The Fallacy of Peace

One of our greatest fallacies is measuring God's will by our "blessings".


We may be able to measure our health with a thermometer, but it is a fallacy to measure our spiritual temperature and whether or not we are walking in God's will by how blessed we are. Our ultimate success and security aren’t dependent on our surroundings or even our blessings, but on our obedience and conformity to God’s Word. We may find success and security absent when we leave out God’s Word and God’s Ways. We may find success present when God allows success so He can eventually reveal our self-dependence by removing our security in things or self-effort. Security, success, prosperity can be related to the flesh just as much as to the Spirit.

In Jeremiah 44, Israel in Egypt slid back into worshipping the Queen of Heaven because they used material prosperity to measure their spiritual lives. They were living in Egypt, out of God’s will, following their own ideas on how to find safety and security, thinking it was to be found in Egypt rather than in obeying God and consequently staying subservient to Babylon. The very thing they feared most, subjection to the Babylonians, would chase them down in Egypt. They were not ultimately safe and secure in their devotion to the Queen of Heaven even though they could measure their immediate success and safety by worshiping her.

We can’t find ultimate success and safety by living for peaceful feelings. I realize that this runs counter to a basic dictum of how to discern God's will. We are told to measure how aligned we are to God's will by how much peace we feel. While that may work sometimes, too often the peaceful path is cowardly, the path of least resistance. For nearly 20 years of my life I tried to live by peace. Avoiding conflict and ruffling feathers, I tried to keep the church I served happy and liking me as their pastor. I watched other friends who were pastors continually hit problems head-on, creating conflict, and saw that they bounced from church to church. So, I tried to avoid conflict, and felt that God's path was always measured by peace. After all, doesn't the Bible say in James 3:17 But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving.... 18 Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness.

However, in avoiding conflict, by using peace and a path free of conflict as my measure of whether I was walking in God's will, led me to frustration when the people around me didn't grow. By equating peace with God's will, I ignored that Jeremiah and Ezekiel had to choose between saying what God said and saying what the people wanted to hear. Jesus, the great Peacemaker, was continually in conflict with those whose hearts had become hard. Few of the Bible’s leaders were able to measure God's will for them by how much peace and material prosperity it brought into their lives. After all, Jesus, the perfect Son of God, did not have a place to “lay his head”—materially, He would not have been declared a material success, and certainly, none of His disciples found safety from death. Rather, by following Jesus, they found eternal security, but not temporal security.

God's will, which runs counter to man's best ideas (Isaiah 55), often brings conflict. We can almost measure God's path for us by asking, "Which path is the hardest, most difficult, and will require God to show up the most or I'm toast?" Certainly, we can learn from Israel in Egypt: choosing peace and prosperity by following our own path or the best path of human reason ("We'll be safe in Egypt") just might lead us straight into what we fear the most--missing out on God's best for us because we have chosen to use our thinking rather than His.

No, the best measure of whether we are walking in God's will is to first measure our behavior choices by the written Word of God and then choose what the Bible says to do. That's the path to find His will. Sometimes heading straight into the jaws of immediate conflict is God’s way to ultimate peace.