James

Problems and Growth

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Problems and Growth

Genre: Sermon

Lesson: 11 of 16

Track: #29

Year:

Dictation Name: RR328P29

[Rushdoony] Let us worship God. Give unto the Lord oh ye kindred’s of the people, give unto the Lord glory and strength. Give unto the Lord the glory due unto His name. Bring an offering and come into His courts. Oh worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, fear before Him all the earth. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we give thanks unto Thee that as we face each morning that we face it with Thee, that we are not alone for Thou art closer to us then we can be to ourselves. Thou knowest our innermost hopes for there is nothing hidden from Thee and so our God we come, we come casting all our cares upon Thee who carest for us, we come knowing how great our need is and how all sufficient is Thy mercy and grace. Oh Lord our God we come, teach us that which we must know, make us strong by Thy word and by The Spirit, guide us in the way that we should go. In Christ’s name, amen.

Our scripture this morning is James four verses one through six. Our subject, Problems and Growth, Problems and Growth; James 4:1-6. “From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? 2 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. 3 Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. 4 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. 5 Do ye think that the scripture saith in vain, The spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy? 6 But he giveth more grace. Wherefore he saith, God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.”

These verses give us a very different portrait of the early church then do idealized accounts. It is a very blunt indictment of certain tendencies. We are told first of wards and fightings traced to the lusts or desires at war in their members, in their bodies, in their nature. Second we are told that they desire things they do not have. Third they kill, or they wish others dead, for actual murder would have brought the Romans into the scene. Then fourth James says “ye desire to have and cannot obtain.” Fifth “ye fight and war yet ye have not because ye ask not.” They do not ask of God because they perhaps know their hopes are ungodly. Sixth, when they do pray their prayers are wrong “ye ask and receive not, because ye ask amiss that ye may consume it upon your lusts or pleasures. Seventh James calls them adulterers and adulteresses in relationship to God to whom they are faithless. And eighth they fail to recognize that friendship with the world is enmity with God. In fact to be the world’s friend is to be God’s enemy.

To whom is James speaking? To just the church or more then the church? We must remember that Judea at that time was in turmoil over various issues. Many were expecting the Messiah, others felt that war against Rome would bring Judea heavenly and miraculous health. All they had to do was to stand up to Rome and God would send His angels to defend his supposed saints. The country was deeply involved in intense factualism and Josephus gives us a very good record of this. These various factions divided the people and the Christian synagogue was infected by the same vain hopes so that James indictment mirrors the Jewish scene both Christian and non-Christian. The intensity of popular feelings severely limited the scope of action and intelligent analysis. Josephus mirrored the horror of a man who saw intelligent decisions ruled out by fanatical imperatives. In this respect Henty’s book on the temple is a very good depiction of Josephus and his reaction.

The early Christians were peoples of their times. The fact that they survived the national judgment came from the impact of our Lord’s words in Matthew 24 and probably also James 4:1 following. Between the ascension and the outbreak of the Jewish-Roman war in 66 A.D. the Christians had slowly but surely disentangled themselves from the fanaticism of popular eschatology, so James apparently had an impact.

James 4:1 following reflects the national scene as it impinged upon the church or the Christian synagogue, but they also tell us about the nature of man, the source of his problems and of his religious failures. In verse one we are told that the conflicts of nations have their origin in man’s fallen being. As sinful men we create sinful societies. No arrangements of powers and forces in any society can undercut the impact of man’s sin. To blame on some other agency the guilt for our society’s evils is conspiracy thinking such as Adam and Eve indulged in to account for their sin. The Godly will say with David “against Thee, Thee only I have sinned and done this evil in Thy sight, that Thou mightest me justified when Thou speakest and be clear when thou judgest.” Evil begins in man’s heart and then embodies itself in life, in men, and in institutions. The modern view is that evil is outside of men, in economic arrangements, in religions, in families, and so on and on. You can see why James epistle is so relevant, because we as Christians must maintain the problem that the world is confronted with is sin, and sin is a personal thing. Whereas our era, our age, believes in victimhood, the sin is in society, or in heredity, or in economic arrangements and so on and on.

In verse two James calls attention to the perpetual frustration of sinful men. Their lives may profess faith and virtue but in practice they negate these things. God rejects their prayers because however good the ostensible purpose of their request their actual motivation is not Godly, verse three tells us. They want what is not possible, peace with God and at the same time peace with a fallen God hating world. This compromising position means, verse four tells us, enmity with God. The holy Spirit whom the Lord gave to indwell within us, yearns jealously to make us the Lord’s. The Lord gives greater grace to those who seek it. God resists the proud, but gives grace to the lowly verse six tells us. We must therefore be meek and lowly before the Lord, acknowledging our sins and our needs.

What James gives us is a very important analysis, he requires us to realize we are children of our time, how deeply our world has shaped us. The members of the Christian synagogues of James day were not inferior to us, their survival in the Jewish-Roman war of 66-70 A.D. tells us that they learned and grew in terms of Godly teaching and the Spirit’s dwelling, the Spirit’s leadings. Their sins were very real, but their grace was even greater. Not a one of them died we are told, because having been warned by our Lord in Matthew 24 and again by James, they grew in terms of that teaching and when they saw the first signs that Matthew 24 speaks of, they left. Now James letter does not accomplish a like work in our time, we have only ourselves to blame.

Local of sin, James teaches us, is the human heart. We cannot without sin neglect that fact. The bitter conflicts with Judean society in our Lord’s day, and up to the war, were seen by the people as occasioned by Roman over-Lordship. Their doctrines of sin and responsibility were very defective, as are ours. We can understand the blinding effect of sin by looking at the reception to James letter in the churches. It should provoke us to self-examination, to confession, repentance, and to renewed service. A proud people in generation will not be heard by God; the heavens become deaf and like stone to the prayers of those who want answers but will not repent.

As James later says in verses 13-15,we whose lives are so ephemeral to readily assume that there is no end, that there is no judgment nor accounting, when all our days are forever held to an accounting. James therefore calls on us for the intensity of faith for a Job or an Elijah, as he says in chapter 5 verses 11 and 17 and 18. James could not be more relevant. We live in a time of victimhood, when no matter how great the sin, people insist on seeing themselves as victims.

In an English Weekly of this past week there was this following item and I’ll only read the first three sentences. “A teacher at a Catholic school has had three children by three different fathers, and ex-husband, a fellow teacher, and a former pupil. She is astonished to have been asked to leave. ‘I have a right to a personal life and a right to have a baby’ she protested.” Just a few weeks ago a prominent figure in the musical, and apparently criminal, world was gunned downed in the streets of Los Angeles when a vehicle passing his opened fire on him. He was full of self-pity and his mother, who admits he doesn’t know who the father of this young man in his twenties was, and who herself was an addict and anything but a sweet lady, was bitter with the sense of the victimhood that this evil society had inflicted upon her and upon her son. Her son, in who a couple of years had made an excess of thirteen million, and run up bills far in excess of that, was full also of a sense of victimhood despite the almost unrepeatable evils he was involved in. And all this is solemnly echoed by the media, and even by the apostate pulpits.

James certainly is speaking to our times; “from whence arrive wars and fightings, conflicts among you. Do they not arise from your own being, your very members? Because you lust and you have not, and nothing satisfies you.” The word of God is the most relevant word for our time. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God we give thanks unto Thee for this Thy word. Teach us to separate ourselves from the victimhood of our time, to confess ourselves indeed to be sinners who stand, not in our righteousness, but in the righteousness of our Savior Jesus Christ. How merciful and great Thou art oh Lord, and we thank Thee. In Christ’s name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

[Audience member] Rush could you address verse four, because some churches use the fact that the friendship of the world is enmity with God as a point from withdrawing from the world.

[Rushdoony] What’s that?

[Audience member] Verse four, friendship with the world creates and enmity with God, and many churches use that as an opportunity to say to withdraw from the world.

[Rushdoony] No, that is exactly what it does not say, and in fact when Paul speaks of holiness, separating ourselves from evil, he is speaking about Christians and their associations within the church, with evil within the church; and he makes clear it does not apply to your business relations, because he says “else must we needs go out of this world” which is ridiculous. So the kind of holiness they’re calling for is an absurd one, they won’t apply it in the church but they want you to do it in the world and on superficial grounds, not dealing with sin as it really is, but very superficial aspects so that the modern approach to it in too many evangelical churches is simply a fraudulent one, and very often it leads to a Phariseeism and self-righteousness.

One verse often used by these people is to avoid every appearance of evil, anything that looks like evil, just separate yourself from that person or that thing, that’s not what it says. Avoid every appearance of evil, when you see an actual evil avoid it, not something that look like it but isn’t. It’s the actual appearance of evil when you’re confronted with it, have the common sense to avoid it. That’s what Paul says, and yet that has been twisted to mean anything that looks like evil. So well “so and so has been gossiped about, so don’t go near that person even though you know it isn’t true”. So it leads from a Phariseeism and a hypocrisy to a gradual withdraw and to an unworldliness that is not moral.

Yes?

[Audience member] A lot of the times Rush they want to escape sin, they want to escape their humanity.

[Rushdoony] Yes, very good point. They’re not so much interested in escaping from sin, but from their humanity and in various forms this desire to escape from their humanity is very, very commonplace. It’s in evangelical churches in terms of the higher life thinking which came in in full force into fundamentalism with the Keswick conferences in England, and Hannah Whitall Smith and her thinking which dominated the evangelical world when I was young, and now it’s still there in other forms then hers. It is present in Eastern orthodox thought in the doctrine of theosis self-deification as salvation. Well when man’s original sin, Genesis 3:5, is to be God how can it be salvation to pursue that course?

And you have a number of other ways whereby false thinking has crept in, the konosis doctrine from Russia crept into England and into catholic and protestant thinking that Jesus emptied himself of His deity so that he was not truly God and truly man, and we too must empty ourselves of our humanity and live life on a higher plane. There’s so many idiotic versions of this kind of false spirituality across the boards in all branches of Christendom so that if you stand for the clear and simple word of God; you’re somehow suspect, you’re not with it, you’ve lost touch with spiritual things.

Any other questions or comments? Well if not let us conclude with prayer.

Our Lord and our God we give thanks unto Thee for Thy word. We thank Thee for Thy blunt speaking through James, the law, the prophets, Thy Son, our Lord, and the apostles. We need the plain, the blunt unvarnished word. Give us grace to hear and to obey. And now go in peace God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, amen.