James

The Holy War

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: The Holy War

Genre: Sermon

Lesson: 12 of 16

Track: #30

Year:

Dictation Name: RR328P30

[Rushdoony] Let us worship God. Grace be to you and peace from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ who gave Himself for our sins that He might deliver us from this present evil world according to the will of God and our Father to whom be Glory forever and ever amen.

Let us pray. Oh Lord our God we come into Thy presence again mindful of how rich we are in Jesus Christ who has made us heirs of eternity, heirs of eternal life, and hast in this world surrounded with Thy protecting care and Thy many, many blessings. Give us grateful, thankful hearts that we may praise Thee, rejoice in Thee, and ever know that we are born rich in Christ. Oh Lord our God we thank Thee, in Christ’s name, amen.

Our scripture this morning is the fourth chapter of James verses seven through ten, our subject The Holy War; James 4:7-10. “7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded. 9 Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness. 10 Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up.”

It is apparent by now that James is concerned with the springs of human action, not with their outward manifestation but with their roots. His analysis places him at odds with our present culture of victimhood and environmentalism. The origins of human conflict, personal and national, are traced to our nature. Being at war within ourselves we are also at war with one another, we may profess peace but we are more inclined to conflict and war than anything else. History is a reflection of man’s inner nature and his inner turmoil; it’s not the other way around. Man’s inner nature is not a reflection of his environment; his environment is shaped by his being.

Sophisticated rationalizing simply masks the actual roots of conflict within human nature. The fall of man created warfare between man and God, between man and man, and within man’s own being. The solution, says James, sounds simple but it is in reality drastic. “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”

Submit yourselves in the Greek is a form of a word which means put yourselves into subjection, subordinate yourself or submit to, be under the authority of. We must place ourselves under the authority and rule of the triune God. God cannot be viewed as an available resource, something to be used when needed, but always and only as the ultimate power, authority, and law-giver. In Robert John Stone’s words this means, and I quote “Submit yourself unto the Lord then brethren, to His grace and to His law whether in regard to being, or doing, or hearing.” As H.A.W. Mayor said “submission to God means resistance to the devil.” Although not now a popular concept submission is a fact of life. One of the silliest aspects of our time is the very, very grave and extensive revolt by the feminists against the idea of submission. A great many brides now in getting married demand the pastor or even priest to revise the words of the traditional marital vows; submission is unthinkable. Well it never occurs to them that it’s a routine fact of life, men have to submit themselves to their bosses, in every area there is submission. We submit ourselves to working hours, or if we are the boss the necessity of making a profit is pleasing those whom we work for, life is mutual submission; and yet few words today raise more red flags then the word submission. We have today, as often in history, a slavish submission to the popular culture and a strong resistance to submission to God. Moral standards are reversed and the tyranny of the mob is seen as freedom because it expresses hatred for and a revolt against God.

In first Peter 5 verses 8&9 submission to the temple means the temptation to apostasy, to a compliance with the world against Jesus Christ. According to one of the early documents of the church, the Shepherd of hermis {?} and I quote “the devil can fight, but he cannot conquer, if therefore thou dost withstand him he will flee from thee beaten and ashamed.” We must submit to God, not sit in judgment over God. Luther said, and I quote, “God gave us His law not that we should censure it, but keep it.”

Verse eight declares “Draw nigh to God and He will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands ye sinners and purify your hearts ye double minded.” What James has in mind is man’s total purification, our hands, our actions, our hearts, or motives, and our minds, our thoughts must be cleansed and purified. In Exodus 30:20 the washing of hands by the priests before beginning their sacrificial duties is mandatory and James requirement echoes that. Men must see themselves as sinners when they approach God, for they stand in God’s grace, not in terms of their works. James addresses us all as “ye sinners” as chapter one verses 6-8 James, you remember, speaks of the instability of the double minded, “such men receive nothing from the Lord” he declares.

James requirement of us is stated in verse 10 “humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord and he shall lift you up.” Lift you up can be rendered “he shall exalt you”. This humility must be before God essentially, not a display before men. Too often in the history of the church elaborate displays of humility before men have occurred as a part of a part of acidic disciplines; but however James obviously calls for is an inner humility before God and as verses 11 following make clear in obedience to God’s law towards our brother, it is thus a call for a practical humility, a working obedience to God’s law towards our brother. James clearly has no use for the parade of piety by the Pharisees and others, neither in the church community nor out of it. Hypocrisy and pretense are alien to the faith for the faith is marked by works. James makes clear that he is weary of religious people who are strong on professions of faith and low on works, it’s still a problem. So many people full of pious gush who are no good when it comes to living their faith.

Hypocrisy is pretending to be something we are not, it is a very popular and common human failing. The solution is not to express our evil propensities but to obey God. In the 1940’s I had members of one cult, one given to bad language and coarse speech, defend their practice as honest because they spoke without pretense. In fact, although I have no contact with that group today and they don’t talk that way openly as they once did, in those days they used to be especially foul-mouthed and accuse everybody else of being hypocrites because they were not. So there holiness was in this pretence to holiness while being obscene and foul and unkind in their speech; but this is not the solution. We are not to pursue evil in any form but to pursue righteousness. My response to these people was “if we indulge in foul language and are holier because of that, why not evil conduct? Why not kill when you feel like it if you can use foul language and you feel like it?” They had no answer to that except to be irritated.

The presupposition of James and the whole Bible is that a holy war is under way and man in his every word, thought, and deed, is involved in that war. He can, in one way or another, give aid and comfort to the enemy, or he can resist him. “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” Resistance is half the battle won. The battle field in this war is in the life of man; James requires us by his plain speaking to recognize this fact and to recognize that the first step to victory is resistance. James letter is a call to resistance and to holy warfare, one with a clear assurance of victory. We are not the victims in this battle – but a people called to victory and promised it, this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Let us pray.

Our Father we give thanks unto Thee for Thy word. We thank Thee that Thou hast spoken so plainly through Thy servant James. Give us hearing ears that we may show forth Thy grace and Thy peace and Thy mercy. We thank Thee Lord that Thou hast been gracious unto us, make us gracious one to another, in Christ’s name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

Yes?

[Audience member] Could you elaborate on the term “double-minded” the meaning of the term?

[Rushdoony] Yes, the term double-minded means someone who is really trying to go in two directions at one and the same time. He claims to be a Christian and yet in all practice he is anything but a Christian. Now in a sense double mindedness characterizes everyone; we know what we should be even if we are not Christians, and what we are not. The Christian however is moving essentially in this direction; he may have an inclination to step to the side but he is single minded of purpose. He still has remnants of the old man but he is not torn between two things. But the person who is not a Christian, although he may be within the church, feels that this is the way he should behave, but this is the way that he wants to behave. He may pretend to this way, but he is moving in the other direction.

Double mindedness is really well-expressed in a modern term “schizophrenia” now the schizophrenic person is someone in whom this double direction is carried to the point of a break-down. And ultimately double-mindedness leads to a breakdown because you are at war with yourself, whoever else you are at war with. And while I don’t put much stock in a great many of the psychiatric terminology and ideas I do think schizophrenia does describe something very real and it’s a very difficult thing to deal with when you’re dealing with a schizophrenic person, as I have in the past, or persons, what you find is one day you’re in total peace and harmony with them, they agree with you, that’s exactly how they feel and think, and when you next see them they built up a whole arsenal of arguments against what you had to say and they blast out at you with hatred and venom, they’re double minded, schizophrenic. So they at one time will strongly affirm this, and at another time strongly affirm that, and in extreme cases they don’t even remember from time to time what they said.

Now double mindedness is endemic in our culture, it is moving of course to a single mindedness in evil, but in the process it is very clearly schizophrenic. I think we see a great deal of it in our politics. People can soulfully express ideas and ideals that we all subscribe to, and then behave in a radically different way. They know they should be this, but this is what they are. We live in an age when extremes are manifesting themselves with greater and greater frequency because we are an age at war with itself. “From whence come wars among you?” said James at the beginning of this chapter “Come they not hence, even of your own lusts that war in your members?”

To take another one of the popular designations, paranoia, a persecution complex, there are people who, and it is an affliction of the highly intelligent, but they develop a belief that the whole of the world around them is in conspiracy against them, and they can be very, very logical in developing their argument. In fact one psychiatrist wrote that he has found on occasion a paranoid person has actually persuaded him by building up this and that piece of evidence, or so-called evidence, until the psychiatrist feels “I am really dealing with a person who has been victimized” and then suddenly one fact a little off-base tips him off to what the whole thing is.

Now, we are an era of victimhood and victimhood inevitably is double minded because of the people who see themselves as victims are warring against God in all their being, warring against their own conscious, warring against the testimony of God within their nature, because we are plainly told by Paul that God has left His witness in ever man’s being, in every atom of our being, we can put it into modern terms. Everything witnesses to God but we have hardened our hearts against this testimony, we hold it in unrighteousness in justice, and the word “hold” means “hold back, hold down, suppress.” Well if you have in you a witness to God, as every man does, and your own fallen nature is pushing to more and more war against God, you’re going to be double minded, you’re going to be at war with yourself. Since God made your nature it’s going to give a witness, but since you’re fallen, you’re giving a contrary witness.

So ours is a double-minded age and it will only be more so until we again become Godly at which time with singleness of heart and purpose we will serve the Lord with all our heart, mind, and being.

To add a word, this is why so often when we go away for a conference for a couple of days, or as in the past sometimes for a week, we feel during the whole time a singleness of mind and heart, we don’t have these other things impinging upon us, but when we get back into the fallen world around us we feel the double mindedness of purpose, things calling us in another direction. One person told me in the past year of working in an environment where it was masculine, everyone’s language was as foul and pornographic as possible and their interests were totally sexual in the worse sense imaginable. And it was a real trial for him to be in that atmosphere and pay no attention to it.

Now, when you live in that kind of a world, as to some degree all of us do, it takes its toll on you; that’s why urban life is more difficult then say life here in the hills where you don’t have a great deal of evil continually forcing itself upon your attention; it’s easier to be at peace with God and with man.

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

Our Father it has been good for us to be here, to sing Thy praises, to study Thy word, and to rejoice in Thy mercies. Give us a singleness of heart that we may love, serve, and obey Thee with all our heart, mind, and being. Forgive us our many trespasses, our sins of omission and commission, and teach us by Thy word and by Thy Spirit. 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.