How should Christians respond to wars and rumours of wars?

Question 10092.

Wars and rumours of wars have marked every generation since Jesus spoke the phrase, and every generation has been tempted to read its own headlines as the final act. I have lost count of the conversations that begin with a news alert and end with the question, is this it? The question is understandable. The way we handle it says a good deal about the state of our faith.

What strikes me about Jesus’ own words is how deliberately He lowers the temperature. He mentions wars and rumours of them, and then tells His disciples not to be alarmed, because the end is not yet. That is not what we expect from a prophetic passage, and it is exactly what anxious people need to hear.

What Jesus actually said

The words come in the Olivet Discourse: “And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet” (Matthew 24:6). Mark records the same statement. Then Jesus adds that nation will rise against nation, and that all these things are but the beginning of the birth pains.

Three things are being said at once. Conflict will happen, and it is not a surprise to God. Believers are not to be alarmed by it. And it is not the signal of the end that people assume it is. Anyone using wars and rumours as evidence that the end has arrived is arguing the opposite of the verse they are quoting.

The word behind rumours is akoe, a report or something heard. Jesus anticipates not only actual conflict but the churn of alarming information about conflict, which in an age of rolling news is arguably the heavier burden of the two.

The setting matters. The disciples had just been told that the temple would be thrown down, and they asked when this would happen and what the sign of His coming would be. Jesus begins His answer with a warning about deception, not with a timetable, and the mention of wars and rumours comes immediately after He says, see that no one leads you astray. The context is not prediction but protection.

Why wars and rumours are not signs of the end

There has been no century without war. If armed conflict were a reliable indicator of the end, the sign would have been permanently illuminated since the first century, which makes it useless as a sign. Jesus says as much by calling these things the beginning of birth pains rather than the delivery.

On the dispensational reading this makes further sense. The signs Jesus describes belong to a period the Church will not see, and the Rapture itself is signless. So watching wars and rumours in order to calculate the timing is a category error twice over. The signs that precede Christ’s return in glory are for another audience.

This is also why I am unmoved when a preacher matches a current conflict to a prophetic passage. It has been done with every European war of the last two centuries and with a good many since. The track record is not encouraging.

The command not to be alarmed

Jesus does not say be uninformed, and He does not say be indifferent. He says do not be alarmed, and the word suggests being thrown into panic or unsettled from within. He is addressing the interior state of His disciples rather than their news consumption.

That command is a mercy, because alarm is corrosive. It shortens our attention, sours our conversation, and makes us useless to frightened neighbours. I have seen Christians so gripped by wars and rumours that they could no longer pray for anything else, and I would not call that spirituality.

There is a discipline here worth naming. If a news source leaves you agitated, angry and unable to sleep, it is not serving you, whatever it claims about keeping you informed. You are allowed to turn it off. The Lord is not depending on your vigilance.

There is also a practical difference between being informed and being immersed. Every generation before ours heard of distant wars weeks or months later, in summary, and could do little about them beyond prayer. We receive them live, continuously, with images, and our nervous systems were not built for that. When Jesus said do not be alarmed, He was speaking to people with far less input than we have, which suggests the command applies to us with greater force rather than less.

Holding grief and steadiness together

Refusing panic is not the same as refusing to care. Wars kill children, empty cities and ruin generations, and a Christian who shrugs at that has lost something important. Jesus wept at a single graveside. The right response to the news is prayer and grief rather than either hysteria or detachment.

Paul tells us to pray for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life (1 Timothy 2:1-2). Notice that praying about international affairs is not presented as an optional interest for the politically minded. It is part of the ordinary work of the church.

So bring the headlines into your prayers rather than into your anxieties. That single redirection changes what the news does to you.

Prayer also protects us from the thing that news does to our hearts, which is to make distant people into categories. Wars and rumours reach us as nations, movements and blocs. Prayer turns them back into mothers, sons and neighbours, which is how God sees them. I have found that praying by name for a place changes how I speak about it, and the change is always towards mercy.

What about our own nation’s wars?

Christians have differed on the ethics of warfare for centuries, and I am not going to settle that here. The wider question of war deserves its own treatment. What I will say is that prophetic anticipation must never be used to excuse indifference to injustice or enthusiasm for bloodshed.

Believing that conflict will characterise the age does not mean welcoming it. Jesus called peacemakers blessed in the same sermon in which He described a world in turmoil, and He did not see any tension between the two.

There is also a question of tone in how we speak about conflicts our own country is involved in. Christians hold different views on military action, and those differences run through congregations as much as through nations. What ought not to differ is the manner of the disagreement. A church that can argue about foreign policy without losing its love for one another is displaying something the world rarely sees, and it says more than any position paper.

Reading the news as a Christian

I try to hold three things when I read about wars and rumours. First, God is not surprised, and nothing is running ahead of His purposes. Then, the suffering is real and my prayers are not a formality. And last, my neighbours are frightened, and fear makes people ask questions they would not otherwise ask.

That last point is worth dwelling on. Wars and rumours unsettle people who never think about God, and a calm Christian is unusual enough to be noticed. Peter’s instruction to be ready to give a reason for the hope within us assumes that someone will ask, and unsettled times are when they do.

Keep a longer view as well. Read a little history alongside the headlines and you will find that every generation believed its own crisis was unprecedented. That is not an argument for complacency, since one generation will eventually be right about the end. It is an argument for humility about our own reading of the moment, and for getting on with the work in front of us while the wars and rumours continue.

So, now what?

Take Jesus at His word this week. Stay informed enough to pray intelligently, and no more. Give the same amount of attention to the Scriptures that you give to the news, and see whether that alters the weight the headlines carry.

Then be the calm one in the room. Wars and rumours will keep coming until the Lord returns, and He told us so in advance precisely so that we would not be shaken by them. If your neighbour asked you tonight why you are not afraid, what would you say?

And do not let this become a reason for detachment from your neighbours. A Christian who is calm because he has stopped caring is not obeying Jesus, he is just numb. The calm Jesus commands is the calm of someone who knows the end of the story and can therefore afford to be fully present in a frightening chapter.

And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet.

Matthew 24:6 (ESV)