Peace is an extremely popular idea in the 21st century. It’s a stated goal of both the U.N. and every Miss America contestant ever. Okay, perhaps the former is a lot more serious about it than the latter. But it’s a popular existential idea as well, often phrased as “finding inner-peace.” It’s extremely important in some religions, central to New Age Spiritualism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Humanism among a few others. It’s the preferred state for any nation, it’s the stated goal of many nations fighting wars and the cause of many wars in the past.

Ignoring the inherent irony there, it seems that the takeaway here is that peace is something that we all want, both politically and existentially. And this is very natural inclination, after all. Conflict for most of us is seriously egregious, uncomfortable to no end. No one wants conflict, period. Even people that like to argue don’t like it in every context, and hate it when it gets personal. The chronic problem of the desire for peace, is that we confuse its results and its effects for the thing itself. Peace may make for an environment where there is little or no conflict, but that is not a prerequisite for peace. Peace makes for this, not the other way around. For lack of a better phrase, peace is not simply the absence of conflict. That’ll be a result, but we’ll miss the mark constantly if we don’t make the separation appropriately. If peace is always only the absence of conflict, then the absence of conflict will become our real goal. Real peace will fall by the wayside.

Peace, in the truest sense, is not built on compromise or simply ending a conflict. Germany learned this after the first world war. Though defeated and the conflict over, attempts at keeping it finished by punishing the German people failed miserably, building an entire nation ripe for nationalistic language of revenge. The same thing can happen, albeit secretly, in each one us. We’re trying desperately to make peace with our conscience, and unfortunately we determine that the lack of conflict means peace.We’re “good people.” We don’t go around killing people, we pay our taxes, we don’t lie (when it matters), we think highly of ourselves for not doing the aforementioned, and we manage to forgive ourselves. But this is a shaky peace at best. Peace is only so good as the foundations they’re based upon. A peace based upon our best efforts will only get us as far as... well, our best efforts. Unfortunately, this is the real rub. Heaven is a place of perfection. God is a god of perfection. Only moral perfection exists in Him and with Him. Deep down we know this. Our sins and our depravity are always present with us, as awful and shameful to us, but we are unable to act in any way to undo the past. We are then, at war. Not with ourselves, but with a righteous God. To be righteous means to not leave guilt unpunished. To be entirely just and judicious in your judgments. The defendants, meanwhile, are we. And we stand entirely guilty.

This is the stage for

Christmas. The meeting of the immovable object of God’s righteous justice and unstoppable force of our evil and our wanting to make peace with our conscience by any means that isn’t God’s.God can’t leave evil unattended. He refuses to not deal with our sin and our blackness. The only right judgement is death. But His mercy demands that He do just the opposite. In the Advent of Christ, the solution is finally here. The resolution of these two great hemispheres of God’s nature is Christ. In His death, the hell we deserve was poured into Him. The gavel of divine justice fell on Him who didn’t deserve it.When God extends His grace to us and makes us new in order to believe in Christ, then we are at peace with God. Then our peace will be as sure as the tomb is empty; entirely. But this peace does not come on our terms. All God ever did to us has been good, and it is we who choose to reject Him and sin. If we will have peace, it will be on His terms. Every one of His terms. Exactly as He says. It’s His right as the victor, and it’s His right as God. This is what the oft misquoted passage of Luke’s gospel says, when it says “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!” While all those with whom He is pleased are humans, not all of us constitute those with whom He is pleased. The secret to peace is not finding it within ourselves; we’re the problem. This is peace for us, that can only come from outside us, from another. From Christ. And it all began with His humble birth this Christmas.