As it was in the Days of Noah: On Violence

Violence & Ignorance

Noah's flood came in the midst of unprecedented violence against the law of God. There were no guns, yet violence against the truth of God, which also led to violence among people in all relationships, reigned, and to such a world God brought a disastrous flood and grieved that He had made humans.  Jesus lived in 1st century Israel, He lived in a violent time. Even with primitive weapons, it would be unsafe to travel the roads for fear of bandits; human hearts did not know God or His Son Jesus Christ. The Lord spoke much about peace and violence in the book of Matthew. The Lord said that we should expect violence on this earth in these dark and evil days. If every gun is removed from the hands of every human on earth (and the only people to own these guns are our trustworthy leaders who are not corrupt and who never lie and who have no interest in coercive power-tongue in cheek) there will still not be peace on this earth. No complete peace will be found until Christ comes again revealing himself and taking His visible reign as king. Full peace will never exist among humans who do not have Christ, who do not have new life.                                                            

There certainly are times in history when one might experience greater amounts of peace in one's surroundings, city or country. Yet now that instant communication has shrunk our world, we know that there is always strife, war, persecution, or genocide happening somewhere. There are also hidden and approved forms of violence as with abortion. Strife exists in families, at work, in our social circles--everywhere. The Bible makes it clear that there is violence in every human heart; the disciples themselves wrestled with this. A true believer who has turned toward Christ must wrestle with violent tendencies of sins both great and small-no matter in what docile forms they may appear-until the day of the Lord's appearing. So while we are peacemakers by the definition that Christ gives: of bringing the gospel to people without coercion or physical force, settling arguments peacefully rather than violently and without litigation,  doing good to those with whom we come in contact, whether we agree with them or not: our spouses, our neighbors, our friends, our enemies, no matter what their worldview, or what their struggles are, we should not have any illusions that we will live in a complete reign of peace by any human effort. Even if all nations ceased their wars we could not say that peace had triumphed over the human heart while wars are waged in our homes and in our backyards or our neighbor's home, until Christ visibly reveals himself. The Lord has promised that the days before His return would be dark, there would be hardness of heart toward Himself. Premillinialists and Amillenialists agree on this one very important point - the world will get even more evil, and to such a world Christ will return.

There are also very "nice" forms of violence. Jesus said that out of the heart wickedness springs. The most violent people on earth can be those who appear the nicest, kindest, and most docile, but they can be schemers of all kinds of ungodliness. They can thirst for power while clothing themselves in humility; or, they can simply scorn the Word of God, by living as if it doesn't exist, by living as if Christ were merely one voice of wisdom among others and not the definitive likeness of the Father. They can twist the truth of God with the best and nicest of intentions, so nice, in fact, that they themselves are fooled. This predicament would happen to every believer except that anyone who has the Holy Spirit remains in God's Word, both the reading and preaching through His biblically sound church, as well as, careful study and examination using proper hermeneutics and catechisms to determine the meaning of God's Word, along with the acknowledgement that it is a demonstrably cohesive Word that spans 44 authors over a period of roughly 1500 years, telling one story without contradiction. It is the Holy Spirit working through God's Word alone that can renew the mind, and we must be under constant renewal in this life.

 Ignorance as Violence

    Adam was the first priest whose duty it was to desire full comprehension and obedience to the words of His Creator and communication of those words in the garden. Adam and Eve together failed their priesthood, their highest calling, to keep God's Words ever before them, clinging to them, taking refuge in them, understanding them, when they fell into temptation. Eve knew God's Word, but paying lip service to God's Words was enough to cause grief for the entire human race; lip service and knowledge of Words were not enough, a right understanding that led to right action, was needed.

   Counterfeit truth is not always easy to discern, we may easily find ourselves exchanging fake dollar bills in our financial exchanges; it is not until the bill is held up to the scrutiny of the magnifying glass or a special light, that the counterfeit can be ascertained. Before eating the fruit, Eve should have held up the serpent's argument to scrutiny, she should have gone back to what God had actually said and taken refuge in it despite nagging desires to believe that God had actually meant something else. She willfully refused to have a right understanding, that she might justify her own desire: "What harm could there be?" she thought, "I am not a bad person. Surely the Lord will overlook any indiscretion for I have no ill will,  I simply desire and no harm has come from my previous desires." In fact, it appeared as though Eve was harming no one! She was simply fulfilling her desires. Without knowledge of God's Word, that is, God's desires, there was nothing perceptibly evil about her desire or the action that she eventually took. To Eve and to us it appeared a neutral act, but, not according to the Word of God.

   On the other side of the story we know that God's Word was there as love and protection and life, not just for herself, but for all the world. God's word would protect Eve from a multitude of grievous consequences; living accordingly would also demonstrate her dependence on God and her love for Him, which bears life. The forbidden tree was a test of faithfulness: faithfulness bears life, unfaithfulness, death. For we do not have merely the laws of nature to which we and creation must bow, but we also have the law of God for our hearts through which Eve had access to a beautiful relationship with her Maker, a beautiful uniting with all the perfections of God that is love, lived through a life of faith-faithfulness. After the fall, the law could no longer bring people all the perfections of God that is love, it only brought grief and death, for it could not be fulfilled-until Christ. The law finds each of us from that moment on, unfaithful. Which is why Christ became the one through whom fallen man could be united to God. Christ fulfilled the law for Adam and Eve and their progeny. Adam and Eve chose to fulfill another law, the one that put them against the Maker and Creator, at enmity with Him, and caused them to exit their perfect union with the wonderful perfections of God in their hearts, minds, and spirits. It was a millenia long example that not every desire was worth following; hearkening forward to a Proverbs mentality, there is a road that leads to life and a road that leads to death. The warning is necessary because the road to death, just as the fruit of that one tree, carries desirability firmly in its grasp and can grip us with it.

   As a result, our own desires daily take us away from the perfections of God. Our response is to be washed by the Word, reminded what is required of us- those who belong to Christ are no longer condemned by the law, but instead are guided by the law- so that we can confess our sins, practice obedience, worship the Lamb who was victorious over sin and who achieved full obedience on our behalf, which is why we worship! Where you find Christians, there you should find much singing. "Worthy,  worthy, is the Lamb who was slain," and the Lamb who lived a perfect life, the life that we could not live, who now enables us to practice that living, walking in the Spirit of God according to the Loving Law and Word of God, as was intended for us from the beginning of Creation.