The wolf will lie down with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. (Isaiah 11:6, NIV)
Not counting those moments after you have just followed a chunked wedge with a shanked pitch shot, golf courses are a place of peace. We hear the birds there, and the wind in the trees. We walk stretches of open grass, lost in recreation while our schedules take a nap.
Peace has never fallen out of favor as a great idea. In fact, the older we get, the more we like it. We settle into the life we’ve fought for and quietly pray that the last of the waves has rocked our boat.
Well, as they say, Good luck with that.
Interestingly, God’s prophecies of peace have been eagerly adopted by even the least religious in our culture. All have heard of the lion and the lamb, lying down together without issue between them. Oh sure, it’s regarded as a romantic notion at best, but everyone can dream a bit. So they do, whether or not they have God in mind.
The difficulty there is that you cannot dismiss God from Isaiah’s passages about the peace that will one day come. You can’t dismiss him because he is there in that same passage, as the fruit-bearing Branch from the root of Jesse. He is there as the Messiah upon whom the Spirit of the LORD will rest. And as the Messiah, “he will delight in the fear of the LORD” (Isaiah 11:3).
The coming of unbreakable peace will follow the coming of Jesus as eternal King. Jesus is the cause; peace—in all realms—is the effect.
Truth be told, many people don’t want this condition for peace. They want the romance without submission (sound familiar?). So they keep speaking of peace with no good idea for getting there. A brutally beaten man named Rodney King once asked a deeply powerful question, “Can we all get along?” He wasn’t asking from a rhetorical enclave. He was asking from the mean streets of Watts, and he was hoping for an answer that would reach all the way into his battered neighborhood.
There is such an answer, but we must give it to the world in completeness. Peace emanates from the Lord of Peace. There is no shortcut, no human answer. Those who delight in the fear of the Lord will receive all the excellences he has for them. Among those is peace.
—
Jeff Hopper
August 18, 2014
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The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.