God's desire and plan in conflicts, pt 2
James 4:5-10 · Andrew Molloy · Aug 13, 2023
James, No. 30
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261932196877

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Okay, James chapter four, and we're covering five through 10. We're gonna do seven through 10 this morning. We got through, I guess, verse six last week, kind of got stuck on verse six, but I think we got that. So let me just read again, one through 10, that's our context, James chapter four. Beginning at verse one, what is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members?

You lust and you do not have, so you commit murder. You're envious and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and you do not receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.

You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that the scripture speaks to no purpose? He jealously desires the spirit which he has made to dwell in us, but he gives greater grace. Therefore it says, God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

Here's our verses for today. Submit, therefore, to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be miserable and weep and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy be turned to gloom. Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord and he will exalt you.

So that's our context, especially what was going on in verses one through four there is the context of what we have. So our verses today, here they are laid out and I've underlined and bolded many things. Submit therefore, resist the devil, draw near to God, cleanse your hands, purify your hearts, be miserable, mourn weak, let your laughter be turned to mourning, and humble yourselves, all bolded and underlined. Any thoughts of why I did that?

Actions. James is encouraging them to do the following actions, or following paths. Good. Actions for 200. You got it. Actions. All actions, and that's correct, and all imperatives, a lot of imperatives there, but also actions. And I looked at this and they're all, and commentators will say, they're all in the aorist tense, these commands, these imperative commands. And I thought, so I went through and why not, why won't they be in the present tense? Like Paul uses a lot of present tense commands. So there are 10 aorist imperative verbs here, five, 10 of them, and there's seven separate commands, but 10 aorist imperative verbs. So we'll go through a little bit, and we'll look at this heiress situation.

Some of them are in that passive voice, like submit therefore, but some are in the active voice. And the active voice is you are to do it. God is not going to do it for you, and you make a point volitionally yourself to do it. And passive, of course, is Everyone kind of has an idea what that is. And you know, that submit, therefore, I think would be passive.

Because you're submitting, so that makes sense. But why the aorist tense and not the present tense? One fellow said, and I think this was actually, he was going through the Arist imperative, because I wanted to know what that was on YouTube of all places.

He had a little video. Actually, there's good stuff on there if you're careful. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, you have to be careful. But he said the Arist is a plain vanilla tense. I like that. So when you don't want to have any time stamp on it. an unmarked tense, no past timestamp, no present timestamp, no future timestamp, you use there. So it's not, it doesn't give it a flavor of time.

So in the present tense, Paul would use commands, be imitators of God, walk in love, obey your parents to children. And it has a do it now and keep on doing it. And that's a stamp to it. We are to continue the action. So that's interesting that these are not in the present tense. Oh, sorry, say again. Someone have something?

So Kelly says that the heiress tense says it's a one-and-done tense do it once and then he says do it once as a subtle thing for the soul and I like that so it's those things are Something you should do and just consider them done Instead of keep on doing like the present tense I Merriman says it's their fact commands, make it fact of your life. See that you do it right away, but it stays as a fact, an ongoing fact, which is interesting.

So I just want to look at those verbs and those commands all at once in seven through 10 before we kind of get into the verses more fully. But I thought that was helpful little exercise there to start out. So submit to God is the first command. Same, submit his wives to husbands, but right before that it says we are to submit to one another and that gets overlooked a lot because you know everyone gets up in arms about wives being subject to your husbands but they don't go a verse ahead of that and say oh well we're supposed to be submissive to one another aren't we?

Right. So everyone says so you know join the club wives and husbands are Yeah, so that's the same word. It's hupotasso, and it's a military term, and I like Merriman's take on it. It's a command to fall in, fall in order with God as your commanding officer, is what hupotasso means.

It's different from, oh, what man in you submits to God or other believers or your own husband? someone for 300, 300 points. Someone has to get on the board. Well, I'll let somebody else go for it. The new man. Ah, 300 for Jim there, yes. And that was the daily double. So you get 600. I'm waiting for 1000.

And I think that's why, you know, when I was younger, I had problems with that submission, submit to God and submission. But I think it was just, I was, I was trying to have the wrong man submit. If you have the flesh trying to submit, that's, that's going to be it. That's going to be a toughie. He doesn't want to do it. Andrew?

Yeah. Yeah. One thing that's significant here is this is a passive voice. Yeah. This is one of them in the passive voice. Yeah. Some are passive, some are active. This is passive, which would mean that it is God doing this and we're for him to do that. Right. Yeah. And if you, we think about on that point, um, wait, let me get my glasses. I'm getting old and I can't see. I don't take mine off.

Oh yeah, up in verse six of chapter four, God's the one giving the greater grace, right? God's doing the God's the one doing that, that's a good point. And I should have probably pointed that out on the slide, that is the passive voice. And I don't think I even looked at the active or passive on these commands. So if you could point that out when we come to them, Roy, that would be helpful. I don't think I have them on the slide. But it's, hupatazo is different from the word hupakuwo, which is to listen under, incline your ear to, which children, that's the command of children to hupakuwo your parents, obey your parents, different word.

Here's what Hamilton Smith says about this, and it's good, I like this quote. He says, instead of seeking to be somebody and something in the world, the Christian is to cheerfully accept the circumstances that God orders. The Lord Jesus Christ is the perfect example of one whose confidence in God led him to submit perfectly to God. In the presence of the most sorrowful circumstances, when rejected by the cities in which he had wrought his miracles in love in, he said, even so, Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight. That's Hamilton Smith, and he's quoting Matthew 11, 26 there. So I like that. And accept the circumstances that God orders. That's a nice phrase. Oh, yeah, go ahead. One of the things that you wrestled with last week, if you remember, is verse 5. Do you think the scripture has no meaning? Do they say that God is passionate? that the spirit that he has placed within us should be faithful to him.

And what I'm quoting is the New Living Translation. And the reason I'm quoting it is there's two ways of translating that, but the context really should be taken. to mean just like this word submit that we're looking at in a passive way, is that it is God who gives grace per verse six. That's the context. What's the grace? That God is in us lusting against our pride, lusting against our lust. And if we allow him, if we submit to him, that the result is in these verses you're looking at today. Isn't that something?

I mean, it's in that context that we're coming out of this. Therefore submit passively to the Holy Spirit. who's resisting our lust and our pride. Yeah, and hold that comment too till the end, because I'm going to touch on that in the end a bit. So can you bring that up in the end?

OK. Yeah, OK, because that's great, Roy. So resist the devil is the second. And Roy, do you have the? the tense of that. Right, not tense but I believe that that is active. Okay, yeah and that makes sense, right. We're doing the resisting. So well, we're standing fast and let the Lord do it. Right, yeah. So withstand or oppose the devils.

And the means by which we do that is by grace, James 4, 6, as I stated earlier. And I put these points up from Paul in Ephesians 6, 11 through 18, by girding your loins with the truth. by putting on the breastplate of righteousness, lacing up with the gospel of peace, taking up the shield of faith, and putting on the helmet of salvation, arming with the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, and finally to pray. So that's all Holy Spirit-powered tools, right? That's the tools in our toolbox that the Holy Spirit gives us to resist the devil. What's our offense? What do we have that is not defensive but offensive? Offensive, offensive on the sword, right? Right, the sword of the Spirit, that's a word, right.

The Word of God and And the result, the verse here says that he will flee, so Satan will flee. same thing he did when Christ was tempted by Satan. He quoted Scripture, and he quoted it accurately, whereas Satan misquoted it for his purposes, didn't he? But Christ quoted it accurately and correctly, and then Satan finally fled. I was wondering, are we you know, is the devil actually picking on me? Or, you know, what if he's happens to be picking on Wayne this week? Oh, well, then he can't pick on you. So if he's at Wayne's house, he can't be at my house.

But then he has emissaries, right? Spirits and fallen angels. He has a whole vast array of helpers who help him do those things. So I think it's a generalized statement, resist the devil, but it's also evil. It's his system. He can't be in two places at one time.

But back then when this was written, when this epistle of James was written, Christianity had just kind of gotten off the ground and I bet that the devil could personally bother James. I think he personally bothered Paul and Peter and he was personally involved with them and then a lot of their converts because there was there wasn't a whole, you know, there wasn't millions and millions of believers at that time, so he could really get around the world at that time and get around. So it says resist the devil, but it's all the evil things and there's this whole spiritual battle going on that we don't quite know about what's going on under there, but the Holy Spirit is in that fight, isn't he? So many times I think we forget that God is omnipresent.

Yeah, right. And he's, yeah, and he's able to be, he's able to be at Wayne's house and my house. Amen. And my house too. Yeah. I was just reminded there, Andrew, in Acts 5, Peter says to Ananias that Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit. So it was a, Pretty direct, but it was a small group of believers at that time. Yeah.

So I think he definitely could get around and he knew people's names and he knew the important people in the church and he would go there. But then he still had all these fallen angels, these demons, because they existed at that time too. So he had a lot of resources. His resources weren't spread thin, let's say.

And then I think of that what Daniel, what chap, maybe seven, where he prays and the angel comes to him and says, you know, he basically says, we got your prayer a week ago, but I couldn't get to you because I was fighting, I was fighting the king of He was fighting a spiritual battle, and he couldn't get away to visit Daniel on the banks of the Euphrates or something.

You know that story? Yeah. I'm referencing, so yeah. So that's the things going on, and that's what we are to withstand or oppose. Resisting the devil. Cleanse your hands is the next command. Oh, and by the way, I skipped draw near to God. I just, I was, I was just, I'm just dealing with the, kind of the negative, I guess. I just, I just totally skipped that and I realized that and I said, oh, and that's a very, that's a very comforting one, is draw near to God.

And a lot of times, we'll always go, we'll pick out that little, that 8a, draw near to God, and he will draw near to you when we're talking about comfort and the resources we have, and so it's a comforting thing. So we bring that up a lot in other contexts, so maybe it's Maybe it's- Yeah, Andrew, isn't it amazing that we're able to do that? I mean, that with a God who made all things and knows all things, we're able to draw near to him. The whole concept kind of seems to talk to, like the Jews would go ballistic if you, you know, God's there, how can I draw near to him?

It's only under grace that we're able to do that. Yeah, and so it's a very positive one. And so we'll just deal with these ones that are more negative, if you will, this morning. But cleanse your hands as Katharizo, it's to clear, purify, wash away. How do we do it? By confessing our sins, is the picture there. You asked me to comment on the tenses here. Those are all active voices. All three of those are active voices. Active voices, so we're doing them. Okay, great. And drawing near to God is active voice too. That's active also. Okay, great.

And I ask here, is there any other way to cleanse our hands than by confessing our sins? Anyone can, that goes out to you guys. Now that, Kathy, that's a thousand point. I can't think of any other thing that it's saying there than to confess your sins. There's no other way. Yeah, okay. So I get 1,000? Well, what would Pat Sajak do? I don't know.

Oh, so here's, he says, cleanse your hands, you sinners. And that's interesting. What cardinal rule? Is he breaking? We're saints. Now there's 1,000 So why is he saying that, right? Yeah, and it's on Kathy. It went out. What was the question? Oh, what cardinal rule is James breaking here when he says cleanse your hands you sinners? That's one of those buzzers. Okay, the buzzer.

I thought about it, but aren't we Aren't we, we don't call ourselves sinners, we're saints, right? And this might be the only time where a believer is called a sinner here. But I think because he's, James is focused on these believers condition, their state, their state of practice. And he's not really touching on positional standing, is the most likely reason he gives this pejorative.

Cleanse your hands, you sinners. And it's very serious stuff that he's bringing to these believers. So purify your hearts, that's the haqnitzah, haqnitzah, and it's a ceremonial word in nature. It's, the adjective there is hagnos, being free from defilement, not contaminated. And Roy, I would think that would be in the active voice too. Yeah, all of these are active. Active, okay. Great. So that's free from defilement.

Same root word as holy, hagnos. And this, and he calls them double-minded here. Oh, blessed or happy are the pure in heart, Christ says in Matthew 5, 7. So being pure in heart brings us blessedness. But double-minded, he brings this up again. He brought that up the first time in James 1, 8. And he's saying, you're unstable. Don't be unstable or don't be double-souled. I think that's the Greek. word double-minded, it's double-souled or divided in heart. And this is interesting because I kind of came up with this late, but there to be hagnizo or holy or set apart, right, is that word.

So what are they to be set apart from? And then it's obvious, it's set apart from the world because that's a context here, the cosmos, and these believers are getting so wrapped up in the world here, to the point where James calls them adulteresses. So it's interesting that that purify your heart has that holiness aspect to it, to get away and to separate yourself from that. How do we purify our hearts in our dispensation today? And I looked at the word purify, and I came up with this old slide. I'm gonna recycle an old slide I made from 1 John 3. two through three, and it's really wonderful how it ties in here.

He says, Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared, as yet we will be. We know that when he appears, we will be like him, because we will see him just as he is. And everyone who has this hope fixed on him purifies himself, just as he is pure. So there's just a picture there of people, they're fixed on the risen Lord Jesus Christ, the glorified Lord Jesus Christ. The verse there in 3, 1 John 3, 2 and 3 says that we will see him, which is Harao, we will see him in the future with our eyes, our own eyes. That will be our, we'll be acquainted with our real yet future experience, but we are to do that now, aren't we?

By 2 Corinthians 3.18, it's a, hara'o can be to stare at or a fixed gaze to become acquainted with by experience. And so we can become acquainted in our positional privilege that we have in them through the word of God, and letting that position express itself through our lives and our condition. Andrew, without those truths, positional truths, identification, look where that takes the believer.

All the work, doesn't it? Trying to fix up the old man. Right. Yeah, and you can leave the old man behind with these and reckon him dead, right? Yeah. And to live in the new man. And to live in the new life. Andrew? Yeah. In this context, it's the Holy Spirit showing us Christ, isn't it? Yeah. And the submission that we're doing is we're saying, oh, thank you. And we're looking at Christ as he is shown to us. Yeah. Doesn't that tie this together? And this little section, one through 10 here, is so packed. I keep unpacking it. I can't stop unpacking these verses. From when Miles started out with, you know, verse one, you're like, wow. Because yeah, and that also goes, and submitting is humility too, right? And he gives that. He says, you know, God, resists the proud, but he gives grace to the humble. So humility is also in here. And yeah, these things aren't things we can do ourselves, through ourselves.

I love your picture there with the word hope in each one of those is that word of, you know, steadfast confidence in Christ, right? Fixed hope. It isn't a wish, it's a confidence in him. or a fixed certainty, maybe, huh? Yeah. Yeah. So I just, yeah. A continual occupation with Christ. Right, right. And the little, I guess I kind of stole that from my dad, but I think I reworked it, but this little circle, and you see those arrows, and it's just a continuous, as you walk in your life, That's okay, Andrew. Fixed hope. You're allowed to do that. Yeah, right.

I kind of update them because his was a little more old school, but so that's good. So I just thought of that, led me to that verse about this, how we purify or how we are purified really. It's really him who is pure and we're fixed on him. Okay, verse on to verse 9 of James chapter 4. And these are Debbie Downer verses, I think.

Be miserable and mourn and weep and let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy to gloom. And this is This is different because, you know, Paul and even Peter wouldn't really state things as quite as starkly as this. But you see those, miserable is a verb, and mourn, that's something that, and weep, that's also a verb. And I think those, if you can check that out, Roy, those should probably be active That's right, and there's one passive here and that's the last one there the turn to is yes It's passive. Okay, and let your your laughter Uh be turned into mourning joy to gloom Um, so I asked myself And I'm thinking aloud here, what about all these commands from Paul and Peter to rejoice?

Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I say rejoice. Philippians 4.4. Rejoice always.

1 Thessalonians 5.16. Keep on rejoicing.

Keep on rejoicing, Peter says in 1 Peter 4.13.

So what are we to do? We're getting two signals here. But the fact is, both can be true, right? Both things can be true depending on the circumstances. I think of this, we're getting mixed, you know, are we to be miserable and mourn and weep or rejoice?

I think of that scene in, it's called A League of Their Own, right? About the women's baseball league. And Tom Hanks is the manager, but he's been drunk and passed out the entire time. But finally he wakes up and he wants to start his job managing, but Gina Davis is kind of the manager and they fight and they give the batter these two different signals and the batter doesn't know which one to go with. You know, do I bunt? Tom Hanks is saying hit. Jean Davis is saying no punt.

So, and she gets confused, but I just thought of that little scene on this point, but both can be true at the same time, depending on the circumstances. But what really is important is context, right? Beginning in verse one of chapter four. And here's just a, I wrote down a quick narrative summary. Oh yeah, go ahead. Well, you know, the scripture tells us to rejoice and to be joyful, and yet we can have very sorrowful situations. Right. So it's not about, it's not about emotion, it's about your mental status. Yeah. Your viewpoint. Your viewpoint, right. And in this These believers, and we can go through the same thing too, that they're going through here, and James is addressing. He was addressing, there was hostility among these believers, one to another.

Their soulish passions were bubbling up to the surface. They were jealous of one another. And as Miles pointed out, In that first lesson, there's a militancy of these pleasure-seeking drives. It has a militaristic word. There was warring factions among them. And as you remember in chapter three of verse one, some were desiring to be teachers. But they weren't really qualified, and they were wanting to become teachers because it had a status associated with it.

So that when they prayed, It was falling on deaf ears from God. And he was blocking them because of all this pride that they had. And so he wouldn't answer those prayers. And so that caused them frustration. But they were in love with the world, worldly thinking. They were adulteresses in their fidelity to God.

So that's the context. So in context, you say, oh, definitely that's a miserable situation. And yes, you should mourn and weep and you should have no joy in any of this and be distressed. That's a correct kind of a reaction. Merriman says they were missing, when you miss God's best, that's a miserable condition for a Christian to miss God's best by grace.

Hey Andrew? Yeah. Just as a parallel thought there, do we grieve the Holy Spirit who is lusting against our pride? And that grieving is can only exist if he loves us so much. You know, we can't breathe for somebody that we don't love. Right. Oh, good point. Yeah. That falls right in here, doesn't it? Yeah. that there we're walking with the Spirit, aren't we? If we grieve over our sins, that would be in harmony with Him. Yeah, because the Spirit will do that. He'll turn our, if we're happy about being friends, He'll turn that joy in the world into, He'll make sure we feel that that grieving, I was just thinking that a couple weeks ago, something was bothering me.

I was just vexed about something and I just couldn't figure it out. And I then finally figured, and I think this was the Holy Spirit convicting me that I was just super angry about something. And it was really internal and I couldn't, but when he, when I thought, oh, maybe I'm really angry. And so I confessed that and voila, I mean, the Sunday, just all this burden was just everything melted away. And I was, ah, that was it. So that's the Holy Spirit that's doing that, right? Right. Gail had a thought here, and she didn't want to express it, so she did it to me.

She's expressing here that this is in the context of a double-minded man. And looking at it from that perspective, that grieves the Holy Spirit, doesn't it? And we should grieve with him about that. Yeah, and yeah, and keep in mind we're grieving. That's a great point. What are we grieving about? We're grieving or he's making us, he's turning, he's making us grieve about sin and the sin condition. And he's turning our joy and sin into grief about this. Yeah. Oh, this is good. Yeah. I hadn't thought about that. That's excellent. So the Jewish picture, they would recognize this language.

Back in the Old Testament, when they were to mourn, they would rip their garments, they would put on sackcloth and ashes and things like that. So summing up here, oh yeah, the point I have here on this last slide of this lesson, is, could James be trying to spur on these believers to sorrow and repentance? And that's really the Holy Spirit doing it. As Paul did in his second letter to the Corinthians, I'll just put this up here, so he wrote for and you'll have to help me out, Roger, because you went through this. Okay. Wow. So he yeah, he go ahead.

But Paul says for I caused you sorrow by my letter, I did not regret it. So I did regret for I see that that the letter caused you sorrow, though only for a while, I now rejoice. Not that I made you sorrowful, but that you were made sorrowful to the point of repentance. And he says, he goes on to say, skipping down, for the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but sorrow of the world produces death. For behold, what earnestness is this very thing, what godly sorrow has produced in you, what vindication of yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what avenging wrong, So the Corinthians were going through this too, because Paul was really harsh to him in his first letter to the Corinthians. I think James is trying to spur them on to the same sort of repentance here that Paul did with the Corinthians. Yeah, that's a great match. Well, it's good.

Yeah. And you know what I'm saying there, Roger? Yeah, when we say that, that's, you know, there is a godly, there is a godly sorrow and Paul also taught that. Yeah. And it, you know, it leads to repentance. I mean, that's kind of the point. You evaluate where you're at and then it leads to a, and you kind of expressed it in your little discussion there about your struggles. Yeah. So that's pretty, pretty cool. May the Lord is getting you ready for this message. Right. Oh, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

So that could be putting me through the ringer and, uh, Are we pretty much out of time there? Yeah, we probably are. I thought it would go quicker, but you can read it during the week if you want to go through it. But I have just a couple. More thoughts on that from last week. I was going to go through but But i'll say that as an addendum about okay Yeah, um some interesting stuff but uh, it keeps changing because I keep trying to figure out that little tough nut that verse six, but uh You can read that on your own.

So let's uh, yeah, let's close in prayer Our heavenly father. We thank you for all your tremendous blessings that we have in Christ and we thank you for your word and again for the ministry of the Holy Spirit. in doing what he does to convict us of sin and to draw us near to God. And we just pray that you'll be with us this week. And again, pray for journey and mercies for Miles as he drives to Denver. And just pray that he has a smooth sailing time. and that when we see him next week, there'll be joy and some time of good fellowship. And we pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.