What Is Peace?

Peace is more than just the absence of conflict. The Hebrew word shalom captures what true peace really means: wholeness, completeness, and harmony in all our relationships.

Think of three dimensions of relationship: our relationship with the world around us, with others, and with ourselves. When all these relationships are healthy and whole—not broken, twisted, or full of tension—that is real peace. Shalom is like an orchestra in harmony, or a family feasting together and flourishing, loving one another and letting that love overflow outwards.

We all want to live lives where our relationships are harmonious and flourishing. Yet even when we glimpse peace for a moment, it feels slippery and hard to hold onto. There's a missing ingredient we don't have.

The Root of Our Problem

According to Jesus, our most fundamental relationship—the one that lies at the root of all the others—is our relationship with God. Like the roots of a tree, this relationship isn't always obvious. Some of us might not even think we have a relationship with God or need one. But Jesus teaches that the health of every other relationship in our lives depends on the health of our relationship with God.

We were created by a good and loving God. Everything we have and everything we are is a gift from him. We were made to love him back, to do life with him, trusting him. But most of us can relate to wanting independence. We don't want anyone telling us what to do—not even God. We want to be the supreme authority in our own lives.

Whether we actively reject God or just try not to think about it, we essentially say to the God who made us and loves us: "Can we pretend you're dead? Can we just act like you're not there?" Jesus warns us that this is a deep problem.

The Parable of the Lost Son

Jesus told a powerful story to explain this. A father had two sons. The younger one demanded his inheritance early—essentially asking his father to pretend he was already dead so he could take the money and leave.

"The younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country, and there squandered his wealth in wild living."

The younger son represents all of us. He's a picture of what happens when we turn away from God. After spending everything, a severe famine came. He ended up starving, friendless, alone in a pigsty feeding pigs. He had run away looking for the good life but ended up in darkness and isolation.

Jesus is warning us: if our relationship with God is broken underneath the surface, we will never find lasting peace. Our other relationships will suffer. We cannot build lasting peace on a foundation of ignoring the God who made us.

God's Offer of Reconciliation

But then the son comes to his senses. Ashamed and penniless, he decides to return home and ask to work as a servant, thinking he must earn his way back.

"But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him. He ran to his son, threw his arms around him, and kissed him."

The father doesn't make him prove himself. He covers the son's shame with his best robe, puts the family ring on his finger, and throws a feast to celebrate his return. The son had come expecting to be a servant, but the father welcomes him as a beloved son.

This is shalom—deep reconciliation, relationships restored, belonging and wholeness and peace.

Jesus is saying: "This is what God is actually like." He's not just telling us about God's character; he's showing us. Jesus himself is God running out to embrace anyone who will come to him with open arms.

Why Jesus Died

When Jesus died on the cross, he was enacting this welcome. God became human to run out and meet us and reconcile us to himself, to restore peace between him and us.

Forgiveness is costly. It means taking the pain of what someone has done to you into yourself and refusing to push it back on them. That is what God does for us in Jesus. He takes onto himself all the pain that our wrongdoing has created, all the pain that our wrongdoing deserves, and lets it crush him on the cross.

He pays the price of our peace so that whoever we are, whatever we've done, we can be forgiven. We can be reconciled to him. Our relationship with him can be healed and restored.

Jesus dies on the cross so that we can have lasting peace with God—peace that is not fragile and broken by every failure, but enduring because he's already paid the cost of everything we will ever do wrong.

The Challenge: The Older Brother

But Jesus doesn't end the story with the younger son's return. He introduces the older brother, who was working in the field.

When the older brother hears about the feast, he becomes furious. He says to his father:

"Look, all these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders, yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours, who's squandered your property with prostitutes, comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him."

The older brother sees himself as a slave who has earned reward through his work. He's angry that his brother—who doesn't deserve it—is being treated so well.

The father replies:

"You are always with me. Everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found."

Jesus doesn't tell us what the older brother does next. Does he go into the feast, or does he stay outside, consumed by anger and pride? Jesus is looking at each of us and asking: Will you let pride resist God's offer of peace? Or will you come home?

Three Foundations for Peace

If we embrace the peace with God that Jesus offers, it becomes the root out of which peace in all other relationships can grow.

Peace with ourselves. If the God of the universe knows all your flaws and failures, and loves you enough to die on the cross so he can forgive you forever and for free, then you don't need to be haunted by those failures. You can face them knowing you are loved anyway. When anxiety or guilt comes, you can fight those feelings with the truth: the God of the universe loves you and delights in you.

Peace with others. When we see Jesus on the cross enduring all of that out of love for us, it stops us from believing we don't need forgiveness. It also empowers us to offer forgiveness to others. If he's done that for us, we can try to pass it on.

Perfect peace one day. Right now, this change is real and powerful, but it's not finished. We're still a mess in many ways. But Jesus promised he will finish the job. He will bring us into true and total peace. He proved it by rising from the dead. The resurrection is the guarantee that if we let him reconcile us to himself, one day he will raise us into a healed world, a restored world of true shalom—total freedom, flourishing, deep peace, all centered on the blazing goodness of God, his beauty and his love.