NOTES for Rom 14:19

This sounds rather boring, uninspiring, does it not? It would be much better to say: “Let us seek what serves our self-assertion and mutual pleasure!” The word “peace” reminds us of old slogans about the struggle for peace, and “edification” of the most unpleasant teachers in school.

Why is this so? How did these wonderful words become so distorted in our perception? After all, “peace” is not simply the absence of war, nor even the absence of hostility. In biblical language, “shalom” is the state of Creation on the seventh day, when God, having completed everything, rests, when everything is “very good.” In some contexts this is translated into Greek as “kosmos,” the word from which “cosmetics” comes, because the Cosmos is the Universe filled with beauty. “Peace” is true wholeness, harmony, order, and beauty. And it is precisely this that the apostle Paul calls us to seek: such peace within us and in our relationships with one another, a peace created only by God.

And the word “edification” describes not moralizing, but nurturing, the increase of good, of what is good. Here there is another astonishing thing connected with God. God Himself is the Good, and He is infinite, and therefore in everything connected with the concept of good, ordinary laws of conservation do not operate, such as “if something has increased somewhere, the same amount has decreased somewhere else.” When we share something good with another person, love, consolation, knowledge, and so on, it increases in the other, and in us it not only does not decrease, but in some unexpected way also increases. Mutual edification takes place, mutual growth in good, a shared movement toward the true Good, toward God.