War & Peace

Habakkuk 1:1-11; Matthew 5:38-48

I watch the evening news every day. Actually I watch two evening new programs each evening. I am a glutton for punishment. I record two American networks or sometimes the BBC America news to give a little different perspective. I also read a daily newspaper. The war in Syria in an ongoing leading news story every day, especially now that the US has decided to get involved. One of the news programs recently mentioned that 93,000 people have been killed in the Syrian War so far. It is tragic. War is one of the great tragedies of human history. The numbers of people who have died in war in recorded history are so high we do not even know how to count them. When I researched the figures for this sermon the estimates for WW II were between 40-72 million. WWI estimates were between 15 and 75 million, depending on whether you include the influenza epidemic that followed it. The Russian Revolution killed between 5-9 million. Those are just the twentieth century wars! There were the wars like Mongul conquests of the 13^th and 14^th centuries that killed 30-70 million. The list goes on and on; we can really depress ourselves in the process You get the point. War is bad.

War is not the only opportunity we find to kill each other. There is murder and violence. There are the senseless crimes of young men going into schools and cinemas and shooting them up, or go to the Boston Marathon and blow up innocent spectators. People are rightly concerned about the culture of violence in America when it comes to gun deaths. We had our 14 year old nephew visiting with us for a weekend a few weeks ago. He spends a lot of time playing hand held video games where in the game he kills people with automatic weapons. It makes you wonder what such games are doing to a generation of kids. Of all the sermon suggestions that I received, more people asked me to preach on the topics of war and violence than any other. It is not an easy subject to preach about, but I will honor your requests today.

War. The world is filled with it and always has been. The Bible is filled with war. The history of Israel in the OT is a story of war, just like our American history is. I have no shortage of scripture texts to use to hang this sermon on. Even God is described as both a God of Peace and a Man of War. The song that Moses sang after Pharaoh’s chariots and soldiers are drowned in the sea is this:

“I will sing to the Lord,

For He has triumphed gloriously!

The horse and its rider

He has thrown into the sea!

² The Lord is my strength and song,

And He has become my salvation;

He is my God, and I will praise Him;

My father’s God, and I will exalt Him.

³ The Lord is a man of war;

The Lord is His name.”

And yet we also find in the OT wonderful visions of peace. From the Book of Isaiah:

“Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

To the house of the God of Jacob;

He will teach us His ways,

And we shall walk in His paths.”

For out of Zion shall go forth the law,

And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

⁴ He shall judge between the nations,

And rebuke many people;

They shall beat their swords into plowshares,

And their spears into pruning hooks;

Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

Neither shall they learn war anymore.”

In the NT we have repeated references to the Lord as a God of Peace, and Jesus’ lofty instruction on the Sermon on the Mount to love your enemy, turn the other cheek, and resist not evil. Today I am going to look at the topic of war under two categories.

I. First is the Cause of War. To put it simply the cause of war is human beings. Animals skirmish over territory, food and mates, but only humans wage war on a vast scale. If we are looking for the cause of war, we need look no further than our own hearts. A couple of weeks ago I quoted the apostle James on this subject, “Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war.” Peterson’s translation “The Message makes it even clearer: “Where do you think all these appalling wars and quarrels come from? Do you think they just happen? Think again. They come about because you want your own way, and fight for it deep inside yourselves.”

How did this violence get into the human heart? You could argue from an anthropological or psychological point of view that it is human nature. That we are a violent species. We can’t help it; it is in our genes. When we look in the Bible we find murder and violence very early. Adam and Eve didn’t kill each other, but their sons did. In Genesis there were only four people in Eden and one of them killed another. Cain killed Abel. When he is banished from Eden for his crime, he is scared that he will be killed by others. He replied to God’s sentence of banishment: “I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth, and it will happen that anyone who finds me will kill me.” Violence appears to be part of human nature.

Christians explain this theologically in terms of original sin. The doctrine of original sin says that humans are by nature sinners. There are those who will argue that people are naturally good and they only become corrupted by human society. But anyone who has raised kids knows that is not true.  I know that is not true just by watching our grandkids. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr famously said, “The doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.” We are natural born sinners. And war is proof of this. The Great War, World War I was optimistically called “the war to end all wars.” But it actually only ushered in a century of war.

We are the problem. Christian theologians look to the idea of the Fall to explain this tendency to sin. We are studying the Book of Genesis on Wednesdays. In Chapter 1 everything is made good, and Chapter 2 starts out with Adam and Eve in the paradise of Eden. Then it says that a choice was made by man and woman that brought moral evil into the world and very quickly brought violence into the human family. And it has been happening ever since. The Christian doctrine of the fall not only teaches us that sin and violence are inevitable. It also teaches us that we are accountable. We can’t just blame it on our DNA or our upbringing.

If it is in our nature, then war and violence are inevitable. I am not being pessimistic; I am being realistic. I have this on good authority. Jesus said that there would be wars and rumors of war until the end of the age. When you read the scriptures there is no sense that war can be ended by the goodwill of good people. Jesus was a good person, and he was murdered by the government. Even people of nonviolence like Martin Luther King Jr and Mahatma Gandhi were murdered by violent people. Practitioners of nonviolence can do great good – and I will talk more about that in a little while – but we should be under no illusion that it is possible to end war, or legislate away violence in society, or form a perfect treaty to end all international conflict. The Treaty of Versailles (Ver – sigh) that ended the war to end all wars only planted the seeds for the next war. I am not against treaties or gun control, but we are deceiving ourselves if we think it is going to stop violence. We will just find another way to kill each other.

In fact I would go so far as to say that government is part of the problem as much as it is the solution. Historically governments fight wars. We are actually in an age of terrorism when nongovernment rebel forces also wages wars, but even they fight governments. We have seen that governments – including our own - are not honest when it come to the reasons for fighting wars. War can be about noble causes like freedom and human rights, but it is just as often about greed and power. As the saying goes, the first casualty of war is truth. Why have we fought all the wars we have fought as a nation? Maybe you believe everything the government says about our reasons, but I don’t.

2. So what do we do as Christians when faced with a violent human nature and a world of war and violence? What is the proper Christian response? What do the Scriptures instruct us in this matter? There are a number of possible Christian responses to war and violence.

One is to fight evil with force when necessary. I am not a pacifist. I believe that sometimes war is the only solution left to people of good faith. But I realize that even to make that statement is problematic. Who is to decide when war is necessary? How do we know which side is right and which side is wrong? Every government paints itself as being on the side of good and God. How do we know what is propaganda and what is true? Listen to the statements that President Assad of Syria makes. You would think he was on the side of the angels, when it appears to us that he is a dictator killing his own people with chemical weapons. The people whom we call terrorists see themselves as righteous warriors fighting on the side of Allah against the great Satan, the United States, whom they understand to be waging a crusade against Islam and Muslims. We see them as an evil distortion of religion, killing innocents with a misguided understanding of God’s will.

Given the human capacity for self-deception, how do we know what side is right? But having said that, we cannot throw up our hands in despair and refuse to take sides. I do believe that there is good and evil in the world. When it comes to war there is often one side that is more on the side of right than the other. Neither side has completely clean hands in war. War brings out the worst in some people, just as it brings out the best in terms of self-sacrifice and heroism in others. There is never a war without war crimes. Innocents are always injured and killed. But still it is often necessary to fight.

There is a long history in Christianity of taking this position. It has been codified in what has been called the Just War theory, which puts forth the principles under which war is justifiable. Last month on the news I watched an excerpt from a speech that President Obama gave at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., on May 23, 2013. In it he invoked the Just War theory to explain his stance on the use of drones in assassinations, even against American citizens fighting with Al Qaida. He is in a long line of American presidents and lawmakers who have historically justified war based on Christian principles and the Bible.

The truth is that Bible is filled with war, often waged with the blessing of God. The Book of Joshua describes the campaigns against the Canaanites and other peoples of the land of Canaan sanctioned by God. We can dismiss OT wars out of hand as examples of a primitive tribal god of violence, or we can see it as something more. The whole history of Israel involves war, and God is not always in Israel’s side. We not only have Israel fighting its foes, we have Hebrews fighting Hebrews – the northern Kingdom of Israel fighting the Southern Kingdom of Judah. We also have God guiding foreign nations like Babylon to fight against Israel and even destroying Jerusalem and the temple. So God is not just a tribal deity in the OT. 

Furthermore a lot of people try to divide the OT from the NT, saying that OT portrays a God of war and the NT God is a God of peace. It sounds good, until you actually read the Bible. In the NT we have Jesus’ prophecies of the forthcoming destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans seen as God’s will. You will not find any bloodier book in the Bible than the Book of Revelation. I am talking the Battle of Armageddon, which is the fight of the forces of good against the forces of evil. The God of the Bible – OT and NT - is clearly involved in war. Therefore it is a biblical to be a Christian and a warrior. We find Jesus interacting with Roman soldiers in the gospels and Roman soldiers converting to Christianity in the book of Acts and nowhere does Jesus ask them to change their occupation nor does it say they resigned their commissions. There is a long tradition of Christian soldiers. There was an attempt in the 1980s to remove the hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers" from the United Methodist Hymnal and the Episcopal Hymnal. Outrage among church people caused both hymnal committees to back down. However, the hymn was omitted from the 1990 hymnal of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). I believe that it is a noble calling to be a soldier as well as a Christian, and that is why I am so supportive of those who serve in the military.

But having said that, I believe there is another calling just as noble. That is the calling of the peacemaker. I honor and respect those who have taken the road of nonviolence, those who see that history teaches that war only sows the seeds of future war in a never-ending cycle. That an eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind, as Mahatma Gandhi says. This is the road of Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist preacher. This is the road less traveled. It is the way of Jesus Christ. Jesus was a pacifist. Only on one occasion did Jesus instruct his disciples to buy swords, and that was prior to his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. But when Peter used the sword to defend Jesus from capture, Christ ordered him to put it away, saying, “Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” Then he proceeded to heal the injury of the man who had been wounded by Peter. In our gospel lesson Jesus famously said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.” And he also “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven…. Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.”

Some hear this call of perfect nonviolence, and they follow it. They have made the world are more peaceful and less violent place. I agree with the words of Jesus, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” These peacemakers may be our best hope for a more peaceful earth. But ultimately I believe that Jesus is also right when he says there will always be wars and rumors of war. The only end to war will be when Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, establishes his Peaceable Kingdom predicted by the prophets upon this earth. That is our hope. Let’s try not to kill ourselves completely off before that happens.

The hope for peace on earth is Jesus Christ. If the cause of war is the human heart than the solution to war is the transformation of the human heart. That happens only when Christ reigns in our hearts now just as he will reign someday on earth in the future. So I have three Christian responses to war and violence. One is to fight on the side of right, and do our best to discern the right. The second is to wage the spiritual warfare of nonviolence, knowing that the real fight is not against flesh and blood but against spiritual forces of evil. The third is to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ which by the grace of God through faith in the Savior transforms the human heart, leading it from violence to peace, curing our warring madness from the inside out. The work of Christ in our hearts and in the world is the only hope of peace.