President’s Day evening I attended a lecture by author/historian Ronald C. White at the University of Saint Mary in Leavenworth on the subject of Abraham Lincoln’s journey of faith.  Specifically, the lecture focused on Lincoln’s second inaugural address, which some have called his “Sermon on the Mount.”   The address rivals The Gettysburg Address in profundity and eloquence, revealing a president whose entire worldview had been shaped by his spiritual wrestling match with God’s Providence and its role in the events of human history.

I found the lecture and the address which was its focal point to be unexpectedly challenging to me as a believer.  God showed me something that struck a very personal chord.  Though still wrestling personally with its implications, I’ll do my best to explain why I was so challenged.

America in 1865 was on the brink of seeing a cessation of military action after four long years of civil war, but she was a long way from seeing an end to conflict.  The people of the North were angry.  Two percent of the American population, 620,000 people, had died as a direct result of the South’s rebellion and now, having won the war, the North was eager to punish them to the fullest extent.  So the crowds that day had gathered eager to hear their leader give voice to their anger.  What they got was much different: a call to unite as a nation and as brothers.  The motive Lincoln gave them for doing so is what stirs waters so deeply within me.

A few years earlier in 1862, with America fully immersed in the bloodshed of the war, Lincoln wrote down seven sentences on a scrap of paper; a scrap of paper found in his desk drawer after his death by one of his aides:

The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party -- and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true -- that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.

In meditating on the theological implications of the war, Lincoln was coming to the conclusion that God was willing the war to continue in order to carry out purposes which Lincoln himself could not yet see and that this purpose stood outside of man’s purposes for the conflict.  On that scrap of paper, he offers no hint that he knows what that divine purpose might be.  But it becomes clear by his second inaugural address that he had reached a settled conclusion on the matter. 

The crowds gathered for Lincoln’s second inauguration had conditioned themselves to believe that they were on the side of God in the conflict.  But Lincoln points out that Southerners held to the opposite conviction; they believed God was on their side.  He reminds his listeners of this fact when he states:

“Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.”

Obviously, both could not be right.  God could not be on the side of both parties.  But in what was no doubt a shock to Northern partisans, Lincoln’s conclusion was that both sides were wrong.  God was on neither side and, thus, this was the reason why prayers for a speedy northern victory and the prayers of southerners for northern defeat had gone unanswered.  He can only conclude, as he had three years before on a scrap of paper, “The Almighty has His own purposes.”  However, unlike three years before, he was now ready to state what he believed that purpose to be.

Northerners believed slavery was the Great Sin of the South and that the war and their impending defeat was God’s judgment on them for it.  However, in his address, Lincoln called slavery an American issue; a national sin.  He reminded his audience that slavery had been woven into the fabric of the entire nation since adventurers began to settle the continent 250 years before.  He reminded them that the economic enterprise of the entire nation had benefited from the labors of slaves.  Thus he concluded that:

“…if God wills that (the war) continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’”

What possible purpose could be served by reminding northerner’s who were ready to celebrate victory that they, too, should be humbled; that they, too, had been judged by God?  The only purpose that mattered in Lincoln’s mind:  national healing.  And this is where God began to push me around a bit.

As man in his mid-forties, I have participated in more than my fair share of conflicts.  The worst kinds of these conflicts have come when I believed that I was on the side of God and the opposing party believed that they were.  In some of those conflicts, I declared victory and in others I was vanquished.  In almost all of them, however, relationships where shattered forever.  Why?  Because in my arrogance I concluded that God was on “my side” without seeing that perhaps God was on neither; without seeing that perhaps the purpose of the conflict was greater than my little “tribal” understanding of it.  I had not seen that, perhaps, the purpose of the conflict in God’s mind was to chasten both me and the party against whom I was warring.

Lincoln understood that the Civil War was a conflict in which no one had won and all had lost.  He understood that, as in all things, God had a purpose for it.  And now, the only possible hope for national healing after a catastrophic civil war was for a nation to understand that purpose and come together chastened before God.  And so he concluded:

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

The hope, of course, was not to be realized.  Northern vindictiveness, without Lincoln’s stabilizing influence, ran unchecked and the country’s recovery from hostility took decades to be realized.  My prayer in the future conflicts of my life is that I won’t similarly sabotage God’s reconciling work in my relationships.  My prayer is that I will understand “the Almighty has his own purposes;” purposes that may include my own chastening.  I believe, if by God’s help I can remember these things, that I can genuinely come out of conflict with “malice toward none; charity for all” and realize the peace with other believers God has called me cherish and guard.