Many years ago, I read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, the Russian writer considered one of the great literary masters of the novelist sort. His masterpiece, portraying in great detail Napoleon Bonaparte’s war-making on Czarist Russia is, once you have the courage to get into it, spellbinding. At least it was in my case.
I have two volumes—each a different English translation, and each well into the thousands of pages. I’ve read both and have gone back to read portions again and again.
I say “once you have the courage to get into it” because it’s an ancient report of a long-ago war, and dedicating oneself to such a daunting read indeed takes courage–or something like it. There is a long-time stigma attached to reading overly long tomes, and War and Peace is almost always the one held up as the example of the long-winded reads.
However, the book is a brilliant, although fictional, accounting of man waging war at its most terrible and personal, yet most fascinating, level. Yet we think of such wars of the distant past—such conflicts—as irrelevant to life today. It’s all history. We must deal with now…and with the future. We have our own threats—and they’re potentially globally destructive—so we find it unproductive, a waste of time, to live the lives of characters of antiquity such as Prince Andrei Nikolayevich and Natasha Rostova. Wars of our own time are everywhere we look, and they genuinely and in real time threaten our own existence.
War and Peace is simply too close to home, and most today shy away from dwelling on the reports of actual conflicts and the efforts at peaceful resolution.
But matters of war and peace within God’s prophetic Word cannot, for the Christian who is commanded to examine the future through that Word, be avoided, if obeying Heaven’s instruction. Jesus said: “What I say unto one, I say unto all. Watch” (Mark 13:37).
The Lord was talking about the signals of His coming again to watch for as the end of the age approaches. He said, for example, that there will be “wars and rumors of war.” We who are in God’s family are to watch, therefore, for these prophesied wars and rumors of war. I believe this warning by Jesus, the Greatest of all Prophets, points to wars and rumors of war as being most profound as an end-of-the-age indicator, second only to the nation of Israel itself.
God’s Word also states that at the same time there are wars and rumors thereof, there will be a great cry for peace and safety. As a matter of fact, we’re told that when there is that end-times cry for peace and safety, we can expect sudden destruction to fall (“For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape” [1 Thessalonians 5:3]).
A recent news article indicates proliferating signals, I think, of the growing global call for peace and safety.
Pope Leo XIV and Russian President Vladimir Putin had a phone call today, with the Pope asking Putin to “make a gesture that would promote peace,” while emphasizing dialogue.
Earlier today Russian news outlets reported that Leo and Putin had spoken by phone, but it was not until a little after 9 p.m. Rome time that the Holy See Press Office confirmed the news.
A statement issued by the Vatican read:
During the phone call, in addition to matters of mutual interest, special attention was paid to the situation in Ukraine and peace.
The Pope made an appeal for Russia to make a gesture that would promote peace, stressed the importance of dialogue for the realization of positive contacts between the parties and seek[ing] solutions to the conflict…
In his first address to the world and the Church on his first Sunday appearance after the election, Pope Leo called for an end to global conflicts. “Never again war,” he urged, citing the conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and Pakistan by name. (“Pope Leo holds first phone call with Vladimir Putin, urges him to ‘promote peace’,” Michael Haynes, Snr. Vatican Correspondent, LifeSite, June 4, 2025)
The dichotomy of war and peace has been a constant exigency in humankind’s history since the disobedience of Adam in the Garden of Eden. I heard recently that there have been no more than 268 years of peace in all of recorded history. Certainly there has been no such lack of wars and rumors of war that I’ve known during my lifetime. Nor can I find any such periods of absence of war in my admittedly less than stellar academic study of humanity’s long history. I’ll just have to trust the statistic, which I heard from Dr. David Jeremiah, who said the 268 years of peace number came from an article in the New York Times.
Again, the Word of God tells the reason for the war that rages and moves humanity toward Armageddon. The war in fallen humankind began in Eden, and it will end at Armageddon.
“From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not” (James 4:1-2).
There is no peace in this fallen world other than the peace the Lord Jesus Christ gives upon salvation of souls. The Lord said:
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid” (John 14:27).
The person who doesn’t know Jesus Christ as Savior can’t find the peace of which Jesus spoke, unless, as James in the Scripture above says, the person “asks.” One has only to ask to receive God’s forgiveness and achieve the inner peace the Holy Spirit gives when He comes to live within the believer.
Here again is how to come to that moment of peace Jesus promises to all who but “ask”:
“That if you will confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and will believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart man believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Romans 10:9-10).
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