Seasons, And Advent and Lent Podcast by Willow Park Church

Peace 

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

God created Light and sky, God created the land and the seas, the sun and the moon and all the creatures that roam within it.

God created Humans, and it was good, and man and God walked together in the Garden.

The Bible tells a big story. Holy Scripture is a sacred saga of more than a thousand pages that takes us from creation to new creation, from paradise lost to paradise regained, from the Garden of Eden to the garden city of New Jerusalem.
In every epic drama, there are antagonists who threaten goodness and menace justice
In the Bible, we find the likes of Pharaoh, Goliath, Nebuchadnezzar, King Herod, and Pontius Pilate among the villains who are in league with the very embodiment of evil itself—the devil. It’s with these enemies that the heroes of the Bible—Moses, David, Daniel, John the Baptist, and most of all, Jesus—must struggle and prevail.
The story contained in the scriptures wastes no time in introducing us to the main antagonist, that will stop at nothing to bring division between God and humans.
What the enemy comes to do is bring war when there is peace, pain when there is health and division when there is stability.
As we gather during Advent, we anticipate the peace that God intended in the Garden.
Over the next few days, we will be reading from the prophet Isaiah.
Seven centuries before Christ, Isaiah of Jerusalem began a poem with these words: In days to come. He doesn’t know when and even less how, but inspired by the Spirit, Isaiah imagines the kingdom of Israel becoming the true kingdom of God and gaining preeminence over the nations.
The kingdom of God—will become famous the world over for its wisdom. A king will come to Jerusalem who possesses the very wisdom of Yahweh, and he will teach the way of God to the nations. And what will he teach? He will teach the way of peace.
Those who hear the message of the Kingdom of God will know to abandon the folly of war.
For the first three centuries, Christians knew that the kingdom of God and the kingdom of death and destruction of war were incompatible.
With war abandoned in response to the teaching of the wise king, weapons of war are converted into instruments of agriculture.
Since Cain slew Able in the fields, the place of peace and growth was turned into a place of war. Instead of plowshares, man has made swords of destruction.
Now, the prince of peace comes to correct and restore. Turning swords back into plowshares.
When the first Christians read Isaiah’s swords to plowshares poem, they recognized the wise king as Jesus and realized that God’s kingdom of peace had been inaugurated. The Apostle Paul said that Christ Jesus “became for us wisdom from God.” (1 Corinthians 1:30)
For the Early Christians, War no longer belonged in the everyday. There was no longer the need to participate in the destruction that the Kingdoms of this world brought because they were baptized into the new kingdom of peace. We Christians, by living lives, surrendered to the anticipated King, have left our ways of conflict behind.
As Jesus tells us in Johns's Gospel.
Peace, I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.
As Isaiah told us, In the days to come, we will one day know a peace that passes understanding.

Music: 
Salt of The Sound: Angel Gabriels Message
Dear Gravity & Lauge: Candescent, Stellar
Simon Wester: The Care Of Me

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