Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the Word of God from James 1:12-20
The Saving Word is a focus on one of the aspects of the Word of God. Eventually, then, we will come to verse 21, “Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you,” and we shall try to understand that passage in the framework of the entire section. James 1, beginning at verse 12. Hear, then, what Scripture says.
“Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him. When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.
Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death. Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.
My dear brothers, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, for man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you. Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.
Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it—he will be blessed in what he does.”
This is the Word of Lord.
There it is, then, an explicit connection between word and being saved. In fact, there are many such connections in Scripture, sometimes narrowly textual like this one in verse 21, but sometimes in large thematic construction. For example, Psalm 107, verse 20 depicts a time when a lot of God’s people were running away, and then they fell to destruction and illness. Then we are told, “God sent forth his word and healed them.” That’s a kind of saving.
Saving is, in Scripture, a broad category that touches many different kinds of transformation. “God sent forth his word and healed them.” Or again, Jesus often speaks and heals. Although our English translations render it heals, very frequently the word is the same word as here; it’s the word to save. He saves them. He saves them from their illness and from the consequences of their rebellion.
In some instances, the connection between this saving power and word is startling. In Matthew, chapter 8 and parallels, for example, a centurion comes to Jesus and says, “My servant is ill.” Jesus says, “I will come and heal him. I will come and save him.”
The centurion says, “That’s not really necessary. I know you’ve got the kind of authority that can speak at a distance. I myself am a man under authority. I say to one servant, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to another servant, ‘Go,’ and he goes. I know you have the kind of authority such that if you say, ‘Servant, be healed,’ well, you don’t have to be there. That’s enough; the servant will be healed.” Jesus attests that he has not seen such great faith in Israel.
Now what is going on in that passage? The centurion understands that when he speaks, he does not speak as an isolated man. When he speaks, he has all the might of Rome behind him. When he speaks to one of his hundred men (he’s a centurion), it’s not as if one man is addressing other men. When he speaks, Rome speaks.
If some grunt in the troops wants to say, “Well, that’s your opinion but, quite frankly, I’m going to do something else,” the chap is in huge trouble because now, in fact, the centurion, if he doesn’t knock his block off immediately, can call up other troops or appeal to his tribune. The tribune goes all the way back to the emperor, and you have the mighty Roman Empire against that one grunt.
Now how is this man applying his own experience in the military to Jesus? He’s saying, “I recognize you have the kind of authority such that when you speak, God speaks.” It’s a remarkable understanding of faith. This is not to say the centurion had some deep understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity or some such thing, but he did understand that Jesus had the kind of authority such that when Jesus spoke, God spoke. So all Christ needed to do was to speak, and the servant would be healed.
So there it is again. The word and then there is salvation. There are a lot of other passages of the same sort. In 1 Corinthians 1, Paul attests (as our older English translations say), “It is through the foolishness of preaching that people are saved,” but that isn’t quite right. It’s not through the foolishness of the preaching merely as the dynamic of preaching. It’s literally, “Through the foolishness of the thing preached, through the foolishness of what was preached.” That is, it’s through the foolishness of the gospel that is preached.
Now it’s not through the foolishness of the gospel discussed or the foolishness of the gospel shared or the foolishness of the gospel that is debated, although all of those things are done on occasion. God himself can say elsewhere, “Come now, and let us reason together.” There is a place for sharing, for reasoning together, and all the rest. Yet there is a certain primacy in the New Testament for preaching not understood as necessarily behind a pulpit.
If I move to the side of the pulpit, have I stopped preaching? If I stand below it, does this mean I’ve stopped preaching? If I sit down on a seat, does that mean I’ve stopped preaching? No, no. You must understand that in the New Testament, preaching is bound up with heraldic proclamation. There is some kind of announcement. That’s what is essential to preaching.
When God comes with the good news, he announces it, he proclaims it. And it is the good news itself, the gospel, that transforms. Men and women are saved, we’re told, through the foolishness of this heraldic announcement of the gospel, the foolishness of the thing proclaimed. There it is again. There is salvation through the word, this ministry of the word, in its content, in its essential gospel.
You can find similar passages in 1 Peter 1 and in 2 Peter 1. I wish I had time to unpack them for you. Let me mention just one more. This is an entire thematic one. We could ask the question to begin with.… What does it mean to be saved? What does it mean to be saved in Sacramento? So many of the biblical words that we use all the time are, in fact, incomprehensible to the people around us, or they mean something else.
All the religious God-talk words we use all the time (spirit, faith, God, save, and the like) all mean something else in our culture. Every single one of them. Not one escapes. What does the verb, to save, mean in our culture? Well, it depends. If you’re going by a bank, it means what you’re supposed to do to retire comfortably. If you’re into sports, it’s what a good goalie does in a soccer game or in an ice hockey game (I’m from Canada; I had to get that in). If you’re a geek, it’s what you’d jolly well better do unless you want to lose a lot of data. That’s what it means.
I have a son. He’s grown now, but when he was 14 or 15 he went through a stage where he liked to wear a whole lot of tee shirts with slogans on them that were right on the edge. We were pretty flexible, until they went over the top. “He’s 15. He’s growing up.” He had one, for example, that said on his big, broad back: “Woke up this morning. Late. Missed my math exam. Flunked. Girlfriend rejected me …” He didn’t have a girlfriend; it was a slogan. “Girlfriend rejected me. Played soccer. Not a bad day.” There was a kid with his priorities about right, I thought.
There was one where we thought it was just a bit over the top. It was a picture of what was clearly a soccer net, and the ball was coming in, as shown by lines in the air. It was coming in and then, at the last moment, the goal attender did a dying save. The ball bounced off his fingers and was clearly going to go over the top of the net, but the goalie was dressed in first-century garb, and underneath were the words, “Jesus saves.”
I said, “No, Nicholas. I don’t think that one will quite do,” because you see, the New Testament already tells us what it means. Begin with the very first book, Matthew. The very first chapter.… We’re told in the first chapter that God says to Joseph, “You shall give him the name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
Jesus is merely the Greek form of Joshua, and Joshua is the Hebrew form that means Yahweh (the name for God) saves. “You will call him Yahweh saves, for he will save his people from their sins.” That is put right at the beginning of the book, which means, in some ways, it’s the controlling category by which to read the entire book.
So when you read that Jesus begins his ministry publicly in chapters 3 and 4 and goes everywhere preaching, teaching, performing miracles, and casting out demons, in part this is because he has come to save his people from their sins.
When you read chapters 5, 6, and 7 and begin to take in the Sermon on the Mount, you understand these chapters, which are given over to explaining how his teaching and the dawning of the kingdom fulfill the Old Testament Law and Prophets, then in this fulfillment and all that it does in transformation, in fact, he is coming to save his people from their sins.
When you read chapters 8 and 9, you see miracle after miracle after miracle topically arranged so you can see that death is reversed, sickness is overcome, and nature is pacified. All of these things, biblically, are the consequences of sin, and he has come to save his people from their sins.
When you get to chapter 10, and you have a trainee mission.… Well, in this trainee mission, he’s training people, his own disciples, for the way the gospel will be advanced. Indeed, he warns them, then, that eventually they will be brought before Gentiles and kings. They will suffer various things, and so forth, because he understands it is through such mission that eventually people will be saved, and he has come to save his people from their sins.
So I could take you through the whole book to the very end, the Great Commission, where Jesus says, “All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth. Go and make disciples, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you.” Thus by the proclamation of the message, which focuses on the cross and resurrection, by the proclamation of this message and the teaching of all Christ has commanded, men and women are saved, for Jesus came to save his people from their sins.
You see, there is a huge connection in Scripture between the ministry of the word, the proclamation of the word in some fashion or another, and what it means to be saved. I thought I might be most focused here, I thought it might be most useful, if we chose one passage, in this case James 1, where perhaps the best known connection of word and saving exists.
We’re told in verse 21, “You are to accept this word planted in you, which can save you.” We shall try to see how the connection is made in this context. So let me approach the passage with an introductory anecdote that will take us into the text and eventually into our theme, and you’ll see, in due course, how crucial this passage is.
I knew an English chap some years ago who felt called to the ministry in England. He went to a Bible school, a Bible college, in England. He turned out to be quite gifted. He was an able speaker and good with people. He had a certain ability to declare the gospel with a certain boldness and fruitfulness. Eventually he graduated and became pastor of a church. The church began to grow; people were getting converted.
Then he got caught out in adultery. Of course, he resigned. He disappeared from the scene. He showed up in Canada, although nobody knew the background. In fact, that’s where I met him. I met him at the seminary where I was studying in Toronto, so it was quite some time ago. We didn’t know anything of his background, but we graduated from the seminary at the same time. I became pastor of a church on the West Coast of Canada. He became pastor of a church somewhere in Ontario.
In due course, I went to Europe and was there for a number of years, but I heard through the perennial ecclesiastical grapevine that this chap had committed adultery and was dismissed. He disappeared from the scene. Years went by. I went back to Vancouver. More years went by. Then I moved down to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where I am now, in Chicago.
When I got there, I didn’t know any of the churches in the area, but the seminary said, “Don, if you don’t mind, where you end up in church is ultimately for you and your wife to decide, but in fact, there’s a Free Church near here that has recently gone through some trauma. They’ve had a minister who saw quite a lot of fruitfulness, people growing, people being converted, the numbers multiplying, but then the minister there was caught out in adultery. There’s a mess. Would you mind serving there while you teach here for a while?”
You guessed it. Your friend and mine. This same chap. Round number three. Different country, different church, same pattern. Besides saying some things about how sometimes churches don’t do enough background checks, this also brings me to the point of the story. If you speak to this chap today.… The last time I heard of him, he was in Ohio selling computer parts. Mercifully, he’s not gumming up any more churches.
If you ask him, “Come on. What went wrong? Three times. For crying out loud. Didn’t you learn anything?” The most he would say is, “The New Testament says God will not allow you to be tempted above what you are able. I was tempted, and I wasn’t able to withstand it. God is a liar.” That’s it. Then he turns and walks away.
Now most of us would not put things quite as crassly as that. Yet deep down, when we’re going through trials and temptations, even though we wouldn’t be quite that gross, yet we can begin to wonder if God’s got it in for us. Job came whisker close to that kind of skepticism, didn’t he? What about when you face horrible bereavement? You’re diagnosed with a vicious melanoma, there’s no outcome but death, you’re 42, and you have three children? You’re crippled at the age of 26? You lose an only son in a war? It’s pretty easy to start wondering what God is doing.
On the other hand, there are plenty of fascinating accounts of Christians whose lives shine most brilliantly under suffering, aren’t there? Some of you who read commentaries will know the name Peter O’Brien. He’s one of my best friends. He’s an Aussie. He spent years as a missionary in India. Now he teaches in Australia. He has written probably the best commentary in the English language on Ephesians plus important commentaries on Colossians and Philippians. A good and godly man.
Do you know how he was converted? He was converted because his mother was converted from a completely pagan secular background. The reason why his mother was converted was because down the street from her there was a semiliterate Christian woman who suffered all her life with horrible illness. The joy that woman had in the Lord was such that Peter O’Brien’s mother became a Christian, which meant Peter became a Christian, which meant Peter became a missionary and the writer of books that have served worldwide.
Do you really think that woman down the road, that semiliterate woman who was suffering but yet with a certain kind of joy in the Lord, understood that because of her reaction it would produce all this fruit? I don’t think so. She was just being faithful.
When I went to England in 1972 for the first time, within a short while I got to know Sir Norman and Pat Anderson. Norman and Pat Anderson had been at University of Cambridge and went out as missionaries to Egypt before World War II. He learned Arabic pretty fluently. In World War II, the British Army co-opted him so he would be involved in counterintelligence work. After the war, he went on with his education.
He eventually became professor of Oriental Studies at London University and was knighted by the queen for establishing a couple of magnificent institutions. He wrote very important books on world religions, all from a Christian point of view. His understanding of Islam was profound. At the same time, though he was a layman, he was a very faithful university evangelist. He became an astonishingly influential layman in the Church of England.
But not everybody knows Sir Norman had three children. The first was a woman who became a medical doctor herself. Then, in the revolution that turned the Belgian Congo into the Congo, which became Zaire, and which is now the Congo again, she was gang raped. She was sent home. As she was recovering, she came to California to do some further medical training preparatory to going back to Africa. While she was here, she tripped and fell down some stairs, knocked herself out, and drowned in her own spittle.
The second daughter died in circumstances almost as bizarre. The year I arrived in Cambridge, the third child, a son named Hugh, a brilliant student already being touted as a potential future prime minister of England since so many of them go through Oxford or Cambridge.… He died at the age of 21 of a brain cancer. In all the years I knew Sir Norman and Pat Anderson, and in their closing years, my wife and I spent a lot of time with them, not once, not once, did I hear a word of complaint.
I’m sure some of you know the name of William Carey, great missionary and minister to India. His wife was so demented she made his life astonishingly difficult. His sister was paralyzed most of her life and spent her time praying for her brother.
Now what makes the difference between these two groups of people, those who blame God and those who become more spiritually minded under it all? What makes the difference? Isn’t that the question? Which group would you rather belong to? Don’t answer quickly, because suffering isn’t pleasant either way, but which group would you really like to belong to?
It would be possible at this point to discuss at some length the nature of God’s sovereignty, secondary causality, and the mystery of providence. All of those things could usefully be described; I wish I had more time to unpack some of them. There are lots of books I could direct your attention to on these subjects, but I want to focus on the simple yet profound truths James articulates in these verses.
If we absorb these points into our thinking, we shall be much better able to withstand trials and temptations, and we shall better understand what we mean when we speak of the saving word. Here they are, four things …
1. When you are struggling under trial, remember the Christian’s goals.
Verse 12. When tempted, “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.” This is actually picking up the argument from earlier in the chapter, in verses 2 to 4.
There we’re told in verse 2, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” So in verses 2 to 4, trials engender perseverance, which makes you mature.
Here in verse 12, trials finally result in the crown of life. Do you hear that? “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.”
So the first result of trials in a person’s life, we’re told, should be perseverance. It’s like an athlete who pushes his or her muscles and it hurts, but nevertheless, that is what enables the athlete to push his or her muscles. In other words, the hardship itself produces an ability to handle hardship. There’s a kind of training, a kind of endurance, that goes on.
Then, ultimately, this issues in the crown of life. Now that expression needs unpacking. Consider the two expressions, the mayor of Chicago and the city of Chicago. In the expression, the mayor of Chicago, the mayor is not Chicago. This is Chicago’s mayor. But in the city of Chicago, the city is Chicago. This is not in the city of Chicago, Chicago’s city. That doesn’t make any sense at all. The city is Chicago.
In this expression, the crown of life, this does not mean life’s crown. It means the life is the crown. That is, what you ultimately receive is crowning life, if I may put it that way. What you ultimately receive is life in all of its perfect consummation, life that is opposed to everything connected with death and destruction and sin and decay, the life of a new heaven and a new earth, of resurrection existence before God.
The expression shows up elsewhere in Scripture. Revelation 2:10: “Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life,” that is, crowning life. In other words, this text insists we must look at our sufferings with eternity’s values in view. No matter how much things hurt now, 50 billion years into eternity things will look different. In fact, you won’t even have to wait that long. You receive the crowning life.
I know an old man in Australia, an Old Testament scholar. He’s now in his mid-80s, and he’s pretty decrepit. He’s suffering quite a lot, but if you ask him, “Frank, how’s it going?” He says, “I’m not suffering from anything that a good resurrection can’t fix.” He’s understood the lesson. He’s heading for the crown of life, and it changes your perspective on things, doesn’t it?
Some people are embarrassed by the notion of reward here at all. If you suffer, then you get a reward. But doesn’t that make it sound as if somehow it’s a kind of tit-for-tat religion, a religion of works? Now we’ll come back to that. This is an important question, because it comes back to how we understand this word of grace, this word of truth. We’ll come back to it, but it is worth pausing here to remember an illustration CS Lewis used to give.
CS Lewis asked us to picture two men. The first goes to the red-light district of town, pays his money, gets his woman, and has his reward. The second courts a young woman, treats her with immense honor and respect, wins not only her affections but the affections and respect of the entire family. In due course, there’s a wonderful wedding, and he has his reward. What’s the difference?
He says the difference is, in the first case, the payment is so incommensurate with the reward that the transaction is obscene. In the second case, the payment is nothing other than the consummation of a relationship. Now the rewards of glory are of the second sort. They are the entailments of a relationship that is itself grounded in grace. That’s what enables the apostle Paul, for example, to write in Romans 8, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”
Indeed, these rewards are of such a kind that only a genuine Christian would really be able to appreciate them, hunger for them, and cry, “Yes. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” We’re told in verse 12 that all of these are promised by God to those who love him. In a sense, it is this love for God that must be built up to enduring love; it is the relationship that is built up to the consummated love of a new heaven and a new earth.
A pastoral friend of mine tells of a funeral he took where an old man lost his wife after more than 50 years of marriage. At the graveside, he said to my pastoral friend, “It must be that God still has something for me to do, else why has he left me here all alone.” My pastoral friend replied, “He has not left you to do anything except to love him still.” Oh, there may be more jobs to do, but is our self-identity bound up with doing stuff? Isn’t the first commandment to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength and our neighbor as ourselves?
In fact, it is important to keep so many of these things in perspective. When I was an undergraduate at McGill University a long time ago, studying chemistry and mathematics, we heard a chap speak in the McGill Christian Fellowship, our chapter of InterVarsity as it was then, from James 1:2, which as we’ve just seen is related to James 1:12. In those days, we all used the King James Version. “Count it all joy, my brethren, when ye fall into divers temptations.”
Some of us decided we’d better take this seriously, so we compacted together a kind of shared agreement that every time we heard any of the others in this compact group whine or complain, we’d quote this verse at them. You can guess what happened. The next day, one poor student came onto the campus moaning about a calculus exam a little later that morning. One of us smirked and said, “Count it all joy, my brother, when ye fall into divers temptations.” It didn’t really help.
Someone complained about a small shortage of funds as the bills were coming due. “Count it all joy, my brethren, when ye fall into divers temptations,” and on and on. It didn’t really help. It was pouring salt into a sad wound. Yet, in due course, it came to have a certain kind of salutary effect.
Eventually, instead of being a form of one-upmanship.… “How many times can I say it to others before they catch me and say it to me? Ha, ha, ha.” Instead of it being a form of one-upmanship, eventually we began to hear it as the voice of God. Remarkably, that year in that McGill Christian Fellowship, whining and complaints dwindled away and ceased, and that year we saw more conversions than all my other years in university combined.
So here’s the first point, then. When you are struggling under trial, remember the Christian’s goals. The Christian’s goals are not, finally, bound up with having as free a life from adversity or struggle as you can possibly manage. It’s nice to avoid those things; those are gifts from God when you have them, but at the same time, they’re not the ultimate goals.
2. When you confess God’s sovereignty, do not misunderstand God’s motives.
Verses 13–15. Now part of the problem in understanding verse 13 is the root behind the word trial and the root behind the word to tempt is one and the same in the original. So you are always forced to ask by the context whether this is saying, “When you are under trial,” or “When you are tempted.”
James plunges from trial to temptation back and forth, because he is writing as we experience these things. The same events that are opportunities to go forward also become temptations to go backward. Trial becomes temptation because it finds a kind of answering chord within us. This text says, however, that when we are tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” What this really means is if you are tempted, that is by such trials as I’ve been talking about, don’t say, “God is tempting me.”
Now there is a sense in which God does test us. Of course he does. There are lots of texts that attest it. In Genesis 22:1, we’re explicitly told, “God tested Abraham, saying …” and then you have the account of his charge to go and take his young son Isaac to Mount Moriah. God tested the people of Israel in Judges 2:22. God tests King Hezekiah in 2 Chronicles 32:31.
Today, after all, God puts us through all kinds of tests of one sort or another, but although God may do this to prove his servants’ faith or to lower their pride or to foster their endurance, he never does so to induce sin or to destroy their faith. In other words, he will, in his sovereignty, knowing what is good for us, put us into tests of one sort or another, but then you mustn’t say, “Well, God is sovereign, and he’s put me into this test. So if I fall into sin, it’s really his fault, isn’t it?” and thus, in effect, you are saying “God himself is the one who is tempting me.”
The reason that doesn’t make any sense at all is explained in the second part of verse 13. “When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone.” What this means is temptation is an impulse to sin, and since God is not susceptible to any such desire for evil, he cannot possibly be imagined to be desiring that evil be brought to pass in us.
If he is not susceptible to sin, if he has no interest in sin, no attraction to it, and he cannot himself be tempted, why should we think for a moment that God has any interest whatsoever in so arranging things in our lives that we ourselves are tempted? That’s not what he’s doing at all. In other words, when you confess God’s sovereignty, do not misunderstand God’s motives.
A true account of temptation and sin, then, is found in verses 14 and 15. Over against this view, in which finally God gets blamed because we’re feeling temptation, what does the Scripture say? Verse 14 says it works this way: “Each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death.”
The language is grotesque. It’s meant to be grotesque. Sin is conceiving something within us because of our own evil desires, and when it actually comes to full birth, to full form, all it is is death itself. When the temptation is given into, ultimately what it produces is destruction and death. It comes to birth, and there’s only death. In other words, what James tells us is this: When you confess God’s sovereignty, do not misunderstand God’s motives.
We see this in some small measure, do we not, with our own children? When the children are really, really young, we protect them all the time, don’t we? But there comes a time when, if they’re facing really difficult circumstances, some really obnoxious friends or a school teacher who really is an international class pill, the first desire from some parents is to go and sort it all out. There may, conceivably, be places where that’s still necessary, depending on the age of the child.
On the other hand, wise parents also know to say, “Whoa. My son or my daughter has got to face reality. There are lots of pills in the world.” “Get used to it, kid. Toughen up. Learn how to handle it.” Isn’t that also right? Then you help your child through high school. You help your child, maybe, through university. Then they want to go to graduate school. Well, maybe you’re so filthy rich you can throw out all the dosh for graduate school as well, but even then, there is a place for saying, “At what point does my child learn the value of the buck?”
At some point, you start saying, “I’m so glad you’re going to graduate school. Get a loan. Establish a credit rating. I’ll give you some help. Here’s money for the car’s gas so you can come home. Here’s a phone card so you can contact me. If you get into real trouble, let me know.” Isn’t that also part of parenting? Isn’t it? Because you want them to understand that in this fallen, broken world, in fact, good parenting involves toughening them up just a wee bit. Doesn’t it? You can’t protect them forever.
That means, although sometimes the child may, on the short range, think, “Boy, oh boy. I know parents who are paying the whole way. I know parents who are protecting them. My parents don’t really love me. They don’t really care.” Whine, whine, moan, moan. Twenty years down the road, they’re doing the same things for their kids because they’ve learned it’s for their good.
Their parents, though far from perfect, full of sin, no doubt making many mistakes, nevertheless, are doing these things for their good. They have learned that. They’ve learned to trust their parents’ motives in such actions. So also when we go through difficult times, we confess God’s sovereignty, we know full well God could have intervened to do something else, at what point do we finally say, “The human participants in this were evil, but God intended it for good”?
Isn’t that the lesson Joseph learned in Genesis, chapter 50, verses 19 and 20, when he was sold into slavery and spent years as a slave and then years in prison? He looked back on it all, and he knew God was sovereign. He did not say, “Well, God really dropped a cog that time. Why should I be faithful to God? You know all those years.… The only reason I’m here now is because of my own efforts.”
No, no, no. He spoke to the brothers, and he said, “Don’t you understand that in those events, you intended it for evil, but God intended it for good to save many people as it is this day.” I know this brings up the mysteries of providence and how good relates to God and how evil relates to God. I understand that; I wish I had more time to explore those things with you, but the practical lesson to learn from all of this is pretty clear: when you confess God’s sovereignty, do not misunderstand God’s motives.
3. When you feel abandoned and crushed, do not forget God’s goodness.
Verses 16–18. “Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.” Verse 16 is transitional: “Do not allow yourself to wallow in rebellious self-pity. You must understand that God is a good God.”
In so much of our experience, there’s a dark side to everything. There’s certainly a dark side to us. We see that when the light is brightest, it comes in on one side, but that means there’s a shadow on the other side. So we look at people’s strengths today, and we say, “Well, that person is a really great extrovert. He’s got a lot of strengths and people skills, wonderful strengths on that side. Of course, on the other side, he can be a bit bossy and a bit pushy.” There’s a dark side to the light side, isn’t there?
But with God, there’s no shadow. That’s what the text says. There’s no shifting shadow. He’s only good. God is good. He is good good. He’s good good good good. There’s no bad side. So while you’re stressing God’s sovereignty, you must also stress God’s goodness and understand that everything we have received that’s got any goodness in it at all has come directly from him, such that it is chargeable to him. “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”
“Do you want to see the ultimate evidence of this?” James asks in verse 18. “Let me tell you. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.” Now there are some people who think this “he chose to give us birth,” means “to give us birth in creation.” He spoke, and we came to be; birth in that sense. That really isn’t quite right.
Firstfruits language in the New Testament is regularly bound up with a new birth. He chose us, of the creation, to give us new birth. Moreover, this expression, to give birth to is only used twice in the New Testament, one in connection with evil in verse 15 and now in connection with new birth here in verse 18. Above all, this expression, word of truth (“He chose to give us birth through the word of truth”), shows up only five times in the New Testament, and every time it refers to the gospel.
For example, in Ephesians 1:13, “And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation.” So we have received the new birth through the gospel, the word of truth. Do you want the final evidence that God loves you and that God is good? You could talk about the glory of a rainbow. You can spend time tramping in the Rockies. Take a holiday in the Lake District.
No one arrived here hungry this morning; whereas, I’ve been in many parts of the world where people are hungry every day. I recently got back from South Africa. In the African community in South Africa, 38 percent of the adults have AIDS. Ministers spend every Saturday all day, funeral after funeral after funeral.
However bad it is here, it’s not that bad. But do you know what the ultimate proof is? The gospel, the new birth. That’s what Sir Norman Anderson understood. That’s why Christians have learned to sing old songs that are not great poetry, but they express great truth.
It will be worth it all when we see Jesus,
Life’s trials will seem so small when we see Christ;
One glimpse of His dear face all sorrow will erase,
So bravely run the race till we see Christ.
This is a world of a lot of beauty, a lot of God’s ongoing providential goodness. It’s also a damned world. Death itself is the ultimate enemy, the final enemy, the last enemy, but death doesn’t have the last word. So Christians live with eternity’s values in view; therefore, our evaluation of everything changes just a wee bit.
A number of years ago, I was asked by a scientist at AT&T Bell Labs, near Chicago, to come and run a Bible club for them. They have about 2,000 scientists there, and quite a few Nobel laureates. It’s an amazingly prosperous intellectual research center. This particular unit dealt with electronic switches of one sort or another. There were 37 grown scientists spending all their days on electronic switches.
This chap, this scientist friend of mine, discovered that, after all, they had noon-hour clubs on philately for those who wanted to study stamps, on homosexuality for those who wanted to study sexual issues in the culture, on politics, on car racing like NASCAR. If they could all have their clubs, why couldn’t he have a sort of Bible club? So he had me go along and try to explain the basics of the Bible to those whom he invited in his 37-person science scholar unit.
He invited all 37 of them, and about 12 came every week. For six weeks, I went in there and had 20 or 25 minutes to work through another passage of the Bible and throw it open to questions while they munched their sandwiches. Of the 12 or 13 who showed up every week, there was a failed Lutheran, a failed Catholic, and a failed Hindu. By failed, I mean this was their own description. They had once belonged to these parties but no longer observed. The rest were raw secularists and completely biblically illiterate.
I’ll not forget the day when I was trying to explain a bit of the Sermon on the Mount. They didn’t have any Bibles; most of them had never held a Bible. So I printed up the relevant texts, and we started talking about them, and so forth. Our rule was I would rabbit on for 20 or 25 minutes uninterrupted and then have free discussion.
On this particular day, I was explaining in the Sermon on the Mount how Jesus said, “Don’t lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust corrode, where thieves break through and steal, but lay up for yourself treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not corrode, where thieves do not break through and steal. Because, after all, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” It’s fundamental to a Christian outlook of everything.
Right in the middle of my rabbiting on, the Hindu chap stuck up his hand and said, “Wait a minute. Do I understand what you’re saying?” I said, “What do you think I’m saying?” He said, “Well, around this table, we’re scientists. We’re really glad we’re here; this is a really good research center. We have plans. We have research projects and a generous budget. We’re producing papers, pushing back the frontiers of knowledge.
Some of us have aspirations maybe of even a Nobel. This is a great research center. Then as we project into the future … more work, more science, more learning, more prestige, more influence, maybe some governance issues in this research center. Then at 65, we retire. Probably we’ll do a bit of research on the side, some consulting, and play with our grandchildren.
Then after that, it gets a bit vague. But you’re saying.… Is this what you’re saying? You’re saying we should so live our lives now that, in fact, we’re preparing for life 10 million years from now. Is that what you’re saying?” “Sounds about right to me.” It was completely and utterly and totally revolutionary. Don’t you see? From a Christian point of view, it’s elementary. It’s elementary.
We’re heading for the crown of life. We have this new birth, this new birth that reverses death, gives us the Holy Spirit already as a down payment of the promised inheritance, gives us the communion of saints, gives us freedom from conscience, turns us away from the enslaving power of sin, brings us into the fellowship of God’s people, and ultimately makes us look forward to resurrection existence, a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.
That’s what we’re heading for. That’s the framework in which we think. Anything less than that is simply pagan thinking, and all of this has come about because of God’s goodness. It’s come about because of the word of truth because of the gospel. So within this framework, then, when you feel abandoned and crushed, do not forget God’s goodness.
I know a young lass; she lost her best friend to leukemia at the age of 15. She told her dad, tears streaming down her face six months later, “Dad, God could have saved my friend. He didn’t, and I hate him.” Her dad put his arm around her shoulders and said, “I’m so glad you told me. It’s a good thing you did, because after all, God knows your heart in any case. There’s no point in pretending otherwise. But before you become so convinced God’s got it in for you, I want you to think about two things.
First, do you want a God like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp? Do you remember the genie in Aladdin’s lamp, Robin Williams and all? Mad laughter? The genie is ever so powerful, can do absolutely anything, but is always under the control of whoever has the lamp. Do you want a God like that? He’s very, very powerful but can always do only exactly what you say? In which case, who is God? Is God nothing more than a whopping big genie who jumps through hoops at your command? Or is he big enough that sometimes he does stuff you don’t understand?
Secondly, I want you to think about is this.… Are you going to measure God’s love for you on the basis of your ups and downs in a life of 70 years or are you going to measure God’s goodness on the basis of a little hill outside Jerusalem? You lost your best friend; God lost his Son. In fact, he didn’t lose him; he gave him. When you don’t understand, you don’t see the way ahead, it hurts more than you can say, and you’re screaming in the night into your pillow, what you must do is go back to the cross, for that is the final proof of God’s love.”
4. When you hear gospel instruction, do not merely learn about it.
Verses 19–25. That’s what drives the final paragraph. “My dear brothers, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, for man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you.” In other words, abandon all self-righteousness and self-justification and accept this word of the gospel.
Do you see what happens? When we go through really tough times and we become bitter and our tongue becomes uncontrolled, what we’re really saying is our vindication, that in which we repose our confidence, is our own opinion about things. That somehow is what saves me. That is what justifies me. That is what gives me my self-identity. But at that point, it is no longer the word of the gospel that saves me. This happens in every arena of life, doesn’t it?
We come to the cross. We understand we’re justified by God’s grace in our lives. Then we go back to the school where we’re studying, we go back to the workplace, and so much of our self-esteem and our self-identity is bound up with what others think of us. Then we get really down in the dumps because somebody thinks badly of us. At that point, we’ve just erected another idol. Our self-justification now turns not on what Christ has done for us but on whether we can live up to somebody else’s expectation. We’re back into self-justifying works.
Or you go through suffering and instead of being satisfied with God’s great goodness on our behalf that issues, finally, in resurrection existence.… No, no. Our significance, our importance is in having a God, somehow, who does what we want. Now we’ve got an idol again.
What the gospel does is come along and change everything, because it means instead of us having to justify ourselves before God according to our expectations or our desires or what others think of us or Mummy’s or Daddy’s expectations or how much money we’re making or anything else, all of which things lead eventually to frustration, we come back to the cross. We’re accepted in the beloved. We’re love by God. We’re cherished. We’re prepared for all eternity because of the word of the gospel.
It’s in this sense the word is able to save you. It’s not just that it saves us eschatologically; it saves us on the last day. Or it saves us right now so we’re clear from guilt. It saves us from all of this endless enslavement, because now we look at things differently. We look at things and ask, “Where does my self-identity lie? Where does my confidence in the love of God lie? Whose approval do I want?” It’s all bound up with this word of the truth, with the gospel.
Abandon personal excuses and listen to the word. That’s the point of verses 22 to 25. “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves.” You listen in such a way that you do what it says. That means going back to the cross again and again and again. So here it is then, the difference between the two groups with which I began.
This gospel saves you, not only in the immediate eschatological sense, somehow you’re accepted before God (that’s all true), but it saves you from all of the enslavements of all of the sins in this chapter. It saves you now. It transforms you. We bask in the sheer delight of gospel truth. That’s why we sing …
How deep the Father’s love for us,
How vast beyond all measure.
That he should give his only Son,
To make a wretch his treasure.
How great the pain of searing loss,
The Father turned his face away.
As wounds which mar the chosen one
Bring many sons to glory.
Behold the man upon the cross,
My sins upon his shoulders.
Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice
Call out among the scoffers.
It was my sin that held him there
Until it was accomplished.
His dying breath has brought me life;
I know that it is finished.
Then this:
I will not boast in anything:
No gifts, no power, no wisdom.
But I will boast in Jesus Christ;
His death and resurrection.
Why should I gain from his reward?
I cannot give an answer.
But this I know with all my heart:
His wounds have paid my ransom.
Let us pray.
Merciful God, forbid that we who confess the name of Christ should ever reduce the gospel to that which merely justifies us now but has no bearing on how we live. Open our eyes to see that this is the gospel that not only saves us from guilt but saves us from sin’s enslaving power. This is the word that saves us. It is the saving word, the transforming word.
Merciful God, if there are some here who have never yet bowed the knee, who have not understood how this gospel transforms men and women today, grant that even where they sit now they may lift their eyes heavenward, the eyes of their heart, of their understanding, and cry, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”
And all of us, Lord God, who name the name of Christ, we confess how easily we have turned away in practice from the gospel and become whiners and complainers, acting as if you are dead, acting as if you are ignorant or heartless. Forgive these deep grievous idolatrous sins and return us again and again to the cross, that we may trust you and put your Word into practice in every domain of our lives. For Jesus’s sake, amen.
