate names by which the heathen had tried to explain the divine workings in nature and the perplexing witness of their own hearts.

It is in this name that Paul blesses the Churches he writes to. This is the Lord of Peace whom he asks to give the Thessalonians peace always and in every place.

I. The words are very emphatic: may he Himself give you peace. It is as if Paul said, “I am persuaded that no one else can give it, not I nor all the preachers and doctors in the universe. Strictly, you do not even receive it second-hand through us. He gives you the thing itself, and we present the seals and sacraments of it. He opens a direct communication with your hearts and conveys into them what we can only offer from outside. Do not be content to take it from anyone else, or expect it from anyone else. When you seek it, be sure he is present to give it, and so it will become yours.”

II. “And be sure also that he gives it. You do not purchase it by prayers or faith or good deeds. True prayers are acts of submission and surrender. The heart is frozen in self-reliance and self-exaltation. You pray that it may be thawed, so that the pores through which his grace would enter are not unnaturally stopped. You bring nothing to your prayer but the confession of unworthiness and helplessness.” Paul’s divine teaching anticipated the humbling maxim of physical science: “Man can only bring natural bodies together or separate them; all else is transacted by Nature in secret.” He taught that this holds in a higher and stricter sense of man’s relation to his Creator. Man can only draw near to God or dwell apart from him, and the consequences follow inevitably. Either God works in him, or he stays wrapped in himself. He receives the gift of a higher life, or he sinks into death. In other words, God gives him peace, or he continues in perpetual war.

III. This peace the Apostle desires for the Thessalonians: not an image or shadow of peace but peace itself in its full meaning. It is not a peace resting on pacts and bargains among men, but one belonging to the very nature and being of God. It does not come from stifling activities and energies, but is the peace in which they are perfected and harmonized. It does not come from tolerating what is base or false, but demands its destruction. It does not begin from outside, but is first wrought in the inner man and then goes out to subdue the world. And it is not the peace a man gets for himself by standing aloof from the sorrows and confusions of the world and of the men whose nature he shares, choosing a calm retreat, quiet scenery and a regulated atmosphere. It is a peace that has thrived only in those who have suffered with their suffering kind, given up selfish enjoyments, sensual or spiritual, for their sake, and abjured every device to escape ordained toils and temptations. It was the peace of him who bore man’s sorrows, infirmities and sins, who gave himself up to become one with them, and so won for them a share in the Divine Nature and an inheritance in the peace of God which passes understanding.

IV. So Paul could boldly say, “The Lord give you peace at all times.” He lived in an exceedingly restless time. All around him were wars and rumours of wars. The Jewish commonwealth was breaking up through the hatreds of its sects and its mad desire to test its strength against its Roman masters. Those fighting sects directed their fiercest spite at Paul; they did not hate each other as much as they hated him. He knew the end was coming, that God himself had pronounced doom on the city of David. If he did not see the fall of the nation he was willing to be accursed to save, it would only be because a violent death took him from the world first. This time of trouble touched his disciples as well. It had brought great suffering on the Thessalonian Church, from present Jewish persecution and from a dim, feverish dread of a day of the Lord close at hand. In such a time he could ask the Lord of Peace to give peace to himself and to them. He could ask confidently, not doubting the petition would be answered, and even sure that the tumults in the world and in themselves were meant to awaken and accomplish it. He knew that easy and comfortable circumstances do not give men the peace they need, and that the most disastrous may drive them to the centre where it dwells and where they may possess it.

V. He prayed also, if the reading I mentioned is the true one, that they might have peace in every place. He knew different places, Greek cities and Jewish, though he had not yet seen Rome as he intended, and all his experience so far was of strife, tumult and persecution. He came to Thessalonica because he had been imprisoned at Philippi, escaped to Beraea, and then went to Athens. At Corinth the continued Jewish opposition was trifling beside the struggle in his own spirit, which made him despair even of life. At Ephesus he was to fight with men who assailed him as beasts assail those exposed in the Amphitheatre. At Jerusalem voices cried, “Away with such a fellow from the earth! it is not fit that he should live.” Bonds and imprisonment awaited him in the capital of the world. Yet he could say, the Lord of Peace give you peace in all places. He had found it in prison, and in the tumult and despair of his own spirit. When nothing around or within him gave him anything to rest on, when he was more battered by his own thoughts and their contradictions than by Jews, heathen or false brethren, he had learnt that the Lord of Peace was there. This was so even though he was no Stoic about these things but felt them in every nerve. The Lord sat above the water-floods as King, Friend and Father for ever. And Paul was certain this was not because he was an Apostle, or had divine revelations, or singular gifts. It was because he was a man, sharing men’s temptations and experiencing in himself the redemption wrought for men. It was because he was sent to men everywhere with glad tidings of peace.

VI. Brethren, do we not need to hear the same message now, in this place? We shall soon be giving thanks for victories over men who two years ago were counted our friends and defenders. We ask one another whether anything can keep the nations of our own Continent from drawing swords on each other. We have enough to remind us that peace is not to be reckoned on, and that powers within and without are at work to take it from us. Our own minds, perhaps, are not very peaceful. Passion-week and Easter-week will be a time of contention between parties at home, if not between armies abroad. Does that seem strange to you? Do you think this week should be what in one country it is called, “the still week,” so that our Lord’s Death at least is remembered in silence and calm? God has not ordained this outward quietness, and we cannot create it. Perhaps we would understand these days less if we could make their circumstances look more suitable. The Passion means not rest but suffering and agony, through which the Head of the body passed. Will its members revere him more if nothing in their own condition testifies to the need of effort and endurance? The Resurrection means not sleep but awaking out of sleep and return to all the energies of life. Shall we believe in it more if we covet the kind of rest of which the grave is the emblem?

VII. But does not the week that witnesses the Sacrifice of the Victim bring peace, if it finds little? Does not the week that commemorates the sacrifice’s completion carry peace even into the midst of war? Yes, this and nothing less is what these days signify. “The Lord of Peace Himself give you peace always in all places.” You want a Lord of Peace in whom Peace dwells always, under all conditions, amid all turmoils. Behold him in the agony of the Garden and on the Cross of Calvary. There is the Peace that lasts, not only when it is threatened from without, but when it seems to have perished within, when the soul is troubled even to death and cries, Why hast Thou forsaken me? It is there because trust is there, because the sufferer can say, Thou continuest the same, O Thou worship of Israel; Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit. There is the Peace of God resting on the Man, sustaining him so that he may sustain all creation, and glorifying the Son so that he may glorify the Father. You want to know where Peace may come from to men in all conditions and turmoils. Behold again the Agony and the Cross. From there it goes out to meet everything in the world and in you that strives against it. It goes out as the power of Sacrifice, stronger than the power of Self, as the power of Love, stronger than Hatred, and as the power of Life, stronger than Death. It comes as the Peace that can subdue all things to itself and reconcile all things in itself.

The Lord of Peace then Himself give you this peace. He has given it whenever you have won it. We did not recover it in India because we were the best of peoples; we had sins enough to answer for there, in hard and unjust acts by governors and individuals, the very reasons we lost it. But God gave it to us, and gave it all the more perfectly because he did not let it drop like manna from heaven. He gave our soldiers and citizens stoutness of heart, wisdom and endurance, that they might seek and obtain it. He himself will give it, not diplomatists or monarchs, if it is to be preserved on the Continent, his Wisdom using or else counteracting theirs. He will give it even if the wars and fightings in men’s hearts make it needful that the nations receive it through blood, that swords punish those who have removed their neighbours’ landmarks and trampled on Freedom and Right. He himself, and not the intrigues or compromises of statesmen or of schools, will give us Peace in our own land. That will be the reconciling of what is good in those who can acknowledge no good but their own, and the destruction of what is contentious and selfish in them all. He alone, and not our opinions, judgment, virtues or faith, will give us Peace in a nearer region still: Peace with him, Peace with our brethren, Peace with our own hearts.

Therefore let us crave this Peace, which he promises and has assured us in the blood of his Eternal Son, always and in all places. Let us desire it when we know we have deserved it least and forfeited it most utterly, because it comes down to us from him who gave his Son for us, not to reward our love but that his Love might bring ours back. Let us desire it in all times of tribulation and of wealth, when our self-accusations are loudest and our self-security most dangerous. Let us desire it in every place, so that in every place we may be peace-makers and be called the children of the Great Peacemaker.