“Why do my eyes hurt?” “Because you’ve never used them before.” Lines from the movie The Matrix.
 

“If your brother sins rebuke him…if he repents forgive him.” Lk 17:3

"The incentive to peacemaking is love but it degenerates into appeasement whenever justice is ignored."  - John Stott on loving our enemies from The Cross of Christ.

All authentic Christian peacemaking can do nothing more or less than to take the form of the only effective peace treaty ever ratified- the cross of Christ- where love and justice, truth and grace, judgment and mercy met and were each fully satisfied. There is no conciliation with rebels. God will have no peace treaty with evil otherwise He would not be morally perfect. But in His justice God made a complete judgment of evil in the body of His Son at the cross where He who knew no sin became sin for us. The peace which comes through His blood and silences the voice of the avenger can only be possessed through a change of one’s mind from rebel to obedient son whereby we cut off our old man of sin in the corrupt nature and by the Spirit we put on Christ in His death and resurrection. The cosmic moral demand for judgment of evil is satisfied in the substitute of God. 

Genuine love will be hostile to everything that threatens the good of the object of love’s affection. Discipline, including correction for holiness sake within the context of the church as God’s family, is necessary as both the manifestation of God’s moral order without which we resort to chaos and anarchy, and for the sake of those being saved from wrath through it in order that the offender might be restored to fellowship with God and the community. Perhaps the most frightening words in the bible are the words of a father concerning the child He has raised from birth: “Ephraim has joined himself to idols….let him alone.” (Hosea 4:17).

The Shepherd of Israel is in a dilemma: “The Israelites are stubborn, like a stubborn heifer. How then can the LORD pasture them like lambs in a meadow?” There is only one fate for the child in error who refuses correction: rejection. There is only one remedy for rebellion: execution. Rebellion and righteousness are irreconcilable. The cross that Jesus was crucified on was made for the rebel Barrabas who had been convicted of sedition against the state and was sentenced to death for it. Barrabas escaped death because Jesus was executed in his place. Barrabas was us and Christ has taken the death we were destined for. Therein we see the mercy of God towards us while we also observe the demonstration of His justice executed upon evil. The passion suffered by Christ in His body from Gethsemane to the grave was the penalty for your rebellion and mine. We have each gone our own way and God has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. (Is. 53).

Rebellion towards God, if left unattended in an individual soul, or in the hearts and minds of members of a community, ultimately assures exile of the individual or the breakdown of the community itself. The same is true in the church. In the story of the disciples in the storm on the sea of Galilee, Mark writes that “they took Him into the boat as He was.” (Mk. 4). Only when we accept Jesus into the vessels of our lives in the fullness of who He really is can we be recipients of the peace that His presence brings to every situation. God’s peace begins in the soul that has been reconciled to God through the cross. Only when we allow Him to open our eyes to the truth of ourselves as we are can we become the beneficiaries of His peace treaty. “Peace, peace to him who is far off and to him who is near,” says the Lord, “And I will heal him.” But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. “There is no peace,” says my God, “for the wicked.”

Just at the brink of extinction the disciples cried out to the Lord asleep in the stern and He arose and rebuked the wind and waves. Jesus died under conviction and sentencing as a rebel. “And they wrote over His head, ‘This is Jesus, King of the Jews.’ Thus in His cry, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?” the rebel in exile from God was being put to death. There is no peace for the rebel. But when a man or a woman turns to the Lord they put on Christ, the rebel in them is executed through the exercise of faith and the new true son or daughter, born again of incorruptible seed, begins the journey home

Prayer: “Open our eyes, Lord, that we might see You as You are: King and Judge, Savior and Lord. We ask You today to come into the vessel of our lives as You are that we might be partakers of Your peace.” Amen.