When I was growing up, my mother assured peace in the family by force. My brother and I had a thousand reasons to bicker and quarrel, but Mother squelched irascible behavior by means of creative and onerous punishments. She wanted peace, and she achieved it by means of aggression and power if she had to. Communities faced with rising crime and nations faced with internal rebellion or external aggression do exactly what my mother did. They undertake to enforce or “keep” the peace by making unpeaceful behavior painful.

Unfortunately, my mother’s punishments did not transform the attitudes that led to brawling between my brother and me. We may not have bickered or yelled or hit each other, but our objectives, and objections, grated and ground on our spirits with the result that our sense of being wounded and oppressed made us angrier, not more amiable. More police on the streets or more soldiers on the battlefield do not transform the attitudes that made them necessary, either. The “peace” that exists due to fear of punishment is not at all peaceful. The situation between two siblings or between two nations may have the appearance of peace, because no aggression is being acted out. Under the cover of polite words, however, everyone is scheming to find a way to achieve the goal of the aggression without incurring the pain of the punishment. 

Such a situation only looks like peace when we are willing to consider the lack of aggressive behavior as peace. Better laws, stronger enforcement, harsher punishments, more powerful guns, more soldiers on the ground – all these efforts may contain or even suppress aggression between opposing parties. They will never transform the attitudes of the opposing parties and bring peace to their relationships with each other. 

The breakup of Yugoslavia after the end of the Cold War is a perfect model for the inability of force to bring peace. Yugoslavia was created by gluing together a number of political entities that had fought with each other for hundreds of years. The country of Yugoslavia was governed by military force, which ruthlessly suppressed aggressive behavior between historic enemies. The country appeared to be at peace, but the enmity and hatred that existed before Yugoslavia never died.  The death of the strong man who had made it all work precipitated the death of the fake peace that had existed there. History is littered with “peaceful” solutions that are only facades that cover smoldering resentments that flare explosively when the enforcing power disappears.

 At the end of World War II, a lot of people put their faith in a movement to create a world-wide forum where disputes and aggression could be worked out with words, not bullets, and the United Nations was born. The UN was to be the place where nations could settle disputes peaceably. We could finally bring an end to war.

 Sadly, this dream, too, is now dust. Rather than a forum where disputes are resolved, the UN has simply become a place where chicanery and human greed find yet another opportunity to flourish. The world has not become a more peaceful place due to the existence of the UN. In fact, the history of the UN is a demonstration that even a peaceful forum does not transform attitudes. The nations of the world come together with the same agendas that have sent them to the battlefield, and if any nation fails to achieve its objective in the UN, it proceeds to the tried and true methods of aggression and military action just as if the UN did not exist.

 Why don’t we have world peace? Why doesn’t anything work?

 The answer is in the Bible. In Genesis, it is recorded that “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.” [Genesis 6:5] Isaiah said, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way.” [Isaiah 53:6]  Paul wrote, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” [Romans 3:23] In simple words, while we may create the appearance of peace, we cannot create real peace, because human beings are sinful. They would rather serve themselves than others. They cannot give up their bad attitudes, because they don’t want to. If we want world peace, human beings need to be different. Just as my mother could not make me want to share with my brother, the UN cannot make Palestinians want to share with Israelis. Under the most implacable force the resentments seethe as furiously as ever, waiting impatiently for a crack in the barrier to aggression.

 We all can pray for peace, and we all should pray for peace. There certainly won’t be any peace without God’s intervention. The peace we want, however, is not the façade that covers up violent hatred. What we really want is the end of hatred. We even make laws against hate speech and hate crimes, but the laws do not end hate. UN sanctions against aggressor nations do not end aggression. So far, human legal action has been completely impotent in bringing about peace. How can we have peace? Peace in families. Peace in communities. Peace in the world.

 There is an answer. In the same hour that one of Jesus’ closest friends was betraying him to enemies, Jesus spoke to the remaining eleven disciples. He warned them what was coming his way. Even as Jesus warned his friends of the hateful aggression in their future, he said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.” [John 14:27] The peace Jesus gave was internal peace. This peace was a transforming experience that gave the disciples the ability to face aggressive power with a peaceful attitude. This is the kind of peace that we all really want.

 We all should pray for peace, but when we pray, we should not be hoping simply for better disarmament treaties or for dictators to comply with economic sanctions. Rather, when we pray for peace, we should pray for transformed human hearts. When we pray for peace, we are praying for one of the fruits of the indwelling Holy Spirit, a fruit that only matures when there is also the fruit of love, joy, patience, kindness, generosity and faithfulness. I pray fervently for peace, but I pray with the full knowledge that the cessation of hostilities is not real peace. I pray for the transformation of human hearts and the peace we all will know when time ends and “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” [Revelation 21:4]

 To some, this notion sounds like “pie in the sky by and by.” What do we do, you may ask, until then?

 One answer, a concession to reality, is to keep making laws that punish aggressive behavior. Continue to do everything possible in international relations to prevent aggressor nations from hurting other nations. The Bible tells us that one of God’s purposes for human government is protection of citizens from both internal and external aggression. Until every human heart is transformed by love, we must realistically expect that natural, sinful human nature will manifest itself in crime and war, and we must be prepared to stop it.

 However, the best answer is to do what Jesus told us what to do. Early in his ministry, he sent his disciples out to tell Israelites that the kingdom of heaven had come near. They were to tell everyone the good news that God loved them and that God had come down to bring the kingdom to them. They were practicing the work that would become their permanent calling, and the calling of everyone in whom the Holy Spirit dwells. As Jesus ascended to heaven, he commissioned his followers again in that ministry of love, saying, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” [Matthew 28:19-20] We work for world peace when we gospelize the people around us – that is, when we envelope them in our love and God’s love by telling them this good news. The good news of God’s love and grace through Christ is the power that transforms people and puts out the fires of aggression, greed, and hatred. Only God can bring about world peace, and it only happens when he dwells in the hearts of people everywhere. If we want world peace, we need to say to everyone we meet, “God loves you, and I love you.” That’s it.

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.  Luke 6:27]

Do you want to live in ruins?  Recently, while watching a television program, I heard one of the characters say, “He ruined my life.  He should pay.”  She had been raped thirty years before, and it took a long time for the perpetrator to be brought to justice.  The court proceedings did not turn out as she hoped.  The prosecutor was not able to win a conviction.  Outraged by what she considered a miscarriage of justice, she struggled with her need to be avenged because her life had been ruined.

I see this attitude in a lot of situations.  Adults live in ruins because of abuse at the hands of a priest or a parent in their childhood.  Ethnic groups live in ruins because of wrongs done to their ancestors. Siblings live in the ruins of a quarrel long in the past, and they never speak to each other again.

These individuals believe that the effect of a wrong done in the past cannot be erased from their lives until some matching or greater pain is inflicted on the person responsible for the original injury.  They claim that they want justice; what they really want is revenge.   

In the service of their need for payback, not only do these individuals testify to the pain of the injury, but they also commit to the role of victim.  Any suggestion that they might give up the quest for reprisal due to the passage of time or in the interest of building new lives for themselves is received as if it were an insult to the magnitude of their suffering.  They seem to prefer sitting in the ruins of the life that might have been. 

Pray for those who persecute you.  [Matthew 5:44]

Jesus taught us that it is not necessary to live in ruins.  When he said that he came to give life and to give it abundantly, he made that offer to everyone.  Those with trauma and injury in their past were not excluded.  Jesus offered healing and wholeness, joy and fulfillment, cleansing and change to everyone.  What he did not offer was retribution.  Some people take undue comfort in the proverb which says that doing good to an enemy heaps coals of fire on his head, and they legalistically exhibit what they choose to call kindness to those who have wronged them in the deliberate hope of seeing smoke from those coals rising from the heads of their enemies.  However, careful reading of biblical teachings will make it clear that any such coals were more about shame than punishment.  They were not revenge.

Do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves.  [Luke 23:38]

Jesus’ life is a lesson in giving up the right to be a victim.  In his own home town of Nazareth, he was attacked with the intent of throwing him over a cliff; he escaped, and he took no action at all against those who had attacked him.  When he met a vile tax collector, who would have had to steal from honest citizens in order to make a living at his chosen occupation, Jesus invited this man to be one of his twelve closest friends.  When Roman soldiers were nailing Jesus to the cross, He prayed that they might be forgiven and spared the vengeance of the Almighty for the assault on His Son.  Jesus demonstrated that it is not only possible but highly desirable to leave the ruins behind.

Why is this a good thing?  Why should anyone let an enemy escape without punishment?  How do we even do that?  We read in the Bible that God wants justice done on behalf of the weak and the wounded.  How is it justice to forgive and forget? 

The answer lies in what becomes of those who remain victims.  Suppose, for example, that the prostitute Jesus rescued from the Pharisees had devoted the rest of her life to getting a court judgment against the Pharisees for false arrest.  Imagine that Zaccheus, overcome by guilt for his theft and graft, had simply wadded up in a ball and cried remorsefully until he finally died.   What if the widow of Nain had gone on a crusade to destroy the local doctor who had let her son die in the first place?  What sort of life does a person live if he or she is unable to leave the ruins of victimhood?  People who cannot forgive others and cannot forgive themselves live in the ruins of what might have been a life.

Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.  Romans 6:4

How do we escape the ruins?  There is a simple answer that is hard to learn.  When we remember our baptism, we remember that we are marked with the cross of Christ forever.  Christ died on the cross, endured the ruin of our lives for us, and rose victorious over all of that.  The power of this sacrifice is embodied in his words, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”  [Luke 23:34]  Those words mean that our lives need never be in ruins because of our own guilt, and those words set us free to forgive others for all the pain they inflict on us.

God’s forgiveness through Christ is always there for each of us.  A new life, made whole, guilt-free, is right in front of us.  However, when we are busy keeping accounts of the things other people do to harm us, it is very hard for us to allow ourselves to be forgiven by God.  We even project our own attitudes and need for retribution on God.  At the very least, the self-righteous attitude which nourishes our victimhood keeps us from knowing that we need forgiveness.  The Pharisees were completely self-righteous individuals, and Jesus said to them, tongue in cheek, “I have come to call not the righteous, but

sinners. ”   [Matthew 9:13] He was saying that as long as we think we are righteous, we hold ourselves apart from God.  When we are able to see ourselves more clearly as the sinners we are, we hear Jesus’ call to forgive and to be forgiven.

When we experience forgiveness, we learn what it means to be healed and made whole.  We discover that we want to be like the woman at Sychar and the mental patient in the Gadarenes – we want to tell everyone what Jesus has done for us.  We are able to forgive others, because we have moved into a new life, a life where we are no longer living in the shadows, in the tombs, in the ruins of a life.  We don’t feel like victims, and we don’t want to act like victims.  Life feels so new and so full of promise that you might say we are reborn.

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!  [2 Corinthians 5:17]

And not because they were written on stone, either. 

The Ten Commandments flummox lots of people. Some are even outraged. How dare God be so demanding, so restrictive, so downright mean! The Ten Commandments provoke commentary about many issues which completely overshadow recent fear that displaying them establishes a state religion.

 Most people see the Ten Commandments as a checklist for human perfection. In fact, when asked to talk about the Ten Commandments, many people explain them the way a mother might tell a child how to earn gold stars by completing chores on a list. God must wonder where our heads are, because he gave the Ten Commandments to show us how to achieve world peace.

 Yup. World peace. How many national and international meetings have assembled for the purpose of figuring out world peace? Forget peace for the whole world. How many have assembled to focus exclusively on peace in the Middle East? There have been a lot, and after each one, the dignitaries sign on the dotted line and the paparazzi photograph all the smiling faces. Yet the “peace” sometimes doesn’t last as long as the flight home.

There is a solution. The Ten Commandments point to it, the whole Bible points to it, and the Word of the solution is our Lord Jesus Christ.

 How, you may ask, do the Ten Commandments point to Jesus? and world peace?

Talking about all of them would take a long time, so one will have to stand in for the rest. Let’s look at the final one – the tenth commandment. It reads as follows in Exodus 20:17:

You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

This commandment points to powerful components of a solution to world peace. Envy, jealousy, the desire for attention, popularity and pre-eminence all subvert my commitment to love my neighbor, and a lack of love for my neighbor is a dominant theme in the violence that destroys our peace around the world. The tenth commandment instructs us in no uncertain terms that focusing on our selfish interests is a very bad way to live.

Many of the conflicts around the world seem to be never-ending, and most center in an unwillingness of all participants to let go of the past. It might be a past as recent as five hundred years ago, or it might go back thousands of years. No matter how long it has been since the original land grab or insult or assault on innocent children, nobody has ever let go of the problem. Somebody coveted something that belonged to someone else, somebody felt slighted or insulted, somebody felt that another nation’s achievement diminished their own. No matter how long the participants have been fighting over the problem, nobody has ever been willing to say, “enough.”

Lest we be too quick to judge nations who act this way, we should remember that the Hatfields and the McCoys are just ordinary people who can’t ever let go of an injury.

You may think that it is too simplistic to say that the tenth commandment is the route to world peace, or even interpersonal peace. Is there really that much coveting going on?

The answer is, “YES!” There is a lot of coveting going on. Some of it is disguised as “my rights.” Some of it is disguised as “my entitlement.” Some of it is disguised as “my feelings.” Some of it is disguised as “my needs.” In other words, all that coveting is about selfishness. If Mark believes he had a right to the promotion that was given to John, the sense of entitlement can destroy his peace the way sand could destroy a gearbox. Upgrade the offense to a nation’s entitlement to a piece of land, and the constant irritation produces a war.

To find the real solution to all this coveting, and the subsequent violence, we need to look further than a proscription against it. The commandment only points up the problem; but it does not stand alone. No piece of Scripture in the Bible can safely be interpreted as if it stood alone. Every word of Scripture is like a single element in a complex protein. Change even one element and the whole is changed. Interpret one word of Scripture without reference to the rest, and you risk missing the whole point.

Here is the point of the tenth commandment. It teaches us what is wrong. Where shall we find out how to right the wrong? That answer is spoken by Jesus, the living Word of God, and recorded in the New Testament. Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Ah. That sounds like somebody’s universal wisdom. It would really make me feel good if I loved my neighbor as much as myself. I could do it, too, if my neighbor were not such a renegade. Does the Bible really think I should love that scoundrel?

Yes it does, and Jesus explained that, too. Jesus said that if we want to be like him, like the living Word of God, we need to deny self. The exact words are “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23)  Denying self means we dethrone King Ego who sits on the throne of every person’s heart and enthrone God Almighty. In other words, I acknowledge that I am not the most important person or thing in the universe. God is most important, and I am the equal of all the other people he created. Before God, I don’t stand any higher than my scoundrel neighbor.

So, what is the answer to world peace? Remembering all the other things Jesus said we look at what he said in Matthew 5:23.

When you are offering your gift at the alter, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first, be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.

The answer to world peace is reconciliation based on loving God and neighbor more than self. This is a hard truth. We don’t like it. We like simple rules that make sense. That sends us back to the Ten Commandments. There is a simple list everybody can remember and follow. Where do the commandments start? “You shall have no other gods before me.” Where do they end? “You shall not covet … anything that belongs to your neighbor.” In other words, Love God the most, and love your neighbor as yourself. The whole answer to world peace.

Yes!

If that’s what we find in a commandment at the tail end of the list, all about coveting, what might we find if we look at the rest of them? Check back from time to time and find out!