Jesus Secures Our Peace with God

BY Melanie Rainer

There have only been a few moments in my life when I have felt perfectly at peace. Moments of sweetness and beauty are so profound, they leave me feeling as though the veil between now and eternity is lifted for just a moment, long enough to breathe in before the exhale drops me back into the mundane. 

We live in this in-between, in the “already but not yet” reality of Christ. We only receive a few precursors of perfect peace in our mortal bodies, when our desire for heaven is almost satisfied for a second. We crave heaven because it is what we were made for. We long for peace because our hearts are hard-wired for it. 

In her novel Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson describes longing for peace like this:

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. 

Today’s passages give me similar moments of peace and pause. Colossians 1 and 1 Corinthians 15 are both banner moments in Paul’s writings. I can hardly read them without the very best kind of tears filling my eyes. These passages provoke the deepest, unfulfilled places in my heart. They remind me that I was made for a perfect eternity.

Our eternal peace with God will be better than anything we can ever imagine. We will put on, as Paul writes so hopefully, our incorruptible bodies—new and perfect versions of ourselves (1Corinthians 15:53). We will also be fully reconciled with God. 

Theologians categorize the work of Christ into different buckets, one of which is Christ as our reconciler. Sin alienates us from God and it makes us strangers to His mercy. There is an uncrossable chasm between us. But when we know Jesus and believe in Him, He makes our peace with God. He binds us up into a covenant relationship, into perfect peace. 

Jesus doesn’t offer that peace to us as a pretty gift wrapped in a bow; rather, He spent His breath and bones to purchase it for us, “making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 1:20). And so because of His blood, we claim reconciliation as God’s people. We will be reunited with Him forever. Death is no longer an uncrossable chasm. Death has lost its sting, having been swallowed up in Christ’s victory on the cross (1Corinthians 15:54–55).

As those who have been raised with Christ, let us seek eternal things, not earthly things. One day He will appear again, and we will join Him in glory. But as we wait, let us rest in the peace of Christ today. Lord, hasten the day of your return.