Oh Lord, have mercy!

The Lord Almighty… makes wars cease to the ends of the earth. He breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the shields with fire. He says: ‘Be still, and know that I am God…’ Psalm 46:9-10

Oh, how one’s heart sinks! Surely not another war!

We’ve got used to what’s going on in Ukraine. We thought it might last days or possibly weeks; but it’s running into years and there is still no end in sight. And now renewed conflict in the so-called “Holy Land”, right out of nowhere, and the familiar, distressing statistics… so many dead, so many injured, so many missing. Not to mention grim facts that can’t be quantified: the increased intensity of hatred and the burning desire for vengeance in people’s hearts on both sides. Oh, Lord…!

If we are Christians we naturally ask the question “What can we do?”, to which there is no simple answer. Pray, of course; that goes without saying. But somehow – even if wrongly - it seems such a feeble response. See what light we can gain from the Bible, which has much to say about war? Yes; but even there it seems to speak with mixed voices. No wonder many people, including Christians, find themselves slipping into hopelessness and even despair.

But it might be helpful to pull together some of those voices to see what kind of perspective they give us.

The voice of Jesus, of course, is paramount: “You will hear of wars and rumours of wars”; but he then goes on to tell his followers not to be “alarmed” (Matthew 24:6).

These words reassure us that he is Lord of all, that nothing happens outside God’s ultimate control. There is indeed real comfort there – but let’s be honest and recognise that it can seem pretty cold comfort. Who would want to preach a sermon on that verse to a congregation today in Jerusalem or Gaza city? How would it be possible to avoid a hollow ring?

One thing we mustn’t do is to read Matthew 24 and respond inwardly with, “Oh, so that’s all right then. Jesus saw it coming and tells us not to give in to anxiety”. Yes, Jesus did see it coming, and his words do offer reassurance; but to individual men and women and to boys and girls caught up in the horrors of bombs and shells, collapsed and burning buildings, and dead and mangled bodies in the streets, to those poor people something more than words is needed, even the words of Jesus.

Perhaps this is a prompt to focus prayer on those who are genuinely working to provide that “something more” - that they will see what that means in practice, and be given the means to provide it. On the radio this morning I heard two people speaking, one Palestinian and one Israeli, both of them parents of children killed in previous atrocities. They work together for an organisation determined to find a measure of reconciliation between the warring factions. Let’s pray for them and others like them.

In general, of course, the Bible sees war as an evil. The psalmist plaintively laments its prevalence in his day and place: “Too long have I lived among those who hate peace. I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war” (120:5-7). Isn’t that the authentic voice of the ordinary people who, suffering terribly, just long to “get on with their lives”?

There has never been a time in human history when war has not been part and parcel of life. I still find it slightly startling every time I read 2 Samuel 11:1, which speaks of “the spring, the time when kings go off to war”. It almost seems that just as we speak of “the holiday season”, so in the ancient world they had a corresponding “war season”! It’s just what they did.

The very existence of Israel as a nation depended on being victorious in war. How else would they survive? That didn’t make it right, but simply a fact of life. And that is what explains to at least some extent those uncomfortable passages where God - the God of peace - actually commands war, and why Psalm 144, for example (traditionally ascribed to David), celebrates God as “the Lord my rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle”.

Not to mention those episodes where God commands what today we would see as genocide or massacre, such as Joshua 11:16-21 (which includes that terrible word “exterminate”). I doubt if those words get read very often in church! It’s as if God adapts himself to the ways of sinful humankind in order to bring about his purpose of fashioning a viable nation, while at the same time using war as a form of judgment.

Other passages tell us that, terrible though war is, it is only for a time. Micah 4, paralleled in Isaiah 2, holds out a vision when “all nations” will stream to a new Jerusalem. We are given the wonderful prospect (take time, please, to soak this up!) of armies “beating their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks”, when “nation will not take up sword against nation, nor… train for war any more”, when “everyone will sit under their own vine and their own fig-tree, and no-one will make them afraid”.

That’s desperately hard to imagine in times like the present. But come it will, come it will! If not, the Bible is unreliable and Christianity itself a cruel lie.

Those prophecies will be finally fulfilled in Christ, the Prince of Peace. It is of him, ultimately, that it is said: “He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth. He breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the shields with fire. He says, ‘Be still and know that I am God’…”

It takes faith to believe in that. But if we know the love and grace of God in other areas of our lives, why should we doubt him in this one?

Lord, have mercy!

Lord God, help me to believe these promises – and, until they come true, to work day by day to be a peace-maker in my own little world, following the example of Jesus himself. Please look with compassion on all people who are currently caught up in the horrors of war. And please bless and give success to all those movements and agencies that are committed to working for peace in our troubled, groaning world. Lord, have mercy! Amen.