18 June 2010 (Sheshi/Kippur) Day #95, 5934 AM
Shalom!
The Peace I Give To You.....
"Shalom I leave with you, My shalom I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid" (John 14:27, NKJV).
The word 'peace' is a commonly used word in our vocabulary. It is used by the religious and irreligious alike. It is the 'in' thing to be a promoter of peace. The communist East and the capitalist West used to promote it with equal vigour while calling each other war-mongers. 'Peace' is still the slogan of humanitarian efforts around the world. We hear of it incessantly and yet civil wars still rage. There is little peace anywhere.
You'll hear the word 'peace' or shalom used in the scriptures a lot too. However, biblical shalom is not a psychological phenomenon. If one were to isolate 'peace' psychologically, the psychologist's perception of it would probably be similar to the psychically isolated phenomenon of 'security'. Nevertheless the psychologists 'peace' and the biblical 'shalom' are objectively different. For shalom initially takes place outside man, in the objective shalom with Yahweh-Elohim, our Heavenly Father, by virtue of the reconcilliation of Yah'shua the Messiah (Jesus Christ).
"Now all things are of Elohim, who has reconciled us to Himself through Yah'shua the Messiah, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, that Elohim was in Messiah reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation" (2 Cor.5:18-19, NKJV).
This reconcilliation, however, entails man's appropriating it from the posture of repentance.
"As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Therefore be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me" (Rev.3:19-20, NKJV).
And repentance in turn means willingly turning away from the spellbinding powers of existence, from sin and its causes and consequences, in such a way as to face these powers realistically, consciously allowing oneself to be placed under judgment. Shalom therefore is granted to man standing under the Torah; it comes even while man realistically shoulders his burden of slavery to sin and death, a slavery exposed by the Torah in all its realism.
If one were crassly to juxtapose the two phenomena - shalom and security - one might say: Security lives on the resources of untruth inasmuch as the true realities are repressed and an 'as if not' illusion is the source of the self-securing existence. Shalom, on the contrary, lives from the Emet or Truth which is in Messiah Yah'shua. Shalom is bestowed in face-to-face confrontation with death's hideous strength and its yawning abyss.
The world's 'peace' and Yahweh's shalom are universes apart. All security apart from him is ultimately folly and is a fool's paradise, short-lived and illusiory. Read the Scriptures, repent of your sins, accept Yah'shua as your Messiah, walk in the Torah of His commandments and you will know SHALOM!
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