David Jeremiah - The End of War
Vladimir Putin called it a special military operation, and the rest of the world called it the largest ground invasion in Europe since World War II. In the early hours of February 24, explosions erupted across Ukraine. Russian airborne forces descended by the thousands, quickly amassing at the Hostomel Airfold, and ground forces poured into Ukraine by the hundreds of thousands from Russia and Belarus. Speaking on Russian national television, Putin offered many justifications for his operation, and he warned other nations to stay out of it, and if they didn't, they would have consequences they have never seen, and he was rattling his saber, if you know what I mean.
Looking back on it now, we've seen the awful nature of war. The first 18 months of full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine resulted in nearly 500,000 soldiers wounded or killed on both sides. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, more than 3 million civilians have been displaced in Ukraine, with more than 6 million more refugees forced to flee into neighborhood nations across Europe and around the globe. Almost 15 million Ukrainians require humanitarian assistance, including those without proper access to food. War is an awful thing, it's an ugly thing, and that's just one picture of it.
Go to the Middle East and you can see what's happening in Gaza. War is a drag on humanity. Russian civilians have fared just about as bad as the Ukrainians. A lot of people think this has all been just Ukraine and their soldiers, but the Russian economy has been jolted. Many of their soldiers have been killed, husbands and fathers no longer coming home to their families. These are the consequences. These are the terrible realities we call war. And sometimes people ask me, "Do you think we'll ever have peace? Will there ever be a time of peace in this world"?
There's a study that's been done that's quite interesting. Has there ever been peace? So far, the odds are pretty bad. Over the last 3,400 years, there have been 260 years of peace, meaning far more than 92% of human history we have been forced to endure the specter of war. In more recent history, things have become even worse. Even a peaceful nation like the United States, we've endured two world wars, a Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, two wars involving Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the war on terror, and what's going on right now all over the world.
And people ask, "Why do we have to have war? What causes war"? You know, the answer to that question is so very clearly presented in the book of James. Once you read this, you will never have to ask that question again. Here's what it says. "Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? You lust and you do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. And you fight and you war..."
The Bible says war comes from your heart. Just take Putin, for instance. What is his heart war? He wants to reassemble the old Soviet Union. He'll never be happy till he does it, and as soon as he steps a foot in Poland, he's got NATO against him, and we'll have a world war. So war starts in the heart. What does he need with all of that? He doesn't need that. He doesn't need anything more than he has. But he wants it and he lusts for it, and so he craves it, and he's willing to put everybody at risk just to satisfy his own desire. The fallen heart of humanity explains why we fail at peace. But will that always be true?
During World War I, C. S. Lewis was sent to the front lines of France. It was in 1917. After a few weeks, he was hospitalized with a bout of trench fever, and when he was discharged from the hospital, he immediately returned to the front lines, where two months later he was wounded in three places by an exploding shell that killed the sergeant who was standing next to him when it exploded. Not surprisingly, Lewis carried those experiences with him for the rest of his life, as many of you who have been in a war carry your experiences.
He wrote these words: He said, "My memories of the last war haunted my dreams for years. Military service, to be plain, includes the threat of every temporal evil; pain and death, which is what we fear from sickness; isolation from those we love, which is what we fear from exile; toil under arbitrary masters, injustice and humiliation, which is what we fear from slavery; hunger, thirst, and exposure, which is what we fear from poverty. I'm not a pacifist," he wrote. "If it's got to be, it's got to be. But the flesh is weak and selfish, and I think death would be much better than to live through another war".
Most of us feel the way C. S. Lewis does. We feel like war is an interruption of life. But is war always harmful? Of course it is. War is always harmful. Is it destructive? Absolutely. Does war always involve a cost that feels too heavy to bear? It certainly does. But is war always wrong? No.
I will never forget the first time I read the following statement from John Stuart Mill. He wrote, listen to this, "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing is worth a war is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares about more than his own personal safety, that man is a miserable creature, and has no chance of being free unless he's made free by those who are better than he is".
When I think of that statement, I'm probably not too far away from your thinking when I say, is there enough personal courage to fight for the American Dream? What if there were a war today that caused conscription instead of volunteers? When I grew up and went to college, I had to register. I didn't get drafted, because I was a student in the biblical studies and they exempted us, but many of my friends went to war. Some of them didn't come back, and you all know what I'm talking about. There are many, many reasons why war can be necessary. They're all sad, but they're necessary. And I don't know if you've studied this in the Bible, but there's a lot in the Bible about war.
I wrote a paper some years ago called "Is War Ever in the Will of God?" and I was really shocked to find out how much the Bible has to say about war. Moses obeyed God's command to attack pagan kings and leaders. Here's what the Bible says in Deuteronomy. "'So the Lord our God delivered into our hands Og king of Baishan, with all his people, and we attacked him until he had no survivors remaining. And we took all his cities at that time; there was not a city which we did not take from them...'"
When you go through the book of Joshua, Joshua was the great military leader of the Old Testament, and he stood on the basic shores of Canaan with the command from God to go in and conquer Canaan and take it. And God gave him very specific instructions. He said, "Take out all the survivors. Don't leave any of the survivors in the Canaanite camps". And people wonder why he would do that. If you study it, you discover that the Canaanites were the most wicked people that ever walked on this earth, and God was not about to take a chance of their wickedness penetrating the Jewish bloodline and changing his purpose for them. But the sad thing is, the soldiers didn't do what God told them to do.
I remember reading, I think it's about the 15 chapter of Joshua where it talks about what God said for them to do. "Go and do this," and then the last part of the verse says "but they did not drive them out". Over and over again, maybe ten times, but they did not drive them out. It just goes overboard to tell us that what God told them to do, they didn't do. And you know what? For the rest of their life, the people they didn't drive out were a nemesis to them. If they had done what God had told them to do, they wouldn't have had all that anguish, but they didn't. You know who did? Only one guy: Caleb.
Caleb took the hardest place and he drove out all the enemies. God blessed him because he was obedient. The book of Revelation describes the moment at the end of the tribulation when Jesus comes back as the great warrior. He leads the armies of heaven in a brutal war against all who defy his rightful reign. Revelation says, "And I saw the beast, the kings of the earth, and their armies gathered together to make war against Him who sat on the horse and against His army. And the rest were killed with the sword which proceeded from the mouth of Him who sat on the horse. And all the birds were filled with their flesh".
Now, none of this is pretty and none of this is exciting. I don't like reading it any more than I like looking at the burned-out houses of Ukraine, but it's a reality, and war is with us. Instead of war, however, there's coming a time of peace, and that's what I want to tell you about. Someone has observed that in Washington, D.C., there are a huge assortment of peace monuments, and that's not because we value peace. That's because we build a new monument after every war. And you think back through the great leaders of history, you'll quickly make the connection that most of them became textbook-worthy because of their participation in war.
Many of the great leaders of our nation and of the world, the pharaohs were masters of war, including Ramses and Cyrus and Darius. Go through history and you'll find out that most of the people who did mighty things were people who were products of war. Napoleon, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, all of them used war as a tool to accomplish their aims. There's one leader who did not, and that was Jesus. Once the millennium is established, this period of time we're looking forward to, the kingdom of Christ will be on display, and it will be a kingdom of peace, and the Bible says there won't be any more war.
Think about that for just a moment, what it would be like if there were no more war. First of all, there's peace from God. As we've seen during that period of time, we've already seen this in one of our studies, there will be an absentee member of the universe, and that person will be Satan. He will be locked away in the bottomless pit, and he won't have any influence on the wars. He won't be able to make war worse than it already is. The psalmist describes the Lord as the one who "makes wars to cease to the ends of the earth; and He breaks the bow and casts the spear in two; He burns the chariot in the fire". According to scripture, when we get to this coming Golden Age, God will end every war. He doesn't end wars on just one or two continents. He stops them to the ends of the earth.
Today, there are wars, or conflicts, ongoing over the entire world, from Ukraine to Gaza to Yemen to Sudan to Myanmar to Ethiopia. And one day, the God of all peace will bring peace to all the world. He will break all the instruments of war and throw them into the fire, and war will be history. Psalm 72 was written by Solomon on the occasion of his coronation. This psalm was to be prayed by God's people on behalf of their king. Here's what it says. "In His days the righteous shall flourish, and abundance of peace, until the moon is no more".
During the coming Golden Age, peace will flourish. I don't know if you know this, but the millennium is the reverse of the curse. It's everything that God intended the world to be until man sinned. God will bring all of that back, and during the millennium there will be a kind of perfection, though not total, and peace will be reigning where war now reigns. An abundance of peace. God is gonna pour out peace on all of the nations. Isaiah described it this way: "The work of righteousness will be peace, and the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance. My people shall dwell in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places".
So the effect of the reign of Jesus is going to be quietness and peace. And listen to this verse, God's peace, a great peace, will be passed on to our children. Don't we all want that? "'And all your children shall be taught by the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your children.'" I know one of the things that we talk about in my generation is, I think we're gonna be okay, we'll get through this, we'll be out of here before this gets really bad. But we care about our children and our grandchildren.
I've heard so many of you say, "I really fear for my children and my grandchildren if we don't stop what we're doing right now". Well, the Bible says when we get to that point, you don't have to worry about your children anymore, 'cause great peace shall all your children have. What a joy that will be for everyone. So peace from God, and then Micah talks about peace among the nations. The prophet Micah was especially vivid in portraying the unprecedented peace of Jesus's rule. He says, "Now shall come to pass in the latter days... Many nations shall come and say, 'Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; He will teach us His ways, and we shall walk in His paths.' For out of Zion the law shall go forth, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem".
The goal of King Jesus's teaching will be the direction of people's lives so they will end up walking consistent with God. His powerful presence, his persuasive message will transform the thinking and the behavior of millions of people. No longer looking for conquest, now looking for peace. Then Micah described the consequences of Jesus's reign. He wrote what has become one of the most famous prophecies about the millennium in the Bible. Here's what he wrote. Micah 4:3, "He shall judge between many peoples, and rebuke strong nations afar off," here we go, "and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, and nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore".
In this powerful image, God sits as the ultimate judge of the world. He removes every reason for war. He rebukes those in the wrong, and weapons of destruction are melted down and repurposed for agricultural use. During the millennium, life will be preserved and enhanced, not taken away and destroyed. And notice that God won't bring about the peace through force or coercion. Instead, each nation will renounce their desire to wage war against others.
I don't know if you've ever seen this, but if you ever go to New York and go to the United Nations building, you might see the bronze sculpture across the street that depicts a figure of a man holding a hammer aloft in one hand and beating a sword into a plow. And the statue's called "Let Us Beat Our Swords into Plowshares". And the sculpture suggests that one of the missions of the United Nations is converting implements of war into implements of peace and productivity. It's a screaming against them because they haven't got anything close to that, have they? The United Nations has utterly failed in that mission. All human efforts for true, lasting peace will fail.
Will there ever be worldwide peace during your lifetime and mine? No, there will not be. As soon as one problem is solved, somebody starts another one over here that has implications of the people over here and over here. Does it mean we should stop trying for peace? No, just don't be disappointed when you don't get there, 'cause there will never be peace on this earth until Jesus Christ comes back. The Bible is replete with prophecies of a coming age of peace, and it will be a time, listen to this, when war will be utterly unknown. Not a single armament plant will be in operation. Not a soldier or a sailor will be in uniform. No military camps will exist, and not one cent will be spent for armaments of war. There'll be no budget for the war, no budget for defense, no budget for offense.
Can you imagine such an age when all nations shall be at perfect peace, all the resources that were spent there, available for enjoyment and health, all industry engaged in the articles of a peaceful history? Is that possible? Not now, but there's coming a day when King Jesus, you remember one of his names? He's the Prince of Peace. He will sit upon the throne of David, and he will reign, and there will be true peace for a thousand years. And you and I who are Christians, we're saved now, here's how we get involved. If that happens seven years from now and we're still hanging around here, we'll just go right into the millennium and we'll be in there for a thousand years and we won't die.
If you happen to die before that takes place, you will come up in the Resurrection, and once you are resurrected, you will go into the millennium and you will never die again. You will live forever. You will go through the whole thousand years of the millennium and then just make a quick little transition right into heaven. The excitement of that for us is, will we ever know peace? Well, if you know peace in your heart here, you will ultimately get a chance to know peace on the earth there. That's the answer. I hope you have that peace in your heart.
And then there will be peace in nature. "'You shall go out with joy, and be led out with peace; and the mountains and the hills shall break forth into singing before you,'" whoa, "'and all the trees of the field will clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree, and it shall be to the Lord for a name, and for an everlasting sign..." Are the mountains gonna sing and the trees clap? No, that's a symbol that's given to us by the prophet to help us understand that when peace reigns on the earth, it cannot but help affect even nature.
I don't expect to hear the mountains singing or see the trees clapping, but in that particular time of peace, when Christ is on the throne, you're gonna have a different vibe. You're gonna have a different feeling. You will know that you're in a land protected by the one who loves you dearly and who died for you on the cross. The transformation of the world following the lifting of the curse is observable. This is a description of what's going to happen in the 1,000-year reign of Christ.
Here's one that's even taking place now: Isaiah 35:1 and 2, "...the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose; it shall blossom abundantly and rejoice..." Well, there's a lot of desert in Israel, a lot of desert. And when you go to Israel, you normally fly into Tiberias and you stay near Galilee, and then you go from Galilee down to Jerusalem. And the ride from Galilee to Jerusalem is usually on a big bus, and you go kind of through the Arabeh, or the desert. When I first started doing that, all you saw on the desert were the tents of the Arabs. Now when you take that ride, you begin to see that produce is in the desert.
You say, "How do they do that in the desert"? They've learned how to take the water from the ocean and desalinate it, and now it's used to irrigate their land. The Jewish people are some of the most creative and genius people. In fact, I was reading a book called "The Genius of Israel". I'm telling you, the stuff they have done in that land, they have taken land that was a desert, and as the scripture requires, they made it blossom like the rose. And you see it when you take that trip. I hope you get to do that sometime.
And the Bible says, "'I will open rivers in desolate heights, I will make fountains in the middle of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land spring of water. I will plant in the wilderness the cedar and the acacia tree...'" and on and on. Isn't it interesting that when the Bible talks about peace during the millennium, it emphasizes green landscapes, lush gardens, pools of water? What an atmosphere of peace that is. Sounds like the place you want to go to on your vacation. And then there will be peace throughout Israel.
One of the Bible's central texts on the coming golden age is found in Isaiah chapter 60. Here's what it says in verse 18. "Violence shall no longer be heard in your land, neither wasting nor destruction within your borders; but you shall call your walls Salvation and your gates Praise". For a land that has known so much violence and destruction in its history, what a relief this must bring. In the coming kingdom of the Messiah, bullying, assault, abuse, neglect, and murder will be unheard of within the borders of Israel. And not only that, there will also be a lot of singing in Israel. I don't know if you've noticed that. To enter Zion in that day, you will do so with a song of praise. So you should get practicing on that now.
The Bible says when we get to the millennium, we're gonna sing a lot. So don't give me this business about you don't have a good voice, you only can do a joyful noise. When you get there, I think you will be adjusted so that you can sing. I hope so, for your wife's sake. But we're gonna sing a lot in the millennium because we'll be in peace. We'll be filled with the joy of the Lord everywhere we go. The Bible says that when the Lord comes, his feet touch the Mount of Olives. The whole land of Israel is going to just totally change, and a mountain will come into Israel. They'll be the tallest mountain in the world.
On top of this mountain, Ezekiel's Millennial temple will be built on a 10-square mile, and the Bible says we will go up the highway of holiness to see God. We will have access to the throne of God through Jesus Christ and Prince David, and what a joy that will be. Maybe instead of going to the ocean on the weekend, we turn to one another and say, "Let's go to the mountain this week and see the Lord," and that's what we will do. And singing on our way, we will head up to the place where Jesus is on the throne. Isaiah recorded these words, he said, "Thus says the Lord, 'Behold, I will extend peace to Israel like a river...'"
Now, I've saved one of my favorite thoughts about this to last because this is almost beyond belief. This peace that Christ brings to the millennium is going to destroy enmity between nations, and there's a passage of Scripture that teaches that. And when you read it the first time, you can't believe it. Here it is. "In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian will come into Egypt and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians will serve with the Assyrians. And in that day Israel will be one of three with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the land, whom the Lord of hosts shall say, bless, 'Blessed is Egypt,' says the Lord, 'My people, and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel My inheritance.'"
These three former enemies, the Bible talks about them going up the highway together, joined together in doing the work that needs to be done. God's Word, which is divine truth and cannot be deceiving, tells us this. I remember reading in a book by W. A. Criswell, his take on this particular verse, and here's what he said: "Can you imagine such a thing as that? Think of the years of hatred ever since Ishmael and Isaac grew to despise one another. From that day until this, there has never been a time where there hasn't been war between Israel and the Arabs". But there is coming a time, says the Lord, when "the Lord of hosts will bless them all, saying, 'Blessed be Egypt My people, and blessed be Assyria the work of My hands, and blessed be Israel Mine inheritance".
All of us, saved Jews and saved Gentiles, are to be together in the glorious and ultimate kingdom of the Lord, and there will be no more enmity between these nations, and we shall study war no more. That's what the scripture says. There's a man by the name of Hollis Godfrey who wrote an old science fiction novel called "The Man Who Ended Wars". He published this in 1908, and the story follows a mad scientist of sorts who discovers a type of radiation that can dissolve metal in moments, and the only person possessing that technology, this scientist, demands that the whole world unilaterally disarm and dismantle all of their weapons of war.
Here's the letter he sent to the leaders of every nation. "To the United States of America and to all other nations: greetings! Whereas war has too long devastated the earth and the time has now come for peace, I, the man destined to stop all war, hereby declare unto you that you shall, each and all, disarm; that your troops shall be disbanded, and your navies sunk or turn to peaceful ends, your fortifications dismantled. One year from this date I will allow for disarmament and no more. At the end of that time, if no heed has been paid to my injunction, I will destroy, in rapid succession, every battleship in the world. And by the happenings of the next two months, you shall know that my words are the words of truth, given under my hand and seal".
Now, as novels go, that's a pretty interesting read. Of course, it's all fiction. He has no power to do that even if he has some special invention. But it points up to one thing. There is coming a man who can do that, and that man is our Savior, our King, the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the man who will end all war. We will study war no more. We will dissolve all of our implements of warfare into implements of agriculture, and for 1,000 years we will live on this earth in peace with one another. No uprisings, no war. There's another kind of war that most of us are quite aware of. It's not the war in the world. It's the war that goes on in our hearts.
The Bible has something to say about that. The Bible says that there are two energies going on in our hearts. There's the enemy called Satan, who wants to take us into his kingdom, and there's Jesus Christ, who wants us to come to be with him. Some of you have been fighting that war. You know you should be a Christian, but you just keep being pulled back into the world. God created you with a space in your heart that belongs to God alone. Until you allow him to have that place and occupy it, you will always be at war. But you don't have to. You can make peace with God.
Have you ever heard people say that? "Have you made your peace with God"? You can make peace with God today, and that war can be over. And by the way, Christians, if you read Romans 7, you can also have war going on in your heart as a Christian because you've got the old nature and the new nature. War is something that happens in our hearts. Until we place Jesus Christ on the throne of our hearts, we will always be at war with God.
So I want to ask you today, as I have been doing so faithfully over these last weeks, have you made that decision? Is Jesus Christ now on the throne of your life, or are you running the show? I can tell you what it's like if you're running the show. You don't want to go that way. Put Jesus Christ in control and watch what he does to bring peace to you, in your heart, right now. You don't have to wait for peace of heart until the millennium. You can have it today if you put Christ, the Prince of Peace, on the throne of your life.