MISREPRESENTATION

It has been said that God denied David the honour of building His temple because of the blood which David had shed as a man of war. The idea being that spirituality and pacifism go together. This is not true. The nature of this city expressed in its name, in which God's name would be represented in His Temple was the real issue.

God had supernaturally assisted David in the violence that had so characterized his rise to leadership in Israel, from the killing of Goliath to the slaughter of Philistine occupying forces (1 Sam.23:2). For God to later then discriminate against David on these grounds would have been hypocrisy on the part of God. God forbid!

Jerusalem is introduced to us in Scripture as Salem, the hill city of the godly Melchizedek. Named for the peace of his rule whom God acknowledged as His priest (Gen.14:18; Ps.110:4), nothing less than truthfulness - a practical congruence/consistency/conformity to its name was essential. To erect any temple structure which testified to God's rule in Israel, whose rule brings peace, peace was necessary; not simply a cessation of war, but peace in its full sense, which would only come under Solomon, a king of lesser spiritual character. So, to represent pacifism as holiness is a perversion of this history and of the Bible's teaching.

David was a man of such tender conscience that, while on the run for his life from Saul's attempts to kill him, even David's act of cutting off the edge of king Saul's robe troubled his conscience (1 Sam.24:5). David's delight was the Lord, and so it was written of him:

The peace of Solomon's reign, inherited from David, was the necessary state for the temple's construction in accord to the name of its city, so therefore even:

But then some will say that Christ's rebuke of Peter at Gethsemane for drawing his sword was a statement by Jesus against all forms of violence. This again is a perversion of the events and of Christ's teaching.

Before Gethsemane, as Jesus and the Eleven were walking toward that garden, the Lord instructed His disciples that although He had sent them out before on their mission without resources (they were to depend upon the appreciation of the people, Matt.10:9-10) now in contrast they were to provide for themselves, and to prioritise their security above their comfort:

Sadly, those bent on believing their pacifist ideology bend the Holy Scripture also and interpret Jesus' words 'It is enough' as an irritated rebuttal to shut down the conversation because the disciples had misunderstood his 'metaphor'. This teaching perverts God's Word. There was no 'metaphor'. Jesus simply meant what He said. As a deterrent to hidden violence in the night against His disciples by the arresting officers of the chief priests, two swords were "enough". This word is 'hikanos' (ἱκανός) in our New Testament and it simply means 'sufficient'. This was certainly not a conversation put-down. It simply means what it says.

If Christ had disapproved of His apostles carrying a sword, He had had more than three years time, in which they had lived together with Him, to tell them. Now, with the real threat of violence against Him and His disciples in the coming night-arrest of Jesus, He warns His loyal followers to not do what they had done before in relying on the appreciation of their ministry by the public for their material support, but in contrast to take necessary precautions. This was the voice of practical wisdom, not of inscrutable parable terminated with irritation, as some pacifists allege.

Context must always determine our understanding of a text or it truly becomes a pretext, and prejudice produces dishonesty in exegesis.

Note also: in contrast to a mythical pacifist-Christ, twice, once at the beginning and again at the end of His public ministry, Jesus our example used calculated violence in the temple itself to assert the priority of people's prayers over the disruptive sacrifice-supporting agencies authorized by the high priest (Jn.2:15; Matt.21:12) and paid for.

THE TRUTH

Jesus taught the principle of fleeing persecution (Matt.10:23), and not of fighting back or resisting.

Prolonging one's witness by fleeing is good, but it is also an honour to suffer for Christ's sake, if needs be! Suffering adds no merit to us, but it is a privilege to share in the suffering of Christ to deliver His message to others. Christ's cost of suffering hardship, contradiction, scourging and abuse, in fact every cost other than His separation-from-God on the Cross for our sakes, was part of the price, not of redemption from sin, but of reaching out to us with God's word of mercy. It was the delivery-cost, to which we are invited to participate, in self-denial - taking up our cross daily. Thus we share in this cost:

"Now I rejoice in my sufferings for you, and I fill up in my physical body — for the sake of His body, the church — what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ." (Col.1:24).

This was a very real experience to the Apostle Paul, and he encourages us to personally follow his example (1 Cor.11:1).

May the Lord of grace bless you also in following Christ through all forms of hardship, as His wisdom allows and enables.