When the Road to Peace is Stained with Blood

 

Wednesday, February 16, 2022

I took my troubles to the Lord; I cried out to him, and he answered my prayer.  Rescue me, O Lord, from liars and from all deceitful people.  O deceptive tongue, what will God do to you?  How will he increase your punishment?  You will be pierced with sharp arrows and burned with glowing coals.  How I suffer in far-off Meshech.  It pains me to live in distant Kedar.  I am tired of living among people who hate peace.  I search for peace; but when I speak of peace, they want war!  Psalm 120:1-7

Peace is forever sought and elusive.  The writer of today’s Psalm of Ascents for those travelling to Jerusalem’s temple, understood the anguish of one living far from home.  And the distance was not in miles or travel days, but attitude.  “Home” (as the poet has it) is where the heart is.  The heart of this writer longed for kindness and strength of trusted relationships.  You can almost feel his bones creaking for the absence of peace.  He brings forth his words from a tired heart that aches for the renewing of truth, an honest moment of unguarded rest.

The sentence that stands alone in this Psalm is I searched for peace, but they wanted war!  As the exhaustive climb to the apex of life’s mountain of experiences comes to a close, this aging prophet looks back at life and the vanity of all else but peace; his stand-out takeaway-line is anger.  He craved a soft, refreshing water of calm truth to restore his dusty soul; what he got was a mirage of an amusement park’s diversion…success offered on the backs of the poor and lonely.  So-called peace was bought with bloodstains on every road.

The Psalm begins with assertion that God heard and answered his cry for rescue from the peace-barren, angry foreign place!  So, how is the prayer of the writer’s troubles answered?  This is a good question, and one which the eons of humanity find sparse answer.  That is – there is sparse answer without the leap of faith. 

There is a tendency toward thinking too much in the here and now, as opposed to the eternal.  Peace (in this life…at the address you call “home”) is measured in fleeting moments of satisfaction with circumstances.  The key word is fleeting.  That word is key, because the heart longs deeply for peace that is eternal.  Considering the track record of humankind, from the moment Eve took the first unsatisfactory bite of the fruit that separated her from God’s loving embrace, to the sharing of it with Adam, and then passing it along to Cain, and the rest of every breathing being, staining with curse every part of our existence right down to this present moment, we can have little hope in the maneuverings of human cleverness to somehow produce anything close to peace.  

Much more likely is the scenario of Russia invading Ukraine, and then America retaliating, followed by some sort of “peace-response” of the United Nations, followed by decades of tension-filled negotiations, incidents, and exposed treachery on all sides.  Man longs for peace, but it’s an illusion, because the blood-stained road of war is more “profitable.”

For You Today

It is a short-leap from the history books to despair.  The one antidote for such misery is embracing it the way God did.  He sent his only begotten, beloved son, Jesus to deal with our problem.  In true fashion, we nailed the Prince of Peace to a tree on the town garbage dump.  And that’s when the olive branch of peace appeared…in the wonder of an empty tomb!

So…go on in…look around that empty tomb; see the folded death shroud…feel the empty space death was supposed to inhabit…and know that peace lives forever in the beating, resurrected life of our Savior.  And he wants you to have it.  You only need drink…deeply!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!  

[1] Title and other images:  Pixabay.com    Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©