Blessed are the Peacemakers . . .

PEACEMAKERS AND THE ROYAL LAW

However much we speak of believers not being under law, we are to remember that there is one law of God that is forever binding, which the Jerusalem Bible refers to as “the supreme law of scripture,” but which is more commonly known as the royal law. It may say something about where most of us have been that we have made so little of the greatest law of the Bible. The role of the peacemaker is best seen in the light of this law, the royal law, which is: you must love your neighbor as yourself. When it comes right down to it, there is no other way to make peace except by applying the kingly law of love.

The problem in James 2, where we read of the royal law, is that some believers were making distinctions among themselves, giving special attention to the rich while neglecting the poor. They argued that in honoring the rich they were, after all, obeying the greatest of all the commandments, the royal law of love. But the apostle questions whether they were really motivated by love, for in catering to the rich they despised the poor. Nevertheless he says to them: “If, however, you are observing the sovereign law laid down in Scripture, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’, that is excellent,” as the NEB renders it. From what he says next it is clear that he questions whether they are really obeying the law of love, but are rather condemned by that very law: “But if you show snobbery, you are committing a sin and you stand convicted by that law as transgressors” (verse 9).

So, despite their claims, they were not honoring the royal law, which in its lofty ethic allowed for no distinctions between believers, which meant that the poor brother, meagerly clad in smelly clothes, was to be received with the same honor as the rich, who enter the assembly in fine raiment and with gold rings on their fingers. All generations, whether Christians or not, tend to say to the well-heeled, “Please, take this seat!,” while to the poor man in rags they say, “You may stand or sit on the floor.” Pride is the name of the game.

We must see here that it is making distinctions between God’s children that violates the law of love, which is the law of all Scripture. There are different ways in which our sisters and brothers can be “poor people in rags,” for few are literally like that in our churches. One may be more despised for being “a brother in error” than for being poor, or a sister may be told to sit on the floor because she speaks in tongues. Among many of our folk there is nothing worse than to be wrong, and so we make our distinctions between the right and the wrong. To those who are right, doctrinally correct, we say, “Please, sit here, and will you be so kind as to lead our prayer,” while to our brother in error, because of tongues or organs or classes or institutions, we kindly greet and even bless with “May you be warmed and filled,” and yet give him not what he needs in terms of tender, loving fellowship. Distinctions! That is the sin that violates the sovereign law of the Bible.

The royal law is also called the law of liberty in James 2:12: “Always speak and act as men who are to be judged under a law of freedom,” the NEB again. What is bothering James is that his brethren are seeing the commandments of God as apart from that one law that undergirds and gives connection to them all. “If a man keeps the whole law apart from one single point, he is guilty of breaking all of it,” he insists, showing, as did Jesus, that all the law hangs upon love. It is, after all, the law of love and of freedom that will judge them, so it is not enough simply to obey laws that prohibit adultery or murder. Never are we so free than when we realize that love is behind every commandment and ordinance of God—“the end of the charge is love” as the apostle explained to Timothy.

The royal law is the law of Christ, or, to put it another way, the law of Christ is the law of love. “Help one another to carry these heavy loads,” we read in Gal. 6:2, “and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” Gal. 5:14 identifies the law of Christ as the law of love: “For the whole law can be summed up in a single commandment: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

The royal law is also the perfect law of James 1:25. When one looks into the mirror that reflects the love of God as manifested in Jesus, he sees the force of “the perfect law, the law of liberty,” and thus measures his own sinful self, so void of that love. If he is not a hearer that forgets, but a doer that works, he will be blessed in his doing of love. In seeing Christ in the mirror, we see how love makes us accepting, forgiving, and forbearing. By his Spirit we are more and more transformed into his loving image, from one degree of radiant holiness to another, as 2 Cor. 3:8 says.

This is what is happening to many of our folk these days. Only last week a brother from a distant state sat in my livingroom and told how he had at last learned the law of love and that he now was a maker of peace among his fellows. Rather than to argue with his brethren as he had long done, with all its attendant enmity, he now sought to be with them only in an atmosphere of love. He told of visiting with one brother who had been conditioned to argue at the drop of the hat, and who would drop the hat if need be. “I am not here to argue with you,” he explained, “I simply want to be with you and enjoy you as my brother.” This kind of peacemaking, motivated by an adherence to the royal law, can be contagious.

My visitor made one point, rather forlornly, that lingered with me. Why, he asked, are we so slow to learn what religion is all about? But has this not always been the case in organized religion? On more than one occasion Jesus urged those who knew the law virtually by heart to learn the meaning of what Hosea had said, “I desire mercy rather than sacrifice.” They too had missed the point of religion.

It is like boys slipping in under the canvas wall to see their first circus. They made their way around the periphery and saw the sideshows, but, ignorant of the way of circuses, they left unaware of the three-ring event under the big top. They saw the sideshows but missed the main event! To miss the main event, James is telling us as he points to the royal law, is “to be guilty of breaking the whole law.”

This is the fruit of the Spirit, love, which issues from a pure heart. Gal. 5:22 shows that the Spirit’s fruit, not fruits, while singular manifests itself in many ways: joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control. The love hymn of 1 Cor. 13 is similar, revealing love as a many-splendored thing. But above all it is the Spirit’s fruit and not our own work as if by our power or might. What a line the apostle gives us in Rom. 5:5! Let it burn into your soul: God’s love has flooded our inmost heart through the Holy Spirit he has given us.

The Bible speaks only of love as fulfilling the law, and this more than once, which explains why an apostle would refer to it as the supreme or royal law. As the NEB puts it in Rom. 13:8: “He who loves his neighbor has satisfied every claim of the law.” He goes on to say that the Ten Commandments and all other commandments are summed up in this one rule, Love your neighbor as yourself.

He goes on in the next chapter to seal the work of the peacemaker: “If a man is weak in the faith you must accept him without attempting to settle doubtful points” (14:1). Ah, doubtful points! What mockery we make of the royal law of love because of them! He goes on to say more than once that we are not to judge one another, for it is before his own master that each of us stands, and so we do not have to sit in judgment of each other. And what a question he lays on the entire church in verse 10: “You, sir, why do you pass judgment on your brother? And you, sir, why do you hold your brother in contempt?”

When we accept each other as sisters and brothers because we all belong to Him, and not on the basis of party, and thus realize that the kingdom is a matter of love, peace and joy and not sectarian politics, we hear the apostle say: “He who thus shows himself a servant of Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men.”

He wraps it all up in Rom. 15:7: “In a word, accept one another as Christ accepted us, to the glory of God.”

When we do this we look into the mirror of God’s royal law and. go away remembering how God loved us in accepting us while we were yet sinners, and thus we do the sovereign law by accepting each other on the same basis.

If you cut it any other way you are going to have a sect or a country club or something beside a community of love, which is what it is all about.—the Editor