God's promised covenant of peace… When God gives this peace, it pours out its blessing on every aspect of our lives; conversely, without that peace, those same blessings are ABSENT from every part of our lives. Understand this truth, apart from peace with God, there is NO peace! There CAN BE NO peace unless we are first at peace with God. Unrest, riots, looting and carnage; resistance in all its many faces will never succeed in bringing peace, and will in the end only succeed in making more violence and more unrest, looting, riots and carnage... for a thing cannot produce what it does not have. There is no end to a cycle of violence that is only answered with violence. But that is all that natural man can do, for he has no other resources. The only hope, the only avenue, the only path to peace is through the cross of Jesus Christ. His shed blood, the sacrifice accepted by God has made Him our peace. He IS the covenant of peace, He IS the shower of blessing that washed over us... and when we find this true peace, then and only then does peace become possible with our fellow man. Then and only then do we become able to even UNDERSTAND peace... for it is only in the soothed soul of a man at peace with God that we can see the source of our constant striving, our constant warring, our incessant struggle without end or resolution - our war against our fellow man is the cry of a heart that is twisting in the wind, a heart that only knows strife within itself, a heart that lives with the knowledge deep in its core, of wrath, of terror, of doom… But in Christ, all that is lifted. In Christ, all that is healed. In Christ, we have the promised covenant of peace!!