Listen to what people talk about long enough, and you’ll find that most people desire peace. Not just the beauty-pageant “I would wish for world peace” kind of longing, but a yearning for peace from the hustle and bustle of life – a break from the little and the big travesties that are part of this journey, a temporary hold on things going wrong in exchange for some uninterrupted calm.
Yet despite this innate desire for peace, no human being as ever developed a system or a method for creating and sustaining it. Peace is an elusive ideal – that few experience and yet we all pursue. This is why the promise of Isaiah 26:3a is so amazing. The words say “You [God] keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you.” In other words, for the Christian, peace is not something we obtained, but a place where God fixes us. He holds us there; as we trust in Him, He promises that He will plant us in peace. This doesn’t mean that bad things won’t happen to us or that things won’t go wrong (God promises that we will have troubles – see John 16:33), but it means that our lives will be characterized by peaceful hearts, because God will rule them. He will grant us tranquility of mind, as we rest in Him.
No human invention or institution can ever promise perfect peace, even though countless have tried and failed. But God can. May we each be held in His perfect peace as we increasingly rely on Him.