I don’t plan to make this an exhaustive series of exhortations covering all the blesseds in the Bible, but part of the method of staying on the subject for so many weeks is to make the point that God loves to bless His people and that there are lot of ways He does so.

For now let’s go back into the Beatitude orchard and note the seventh in line: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”

Like the first six in the list, “peacemakers” describes a kind of person. It is one word in Greek, made up of two parts, the verb for “make” and the noun “peace” (very nuanced in translation, as you can tell). A man who makes peace is a man who intervenes in disagreements and disputes, who reconciles divided parties, who works to calm conflicts and bring fighting friends back into fellowship.

Peace cannot always be made, and there are certain occasions when peace should not be pursued. Jesus said “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). We are to fight against sin and fight for the faith once for all delivered to the saints. But even then we defend the faith for sake of justified peace. We kill our sin for sake of holy peace. We call for the unrepentant and heretical to repent for sake of eternal peace.

That said, most of us weren’t voted “Most Likely to Be an Arbiter” in our graduation class, and the world does not know that we are Christians by our peacemaking. We are much better at stirring things up, or being stirred up. But, as fun as it may be, Jesus did not say “blessed are the contrarians.”

Why are peacemakers blessed? It certainly doesn’t feel happy in the midst of most conflict, either between you and someone else or when trying to help two other people. But God makes it blessed because it is a share in God’s own work. God makes peace. God gets in the middle. He is a Mediator at heart, or at least He is in flesh, and that’s why Jesus says the peacemakers will be “called sons of God.” When we make peace we are acting like our Father.