Jesus Never Said to Visualize Whirled Peas
How stoned hippies in the 1960's mangled Jesus' message about peace and wove it into the fabric of their proto-woke ideology that's turned today's world into a chaotic, barbaric, lawless mess...
“All we are saying... is give peace a chance!”–John Lennon
In the late-1960's, John Lennon became the poster boy of the nascent “Peace Movement” that began developing worldwide as the United States got increasingly bogged down in what had by that time become a senseless conflict in Vietnam, whose continuation became increasingly difficult to justify and defend from either geostrategic or ideological perspectives.
Appropriating what most of the world has recognized as the visage of the Lord Jesus, Yeshua The Messiah for the last two-thousand years, the ex-Beatle hooked up with a radical, professional weirdo, smoked a lot of dope, held bed-ins in hotel rooms and became the global spokesperson for what his appropriated image was meant to entice us all into accepting as a spiritually-enlightened philosophy of a nebulously-defined “peace” as the solution to all humanity's problems, by making us think that because he looked like Jesus, his message must derive from and be approved by Jesus.
That's how we began sliding down the slippery slope of the whole notion of Jesus-and-peace as one of the most often inappropriately and disingenuously misinterpreted concepts of Holy Scripture, and especially of the Gospels and the teachings and works of the Lord Yeshua.
Because of this dangerous and disingenuous misappropriation, all that far too many people still today ignorantly think of Jesus, is in terms of a long-haired hippie who went around making everybody feel good while teaching them to just be kind to one another, let everybody do their own thing while not assessing any of it, come together, link arms, sway in the breeze and sing “Kumbaya” by campfires while swords are magically beaten into ploughshares, “life I love you, all is groovy,” and welcome to instant paradise on earth!
That image and interpretation of Jesus was popularized when selective and grossly misunderstood elements of his teachings were appropriated by commercially-and-culturally-and-criminally-manufactured hippies in the mid-to-late 1960's–stoned on dope, tripping on acid and sexually revolting–who thought (or more precisely, were led to think by lawless perverters of the Lord's faith, who were quite consciously and deliberately using its corrupted misinterpretation as the vehicle with which to covertly lead millions into sinfulness, lawlessness and criminality as a culture and psychology, while making them believe it was Yeshua's righteousness they were following), that's all Jesus was: a laid-back trippie whose only message was “God is love, and love means everybody and everything's okay; peace means let's all just get along, so put down your guns, quit your jobs, take off your clothes, have sex with everybody, tune in, turn on, drop out. Peace man!”
Yes. That's really what the hippie conception of the Lord Jesus was. He was just a cool dude with long hair and some snappy sounding bits of advice on how we can all get along. I know the drill well. I was five when it was born, I fell for it by the time I was fifteen, and paid for that mistake for the next three decades.
It was a really slick and sly way Satan devised to twist the image and teachings of Jesus around to draw a whole generation of unsuspecting kids distracted with ubiquitous sex, drugs and rock and roll, into believing that getting all hopped up on sex, drugs and rock and roll was what Jesus' peace was all about... as long as you were kind to strangers.
And, oh yeah, as long as you hated “The Man,” thought cops were pigs, thought law and legality was oppression, that working for a living was fascism, that crime is revolutionary liberation, and believed all that was necessary for peace to reign over the whole planet was for America (and only America, not anybody else) to lay down its arms, dismantle its armed forces, and the whole world would magically become a fairy princess paradise “Imagine”-d by John Lennon.
It sounds absurd to the mature, rational mind, because it is absurd. But to the teenage skull full of mush short-circuiting on a steady diet of sex, loud music and dope, just like every innocuous stupidity is exceedingly hilarious, every preposterous spiritual or ideological proposition sounds like it's coming from the mouth of God himself, if you were still into believing in that kind of thing.
Suddenly, then, Jesus wasn't the Son of God anymore, bringing spiritual salvation to the world through the repentance of sin and acceptance of his faith; now “Jesus” meant no heaven, no hell (so no sin and no consequence for it) no countries, no faith, no God, with humanity and the world as all just a globally amorphous blob of happily writhing flesh in which everything and everybody's free, while nobody has anything except some undefined, undescribed “brotherhood of man.”
See how quickly that happened? How quickly they went from Jesus to Satan without even realizing it, in about the time it takes to roll and smoke a joint?
Distracted by the persistent pursuit of sex, stoned out of their senses on drugs, deafened into dumbness by rock and roll, the hippies were incapable of realizing how they were being conned and how corruptly the teachings of the Lord were being presented to them and with what corrupt, lawless, dangerous and destructive intent.
They were incapable of seeing how myopically focusing on “do not judge” as incorrectly meaning “you have no right to say anything about anything anybody does,” was merely the way in which Satan got an entire generation to believe the highest spiritual morality and a sign of advanced enlightenment is to be accepting of all sinfulness, under the false interpretation that because God is love and love doesn't judge, that means other people's sins (and therefore, our own from other people's perspectives) are all permissible.
Satan got a lot of mileage out of perverting “God is love,” because he also managed to get the hippie peaceniks to accept the carefully-crafted lie that because God is love, sex is an expression of love and therefore, all sex is love and therefore all sex, anywhere, anytime, with anybody, is okay. Because God is love.
About the only part about the Lord Yeshua's teachings they got right out of any of it at all, was the part about being kind to people; but even that they managed to mess up by making it merely an empty-gestured accessory to their crimes, and not a foundational spiritual principle of any kind of faith; because the only faith they were being sold by all this was in pleasure, sin, pride and the “Satisfaction” we keep being told we cain't get no of.
That was the way in which the modern version of the notion was born and persists until today, under which we're told to convince ourselves everything we sin like devils at is okay, because we're absolved of it all by our works of being kind to others.
Anybody who even has a child's understanding of Ephesians 2:8-9, understands how baseless this twisting of Scriptural teaching is: “For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves; it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast...” It means that all the goody-do-gooding in the world won't get anybody spiritual salvation as long as there's no faith in the Lord Yeshua and obedience to God's will that accompany it and motivate it.
It means that a disingenuous, virtue-signaling reliance on kindness to strangers (while sinning defiantly and enthusiastically), is just an exercise in the public relations that provide a false legitimacy for libertine narcissism, because all that “kindness to strangers” is just to project an ersatz appearance of spiritual purity through insincerely demonstrative acts of kindness, so that people would look at the sins of the lawless and criminal and say, “Oh, but they're so nice and polite and kind!”
It was the way Satan got the hippies to feel good and morally superior about themselves while they were dragging their souls through the filth of the sin into which they were being unsuspectingly led by him and his servants on earth.
Get them stoned on enough drugs, distracted with enough sex and numbed by enough psychedelic noise, and it's easy for rational truths like that to fly right over their heads. They were convinced by skillful manipulation that Jesus was a communist because he told a few rich guys to give all their possessions away; that he was all for sexual liberation because God is love, and; that he was a political pacifist because he used the word “peace” a few times.
That's how naive, gullible and misled the hippies were. The dangerous part of that? Most of them bred, and then they passed this “wisdom” down to their children, and they told two friends, who then told two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on... until we got to today, where the people today who are what the hippies were back then, are outright criminals and terrorists bordering on the barbaric, who openly worship Satan, and to whom Jesus is the enemy; while the corrupted beliefs about the image and teachings of the Lord Yeshua that the hippies of the 1960's and 70's represented, have become the twisted notions and the totality of all people actually know and believe about the Lord Jesus, and are now the doctrinal principles of many of our churches.
After 2000 years of trying, Satan finally managed in less than six decades to so corrupt so much of established Christian faith, that much of it today is indistinguishable from what we see and hear coming from the enemies of God and mankind. And all it took was getting enough people fornicating with enough persistent abandon and stoned enough for long enough to get them to believe that Jesus is “All we are saying is give peace a chance.”
Now that we've made a brief but accurate summary of everything the peace that Yeshua promises us isn't, let's take a look at what that peace, that shalom he tells us he has for us, is, when he says to the disciples in John 14:27: “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled; do not be afraid.”
To do that, let's first take a quick look at what the Lord himself also says that peace isn't. As he's sending the disciples out on their first ministry tour and giving them their mission briefing, Jesus tells them in Matthew 10:34-36: “Do not assume that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’”
Luke 12:51-3 tells us how he adds to it: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
The Lord Yeshua's telling the disciples the Gospel he's giving them to teach in the way he's giving it to them to teach it, isn't intended to bring peaceful relations among people. He warns them his teachings will cause division and strife between those who accept his message and those who reject it. He's not saying he's deliberately trying to stir up division, but that the clash between the desires of the flesh and the system of the world, and his teachings about the supremacy of the spirit over the flesh and of God over the spirit, will naturally arise; because the nature of his teachings is such that they go against the sinful inclinations of the world and of people, while Yeshua's teachings' are founded in loyalty to God, his will and his Word above all else, especially anything and anyone in the world.
What's more, in John 17:9, while he's giving the disciples his final instructions before leaving them to finish his work, Yeshua says in prayer: “I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours.” With this he's telling the disciples (and us) that everything he's done, everything he's brought us, everything he's taught, everything he's told us we have to do in the way he says we have to do it, isn't for the sake of the world (meaning the physical manifestation of it and the system that rules it) or for saving it, but for the salvation of the souls of the believers called to God.
I recently watched a movie from the 1960's called Revolt of the Slaves. It's one of those spaghetti biblicals, like the Italian spaghetti westerns with Clint Eastwood; but, it's got great production value; an authentic look and feel way ahead of its time and technology, and; a good, mostly spiritually and scripturally accurate story to go with it. It takes place late in the Roman Empire, when Rome's in the process of finally falling apart, and Christians in Rome are already an organized church with a formal establishment, if still underground.
In one scene, one of the believers is telling a non-believer that their aim is to build a world in which all men live as brothers in peace and harmony.
Uh... No! Just the above-cited couple of verses are enough to show that's never been in either Yeshua's or the Father's program for either humanity or the world.
The aim of all the history and evolution of the world and humanity under God's direction has never been to build an idyllic paradise on earth, but to redeem humanity from its sinful fall from God's grace and bring it back to him in actualized, regenerated, living spirit. It's a spiritual effort and aim, not an earthly pipe dream.
The mistaken notion that the Lord Yeshua represents the building of a peaceful world seems more to be a very clever–and disingenuously misappropriated–satanic manipulation of God's Word, to lend a falsely claimed legitimacy to Satan's desire to corral all of humanity into his clutches with the empty and baseless and impossible promise of an earthly paradise founded on a deliberate misapplication of Yeshua's teachings that would appear to support that.
In short, Jesus never said “Give peace a chance!” nor was anything he ever did or said while he was here intended to either give that impression or make that promise or initiate a process to make that happen.
So, now that we’ve got that out of the way, why was it so important for Yeshua to emphasize to the disciples that one of the most valuable gifts he's making available to all who believe in him, is the peace, the shalom–his peace, his shalom–that he brings us?
First, let's remember that most of what he says about the peace he brings us came during the last evening he spent in his earthly incarnation with the disciples before going to the cross. He's telling them he's leaving them, and explaining to them the hardships and trials they're going to face once he's gone. In John 16:5-6, he says: “...now I am going to him who sent me. None of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ Rather, you are filled with grief because I have said these things.”
Then, a few sentences later, he tells them in verse 20: “Very truly I tell you, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy.” And in verse 22 he adds: “Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.”
The Lord loved and cared for his disciples so much, he saw they were despondent about him leaving them; that they were scared because they were starting to get an inkling of everything he was telling them; so he then reassures them that in the ultimate end, everything'll work out just fine; but in the meantime, it's going be a rough ride, so out of his love for them and us, he gives them (and us) reassurance, strength, and reason to hope and stay determined in the exceedingly difficult earthly task he sets before them (and us) as his disciples.
Yeshua tells the disciples that night the world is going to hate them and why, and how that's going to make life for them (and us) very trying, dangerous and maybe even deadly. That's why he goes to such length in his final earthly-incarnated message to remind them (and us) repeatedly, it's not going to be a cake walk, like when he says in John 15:18-19: “If the world hates you, understand that it hated Me first. If you were of the world, it would love you as its own. Instead, the world hates you, because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world.”
Just before that, in John 15:9-11, he reassures them: “As the Father has loved Me, so have I loved you. Remain in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will remain in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and remain in His love. I have told you these things so that My joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.”...to tell them (and us) that if: 1) we keep the peace in our hearts that faith in him gives us, and; 2) we know and trust the Father's promise of salvation into eternal life through the forgiveness of sins, and; 3) we avail ourselves through our faith of all the assistance of the Holy Spirit he's sending to dwell in us and guide us and make available the power behind the name of Yeshua for our employment in his work and our protection... if we do all that, no matter what we face in the world, our hearts and minds and souls will be at peace.
That peace, which comes from confidence in the Father's promise and the power of the name of the Lord which we embrace, can give us the strength we need to endure, and the hope that gives us to have that strength to go on no matter what the world throws at us in no matter how many different ways and no matter how cruelly or even fatally.
He's warning us that out there, it's going to be an almost ceaseless storm for us as God's faithful. That's why he tells us what he tells us here, so we understand that while it's all going to be violently raging all around us as long as we're in the world while belonging to the Father... in Yeshua, in faith in him, in trust in him and his name and his teaching and in the power of the Father and his promise brought to us through Yeshua, we can have the peace in our hearts we need; first, not to lose hope, and; second, to have the clarity of spirit and mind to be able to know what to do and how to act according to God's will in every situation of adversity we face.
Yeshua tells us he sends us the Holy Spirit to tell us what to do, how and when. He's also telling us we can't hear what the Holy Spirit is telling us, or do it, if our hearts and minds are filled with the fear and strife that knowing we're not capable of facing it all alone gives rise to in us. He's telling us not only that we can't do it alone, but we don't have to. We have the love of the Father, and the Son and the voice and the power of the Holy Spirit to be with us in every situation and guide us through it.
And all that gives us the peace we need to make it all possible and not go out of our minds with the fear, despondency, hopelessness and grief that ultimately defeats us, by making us relinquish our reliance on the power and glory of God, while we languish in our own vain imaginations and the failures to which they lead us.
The Lord Yeshua never tells us or anybody else that he's come to make the world a happy place with a happy face, with the peace he brings.
In fact, he says precisely the opposite. He tells us the world's never going to be a happy place because the desires of the flesh and the system of the world ruled by the god of this world are corrupted by sinfulness, and that makes the kind of peace imagined in utopian vanity a fruitless and dangerously deluded pipe dream.
He wraps it all up when he concludes in John 16:33: “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
He reinforces it all, as well, in John 20:19, addressing the disciples' mental and emotional and spiritual anguish in the wake of the Crucifixion. They'd just heard from Mary that the tomb in which Yeshua had been buried was empty and she'd seen the Messiah alive. They were huddled together in a house in Jerusalem, terrified because they didn't know what to expect, what, or who, was coming for them, what would become of them, what the enemies of Jesus all around them had in store for them.
When the resurrected Lord shows up in the midst of them in the room in which they were gathered where the door was locked shut, the first words he says to them, knowing what state they'd be in and exactly what they'd need to hear, were: “Peace be with you!”
Now, that's the spiritual theory behind the “peace” the Lord brings to his faithful. It's not a theory without a practical and a real beneficial application for us in how we manage the difficult walk the Lord has set before us, either.
A good way to illustrate what that means is to look at what happened when the disciples were out on the Sea of Galilee, or the Sea of Tiberias (or Yam Kinneret in Hebrew), the night after the feeding of the multitudes. In Matthew 14:25-31, we read: “During the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went out to them, walking on the sea. When the disciples saw Him walking on the sea, they were terrified. 'It’s a ghost!' they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus spoke up at once: 'Take courage! It is I. Do not be afraid.' 'Lord, if it is You,' Peter replied, 'command me to come to You on the water.' 'Come,' said Jesus. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the strength of the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink, cried out, 'Lord, save me!' Immediately Jesus reached out His hand and took hold of Peter. 'You of little faith,' He said, 'why did you doubt?'
How does this relate to the peace Yeshua brings us? Remember, he tells us we're going to have trouble, there's no two ways about it, so get used to it and get ready for it and be prepared to deal with it. How? By focusing on him and his name and his power and the voice of the Holy Spirit to guide us through whatever difficulties we face, but aren't equipped to handle on our own.
So in the episode on the water, what was happening to the disciples? They were afraid. The Lord knew they were afraid, and what did he tell them? To calm down and not be afraid, because it was he who was coming to them.
Peter wanted to believe, but needed to be sure. He asked Yeshua to prove it was indeed him walking on the water to them. And so he did. He called Peter out of the boat, and Peter climbed out and walked on the water towards the Lord. As long as Peter's eyes were focused on the Lord... as long as his mind was focused on keeping Yeshua front and center... as long as his heart was protected in the peace the reassurance of being in the Lord's hands and under his protection and guidance gave him, Peter was walking on the water just like Jesus was while the storm raged all around them on the lake and in the skies.
Scripture records for us, however, as soon as Peter took his eyes off the Lord and turned his attention to the storm and the waves and the wind, down he went. Why? Because he lost the peace that was in his heart that gave him the ability to stay focused on the power of the Lord to sustain him as he walked on the water. Without the Lord's power and suddenly under his own, Peter lost his peace, became afraid of his circumstances, and then succumbed to them. He turned away from the Lord and paid attention to the storm, which caused him to lose his focus on the Lord, which caused him to lose the Lord's power that was helping him, which caused the storm to have power over him instead of Yeshua, which caused him to go down.
That's precisely how it works with us, this lesson teaches us. When we face the difficulties we face in the world in our walk with and work for the Lord, we need to constantly remember that we may be forgiven, regenerated, restored and saved believers, but as long as we're in the world, we're still captive to the limits of our sinful natures and we can't handle what the world throws at us on our own without reverting to the sinfulness that gets most of us into the trouble we get into in the first place.
That's why Jesus tells us about the peace he brings to us, what it's for, how valuable it is to us and why. It's that peace that allows us to have the clarity and focus to keep our attention on the Lord and his power to help us when we need it, instead of being distracted by the circumstances we face and becoming fearful before them on our own, which separates us from the Lord and his help, and then we get swallowed up by the storms that besiege us just like Peter did.
When we're hit with the world's assaults on us, the natural tendency is to freak out and go, “How am I going to deal with this?” Jesus tells us, “Relax. You don't have to. Stay at peace in your heart, focus on me and let me talk to Our Father for you.”
This peace also makes possible the activation of the spiritual law that “energy follows thought,” in our advantage and to our benefit. When we're clear and unafraid, our focus is on Yeshua. Our thought is on him, and the energy of manifestation that's attracted by thought then follows through to him, and his energy then comes to us and helps us.
We become the deer in the headlights, frozen in fear as our destruction speeds upon us when we lose our peace and our focus on Jesus. And we're not deer, but the Lord's flock. If we listen to our shepherd's voice, we'll never stray, go wrong, get lost, or fail at whatever we may have to face.
We may be able to handle a nice sunny day on our own and don't need the Lord's help to get through it. All we do is thank him for the blessing.
It's when the storms hit that we need him and the peace he gives us. The peace of the Lord Yeshua–the Prince of Peace–is the peace of knowing the hope that comes with our faith. That peace lets us have the focus we need to let the Lord be our power no matter how big or bad the storms we face, instead of us faltering under the delusions of our own designs.