James

Judgment

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Judgment

Genre: Sermon

Lesson: 15 of 16

Track: #33

Year:

Dictation Name: RR328R33

[Rushdoony] Let us worship God. It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord and to sing praises unto Thy name oh most high, to show forth Thy loving kindness in the morning and Thy faithfulness every night. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we thank Thee for Thy faithfulness, we thank Thee that Thy mercies are new every morning. We thank Thee that we live, move, and have our being in Thee. Make us mindful therefore of Thee and of Thy mercy, of Thy presence that we may cease from troubling ourselves with the things of this world, for the things that are here today and gone tomorrow, and that we may always live move and have our being in Thee. Bless us this day by Thy word and by Thy Spirit. In Christ’s name, amen.

Our scripture is from the letter of James, fifth chapter verses 7-9; our subject: Judgment. James 5:7-9. “7 Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. 8 Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh. 9 Grudge not one against another, brethren, lest ye be condemned: behold, the judge standeth before the door.

In these verses James turns to the subject of judgment. Among many groups the last judgment is the sole concern when this matter of judgment is discussed. Certainly the last judgment is important, it is clearly the subject of Matthew 24, or rather 25 verses 31-46, and in portions of Matthew 24. In Isaiah however, we see a series of judgments pronounced on the nations of the day. God’s judgments began in the garden of Eden when man was expelled, continued in the flood, in the tower of Babel, and other events. We see in all these things his judgments on men and nations. God’s judgments come in history to restore order by bringing about the condemnation and destruction of sinful men and nations. When we pray “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” we are praying for judgment, we are praying for more than judgment, we are praying also for His kingdom. But His kingdom cannot come without the enemies being judged; Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace because He is the Lord of judgment. His coming in clouds is referred to in Isaiah 19 verse 1 to signify judgment, so that the clouds of judgment do not have exclusive reference to the last judgment. It is important to stress this face to because too often when the Bible talks about judgment people think of the last judgment and they warp the meaning of many, many passages in the Bible.

James in speaking in the coming and very near judgment had apparently Matthew 24 in mind, that is the approaching Judgment on Jerusalem and Judea. The last days of verse 3 do not refer to the end of the world, but to the end of the Judean order which condemned and crucified Jesus Christ. From the Biblical perspective history is a series of judgments, not one, but a great and almost innumerable series of judgments great and small; sometimes on a particular people, sometimes on the whole world, and they culminate at the end of history in the last judgment. Failure to recognize this fact is a failure to learn, it means misinterpreting the Bible. Surely the 20th century has seen a series of judgments. Men’s failure to see the wars and catastrophes as judgments becomes a failure to repent and to grown, and this only leads ot more judgments.

Having lived 81 years I am among the minority of peoples the world over who can remember the world before WWII; and those who lived before the great catastrophe of WWI could tell me, and did, of how different it was then. No income tax, the Federal government a small thing, Washington not much more than a village, so that a picture I have which I’ve misplaced from 1913 shows the White House, nothing between it and the old state building now used for other purposes, except the Taft family cow tethered on the White House lawn. Now think of Washington today.

You’ve had a series of judgments on the world which has altered the world and will alter it further before it is over. Judgments are the coming of the Lord as King to bring conviction to evil-doers and justice to the world. Many innocent men do die in these judgments, but a secularized world must be judged because it has forsaken justice.

In verse 7 patience is urged with the coming of the Lord. The Jewish-Roman war of 66-70 A.D. was unrivaled in its horrors. And, while Christians being forewarned survived it, they lost their homes and relatives. Our Lord said of that war when He predicted it that it would be unrivaled in all of history to the end of time in its horror. At that time there were pilgrims from all over the world in Jerusalem, a vast population, they died. Rome cut down, deforested the entire area, to have enough trees for crosses, and those it could not crucify it sold into slavery. Not too long ago when construction was going on in Jerusalem they found the body of a crucified Jew, everything about it echoed the gospel accounts. The crucifixion was in the same way, and apparently this particular Jew had been too slow in dying and they wanted to be done and to move on so they had killed him by breaking his bones. It was the greatest horror of all history, now more or less forgotten.

Judgments are the coming of the Lord as King to bring conviction to evil-doers and justice to the world. God breaks up ground in history to prepare the way for the future. James urges therefore “be ye also patient, establish your hearts for the coming if the Lord draweth nigh.” Everything that these Jewish Christians loved, their land and its people, was about to be destroyed, radically destroyed, and James in verses 7 & 8 urges patience, a very remarkable council. In verse 9 the council is ‘Grudge not one against another brethren lest ye be condemned, behold the judge standeth at the door.” The judgment is inevitable on a people who crucified their king who was the Lord of glory. They are not to involve themselves in grudges, in murmuring, or in intense re-criminations. The deed is done, the judgment is sure, it is now time to think of the future, not the past.

When the judge stands at the door with His decreed judgment it is to late to relive the past. As a people of the past, they will then be judged. If they think in terms of the King’s work as a people of the future, they will have a future. The coming of the Lord is His parousia; parousia is a Greek word. It has come over into English, although it’s not commonly used, and the usual interpretation of it is “the second coming” and that’ inaccurate. The word according to Alexander Ross was found in an Egyptian papyrus, and its literal meaning is ‘royal visit’. God’s Judgments are His royal visits come to bring justice. God’s royal visits to history must be welcomed.

The world parousia appears in verse seven, and also in verse 8, the royal visit. This immediately brings to mind a striking image. Our Lord’s royal visit to Jerusalem, on Palm Sunday, was a symbolic event. He came as a king hailed with palm branches; but instead of a military animal he rode on a work animal, a donkey, to signify that he came in peace. But with the Jewish-Roman war his parousia, His second royal visit, was in judgment.

Now instability marks a time of judgment. Hence patience is urged; living in an age of crisis James knew full well is painfully difficult, his letter never deludes us into thinking that it is an easy thing to go through a time of judgment, and a time of upheaval. We are never told that a pseudo-piety can enable us to survive like stoics in a time of destruction. The ideal in the Greco-Roman world when you were faced with problems was to be a stoic. The stoics were a major school of thought and the ideal stoic was a man who, if he were chatting with friends, or lunching with them, word came that his house had burned to the ground, he had lost everything including every member of his family, would not show a flicker of emotion and would be able to say calmly “ could you pass me some more of the beverage.” That was the stoic ideal, it’s an insane one, but it has been cultivated a great deal in the modern age. As a matter of fact most men today have more than a little touch of stoicism, they don’t cry. That came into Europe and especially into the English speaking world as part of a revival of stoic thinking; and yet you go back a few centuries and the most vigorous and strongest of men would cry readily, think nothing of it. We are infected by more than we realize.

James does not call for stoicism. The Bible is full of evidences of strong emotion; we are told that at one point Jesus wept. James urges patience because the conclusions of God’s judgments are good, however painful they may be. In a sinful world God’s judgments are necessary and they are in their conclusions a blessing. Patience means that our perspective is not existential but providential. We live not in terms of the moment, but in terms of God. We know that by God’s grace his purposes for His kingdom for history and for us are entirely good. Patience can be a mark of grace, of trust in God’s purposes and a knowledge that we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. Patience means recognizing that there can be no peace without judgment. Peace without justice would be no more than hell, and unchanging and an everlasting state of evil. History is a series of judgments to prepare the way for the new creation however difficult and painful these judgments are to be welcomed. Let us pray.

Our father we thank Thee that we live in a time of judgment and therefore a time of deliverance, when the ungodly, the unjust, shall be judged and Thy kingdom emerged closer to its great conclusion. We thank Thee that our times are in Thy hands, give us wisdom to trust in Thee, to rely on Thy holy word and purposes, and by Thy Spirit to stand in the time of adversity as more than conquerors in Christ. In His name we pray, amen.

Are there any questions about our lesson at this time?

Yes?

[Audience member] Could you comment briefly on the eschatology connection between the law and the end times?

[Rushdoony] Well, the eschatology and law, yes. It’s a very, very necessary and inescapable connection. We do not hear much about God’s judgment, or last judgment, now days; and the reason for it is most people don’t think much of or believe much in, God’s law. Well, the last judgment is God’s final court of law. If you don’t believe in law, you’re not going to believe in courts and that’s why we are working in this country, step by step, to replace courts of law with psychiatric hearings. Those are not courts, those are places of medical analysis, supposedly. So we are, step by step, eliminating law. The Soviet Union had what it called courts, but it actually made clear that they were not courts because they did not believe in an unchanging, continuing law. They were places where hearings were held, and you were never innocent until proven guilty, you were guilty when you came to court. So eschatology today is a warped subject because there’s no real belief in God’s law.

I mentioned stoicism earlier, to go back to that, it’s interesting how the stoicism of northern Europe, which is where the great revival of Greco-Roman philosophy took place, has infected other portions of Europe to an increasing degree. For example, take the Italian immigrants to this United States; they were strong men, but they cried easily. Why? Because they weren’t infected by stoicism. What happened to their sons and Grandsons? Well their good Anglo’s, they don’t cry. And I can remember when I was younger one old Italian upset because his son had gone through grief and wasn’t crying, was very upset and angry with his son. He was an American now, and he didn’t like that American aspect of him, and that was true of one group of peoples after another, who came here and were affected by the Anglo culture and lost their non-stoical perspective. And of course what has developed is that the areas that have a great deal of stoical influence also have the psychiatrists and psycho-analysts galore.

Freud has never caught on, for example, in France. The French think all that stuff is silly. In France the men are more emotional then the women, because they’re stronger, they give vent to their emotions more freely and nobody can tell them “no”. So the stoic element in the Northern European cultures has exacted a very, very heavy price, and you can trace the transmission of stoicism to other cultures, as in the far east on the upper levels, by tracing where the ulcers are.

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

Our father we give thanks unto Thee for this Thy word, we thank Thee that we live in a time of judgment, and therefore deliverance. We thank Thee that the kingdoms of this world shall becomes the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. How great Thou art oh Lord, and we praise Thee. 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.