They Shall Be Called The Children Of God

“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.” (Matthew 5:9). I believe that Jesus Christ chose the term peacekeeper deliberately. He could have said peacekeepers or peace negotiators or peace enforcers, but He said peacemakers. When we are makers of any kind, we are following in the footsteps of our Heavenly Father, but especially when we are peace makers is when we truly deserve to be called the children of God. God is the Creator. He took of the formless, swirling chaos and formed a world, and He saw that the world was good. He made order and peace out of unorganized matter. If we truly want to be called the Children of Our Heavenly Father, to be seen to be following in His footsteps and acting as He would act, then we must be makers of peace and order of the chaos and turmoil that is our everyday life. We could negotiate an armistice, we could enforce with an iron will a ceasefire, but true and lasting peace can only be made. It takes creative vision and power and a force of will to make peace from conflict. True peace comes when two opposing views are hammered and shaped and forged into a new perspective that combines the best of both worlds. If two people are arguing, and one person dominates the will of the other and cows them into submission, or else grudgingly and resentfully cedes their position because they don’t have the stomach to keep fighting, then peace has not been made. Look how our Father works. He does not force us to be good or to make good choices. He operates in a way that allows us to have our free agency and He collaborates with us to make peace out of His will and our will brought into harmony. We can only have true peace when we make and create and invent a new way of doing things that incorporates the best of everyone’s ideas and takes us down a path that none of us could have thought of at the outset, but turns out in the end to be the only possible way that things could have worked out. Peacemakers are not the most persuasive or the most domineering and neither are they the most timid or self-effacing. Making peace requires an effort of will and a firm commitment to creating something wonderful out of a chaotic mixture of conflicting, insufficient-on-their-own ideas. I know that when we are making peace, we are acting as our Heavenly Father would act, and we shall be called the children of God.