| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James 4: Triumphant Christians and Fleeing Devils
Larry Kirkpatrick
Published on LastGenerationTheology.org on 2006-02-17 20:00Z
James 4:1-5 Source of Wars and Fighting
Much of the book of Yaacov is a warning against putting our emphasis in the wrong place. The poor looks up to the rich but with envy. He doesn’t understand why His prayers and various money-making operations are coming to nought. But the problem is his misemphasis. He is striving to get ahead in the present world while actually it is a mistake for him to be placing his energies upon material gain.
The source, he says, is the wars and fightings that are pleasures (hedonay) that are active in your members. That is, he warns about our being too committed to pleasure and sensation. This commitment to pleasure is a source of problems, for it sets us to fulfilling wrong agendas, it leads us to the pursuit of a mistaken slate of values. Not God’s kingdom but our own kingdom, not God’s pleasure, for He takes pleasure in the moral, but our own pleasure, a pleasuring in sensation, becomes the dominant theme.
Today when appeal to personal pleasure is the norm, the message of Yaacov will be found especially current. Notice that his warning is about the lusts that war “in your members.” People listen too much to sense. Delayed gratification? Our generation has never heard of it. What they have heard of is instant gratification, indulge yourself.
Notice: “ 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.” first is uncontrolled desire. Then there are attempts to obtain, strong attempts. “ye kill” but still you have not. Still you desire to have it, but you can’t have it. These are active people, fighting and warring, even killing. They value sensation more than life. And still they do not have. They are not asking. But they are trying to get it.
But then they shift gears. They do begin to ask. But their attitude, their goal, agenda, mission, purpose, has not changed: “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.” You can try to get that which you are bent upon without asking. But be unsuccessful. And you can shift gears verbally without shifting gears emotionally or spiritually, and ask. You can ask for something like it is some kind of secret formula. But if your heart is unchanged, you “ask amiss.”
How many Christians are out there asking for things from God al the time. And not receiving them. Could it be that exactly as Yaacov warns, they ask amiss? Actually here it says they ask for bad purposes, to spend all of what is received on oneself. He now arraigns the askers amiss before the bar of God: “Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.”
Imagine it: enemies of God asking God for that which they may consume as persistent enemies of God. How strange. He nails everyone. They are adulterers and adulteresses. These are Christians now. They had been married to Christ. But something went wrong and their conversion turned out to be superficial. The center of their world is the world. Underneath the word friendship we have philios, the Greek word for love that the name of the city of Philadelphia, “brotherly love” comes from.
Friendship with the world means necessarily opposition toward God. So here are people, professing believers, who are asking God, praying to God, for His intervention toward them, but they are not His friends. They are opposers. They are involved in their own thing. The Spirit that dwelleth in us will not be trifled with. He will not be played with. God is not a utensil or a machine. He is not a Genie in a bottle who has to grant your three wishes because you said the right form of words. He wants to change us, repair, us restore us, transform us, save us. But if we are double-minded, committed to the world when it suits and committed to God when it suits, then we are going to find ourselves friendly with the world that is passing away.
James 4:6-10 Triumphant Christians and Fleeing Devils
God gives more grace, grace so that His Spirit can work in us. But we have free will and we determine whether we permit Him to work in us according to His good pleasure. The key is whether our own agendas are negotiable. Are we willing to humble ourselves before Him, to surrender our mistaken agenda for His righteous agenda? If so, we will find an entirely different kind of experience opening up.
It was not long ago, during the “Victory in the Thought-life” series that we addressed this passage. But we will not be harmed by running through again. Submission to God is an essential first step. We are to resist the devil. The promise then is that he will not walk away snarling, but flee. Notice the immense contrast between the partially-committed person and the fully surrendered person. The partially-committed person receives nothing. The fully, a fleeing adversary.
When a Christian surrenders to Christ, and I mean nothing between himself and His Savior, the devils are put to route. There is nothing they can do but retreat. But too often we are holding on to something and hindering the work that Jesus would do for us in providing His victory in our lives. We blockade Him. It is like going into a battle without bullets, without body armor, without any armor. Our Savior is left behind. We expose ourselves to destruction.
But we must go with Christ. Submit to God first. Be humble enough to do what He says. He is the Savior and not we ourselves. Submit to Him. Resist Satan. We must first draw near to Christ. We must cleanse our hands, removing them from pet sins, pet agendas, pet worldlinesses. We must approach God with clean hands.
Our hearts must be purified. Our double-mindedness, part for the world and part for the gospel, must be put away. The Christian has no business in this world except the business of soul winning, his own, his family, his acquaintances, his fellow humans. Everything else is secondary at best. Our calling is first and foremost to be signposts to Christ.
“Be afflicted, mourn and weep.” Our laughter and joy are out of place if they are an accompaniment to worldliness and indifference to the claims of Christ. Much more, what is appropriate at this hour is what was appropriate on the Day of Atonement, when the nation stood in their tent doors mourning for their sins and afflicting themselves in repentance (Leviticus 16:29, 31). If we humble ourselves in the sight of the Lord, He will lift us up.
James 4:11, 12 Christians or Judges?
Let’s take a look at the next two verses, James 4:11, 12:
Speak not evil one of another, brethren. He that speaketh evil of his brother, and judgeth his brother, speaketh evil of the law, and judgeth the law: but if thou judge the law, thou art not a doer of the law, but a judge. There is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy: who art thou that judgest another?
How should we talk of one another? Here we are told that if we speak evil of a brother, another pilgrim of the faith, we are speaking evil of the law. Now we might first think we are talking about the Ten Commandments, and that would still be true at least indirectly. But could it be that here Yaacov has in mind that when we say something destructive about our sincere brothers and sisters in the faith, that we are reflecting poorly the message of the Scriptures themselves? By the Law does he mean the Law and the Prophets, the Scriptures that we claim change us?
John 17:17 says that God’s Word changes us, so Jesus pleads, “Sanctify them by Your truth.” But if our brothers and sisters are not changed by God’s Word, that Word whose very engrafting God claims is able to “save your souls (James 1:21),” then we are become witnesses that the gospel of God is ineffectual. If we are saying that they are not changed, then we are testifying against the power of God. If we are testifying against the power of God, we are judging His law; we are operating against His claims and His goals for His kingdom. We are becomes judges of God’s power to change people, and we have actually placed ourselves in opposition to Him, and we are no longer doers of His law.
Too many times we speak before we think, and we say things that we would later wish to take back. But as we said last week, there is no rewind button, is there? Words spoken hang in the air for eternity. They may be forgiven, but the scars may be quite hurtful and long-lasting. God is judge and not us. In the ordinary case, we should have very little to say that could be understood as speaking evil of our brothers and sisters.
James 4:13-17 Boasting, Money-schemes, Wrong Emphasis
Some are ever ready to go on a big money-making business venture. The Bible commends the faithful steward and the diligent laborer, but it warns the profligate entrepreneur. You are going to go where, for how long, and sell how much, and become how rich? Those who are ready to live high are warned. Yaacov has presumption in sight. He reminds us that we do not know what will come tomorrow. Life is short, often shorter than we expected. The activities of our life are very provisional.
It is like the warning of Christ to the farmer who had such large returns on his crops but who wanted to hoard it up for the future, and so went out to tear down his barns and build bigger ones. Instead of passing on the bounty God had blessed him with, he thought to build up his own business, to retain possession of as much as possible. But that night his soul would be required of him. Rich? He was poor and presumptuous. Material wealth he had but could not take with him. An unselfish, humble spirit? That is not what I hear here.
Yaacov advises a different attitude: “Ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that.” All business should be undertaken with the Lord in view first. If the Lord will, we will seek to accomplish this. Our first reference point is not how much we anticipate being prospered, but “If the Lord will.” Is this project the Lord’s will? Will it be a means of bringing glory to Him? So here he warns against those who are boasting of what they are going to do and how much they anticipate they will prosper through their business dealing. But “All such rejoicing is evil.”
Knowing to Do Good and Doing it Not
The last verse in this chapter gives us more insight concerning sin. If we know to do good, and we do not do it, then we sin. This is called a sin of omission. We may tend to think mostly of sins of commission, evil that we do by crossing a line to willfully violate God’s principles. But there is the reverse side as well: opportunities to do good that we refuse to embrace.
But here we must be careful too because it is not God’s plan for us to spend all our energies second-guessing what we should have done or feeling guilty because we may have missed an opportunity. Because we are granted free will we have a tremendous number of opportunities to do good. There are many ways to do good. If we are seeking God’s will, He can guide us and we can have peace that we are in His will for us, doing good in His kingdom in our present sphere of opportunities.
But those are general thoughts. What about more specifically what Yaacov has in mind here? First, in this chapter you might list the positive things one can do good in that have been mentioned or suggested as follows:
- Asking for blessing, not to consume it ourselves but to pass it on to others.
- Seeking friendship with God and enemy status with evil.
- Embracing a Christian attitude of humility.
- Submitting to God, resisting the devil.
- Speaking well of our brothers and sisters.
- Putting God first in all our activities.
Just in this chapter there are several. And what of other points suggested in the remainder of Yaacov’s letter, the first three and the last chapter? Elsewhere in James we are urged to pray, to resist temptation, to make sure our “faith” is accompanied by action, to guard our speech, those who lead God’s people to invest themselves carefully in teaching His truth, those who hear to be careful from whom we hear, to engage in fair treatment of employees, and to seek the healing of one another.
We should manifest no mere obedience to the letter, but a whole-hearted commitment to harmony with the Spirit of God’s requirements. Remember what Jesus said to the scribes and pharisees: “Ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone” (Matthew 23:23). A narrow obedience only, misrepresents God’s law, His ways, His character. Being a Christian means following all of God’s counsel. It means His principles are good not bad. Living the Torah will make us more like Jesus, not less.
There are many ways of doing good open to us. Christianity is no mere list of negatives. Every negative has its flip-side too. There is a place for negatives but also a place for positives. Are we defined by what we cannot do or what we can? Is the Christian one who doesn’t eat this and doesn’t do that? Or is the Christian one who, with an awareness of God’s requirements for his follower’s good, makes his life open to the goodness God longs to manifest in it? This is the kind of experience that sends the devils fleeing. It is the kind that Job had, a kind of experience that the God of heaven and earth Himself can bring up to His adversary and to His universe, and say, have you seen my servant _____? Our God is seeking those who will worship Him in Spirit and in truth (John 4:23, 24). Let us have that kind of Christianity, the kind advocated by Yaacov. LGT