Day 1- You Can Sleep In The Boat, Too
The Nature of Shalom – It was never lost. We only forgot to look.
You keep him in perfect shalom whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.
– Isaiah 26:3
Let’s linger on this verse for a moment. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t mind one bit if I was in perfect peace every moment and every day for the rest of my life!
The Hebrew being translated as “perfect peace” in Isaiah 26:3 is “shalom shalom”. Double use of Shalom signifies a wholeness of peace. This verse is a declarative statement, a promise. Shalom is the natural state of a person whose mind is anchored to YHWH. Shalom is always available, present, and constant. The only question is whether or not our minds are stayed (focused) on Him. The Hebrew word for “stayed” here means to lean upon, take hold of, or to prop yourself up against something.
The Father’s Shalom is the support that keeps us upright. It’s the strong tower we can rest upon, seek shelter in, and trust to always stand. Shalom is the faithful strength and spiritual healing of the Father, which are always available to us. We need only lean into Him.
Digging Deeper
Genesis opens with YHWH establishing dominion over chaos, defeating it and replacing it with His Shalom. In the ESV translation, Genesis 1:2 reads:
The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
– Genesis 1:2
But in the NRSV translation, we see this:
When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.Â
– Genesis 1:2
The word being translated as formless in many of our translations means chaos, without meaning, wasted. YHWH hovered over the formless void, the meaningless chaos, and brought forth life. This tells us a critical concept: chaos has no permanent place in creation. His Shalom, order and peace, has already defeated it and will do so again in the eternal.
In John 14:27, Yeshua said something stunning, but we have likely never taken the time to be awestruck by it because our senses have been dulled to this passage over the years. Let’s look at it now with new eyes:
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you.
– John 14:27
Yeshua is not comparing His peace to a peace the world offers because the world doesn’t offer us peace. He is making a distinction between the nature of His giving and the nature of the world’s giving. What the world gives is always conditional, temporary, and tied to circumstances. It depletes. It runs out. It is fragile by nature because it originates from something that is also temporary.
What Yeshua gives is entirely different. His Shalom is eternal, whole, and healing, one that operates independently of what is happening around you. This is the Shalom that can’t be taken. It can only be set aside, forgotten, or walked away from, by us. We don’t lose access to it, we disengage from it.
Paul’s letter to the Philippians (Phil 4:7) calls this peace from the Father the peace that ‘surpasses all understanding’ and he tells us that this peace will guard our hearts and minds. The Greek word for ‘guard’ in this verse means a military guard posted at the gate, a watcher who has been appointed in advance of the need for the watcher.
But within what I just mentioned is another very important correction to how we normally think of peace. Let’s circle back to it.
How many times have you heard someone offer the advice of “protect your peace”? But Philippians 4:7 reminds us that it is the peace, Shalom, that protects and guards us, not the other way around. Shalom is not passive. In the life of the believer, it stands watch.
Chaos has to get past the guard to reach you. And that guard never sleeps. The only thing standing between us and that Shalom is the direction of our attention.
She Didn’t Ask for an Audience. She Just Reached
Key texts: Mark 5:25-34
Twelve years. That was how long the woman had lived inside chaos. Her chaos wasn’t just a single problem, but all of the results and effects of that problem. Her body wouldn’t stop bleeding which made her unclean according to Biblical law. Her social support system would have cut her off. The text tells us she had exhausted all of her money on doctors who weren’t able to help her, only to have her condition grow even worse.
Beyond that, her ability to make an income to support herself would have disappeared. She wouldn’t have been able to work in a home, no one would have purchased any produce she had picked or any product she had created. She was in an impossible situation with no end in sight.
And then she heard of a man from Nazareth who had been performing miracles. If anyone needed a miracle, it was her. In fact, her only hope was a miracle. In desperation, she pressed through the crowd. She wasn’t hoping for a private audience, a counseling session, or even to sit at his feet. She had this hope that if she could just touch, if her fingertips could graze a single tzitzit, the fringed tassels worn on the corners of His garment, that would be enough. Amid all the chaos that had become her life, she was drawn to the Shalom, the wholeness of YHWH, emanating from this man and knew that the smallest contact with that Shalom could save her from the hopelessness that had become her life.
As she made her way to Him, she didn’t try to get His attention, she just reached out, in the fullness of faith and hope, and touched His tzitzit. Jesus took notice, felt her faith, stopped in the crowd and called for her to show herself. Upon identifying her, He remarked:
“Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” Mark 5:34
The Greek phrase He used for “go in peace” is better translated as “go INTO Shalom“. The word used for “healed” in the last sentence means “to be made whole.” Faith allowed her to defeat the seemingly undefeatable chaos around her and she was then commanded to go into Shalom. These were instructions on how to live going forward. She had become a living testament of a greater kingdom and she was told to reside in that kingdom, whole and in Shalom, even while she still remained in this one. Shalom had been right in front of her, she only had to reach for it.
Day 1 Takeaway
Shalom is not something you are waiting for. It is already here, rooted in the nature of YHWH Himself, available the moment your mind turns back to Him.
You don’t have to chase peace. You just have to learn to stand in it.
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Christy Jordan founded SeekingScripture for the purpose of helping as many people as possible develop a firsthand relationship with the whole word of God. You can find her writings on Seeking Scripture, all podcasting platforms, and in the Seeking Scripture Front Porch Fellowship group on Facebook.
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