Peacemaker: Romans 16:20

Did you know peacemakers fight and win wars, thus making peace? Dwight David Eisenhower was the five-star General, or General of the Armies who led the Normandy Invasion and won World War II.

Commonly known as Ike, he served as the 34th President of the United States from 1953 to 1961. It’s interesting his 8 years as president were marked by a relative state of peacefulness in the world and prosperity in the United States.

I think the rest of the world could have been thinking, “We don’t think we should mess with the guy who just won the largest war in world history.”

So, Ike led the armies that won a war and made peace.

Peacemakers are usually the guys who win wars and make for peace! It sounds backward, great warriors are great peacemakers! It’s true!

Ike was a great peacemaker and wanted peace more than anything! Might he be the greatest peacemaker of all time? No!

Romans 16: 20A, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.” (ESV) God is called the God of peace, but He will soon crush Satan under your feet! Why is that? He and Satan are at war and God will win and Satan will lose, being crushed under your feet!

Notice God will crush Satan under “your” feet! Whose feet might that be? The ChristFollower! Satan gets crushed under our feet because we are at war with him too, but God crushes him under our feet. Satan loses and we win!

God crushes Satan in a war and establishes peace forever.

When does God crush Satan and when do we win?

Revelation 20: 10, “and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they were tormented day and night forever and ever.” (ESV)

After a thousand-year period, in the end times Satan is released from his prison and defeated permanently going to the flames of Hell forever to be tormented!

God defeats him and he’s crushed under our feet in a permanent fashion. The war we’re in now ends and peace is established forever!

I can’t wait! But guess what’s true! We all must wait. We must wait while we and God are at war with the Devil. He loses and we win, but we do have to wait for that day, and most of us will spend our lives here on earth in a state of war!

What’s God’s plan for us during the war?

Let us go back to Romans 16:20 and look at the entire verse, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.” (ESV)

Until God deals Satan his ultimate defeat, during the time we’re at war with the Devil, our capacity to deal with the warring conditions we live under is for the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ to be with us!

Remember we live at war with the Devil. We always have lived with that and always will. It makes for tough times and times of loss! War time is like that and we live at war!

At times it seems like war takes a break and things are peaceful, but hard time always come back! We’re certainly in those hard times now!

We have wars in our streets right now! People lose their business, homes, and lives now in the streets of America. This time ia a symptom of the ongoing war we have with the Devil in our time.

It seems to me we will pass 200,000 deaths to COVID-19. Illness is part of the war! Satan is the author of illness and disease, making it part of his losing strategy in a war!

Illness will touch all of us at some time in this life of war in which we live. I’ve had to endure heart surgery, brain surgery and diabetes for 21 years.

Losing people we love is part of Satan’s war with us! He authored death!

I was 7 years old when my mother went to the hospital to give birth in 1956. I was hoping it was a brother as I had a sister and wanted a brother.

I will never forget my dad walking up grandpa’s sidewalk to give us the good news, but he was crying! My brother was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and died in birth!

That was the first loss I had suffered. There have been many since that day in 1956. All that is part of the war we fight all the time!

God’s plan to pull us through the tragedy and trauma of this constant war we’re involved in is for His grace to be with us! Grace is a gift we don’t deserve. Often it’s simply the God-capacity to pull through the trauma of life.

How does that work? You tell Him where it hurts, and He will grace the hurt and pull you through to a better time.

God did give me a brother in December of 1958. His name was Tim. Tim had terrible back pain in 1998. Later that year it was diagnosed as bone marrow cancer. He passed away in February of 1999. He was 40 years old. The war never stops! God graced me through that loss, and many before and since!

The war will stop…… when God crushes Satan under our feet and tosses him into the fires of hell to be punished forever! Until then we have God’s grace to stand in!

But remember God will make peace one day! He’s the great peacemaker!