peace

I wanted to share a few quotes mentioned by the pastor at CityLife today.

God cannot give us...peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing. 

C.S Lewis

If you throw thousands of pieces of thread onto a table, no fabric results. The threads must be rightly and intimately related to one another in literally a million ways. Each thread must go over, under, around, and through the others at thousands of points. Only then do you get a fabric that is beautiful and strong, that covers, fits, holds, shelters, and delights. God created all things to be in a beautiful, harmonious, interdependent, knitted, webbed relationship to one another. Just as rightly related physical elements form a cosmos or a tapestry, so rightly related human beings form a community. This interwovenness is what the Bible calls shalom, or harmonious peace. 

Tim Keller

God hates sin not just because it violates his law but, more substantively, because it violates shalom, because it breaks the peace, because it interferes with the way things are supposed to be. (In fact, that is why God has laws against a good deal of sin.) God is enthusiastically for shalom and therefore against sin. Let's say that evil is anything spoiling of shalom, whether physically (by cancer, say), morally, spiritually, or otherwise. Moral and spiritual evil are agential evil, that is, evil that, roughly speaking, only persons can do or have: agential evil thus comprises evil acts and dispositions. Sin is, then, any agential evil for which some person (or group of persons) is to blame. In short, sin is culpable shalom-breaking. 

Cornelius Plantinga