The Peace that is no Peace

by the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon
“Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah vi. 14)

Ministers are fearfully guilty if they intentionally build up men in a false peace. I cannot imagine any man more greatly guilty of blood than he who plays jackal to the lion of hell, by pandering to the depraved tastes of vain, rebellious man. The physician who should pamper a man in his disease, who should feed his cancer, or inject continual poison into the system, while at the same time he promised sound health and long life — such a physician would not be one half so hideous a monster of cruelty as the professed minister of Christ, who should bid his people take comfort, when, instead thereof, he ought to be crying, ‘Woe unto them that are at ease in Zion: be troubled, ye careless ones.’ The work of the ministry is no child’s play; it is a labour which might fill an angel’s hands — did fill the Saviour’s heart. Much prayer we need, that we may be kept honest; and much grace, that we may not mislead the souls whom we are bound to guide. The pilot who should pretend to steer a ship toward its proper haven, but who should meanwhile occupy himself below with boring holes in her keel that she might sink, would not be a worse traitor than the man who takes the helm of a church and professes to be steering it towards Christ, while all the while he is ruining it, by diluting the truth as it is in Jesus, concealing unpalatable truths, and lulling men into security with soft and flattering words. We might sooner pardon the assassin, who stretches forth his hand under the guise of friendship, and then stabs us to the heart, than we could forgive the man who comes towards us with smooth words, telling us that he is God’s ambassador, but all the while foments rebellion in our hearts, and pacifies us while we are living in revolt against the Majesty of heaven. In the great day when Jehovah shall launch His thunderbolts, methinks He will reserve one more dread and terrible than the rest, for some arch-traitor to the cross of Christ, who has not only destroyed himself, but led others into hell.

But, my dear hearers, it is a lamentable fact, that, without any hireling-shepherd to cry, ‘Peace, peace, when there is no peace,’ men will cry that for themselves. They need not the syren song to entice them to the rocks of presumption and rash confidence. There is a tendency in their own hearts to put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter — to think well of their evil estate, and foster themselves in proud conceit.’ No man is ever too severe with himself. We hold the scales of justice with a very unsteady hand when our character is in the balance.

My solemn business this morning shall be — and O may God help me in it! — to drag forth to the light some of you who have been pacifying your own consciences, and have been crying, ‘Peace, peace, when there is no peace.’

It is no uncommon thing with me to meet with people who say, ‘Well, I am happy enough. My conscience never troubles me. I believe, if I were to die, I should go to heaven as well as anybody else.’ I know that those men are living in the commission of glaring acts of sin, and I am sure they could not prove their innocence even before the bar of man; yet will these men look you in the face, and tell you that they are not at all disturbed at the prospect of dying. They laugh at death, as though it were but a scene in a comedy, and joke at the grave, as if they could leap in and out of it at their pleasure. Well, gentlemen, I will take you at your word, though I don’t believe you. I will suppose you have this peace, and I will endeavour to account for it on certain grounds, which may render it somewhat more difficult for you to remain in it. I do pray that God the Holy Spirit may destroy these foundations, and pull up these bulwarks of yours, and make you feel uneasy in your consciences and troubled in your minds; for un-ease is the road to ease, and disquiet in the soul is the road to the true quiet. To be tormented on account of sin is the path to peace; and happy shall I be if I can hurl a firebrand into your hearts this morning; if I shall be able, like Samson, to turn at least some little foxes loose into the standing corn of your self-conceit, and set your heart in a blaze.

1. The first person I shall have to deal with this morning, is the man who has peace because he spends his life in a ceaseless round of gaiety and frivolity. You have scarcely come from one place of amusement before you enter another. You are always planning some excursion, and dividing the day between one entertainment and another. You know that you are never happy except you are in what you call gay society, where the frivolous conversation will prevent you from hearing the voice of your conscience. In the morning you will be asleep while God’s sun is shining, but at night you will be spending precious time in some place of foolish, if not lascivious, mirth. Like Saul, the deserted king, you have an unquiet spirit, and therefore you call for music, and it hath its charms, doubtless — charms not only to soothe the stubborn breast, but to still a stubborn conscience for awhile; but, while its notes are carrying you upwards towards heaven, in some grand composition of a master author, I beseech you never to forget that your sins are carrying you down to hell. If the harp should fail you, then you call for Nabal’s feast. There shall be a sheep-shearing, and you shall be drunken with wine, until your souls become as stolid as a stone. And then you wonder that you have peace. What wonder! Surely any man would have peace when his heart has become as hard as a stone. What weathers shall it feel? What tempests shall move the stubborn bowels of a granite rock? You sear your consciences, and then marvel that they feel not. Perhaps, too, when both wine and the viol fail you, you will call for the dance; and the daughter of Herodias shall please Herod, even though John the Baptist’s head should pay its deadly price. Well, well, if you go from one of these scenes to another, I am at no loss to solve the riddle that there should be with you, ‘Peace, peace, when there is no peace.’

And now sit for your portraits, and I will paint you to the life. A company of idolaters are gathered together around an hideous image. There sits the blood-delighting Moloch. He is heated hot. The fire blazes in his brazen centre, and a child is about to be put into his arms to be burnt to ashes. The mother and father are present when the offspring of their own loins is to be immolated. The little one shrieks with terror; its little body begins to consume in this desperate heat. Will not the parents hear the cry of their own flesh, and listen to the wailings of the fruit of their own bowels? Ah, no, the priests of Moloch will prevent the appeal of nature! Sounding their drums and blowing their trumpets with all their might, they drown the cries of this poor immolated victim. It is what you are doing! Your soul is the victim to Satan! It is being destroyed now; and if you would but listen to its cries, if you would give yourself a little quiet, you might hear your poor soul shrieking, ‘Oh! do not destroy me: put not away from me the hope of mercy; damn me not; send me not down to hell!‘ These are shrieks that might penetrate your spirit, and startle you into wisdom. But no; you beat your drums, and sound your trumpets, and you have your dance and your merriment, that the noise of your poor soul may be hushed. Ah, sirs! there will be a day when you will have to hear your spirit speak. When your cups are empty, and not a drop of water can be given to your burning tongue; when your music has ceased, and the doleful ‘Miserere’ of wailing souls shall be your Black Sanctus; when you shall be launched for ever into a place where merriment and mirth are strangers — then you will hear the cries of your soul, but hear too late. Then shall each voice be as a dagger sticking in your souls. When your conscience shall cry, ‘Remember, thou hadst thy day of mercy; thou hadst thy day of the proclamation of the Gospel, but thou didst reject it; then thou wilt wish, but wish in vain, for thunders to come and drown that still, small voice, which shall be more terrible in thy ears than even the rumbling of the earthquake or the fury of the storm. Oh, that ye would be wise, and not fritter away your souls for gaiety! Poor sirs! poor sirs! There are nobler things for souls to do than to kill time — a soul immortal spending all its powers on these frivolities. Well might Young say of it, it resembles ocean into tempest tossed, to waft a feather or to drown a fly. These things are beneath you; they do no honour to you. Oh, that you would begin to live! What a price you are paying for your mirth — eternal torment for an hour of jollity — separation from God for a brief day or two of sin! Be wise, men, I beseech you; open your eyes and look about you. Be not for ever madmen. Dance not for ever on this precipice, but stop and think. O Spirit of the living God! stay Thou the frivolous, and dart a burning thought into his soul, that will not let him rest until he has tasted the solid joy, the lasting pleasure, which none but Zion’s children know.

1. Well, now I turn to another class of men. Finding that amusement at last has lost all its zest — having drained the cup of worldly pleasure till they find first satiety, and then disgust, lying at the bottom, they want some stronger stimulus; and Satan, who has drugged them once, has stronger opiates than mere merriment for the man who chooses to use them. If the frivolity of this world will not suffice to rock a soul to sleep, he hath a yet more hellish cradle for the soul. He will take you up to his own breast, and bid you suck therefrom his own devilish and Satanic nature, that you may then be still and calm. I mean, that he will lead you to imbibe infidel notions; and, when this is fully accomplished, you can have ‘peace, peace, when there is no peace.’ When I hear a man saying, ‘Well, I am peaceful enough, because I am not fool enough to believe in the existence of a God, or in a world to come; I cannot imagine that this old story book of yours — this Bible — is true,‘ I feel two thoughts within my soul: first, a disgust of the man for his dishonesty; and, secondly, a pity for the sad disquietude that needs such dishonesty to cover it. Do not suspect the man of being honest. There are two sorts of infidels. One sort are such fools that they know they never could distinguish themselves by anything that was right, so they try and get a little fictitious glory by pretending to believe and defend a lie. There are another set of men who are unquiet in their consciences: they do not like the Bible because it does not like them; it will not let them be comfortable in their sins, it is such an uneasy book to them. They did put their heads upon it once, but it was like a pillow stuffed with thorns; so they have done with it, and they would be very glad if they could actually prove it to be untrue, which they know they cannot. I say, then, I at once despise his falsehood, and pity the uneasiness of his conscience, that could drive him to such a paltry shift as this, to cover his terrors from the eyes of others. The more the man brags, the more I feel he does not mean it; the louder he is in his blasphemies, the more he curses, the better he argues, the more sure I am that he is not sincere, except in his desire to stifle the groans of his uneasy spirit. Ah, sir, you shall find the red-hot bullets of Divine justice too many and too terrible for your sophisms. When you shall fall under the arm of the eternal God, vain will be your logic then. Dashed to shivers, you will believe in the omnipotence, when you are made to feel it; you will know His justice when it is too late to escape from its terror. Oh, be wise; cast away these day-dreams. Cease to shut thy soul out of heaven; be wise; turn thee unto God, whom thou hast abused. For ‘all manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto man.’ He is ready to forgive you, ready to receive you, and Christ is ready to wash your blasphemy away. Now, to-day, if grace enable you, you may be an accepted child of that God whom you have hated, and pressed to the bosom of that Jehovah whose very existence you have dared to deny. God bless these words to you! If they have seemed hard, they were only meant to come home to your conscience; an affectionate heart has led me to utter them. Oh, do not this evil thing! Suck not in these infidel notions; destroy not your soul, for the sake of seeming to be wise; stop not the voice of your conscience by those arguments which you know in your inmost soul are not true, which you only repeat in order to keep up a semblance of consistency.

2. I shall come now to a third class of men. These are people not particularly addicted to gaiety, nor especially given to infidel notions; but they are a sort of folk who are careless, and determined to let well alone. Their motto is, ‘Let to-morrow take care for the things of itself: let us live while we live; let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’ If their conscience cries out at all, they bid it lie still. When the minister disturbs them, instead of listening to what he says, and so being brought into a state of real peace, they cry, ‘Hush! be quiet! there is time enough yet; I will not disturb myself with these childish fears: be still, sir, and lie down.’ Ah! and you have been doing this for years, have you? Whenever you have heard an earnest, powerful sermon, you have gone home, and laboured to get rid of it. A tear has stolen down your cheek now and then, and you have despised yourself for it. ‘Oh!’ you say, ‘it is not manly for me to think of these things.’ There have been a few twitches at times, which you could not help, but the moment after you have your heart like a flint, impenetrably hard and stony. Well, sir, I will give you a picture of yourself. There is a foolish farmer yonder in his house. It is the dead of night: the burglars are breaking in — men who will neither spare his life nor his treasures. There is a dog down below chained in the yard; it barks, and barks, and howls again. ‘I cannot be quiet,’ says the farmer, ‘my dog makes too much noise.’ Another howl, and yet another yell. He creeps out of bed, gets his loaded gun, opens the window, fires it, and kills the dog. ‘Ah! it is all right now,’ he mutters; he goes to bed, lies down, and quietly rests. ‘No hurt will come,’ he says, ‘now; for I have made that dog quiet.’ Ah! but would that he could have listened to the warning of the faithful creature. Ere long he shall feel the knife, and rue his fatal folly. So you, when God is warning you — when your faithful conscience is doing its best to save you — you try to kill your only friend, while Satan and Sin are stealing up to the bedside of your slothfulness, and are ready to destroy your soul for ever and ever. What should we think of the sailor at sea who should seek to kill all the stormy petrels, that there might be an end to all storms? Would you not say, ‘Poor, foolish man! why, those birds are sent by a kind Providence to warn him of the tempest. Why needs he injure them? They cause not the tumult; it is the raging sea.’ So it is not your conscience that is guilty of the disturbance in your hearts, it is your sin; and your conscience, acting true to its character, as God’s index finger in your soul, tells you that all is wrong. Would that ye would arise, and take the warning, and fly to Jesus while the hour of mercy lasts.

To use another picture. A man sees his enemy before him. By the light of his candle he marks his insidious approach. His enemy looks fierce and black upon him, and is seeking his life. The man puts out the candle, and then exclaims, ‘I am now quite at peace!’ This is what you do. Conscience is the candle of the Lord; it shows you your enemy; you try to put it out by saying, ‘Peace, peace.’ Put the enemy out, sir! put the enemy out! God give you grace to thrust sin out! Oh, may the Holy Spirit enable you to thrust your lusts out of doors! Then, let the candle burn; and the more brightly its light shall shine, the better for your soul, now and hereafter. Oh! up, ye sleepers; ye gaggars of conscience, what mean you? Why are you sleeping, when death is hastening on, when eternity is near, when the great white throne is even now coming on the clouds of heaven, when the trumpet of the resurrection is now being set to the mouth of the archangel — why do ye sleep? why will ye slumber? Oh, that the voice of Jehovah might speak and make ye wake, that ye may escape from the wrath to come!

1. A fourth set of men have a kind of peace that is the result of resolutions which they have made, but which they will never carry into effect. ‘Oh,’ saith one, ‘I am quite easy enough in my mind; for, when I have got a little more money I shall retire from business, and then I shall begin to think about eternal things.’ Ah, but I would remind you that, when you were an apprentice, you said you would reform when you became a journeyman; and when you were a journeyman, you used to say you would give good heed when you became a master. But hitherto these bills have never been paid when they became due. They have every one of them been dishonoured as yet; and, take my word for it, this new accommodation bill will be dishonoured too. So you think to stifle conscience by what you will do by-and-by. Ah, man, but will that by-and-by ever come? And should it come, what reason is there to expect that you will then be any more ready than you are now? Hearts grow harder, sin grows stronger, vice becomes more deeply rooted, by the lapse of years. You will find it certainly no easier to turn to God then than now. Now it is impossible to you, apart from Divine grace; then it shall be quite as impossible, and, if I might say so, there shall be more difficulties in the way then than even there are now. What, think you, is the value of these promises which you have made in the court of heaven? Will God take your word again, and again, and again, when you have broken it just as often as you have given it? Not long ago you were lying on your bed with fever, and, if you lived, you vowed you would repent. Have you repented? And yet you are fool enough to believe that you will repent by-and-by; and on the strength of this promise, which is not worth a single straw, you are crying to yourself, ‘Peace, peace, when there is no peace.’ A man that waits for a more convenient season for thinking about the affairs of his soul, is like the countryman in Aesop’s fable, who sat down by a flowing river, saying, ‘If this stream continues to flow as it does now for a little while, it will empty itself, and then I shall walk over dry-shod.’ Ah, but the stream was just as deep, when he had waited day after day, as it was before. And so shall it be with you. You remind me, by your procrastination, of the ludicrous position of a man who should sit upon a lofty branch of some tree with a saw in his hand, cutting away the branch on which he was sitting. This is what you are doing. Your delay is cutting away your branch of life. No doubt, you intend to cover the well when the child is drowned, and to lock the stable door after the horse is stolen. These birds in the hand you are losing, because there may be some better hour, some better bird in the bush. You are thus getting a little quiet, but oh, at what a fatal cost! Paul was troublesome to you, and so you played the part of Felix, and said, ‘Go thy way for this time; when I have a more convenient season I will send for thee.’ Ah, sir, let me tell you, once for all, you live to grow worse and worse. While you are procrastinating, time is not staying, nor is Satan resting. While you are saying, ‘Let things abide,’ things are not abiding, but they are hastening on. You are ripening for the dread harvest; the sickle is being sharpened that shall cut you down, and the fire is even now blazing into which your spirit shall be cast for ever.

2. I have but one other class of persons to describe, and then I shall have done when I have addressed a few solemn sentences of warning to you all. There remains yet another class of beings, who surpass all these in their utter indifference to everything that might arouse them. They are men that are given up by God, justly given up. They have passed the boundary of His long-suffering. He has said, ‘My Spirit shall no more strive with them;’ ‘Ephraim is given unto idols, let him alone.’ As a judicial punishment for their impenitence, God has given them up to pride and hardness of heart. I will not say that there is such an one here — God grant there may not be such a man — but there have been such to whom there has been given a strong delusion, that they might believe a lie, that they might be damned because they received not the Gospel of Christ. Brought up by a holy mother, they perhaps learned the Gospel when they were almost in the cradle. Trained by the example of a holy father, they went aside to wantonness, and brought a mother’s grey hairs with sorrow to the grave. Nevertheless, conscience still pursued them. At the funeral of that mother, the young man paused, and asked himself the question, ‘Have I killed her? have I brought her here?’ He went home, was sober for a day, was tempted by a companion, and became as bad as ever. Another warning came. He was seized with sickness; he lay in the jaws of the grave; he woke up; he lived, and lived as vilely as he had lived before. Often did he hear his mother’s voice: though she was in the grave, she, being dead, yet spoke to him. He put the Bible on the top shelf — hid it away; still, sometimes a text he had learned in infancy used to thrust itself on his mind. One night, as he was going to some haunt of vice, something arrested him; conscience seemed to say to him, ‘Remember all that you have learned of her.’ He stood still, bit his lip a moment, considered, weighed chances. At last he said, ‘I will go if I am lost.’ He went, and from that moment it has often been a source of wonder to him that he has never thought of his mother nor of the Bible. He hears a sermon, which he does not heed. It is all the same to him. He is never troubled. He says, ‘I don’t know how it is; I am glad of it; I am as easy now and as frolicsome as ever a young fellow could be.’ Oh! I tremble to explain this quietude; but it may be — God grant I may not be a true prophet — it may be that God has thrown the reins on your neck, and said, ‘Let him go, let him go, I will warn him no more; he shall be filled with his own ways; he shall go the length of his chain; I will never stop him!’ Mark! if it be so, your damnation is as sure as if you were in the pit now. O may God grant that I may not have such a hearer here! But that dread thought may well make you search yourselves, for it may be so. There is that possibility; search and look, and God grant that you may no more say, ‘Peace, peace, when there is no peace.’

Now for these last few solemn words. I will not be guilty, this morning, of speaking any smooth falsehoods to you; I would be faithful with each man, as I believe I shall have to face you all at God’s great day, even though you heard me but once in your lives. Well, then, let me tell you that, if you have a peace to-day which enables you to be at peace with your sins as well as with God, that peace is a false peace.

Another solemn thought. If you are at peace to-day through a belief that you are righteous in yourself, you are not at peace with God. If you are wrapping yourself up in your own righteousness, and saying, ‘I am as good as other people, I have kept God’s law, and have no need for mercy,’ you are not at peace with God. You are treasuring up, in your impenitent heart, wrath against the day of wrath; and you will as surely be lost, if you trust to your good works, as if you had trusted to your sins. There is a clean path to hell as well as a dirty one. There is as sure a road to perdition along the highway of morality, as down the slough of vice. Take heed that you build on nothing else but Christ; for, if you do, your house will tumble about your ears, when most you need its protection.

And now, finally, let me beseech you, if you are at peace in your own mind this morning, weigh your peace thus: ‘Will my peace stand me on a sick-bed?’ There are many that are peaceful enough when they are well, but, when their bones begin to ache, and their flesh is sore vexed, then they find they want something more substantial than this dreamy quietness into which their souls had fallen. If sickness make thee shake, what will destruction make thee do? Then, again, put the question in another light. If your peace is good for anything, it is one that will bear you up in a dying hour. Are you ready to go home to your bed now, to lie there, and never rise again? For, remember, that which will not stand a dying bed will never stand the day of judgment. If my hope begins to quiver, even when the skeleton hand of Death begins to touch me, how will it shake ‘when God’s right arm is nerved for war, and thunders clothe His cloudy car?’ If death makes me startle, what will the glory of God do? How shall I shrink into nothing, and fly away from Him in despair! Then, often put to thyself this question, ‘Will my peace last me when the heavens are in a blaze, and when the trembling universe stands to be judged?’

I do entreat you, if what I have said be not an idle dream — if it be not a mere myth of my imagination — if it be true, lay it to heart, and may God enable you to prepare to meet Him. Do not be wrapping yourselves up, and slumbering and sleeping. Awake, ye sleepers, awake! Oh, that I had a trumpet voice to warn you! Oh, while you are dying, while you are sinking into perdition, may I not cry to you — may not these eyes weep for you! I cannot be extravagant here; I am acquitted of being enthusiastic or fanatical on such a matter as this. Take to heart, I beseech you, the realities of eternity. Do not for ever waste your time. ‘Oh, turn ye, turn ye; why will ye die!’