“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you”
John 14:27The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness
Exodus 34:6Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Romans 1:7
As I sift through my remaining journal entries from my time in my Pops’ Workshop, I find some entries that don’t “move the story along” but are nonetheless important to understanding how God was moving in my life at that time. Sometimes I see themes that grow in importance over time. Two Hebrew words fall into that category
When I experienced visions of “My Place,” I came to know that the Hebrew words shalom (שָׁלוֹם) and hesed (חֶסֶד) are foundational to it, and therefore to my offering of spiritual direction. When I would see My Place while praying or thinking about it and pondering what the Lord might have in store for me, those words would come to mind and demand my attention. God was once again trading on my innate (and sometimes obsessive) curiosity. I spent a lot of time wondering about these words. Exactly how the words are significant took a while to unpack.
One day, my regular Bible reading took me to 1 Kings 7, where, as part of building the temple, Solomon constructs two towering pillars which he named Boaz (in him is strength) and Jachin (he will establish). The instant I read that passage, it dropped into my mind that shalom and hesed would be the doorposts for My Place. I have never understood how Solomon’s towering pillars triggered a thought about what frames the entry to My Place, but understanding hesed and shalom helps me understand God’s character. That, in turn, helps to understand and anchor the healing and restoration I experienced in my Pops’ Workshop, and it grounds my practice of spiritual direction. It makes perfect sense that hesed and shalom, or grace and peace, should be the hallmarks of my ministry of spiritual direction.
Grace
The first of those two words, hesed (חֶסֶד), had come to my attention years before my time in my Pops’ Workshop. I was reading in the Psalms and kept seeing “steadfast love” pop up over and over again. Why did those words in particular catch my attention? The only explanation I can offer is that it was a nudge from the Holy Spirit. God reaches each of us in whatever way He can; He uses my natural curiosity to get me to think about something important that I should pay attention to. In this case, he nudged me toward learning about hesed.
The meaning of hesed is multi-faceted and nuanced; it does not readily translate directly into English. Depending on the translation you use, you will find hesed rendered as lovingkindness, mercy, love, steadfast love, faithful love, or loyal love. Yet none of those fully capture the meaning of this word that God uses to describe himself. The meaning of hesed is so deep and rich that Michael Card spent ten years writing a book about this one word. In the aptly titled “Inexpressible,” Card gives us his working definition of hesed: “When the person from whom I have a right to expect nothing gives me everything.”1
Hesed is foundational to who God is. When he passes before Moses on Mount Sinai, God declares that he is “a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in [hesed] and faithfulness, keeping [hesed] for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin…”2 Hesed overflows the Psalms, often highlighting God’s hesed as something that makes him different from any other god; He is love, and he cannot not love, that is the nature of his hesed. Other gods may (temporarily) be pleased with us or with our actions, but the God of heaven loves us. Our thoughts or actions do not enter into a worthiness calculation. In fact, there is no calculation; we are loved and nothing we say, or think, or do can change that.
The Hebrew word “hesed” is, of course, absent from the New Testament, which was written in Greek, but that does not mean that we cannot see God’s hesed there. Scholars tell us that the closest to hesed we get in the New Testament is “Charis,” nearly always translated as “Grace,” meaning unmerited favor. That is an awful lot like Card’s summary of hesed: “When the person from whom I have a right to expect nothing gives me everything.” When Luther translated the Bible into German, he used the German word for “grace” to translate both “hesed” and “charis”, explicitly linking them.
The gospel, the central message of Christianity, turns on God’s hesed. Jesus’s life and sacrificial, redemptive death are the ultimate expression of hesed. We are saved, redeemed, and brought into new life even though we have done nothing to deserve it. (And most of us have done a LOT that should disqualify us from receiving it!)
When my children were young, my wife and I wanted to give them a concrete understanding of Grace. We had fairly early on taken away the option of dessert following dinner; we were exhausted from arguing with them about whether or not they had eaten enough of their meal to merit or “earn” dessert. Then it struck us: Sunday became Grace day. You got dessert even if you didn’t eat a single bite of your dinner; you got dessert on Sunday by grace, by charis, by hesed.
Peace
We have already met Shalom (שָׁלוֹם) in Chapter 8, when the Lord invited (or commanded3) me to “speak peace” over a seeming multitude. Shalom is usually translated as “peace,” but like hesed, its meaning is much richer and more profound than can be expressed in a single English word. We usually think of peace as a freedom from hostilities, either earthly strife or between God and man. Shalom can mean that, but it also conveys prosperity, well-being, health, and completeness. To wish someone shalom is to wish them all those things.
Living in God’s Peace
We are intended to live our lives in the embrace of God’s shalom. It is what we are designed for and what we are meant to experience. If you have hung around many churches, you have likely heard this blessing many times: “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you [shalom].”4,5 That blessing is prescribed by God; he commands the priests to bless the people with that particular blessing, calling forth God’s shalom for the people.
God plans for us to live in his shalom: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for [shalom] and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”6 God wants us to experience his peace, and he is delighted when we do. “Great is the LORD, who delights in the [shalom] of his servant!”7
We have a dysfunctional relationship with God’s rules for his people. We approach his instruction as if it were the criminal code, which we must obey or face punishment; that is not the case. He gives his people instructions for living, not because he wants to force compliance with his way, not because he is the consummate micromanager or a control freak, but because he wants us to experience his shalom. “Oh that you had paid attention to my commandments! Then your [shalom] would have been like a river, and your righteousness like the waves of the sea.”8
Following God’s commandments yields shalom like a well-tended tree yields fruit; not as a payment or reward, but as a natural consequence. C. S. Lewis reminds us that we are meant to “run on” God.9 Following God’s instruction is then just common sense.
When we understand the fullness of shalom, we glimpse the beauty of life in God’s kingdom. As is the case with hesed, we do not find shalom in the New Testament. But shalom’s Greek counterpart, eirēnē, is there some ninety-two times. This should hardly surprise us. The prophet Isaiah declared that one of the names of the messiah would be “Prince of Peace.”10
The Prince of Peace
From beginning to end, peace accompanies Jesus. An angelic declaration of peace heralds Christ’s birth: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”11 At the close of his earthly ministry, Jesus bestows his peace on his followers: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”12 And the resurrected Jesus blesses his followers with peace: “On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’”13
Paul, Peter, John, and Jude all greet or bless their readers with the Peace of Christ. To experience the peace of God, which Paul reminds us “surpasses all understanding,”14 and to live in his shalom, is to partake of the life we were designed to enjoy.
Grace and Peace, Hesed and Shalom: whether in Hebrew or English, those words are central to understanding who God is and how he thinks and feels about us. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection are enactments of God’s hesed and shalom. It is little wonder that God would impress upon me the need to frame my ministry of spiritual direction with grace and peace; hesed and shalom.
- Card, Michael. Inexpressible: Hesed and the Mystery of God’s Lovingkindness (p. 5). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition. ↩︎
- Exodus 34:6-7 (ESV) ↩︎
- Invited or commanded? I like to think it was an invitation – something I could accept or not. But I know in my heart that it was a command and that command is something I still struggle with nearly a decade later. ↩︎
- Depending on the translation you use, you will find shalom behind words other than peace. Here, and in what follows, I have taken the liberty of replacing the translator’s choice with the Hebrew shalom. ↩︎
- Numbers 6:24-26 ↩︎
- Jeremiah 29:11 ↩︎
- Psalms 35:27 ↩︎
- Isaiah 48:18 ↩︎
- See Lewis, C. S.. Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics) (p. 50). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. ↩︎
- Isaiah 9:6 ↩︎
- Luke 2:14 ↩︎
- John 14:27 ↩︎
- John 20:19 ↩︎
- Philippians 4:7 ↩︎
From Pops' Workshop 
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