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God is Love 16


For God is not a God of disorder but of peace. (I Corinthians 14:33a)
God’s peace means that in God’s being and in his actions he is separate from all confusion and disorder yet he is continually active in innumerable well-ordered, fully controlled, simultaneous actions  (Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, p. 203)
          I’ve shared about peace before. For me, the easiest way to understand peace is to think about a river. If you try to swim upriver, the current will push you back, so you will have to fight the river to get where you’re going. If you try to go across the river, you’ll still have to try to go upstream in order to end up directly across. More fighting. Going down river, you can determine to go faster than the river flows. The river may help you, but you’re still not really cooperating with it. Even staying in one place requires at least a small amount of effort against the river. The only way to be at peace with the river is to flow with it. 
         The greatest power in the universe belongs to God. He is the river in which the universe exists. The universe and all its residents can either flow in accordance with His will, or they can try to fight Him. It is only when they are flowing with His will that they are going to have peace. Some people complain that God does not flow with their river, that the relationship is not mutual, but for God to do so, He would have to stop being God. It is nothing more than an example of our not being at peace with God.
         It’s a little harder when we discuss peace as a characteristic of love. As with some of the others we’ve discussed, it’s hard to think in terms of interacting with love as one does with another person. Again, that may be a weakness on our part. I think we all have a sense that peace is connected to love somehow. No one wants to be in a relationship in which there is no peace, and such a relationship would not be called love. But there’s a big problem. In our relationship with love, who is in control? In our relationships with one another, who is in control?
         Some people will say “it’s mutual” but that seems to me to come from two contradictory notions: wanting to be in charge and wanting to not look as though we are domineering. In fact, I think there is love in peace only when we deal with the other person as they are. We can only be at peace with God if we allow God to be God. He will never allow us to take His throne because that’s not good for anyone. Love deals in reality. 
         In our culture, we have a big problem with submission. Most of the time, we’re told women should submit to men. That’s not what’s in Scripture. Wives are to submit to husbands, not women to men. Even with the wives submitting to husbands, many women instantly bristle. If you don’t love him, and don’t trust him to have your best interest at heart, why are you with him? This is not to say that husbands are never to submit to their wives. If you don’t love her, and don’t trust her to have your best interests at heart, why are you with her? 
         For me, part of this is becoming about personality. I think I’d have a hard time loving someone who didn’t “flow with” my Introversion. I think that if I required an extroverted man to hang at the house all the time and not interact with other people, I could not claim to love him. I don’t think the peace that love requires and demonstrates has so much to do with whether we go to this movie or that, but with our accepting and working within the constraints that the person faces. You love a person according to what they are as you seek what is in their best interests. That is at least one way how peace is part of love.

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