What Does Peace Mean in the Bible Read through 5 lenses

• Love, joy, peace: these are not achievements you manufacture by trying harder. They are what naturally arises when you are present, when consciousness is no longer lost in the noise of the thinking mind. A tree does not strain to produce fruit; the fruit appears because the tree is rooted and alive.

So do not chase joy as if it lived somewhere else, and do not force yourself to be gentle. Root yourself in this moment, in the still awareness beneath your thoughts. When you do, these qualities begin to grow in you on their own, the way fruit appears on a healthy tree, without effort and without being forced.

The ego borrows the language of holiness to make its invitation sound clean. It speaks of offerings and vows paid, as though what it proposes were sanctioned, even sacred. This is how temptation always works, dressing itself in the robes of what is good so the mind will not suspect the aim beneath. Guilt learns to quote peace.

What calls itself a peace offering here offers no peace at all, only a fuller entanglement wearing a pious name. A mind that hears fear speaking in the accent of devotion is not deceived by the accent, for it looks past the borrowed words to what is truly being asked.

• Peace offerings: the borrowed dress of holiness the ego wears, sacred language laid over an unholy aim to disarm suspicion
• Vows: the appearance of a debt already settled, temptation's claim of innocence used to make its call seem clean

A new self is born within, and authority passes to it, resting on the shoulder where strength is borne. The titles are not many beings but facets of one presence waking in a person: wonder at the source of things, counsel that guides from within, the might that governs the lower nature, the fathering principle that endures, and the peace that reconciles the warring parts.

The government carried on the shoulder is the rule the inner self assumes over the body once it comes into being. What religion sets far off as a coming king is the ordering power that rises in the crown and takes charge of the whole.

• Child: the new self born within, small at first, that grows to rule the body.
• Shoulder: the bearing-place of strength where the new self takes up its government.
• Prince of Peace: the facet of the inner presence that reconciles the warring parts into one.

Nathan "he gave". The giving faculty, and what it gives here is information. What you receive is often the truth about your own house.

Bathsheba "daughter of an oath". Born of a promise. The part of you that still holds an old commitment after the one who made it has gone quiet.

Solomon "peaceful". Peace as a person: the settled outcome, still young and still unannounced.

Adonijah "my Lord is Yah". A name that says the right thing while the man takes the throne anyway. Correct words are not surrender.

Haggith "festive". Feast and celebration. What crowns itself in you is usually born of an appetite for the party.

David "beloved". The part that knows it is loved and, for that reason, sleeps through a takeover.

• Teaching: giving speaks to promise about peace, because appetite has already crowned itself while the beloved part knew nothing. What is true about your house reaches you through what is given, not through what is loudest.