Isaiah 2:4

THE CESSATION OF WAR

Isaiah 2:4. They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more

A prediction of times yet to come. It has never yet been fulfilled. It is true that when the religion of Christ came to the world it came with the spirit and principles of an all-pacific dispensation (“On earth peace, good-will towards men”); and true that, in the degree of its actual prevalence, this has been the effect. But how far is this from anything adequate to the terms of the prediction, which exhibit a bright and ample idea of this spirit and tendency of Christianity realised, reduced to fact, on the great scale!

I. War has been a prominent character of all ages.

1. Man, when he came fresh from his Creator’s hands, must have had in his soul the principle of all kind affections (Genesis 1:27), a state of feeling that would have been struck with horror at the thought of inflicting suffering. Yet in the first family of man war and slaughter began. Men may argue and quibble against our notion of “the fall,” but here was fall enough! and demonstration enough!

2. War prevailed among the antediluvians (Genesis 6:5; Genesis 6:12). We are told of some that “became mighty men, men of renown.” How? Partly perhaps in a war against savage beasts, but far more in the exploits of that “violence” which filled the earth, and doomed it to be overwhelmed.

3. War prevailed among the race descended from Noah. It was by the descendants of the only faithful friend and servant of the Almighty found on earth that the desolated world was to be repeopled, and we might have hoped for a better race, if human nature were intrinsically good, or corrigible by the most awful dispensations. But the Flood could not cleanse the nature of man, nor the awful memory of it repress the coming forth of selfishness, pride, ambition, anger, and revenge.
(1.) The history of the Jews is to a large extent a history of wars.
(2.) The history of the other races is a history of their conflicts with each other, of a terrible process by which the smaller states were absorbed in others, until they were all included in the Roman empire. How many millions of human beings were destroyed in the process!
(3.) Since that period the history of the world has been to a large extent written in blood, [1279]

[1279] What a vision of destruction! Think of all that tormented and desolated the earth during the long period of the fall of the Roman Empire,—of that inundation of ravage and death, the progress and utmost extension of the Mahomedan power; of the mighty account of slaughter in the Spanish conquest of America; of the almost incessant wars among the states of civilised Europe down nearly to the present hour. Think even of the bloody wars within our own island, especially on the border between its northern and southern divisions; the hundreds of remaining fortresses, monumental of war. And to complete the account—as if the whole solid earth were not wide enough—the sea has been coloured with blood, and received into its dark gulf myriads of the slain, as if it could not destroy enough by its tempests and wrecks!—Foster.

Reflections:—

1. What a state of the spirit of mankind is here disclosed to us!
2. What a state of Christianity, or to any real prevalence of it, among the nations denominated Christian!
3. How necessary that all religioirs persons, especially tutors and parents, should set themselves systematically, as opportunities offer, to counterwork that maddening enchantment of the “glory” of war; of war considered merely as the field of great exploits. Let them strive to break up, in the view of young and ardent minds, this splendid, pestilent delusion about heroes, conquests, fame, and glory.

II. War is not necessarily sinful, nor are those engaged in it to be always condemned. Defensive war does not violate Christian principles. Nay, it is sometimes a duty. [1282] An opposite opinion is held by some who rest on the literal and extreme construction of a few expressions, such as “Resist not evil,” “Give place to wrath,” “Love your enemies,” “To him that smiteth thee on one cheek, turn also the other.” These interdict revenge. But their unqualified literal interpretation requires that Christianity should subject mankind universally to the unrestrained will of whoever is the most unjust and wicked; should teach that so long as there are men who have more of Satan and Moloch in them than the rest, and are intent on practising oppression and cruelty, it is the absolute duty of Christians, as such, individually and nationally, to let them do it,—at least rather than resist them in such a way as to endanger their persons. This would be a delightful doctrine to all the tyrants, bigots, slave—drivers, robbers, and murderers! But the magistrate is not so to leave the matter to God’s disposal, or to refrain from using the “sword” against the doers of evil. And the government of a nation is but a magistracy on a large scale.

[1282] About four or five years since, our Government had a war with the Pindarees—a terrible assemblage of outlaws, robbers, and murderers, to the number of fifty thousand, occupying a strong and almost inaccessible tract on the northern frontier. Thence with impetuous rapidity, they rushed down, all horsemen, on the country, inhabited by a population of cultivators; seized whatever could easily be carried off, and with furious eagerness demolished, burnt, destroyed the rest. But far more than this, they were universally possessed with the spirit of murder; they killed the people without regard to sex or age. Not only so, but when sufficiently at leisure for such amusement, they inflicted excruciating tortures previous to death.

Now, when the Governor-General had intelligence of this—what was he to do? what, acting as a Christian? Nothing? What, as a great magistrate, did he “bear the sword” for? What was he Governor at all for? To live in splendid state, and number and tax the people? Or was he to direct that prayer should be made in the churches for something very like a miracle? And on failure of that, prayers that the wretched people he governed might be all meekly resigned to their fate! and that even should the fell and fiendish legion, being unresisted, choose to pursue their way all down to Calcutta, all the people in their tract that could not escape, and at last himself and the people of the city, might be enabled calmly to submit to a sovereign dispensation of Providence?

He did not do this. He chose rather to act on the rule of his appointment, to be “a terror to evil-doers,” “a minister of God, a revenger, to execute wrath upon them that do evil” (Romans 13:4). But if war is in all possible cases wrong, he perpetrated an enormous crime against Christianity in marching his armies with a celerity unparalleled in that climate, and encountering, intercepting, and exterminating the murderers, so that the surviving people could feel themselves in peace.

Put the stronger case of an immense host of northern barbarians being landed on our coasts (Tartars, Cossacks, Calmucks), and joined there by the legions of the Popish states, what would happen if we all, as Christians, judged it wrong and wicked to fight? Unless, indeed, we should suppose a divided opinion in the nation with respect to the Christian principle of the case, and that so a very large and powerful proportion was resolute to resist in all the array and action of war. Now, while with the utmost sacrifice and peril they were doing so, and suppose successfully, what a remarkable phenomenon would be presented! namely, the other division of the people deploring these very proceedings and successes by which their houses are saved from ravage and desolation,—deploring them as an awful outrage against Christian rectitude,—praying for the instant conversion of these deluded men to a right apprehension of Christian duty,—that they might immediately throw away their arms and allow the barbarian inundation to burst forward! Or, having failed in this prayer (and a mighty victory having finally cleared the land of the infernal irruption), then lamenting that a dreadful national violation of Christian principles had been irretrievably consummated! And as success purchased by crime can in the result be little else than a calamity and a judgment, they might be alarmed and dismayed to find themselves still in possession of their former freedom of worship, of speech, and of action, and of all their rights as citizens.—Foster. (Written in 1823.)

But those principles upon which a Christian casuist would justify war, under certain possible circumstances, would not justify perhaps one in twenty of the wars that have been waged. Very rare has been the instance of a war, on either side, strictly and purely defensive, of either the nation itself or any other endangered or oppressed people depending on its protection. Hence—

III. We rejoice over this prediction that war is to cease on the earth.

1. This prediction spreads a visionary scene before us so new, strange, and delightful, that nothing but prophecy, and faith in the divine power and goodness, could enable us to expect its realisation. [1285]

[1285] It is difficult to realise the fact to our imagination. No fighting on the face of the whole earth! no armies, nor military profession, nor garrisons, nor arms, nor banners, nor proclamations! No leagues, offensive or defensive; no guarding of frontiers; no fortresses; no military prisons! No celebrating of victories in gaudy pomps and revelries for the vulgar, or in prostituted poetry for the more refined! A wondering what kind of times those could be in which mankind accounted it the highest glory to kill one another! Truly this is a state of things we are ill prepared even to conceive!—Foster.

2. It is difficult to conceive the practicability of its attainment. For it is something intrinsic in the soul and nature of man, throughout the whole race, that war has sprung from. There is the hot and terrible element that has burst abroad in so many thunders. And yet it is man that is to be universally at peace! How can it be? (2 Kings 7:2.) Vicious selfishness, ambition, envy, rivalry, rapacity, revenge, these are the things in men that cause wars between them, on the small scale and the great. How can these ever be so repressed, subdued, extirpated, that all war shall cease?

3. Certainly not by experience, philosophy, or civilisation, [1288]

[1288] Such things will be included, certainly, in whatever process can and shall reduce the world at length to peace; they will be taken as accessories and subsidiaries to the Master Power in operation. But whoever would reckon on such things alone should be strangely mortified, one thinks, in adverting to many facts of old and recent history. What, for example, is he to do with the history of Greece? or of the Italian Republics? Or nearer home, Britain and France account themselves the most enlightened and civilised states in the world: have they not been, with all their might, fighting and slaying each other and neighbouring nations for centuries, almost without intermission, down to this time? In the French revolutionary government, which, after a time, became essentially warlike, there were more philosophers, speculative, literary men, than ever in any other. In our own country, through the last half-century, the enlightened and civilised people (often so described and lauded at least) have needed but a little excitement, at any time, to rush out into war. Our institutions of learning, and even theology, have constantly abetted the spirit. An ever-flowing, impetuous stream there has been of oratory, poetry, and even pulpit declamation, mingling with and inspiriting the coarse torrent of the popular zeal for battles and victories. We have had both poets and divines actually sending the most immoral heroes to heaven, on the mere strength of their falling in patriotic combat. All this tells but ill for the efficacy of civilisation, literature, refinement, and the instruction of experience to promote the spirit of peace, without the predominance of some mightier cause.—Foster.

4. Nothing will operate efficaciously to this grand effect that does not go deep into the constitution of men’s souls, and quell internally those fatal passions which have perpetuated external war. And that is what cannot be done by any civilisation, national refinement, science, or even an enlightened theoretical policy. All these may be but like fair structures and gardens extended over a ground where volcanic fires are in a temporary slumber below. All these may be shattered and exploded by some mighty impulse of ambition or some blast of revengeful anger. No; there must be a greater, nobler power brought into prevalence among mankind. Nothing springing merely from the action of the human mind can suffice. It must be something coming from heaven. CHRISTIANITY is the appointed and qualified agent.

IV. It is credible that Christianity will cause wars to cease upon the earth.

1. It has accomplished something in this direction already. To it is mainly attributable the mitigation of ferocity and exterminatory rage, so evident in modern wars. We dare not assert even that it may not have prevented some wars.

2. It is essentially a peacemaker. Look at its genuine tendency, as displayed on the smaller scale, in a family, a neighbourhood, a district: a family in a constant state of hostility within itself, but at length the members of it are converted by the religion of Jesus Christ. The consequence how happy! (H. E. I. 1126.)
3. Precisely as it progresses among any people it will produce a distaste for war. [1291]

[1291] What will the natural consequence be in respect to war? Will it not be coldness towards that pernicious phantasm, martial “glory”;—a loathing of that sort of eloquence and poetry that are making a god of it;—a hatred of the very name of ambitious conquerors;—horror at the image of vast masses of men waiting to destroy one another;—a sense of the flagrant absurdity, as well as iniquity, of avenging some little wrong at the cost of so mighty a portion and variety of misery;—and a faith that Providence has not so abandoned the world that we are not to wait one moment for any interposition from it in favour of justice, but, the instant the scales of justice are poised, we must throw in the sword? Such would be the spirit and temper of a nation predominantly Christian.—Foster.

4. Consequently its progress among the nations is a progressive abolition of war. Every extension of this blessed religion is so much gained against war; quenching still another and another spark of infernal fire; repressing in some more minds those evil passions which are the prompters and the essential power of war.
5. Christianity is progressing among the nations.

6. Consequently it is reasonable to cherish the hope of a scene of universal peace (P. D. 2675).

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS.—

1. The universal cessation of war means much more than merely the cessation of much mischief. Think what will be effected when the wealth, time, labour, art, ingenuity, of truly Christian nations are directed to the noblest purposes of peace!
2. Extirpate the war-spirit from your own breast. The selfish, proud, arrogant, envious, revengeful, are essentially of the war tribe, however little they have to do with actual war, however much they may condemn and profess to deplore it. Such individuals are not fit for that future terrestrial “kingdom of heaven.”—John Foster: Lectures, Second Series, pp. 142–173.