When Will Peace Come
Algernon James Pollock
Table of Contents
When Will Peace Come?
Not till Christ reigns. There may be a peace of exhaustion, a sullen peace, but real, actual peace will not come to stay till the King of kings reigns.
The utter failure of the peace propaganda under the Hague Convention shows that peace will never come permanently till the basis of it is God's.
This peace propaganda has an endowment of £2,000,000; a palace costing several millions; a library on international peace of 75,000 volumes; stained glass windows from England; gates from Germany; marble interior from Italy; silk tapestries from Japan; porcelain from China; marble statuary from the United States of America; carpets from Turkey; minor gifts from small States. Yet what is it all worth?
Five of the monarchs and presidents, whose pictures hang on the walls, have been assassinated since the palace was built. Some years ago it was reported that three visitors were being shown over the deserted building by the caretaker, and they fell to blows in the very place dedicated to peace. They were German, French, and one other nationality. They quarreled so violently that actual fighting took place between them.
The Great War of 1914-1918 with its terrible tale of woe and incubus of staggering debt is over. The League of Nations was established. The nations were to live in peace, or would be made to, if any were recalcitrant. The war to end war was over. Henceforth it was to be peace.
A few years roll by however and deadly war again is raging. Austria has been raped. Czecho-Slovakia has been overrun. Poland has been wiped out. Albania has lost her independence. Abyssinia has been conquered. Small nations are alarmed and full of fear. Men without fear of God before their eyes are acting the part of the common burglar and thief on an immense scale.
The youth of nations is called up to meet this terrible state of affairs The question is on every lip, Why does God allow this war? Is Christianity a failure?
The answer is obvious. There are 75,000 volumes on international peace in the Palace of Peace library. They can all be done without. Let them be gathered into a mighty pile and burned.
And what then? Put in their place a Bible. Let the individuals, who make up the nations, govern their lives by it, and what would be the result? Peace, blessed peace, would come like a gentle dove to the anguished heart of the world, and still its passions and its fears. There would be no need for navies and armies; no need of frontiers to be fortressed; no need of Siegfried and Maginot lines; no need of mighty cannon, of giant tanks, of airplanes, and bombers, no need of strikes, there would be no poverty, no injustice. The men would beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks; nation would not lift up sword against nation, neither would they learn war any more (see Isa. 2:4).
The present war is not the result of Bible teaching, but diametrically opposed to it.
Christianity has not failed, but the lack of Christianity has brought about the present state of things, and men are slow to perceive it.
Why does God allow this war?
Why does God allow a child to burn its finger when it thrusts it into the fire? To teach it to avoid fire in the future. To avoid a recurrence of the pain. To avoid a greater catastrophe. The child knows no better, but yet it has to learn its lesson.
Why does God allow this war?
Why does God allow a man who drinks prussic acid to be poisoned? The man is aware of what he is doing. No one thinks of blaming God in this matter. The nature of prussic acid is well known. The man is blamed for his folly and he rightly deserves the consequences of his act.
Why does God allow this war?
Why does God allow tares to grow instead of wheat, when the farmer deliberately sows tares? No one is so foolish as to ask such a puerile question.
Why does God allow this war?
We answer, the nations have been sowing the wind, and they are reaping the whirlwind. The lesson is a stiff one. But it is needed, and by it God is chastening and warning the nations, lest a more dread thing happen to them.
Germany has thrown off the fear of God. Hitler breaks his plighted word again and again, till no respecting nation trusts him. Shameless is his conduct as witness the tragedy of Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, and Poland. Hitler has substituted Thor, the German god of war, for Christ. A thousand godly pastors are languishing in prison because they refuse to give up the Bible and the Savior for this shameless neo-paganism that is being thrust upon the nation. Who could have believed that this would have happened in the land of the glorious Reformation, the land of Martin Luther? The Jews have been thrust out of the land, many murdered with diabolical cruelty.
Russia has cruelly persecuted the Jews for long. Language fails to express the horrors God's ancient people have gone through at the hands of "holy Russia!" Does the Jew groan and sigh in vain? Surely the God of Sabaoth has heard.
Godless Russia is the name of shame the Soviet Union has earned. She has destroyed churches by the hundreds: She has installed pure shameless atheism in the teaching in the schools. Immorality is rife. Russia has sown the wind, behold the whirlwind.
France has sown the wind of infidelity, and she too is reaping the whirlwind. Nominally Roman Catholic, true religion has little hold on the French nation. All this has its rebound for evil that can clearly be traced.
Britain alas! cannot be truthfully described as a Christian country when less than five per cent of the population attend a place of worship, and of the handful who attend church, many are merely nominal professors, whose lives cannot be described as Christian. Is the land not in reality pagan? Thank God, there is the unconscious influence of former generations of God-fearing ancestors, but it is rapidly a vanishing force. Churches are empty; cinemas and divorce courts are full. Is God not noticing these things?
A more terrible awakening than what is happening in the present is before us. Are the nations hearing? Alas! no. Is Britain humbled? No 1
Why does God allow this war? The vast majority of those who ask this question are men and women, who emphatically don't want God in peace time. When the sun shines, when business prospers, when health is theirs, God would be an intrusion. How unutterably mean to whine out, Why does God allow the war? when their past conduct has been. such. They have done without God hitherto, and now they are learning how terrible it is to do without Him in times of stress. Above all, how terrible it will be to do without Him in-ETERNITY.
Let the individual take heed to what is happening, and learn there from its lesson.
How solemn to see enacted on the Continent of Europe, on this colossal scale, the truth of Holy Writ: "Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting" (Gal. 6:7, 8).
Whether it be the nations, the unconverted individual, or the Christian, this principle holds good. Without this restraining principle at work, things would be so awful as to beggar description. Man would destroy himself.
God is speaking. He has spoken quietly, then louder and still louder, and men are still deaf. He will speak yet louder, and make them hear.
But one thing is certain: There can be no true lasting peace, either in an individual's life, or a nation's, or the world's unless Christ comes to rule.
Does He rule in your life? Is He your Savior and Lord?
Isa. 9:6, tells us our Lord is the Prince of peace, blessed title. The Apostle Peter tells us, "God... is preaching peace by Jesus Christ." (Acts 10:36). The Apostle Paul tells us that Christ "made peace through the blood of His cross. (Col. 1:20).
Your only hope for peace with God lies in your acceptance of Christ as your personal Savior.
Warring nations may make peace, but that is for time only, and is a manmade peace that may break down before the ink of the treaty is dry, but what you need is peace in your soul and for eternity.
Scripture puts the matter before us very plainly. If you come as a repentant confessed sinner and accept the Lord as your personal Savior, you can take up the language of Scripture and say of Christ, "Who was delivered for our offenses, and was raised again for our justification. Therefore being justified by faith [not by tears or striving or work], we have peace with God [present possession] through our Lord Jesus Christ." (Rom. 4:25;5. 1).
The boy was asked what faith was. He replied, "It is laying hold of Christ with the hand of your heart." How true this is!
Readers, do you desire real true settled peace with God and for eternity, your sins forgiven, your soul saved, your hope of heaven assured? There is only one way—-Trust the Savior just as you are. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." (Acts 16:31). God grant that you may do so here and now. The Savior says, "Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out." (John 6:37).
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