What is Peace?

Like many words, ‘peace’ is one understood in various ways. Sometimes it’s used to communicate quiet or calm. Other times, ‘peace’ is the word we summon when talking of conflict resolution or the end to violent clashing. Less benignly, ‘peace’ can be something of a principled-sounding shibboleth under which veiled personal, national, and international interests are accomplished. Sadly, history reminds ‘peace’ movements have been deployed with ulterior aims of increased power, wealth, expansion, and control.

While some of these understandings get at good, desired results of peace, they are yet incomplete. They are less than the peace over which God governs – and short of the peace Jesus said He was leaving for His followers to occupy and extend to others. Rather, God’s way of peace is much more than calm. It is greater than ending war. It is beyond signed agreements and power-sharing arrangements. His peace is both a means and an end, a way of getting to a whole and reconciled life and arriving at it.

If that sounds like a lot, it is. It is because such peace is divine before it reaches Earth. It originates with the Creator before it touches and transforms His creation.

Peace is God’s Idea

You see, peace is God’s idea. It always and first begins with Him, and this is ancient, going back to beginnings. When God created the earth, then a man and woman in His likeness, all was well in every possible way. Peace was complete, with God the source and initiator of it. There was perfect union and unbrokenness with Him, within, with each other, and with the created world. It was life just as God intended, the way things ought to be.

So, what changed? The Bible explains that sin (choosing our way rather than God’s way) entered the world by way of human choice. This broke peace with God. It fractured peace within the man and woman. From this, brokenness arced out further and the couple’s unbroken union became compromised. There was now disturbance within the created world. The uninterrupted harmony and togetherness between God, people, and His creation was disrupted. Things were not the way they ought to be.
There is vast time and story between that first break and the advent of what could become a lasting peace and reconciliation with God. But long story short, that durable, continuous peace became possible and accessible when God offered to us the perfect life and sacrifice of His Son, Christ Jesus. (See Ephesians 2:14-18)

Typically, sacrifice and peace could seem contradictory, at odds with each other. But moved by the breach between Creator and His creation, God saw fit to settle the weight and cost of sin with the sacrifice of His Son’s life. The sinless Christ Himself makes peace with God possible – and our sincere realization of this, and trust in Him, is the beginning of living in unbroken peace.
But how exactly does that work – there’s so much brokenness in the world? When we look around, the absence of peace is a conspicuous presence. War, hunger, disease, oppression, division … the dread list carries on.

The Peace of Christ Transforms

There’s this: Embracing peace centered in God and available through Christ Jesus changes us. As God forms us to be like Him in His character, we become people of peace – peacemakers who imperfectly extend the grace, love, and peace of God to others, and people who steward well the created world we inhabit. One by one, life by life, people of peace learn and practice ‘the things that make for peace and the building up of one another.’ As they do, they help advance the ways and means of a God-centered peace in their lives and communities. This may not set right all the world’s brokenness. But lives and acts of peace are far from insignificant. They can help transform people and change the course of nations.

OneTribe – People Building Peace

This holistic peace that begins and continues with God is the peace OneTribe and its local leaders bring into divided and war-impacted communities. Such peace is not contingent on top level agreements though we advocate political peace and stability of all nations. It is independent of mid-level institutions although these often help rebuild fragile societies. Instead, with conviction that it’s ordinary-extraordinary people who make, break, and build upon peace, OneTribe explores practices of God-centered peace with local people. From this, grassroots-up approach, comes a movement of people building peace that changes lives and communities.