Phil 4:6-7 Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, shall guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

What a promise from God, that if we will reject the thinking that says anxiety is the logical reaction to adversity and go to Him in prayers with thanksgiving, that His peace will guard our hearts and minds from the enemy of the Christian.

In this article we will discuss God’s peace and how we as believers in Christ can come to experience His peace and make it our own. We will look at the 2 types of peace, “Peace with God” and then “Peace from God” and make the important distinction between them. We will see how we gain peace with God at salvation and then what a believer can do to experience peace from God as we live the Christian life. In order to have an appreciation for peace, let’s examine our human situation that gives peace real meaning.

Angelic Conflict

Before we can discuss peace with God we have to understand the context of human history. Before human history began, God had created angels, a group of super creatures who served and worshipped God. The greatest of these creatures, Lucifer, decided that he no longer wanted to worship God, but wanted the other angels to worship him like a god. He convinced 1/3 of the other angels to go along with him thinking they could be free of God’s authority. They were to discover that God’s authority is very important to Him and that He was unwilling to allow these angels to get away with their sin. He called them to account, brought them to trial, found them guilty and pronounced their eternal sentence to live forever without God in the Lake of Fire. It is believed that the reason this sentence has not been executed is that God has allowed the angels to appeal their sentence and that human history is concerned with demonstrating both God’s and the devil’s arguments in the trial.

Creation of Man

Some time after the events of the Angelic Conflict previously discussed, God decided to create a race of creatures who could be used to demonstrate the issues involved in the Angelic Conflict. Created in an almost identical situation, with the same ability to choose, man is forced to choose between the influence of God or the fallen angels. Unseen, behind the scenes of human history, the devil offer his personal philosophy of independence to man while God offers man the gift of eternal life. Let’s look closer at why man needs this free gift of eternal life or he will share the devil’s destiny in the Lake of Fire.

Adam’s Sin

Created in the image of God, placed in perfect environment and in a perfect relationship with God, the devil convinced the first man and woman to follow his ways by disobeying God. When Adam disobeyed God, he lost everything good in his life. He lost his righteous standing with God and came under the same condemnation the devil faces. He lost his human spirit and with it his ability to commune with God and understand God’s ideas. He lost his dominion over the earth and became one of the devil’s subjects. He lost perfect environment and was forced to work the earth along with thorns and thistles to make his living. The choice to sin against God had terrible consequences for Adam and Eve and for all of their children who have inherited everything he chose.

Born in Sin

Adam’s sin and its consequences have passed down to all mankind. We are born condemned, in the devil’s kingdom as God’s enemies, spiritually dead, separated from God, unable to communicate with Him, in the harsh environment of the devil’s world and with a sinful nature that disorients us to God and His authority. Born under condemnation as His enemies and with a nature to reject God, we are nowhere close to being at peace with God. We are now disconnected from God, playing for the losing team and totally disoriented from His way of thinking. In contrast to peace with God, if we die in this state, we will be crushed by God.

God’s Love Gives Solutions

The whole human race is born in danger of being crushed by the Justice of God, eternally. Not just for a time, but forever and ever. Because we chose this in Adam, God would have every right to just allow us to die in this state and pass into eternal fire. Yet God is love and He wants us to have mercy and he wants us to rescued from this terrible situation. He wanted the fallen angels to be saved but they refused His offer. He also wants all mankind to be saved and so He has made a way to offer each of us a way out of our condemnation and enemy status. He made a way through the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ so that whoever believes in His work as their means of being saved, is given eternal life and adopted into God’s family forever. This gift of salvation is the beginning of being right with God and is how we gain “Peace with God”.

Peace with God

Peace with God comes from being in a right relationship with the Righteousness and Justice of God. The only way a fallen human being can be right with God is through faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. As discussed, we begin condemned and as God’s enemies under the authority of the devil. God is not at peace with His enemies, far from it. He is in a long-term campaign to defeat them publicly, expose them for the evil monsters they truly are and ultimately incarcerate them in the Lake of Fire. This means that God is not at peace with most of the members of the human race, which included me before I trusted in Christ as my savior and was freed from all the consequences of Adam’s sin.

When any of us attaches our faith to the gospel (death, burial & resurrection of Jesus Christ) we are immediately reconciled to God and given judicial peace with Him. The cross of Christ paid for the sins of the human race and the resurrection defeated death on our behalf. When we trust in Christ we are placed into union with Him and credited with His work on our behalf. Our union with Christ is one of 50 different descriptions of our permanent relationship with God forever.  As we are connected to Him, we are given total forgiveness for all sins in the courtroom resolving every issue that would stand between us and God. At this moment God has wiped away every problem we have with Him and given us total peace with Him.

Secure in Christ

What God does at the moment of salvation is permanent and eternal. The 50 things He does in heaven and in the believer and irrevocable giving us absolute security of salvation. While some so called Christian churches teach another gospel, a gospel of works where a saved person can lose their salvation, this is a heresy and should be rejected and not believed. Those who believe they can lose their salvation because of sin, because of rejecting God, because of changing their mind or any other reason are most pitiful since they live their lives in the fear of failure and loss. Instead of growing in love with the Lord based on total security, these poor people live trying to hold onto what they couldn’t lose in the first place.

We are secure in Christ and we can never be separated from Him in time or eternity. The peace we have through union with Christ makes our eternal future one of guaranteed blessing and happiness. As believers learn about the life of blessing God has planned for us and believe in His plan, the truth begins to change us from the inside out. The truth about peace with God begins to produce an experience of inner peace which is a wonderful gift from God.

Peace from God

The promise we read in Phil 4:6-7 is about the inner tranquility that builds in the heart of the spiritually advancing believer as he grows in the Lord. Peace with God describes the judicial peace we are given at salvation while peace from God is the inner peace that grows inside of us as we come to trust the Lord more and more in life.  Peace from God is the production of the Holy Spirit as He teaches us about our total security and the life of victory and blessing God intends and provides for each believer. As we understand that every adversity is known and allowed by God-Father as motivation to grow and an opportunity to glorify Him by trusting His word, we come to view our troubles as blessings. We realize more and more that we are swinging with a net below and that God will always catch us when we fall. As this realization grows and as we experience the victory of faith, our expectations become realistic and our confidence of victory in adversity becomes a certainty in our minds. It is this certainty of the sufficiency of grace for every need in life that effects inner tranquility in the life of the believer in Chri

Inner Beauty

Inner peace and tranquility is one of the greatest blessings in this life and is no easy accomplishment to develop it. When a believer has done the hard work of learning the whole realm of bible doctrine and exercised his faith through many adversities, this inner calm becomes the dominant state of the soul. In a man, this inner calm produces a confident kindness and gentleness. The peaceful man can face his life with a calm demeanor knowing that God is in control of his life.

This same calm in a woman produces beauty. In a woman’s soul, inner tranquility produces a serene demeanor that is one of the most beautiful images in the universe. When a woman has serenity in her heart, she can remain calm and quietly joyful even when her life is in turmoil. The woman who is fully surrendered to the Lord in her heart reveals this serenity to those around her and glorifies the Lord through her inner beauty.

A Contented Life

Peace with God is the blessed situation that is the life of every born again believer in Jesus Christ. It is this permanent state of right relationship with the Justice of God that is the basis of peace from God, the condition of inner tranquility in the soul of the contented believer. As we grow into a peaceful state because of our confidence in God’s grace, we are able to be content with whatever God provides. We can enjoy times of prosperity, thankful for God’s generosity and we can enjoy the battles of adversity, determined to glorify God by trusting Him to the end. The peaceful, tranquil believer is the contented believer. They go together in the soul of the believer in the plan of God.