Peace With God

Can the world experience peace from God without first experiencing peace with God? 

Before we can truly understand what this question is asking, we first need to understand what it means to be at peace with God. Scripture teaches that all who sin are separated from God (Isaiah 59:2). Scripture also teaches that all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God (Romans 3:23). That includes you. And that includes me.

Some of us sin "big", like committing murder or adultery. Some of us sin "small" like telling the little white lie or internally judging another person in our thoughts. . But to God, all sin, no matter how our human standards rank it, leads to the same outcome: death. This death is the ultimate separation from Him, His holiness, and His love.  And no matter how we try, we can never live perfectly throughout all of our existence without sinning. This means that we all deserve to experience separation from a relationship with God. That's pretty terrible and heavy news.

But thankfully, Scripture also reveals the best news to us, and that is that "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16) This good news of Jesus is "from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation" (2 Corinthians 15:18-19).

To any who think that they can earn their way into right standing with God apart from Jesus...

To any who believe they reach ultimate internal peace by walking a different path than Jesus...
To any who claim to dwell in peace with God or receive peace from God while rejecting the source of Peace...

God wants you to hear these Words that He spoke through Jesus, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). We cannot experience true peace from God without first experiencing peace with God through Jesus. There is only one path, one way, one truth that can lead us to God.

And that's Jesus.
In the final devotional of this month we will look at how we can experience peace with God through Jesus.