“do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Fil 4:6-7 

What does the gospel of God offer us? If we say “the peace of God,” none will raise objections, but will everyone understand? The use of right words does not guarantee right thoughts! Too often the peace of God is thought of as a feeling of inner tranquility, happy and carefree, springing from knowledge that God will shield one from life’s hardest knocks. But this is a misrepresentation, for God does not featherbed his children in this way, and anyone who thinks he does is in for a shock, and that which is basic and essential to the real peace of God does not come into this concept at all.

This misrepresentation  of God’s peace is that God’s peace brings us two things: both power to face and live with our own badness and failings, and also contentment in the providence of God as prosperity and good fortune”. The truth that this account ignores is that the basic ingredient in God’s peace, without which the rest cannot be, is the pardon and acceptance into the new covenant—that is, adoption into God’s family. But where this change of relationship with God—out of hostility into friendship, out of wrath into the fullness of love, out of condemnation into justification—is not set forth, the gospel of peace is not truly set forth either.

The peace of God is first and foremost peace with God; it is the state of affairs in which God, instead of being against us, is for us. The peace of God, then, primarily and fundamentally, is a new relationship of forgiveness and acceptance—propitiation is the source from which this peace flows. When Jesus came to his disciples in the upper room at evening on his resurrection day, he said, “Peace  be with you”; and when he had said that, “he showed unto them his hands and side” (John 20:19–20 phillips). Why did he do that? Firstly, to establish his identity, and secondly, to remind them of the propitiatory death on the cross whereby he had made peace with his Father for them. Having suffered in their place, as their substitute, to make peace for them, he now came in his risen power to bring that peace to them.

“Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). It is here, in the recognition that, we are by nature at odds with God, and God with us, Jesus has made “peace through his blood shed on the cross” (Col. 1:20), the peace of God comes with the knowledge and reality of the propitiatory work of Jesus Christ.

This knowledge guards our hearts and minds in times of adversity. The peace of God is knowing God is for us and never against us.

Soli Deo Gloria