Paul told Timothy, “Wage the good warfare” (1 Tim 1:18; cf. 6:12). A few verses later the apostle lauds the value of “a quiet and peaceful life” (2:2). Jesus told his disciples in Luke’s Gospel to count the cost and likened considering discipleship to considering war (Luke 14:25–33). Yet the opening and closing announcement of Luke is that of peace (Luke 2:14; 24:36).
Evidently Christianity is war and peace. Both.
Some of us tend to view the Christian life as peace without war. An illustration may help make the point. On April 20, 1945, days before his suicide, Adolf Hitler celebrated his 56th birthday with a tea party. Quietly and safely stowed away in the Reich bunker with a ceiling 18 feet thick, he was “seemingly unaware,” one writer says, “of the war raging around him.” Two days later Hitler announced that he would never be leaving the bunker. Like the dictator, some of us live, sipping tea, unaware of the war raging around us.
Others of us tend to view the Christian life as war without peace. Five months before Hitler’s death, Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda was sent to the Philippines and ordered to slow the enemy’s advance and not surrender under any circumstances. Onoda was buried so deep in the jungle that he never got word when the war ended in late summer 1945. Thinking that the news leaflets dropped into the jungle announcing the war’s end were allied propaganda intended to trick him, Onoda remained in the jungle. Until 1974. Taking pot shots at civilians, engaging with police, and stealing food from farms, Onoda was unfazed by the repeated attempts to convince him that the war was over. He only surrendered—30 years having passed—when his former commanding officer, Major Taniguchi, was flown in to order Onoda to lay down his arms. Like Onoda, some of us live, tense and frenetic, unaware of the peace that has been announced.
Hitler denied the real war he was in. Onoda denied the real peace that had come. The same two imbalances show up in Scripture. Second Peter and Jude combat those who declare peace without war by wrongly teaching grace to be a license for sin. Galatians and Colossians combat those who declare war without peace by wrongly re-enslaving believers with a “Jesus-plus” mindset.
Healthy Christianity requires deep awareness of both the war we are in and the peace that has come.
But how do they fit together?
By understanding that the gospel’s announcement of peace is not a denial of, but the fundamental weapon in, our war against sin. The gospel of peace lets us sigh—not yawn, but sigh. And (counterintuitively) it is in the wake of this sigh that true spiritual tenacity ignites. The only way to successfully engage in Christian battle is the assurance that the war is, in the most important sense, already over. It’s been decided. The peace treaty has been signed. And the weapon with which we now wage war is our cross-bought peace. Christianity is peace-fueled battle. All struggling divorced from gospel peace is counterproductive, like struggling in quicksand.
“Just war” theory says that we must sometimes go to war in order to secure peace. The gospel is the reverse. Peace has been secured so that we can now do real battle in the greatest war of all, the war against sin, Satan, death, and hell. In Adam we were at peace with sin and at war with God, a war that cannot be won. In Christ we are at peace with God and at war with sin, a war that cannot be lost.
In the gospel our eyes are opened to our sinfulness, against which we must declare war. But in the gospel our eyes are also opened to the Christ-won peace that transforms what would otherwise be a futile struggle against sin into a strenuousness that is, through faith, strangely relaxed.
Which is how Paul himself put it to Timothy. “Wage the good warfare, holding faith” (1 Tim 1:18–19). “Fight the good fight of faith” (6:12).
Taken from: http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2010/09/15/christianity-a-peace-fueled-battle/