Books of James & Jude - God's desire and plan in conflicts Part 1 - James 4:5-10

Well, James is going to cover some specific content today with regards to quarrels and conflicts. And so we'll pick up with chapter 4, verses 4 through 6. And I'll go ahead and read that for us. And we'll do a little bit of review for the previous verses that we looked at last week.

But here in verse 4 he says, 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 a greater grace. Therefore it says, God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble. So this is three verses that we're going to look at today. Let's go ahead and back up a little bit to our outline that I've been using for this first ten verses. And Jeremy will pick up next week with the following parts of this section of scripture.

But we're talking about an attitude of worldliness, and we all know what that's about. We all struggle with different attitudes of worldliness. You adopt one sense of it in your life, and it creates needs and frustrations and offers an opportunity for sin to take hold. I have a different attitude of worldliness, or maybe we have the same, but the issue is that we all struggle with, and James knew this, and the Jewish believers that he was speaking to struggled with an attitude of worldliness. And so this is not only applicable from the perspective of James speaking to these Jewish believers who struggled with this, but it's also applicable to us because the attitude of worldliness is just as alive and kicking as it was then. And so when we look at these perspectives that James brings to us, the source, the results, the description of this attitude, We can see it in our own life and we can place it in application to the attitude that you struggle with the most.

I don't spend a lot of time going into the direct application as it relates to, say, humanism or Buddhism or Hedonism. But all of those would apply as attitudes of worldliness, and I think that we all probably have in some way, shape, or form, especially as believers, adopted spirits of the world, attitudes of the world rather, in ways that sometimes are kind of underneath the surface and we don't recognize that they exist. You mentioned that a little bit this morning. But it can creep in and seep in in a multitude of ways. And so this body of text deals with that very issue.

So chapter 4 verse 1 dealt with its source. 4, 2 through 3, its results. It results in a life of continual frustration. It results in a life of wrongly motivated prayer. That's what we covered last week. Today we're going to move on from the source and results to the actual description. So the name applied to worldliness. We're going to hit that pretty heavy. It's that second word that came right out in the verse that I just read. The position brought about by worldliness. The indwelling resistance to worldliness.

And then finally, it's remedy. And I'll start that portion of scripture off. Solutions start with the divine provision. And then Jeremy will continue with verses 7 through 10 next week. and talk about all of the personal responsibility associated with that remedy. So let's go through a background just real quick here to remember why are these guys fighting? Why are they frustrated with one another? Why does James feel the need to deal specifically with quarrels and conflicts and this attitude of worldliness?

First of all, these are some of the first Jewish believers. So, they're on the fringe of the church, right? I mean, these guys don't have all the commentary and all the perspectives of churches having gone through many, many different years and years and years of needs and how an apostle might communicate God's Word in relationship to how they deal with that. They are literally right there on the very edge having very little knowledge and understanding of what it means to be in the body of Christ. This is new to them.

And so they're bringing a lot of baggage. We all bring a lot of baggage when we start out in any kind of church environment. But these guys brought in a specific type of baggage, and all of it stemmed from the Jewish system that they were brought out of through belief in the Lord Jesus. they had issues. Second, they were Diaspora Jews, so they were scattered. They had to scatter and move outside of Jerusalem in order to survive. The Roman officials, even Paul, those loyal to the Roman emperor would have had a lot to say with regards to the way these Jewish believers were now practicing their faith because we know about the persecution that was brought upon the early church and what caused them to have to continually move out. This is God's plan all along, right? I mean, the gospel needed to be spread. And so there had to be a need in order to cause that spread to take place. And they were a part of that need.

And they were some that had just had to leave their homes and, you know, Ephesus being a place of pagan worship, this would have all been something that would have been new to this group of early fringe believers as I call them. Stressful situation to say the least. Not to say that God is inadequate to supply all their needs, but the reality is that that's what's going on. Third, they used to live in a Jewish world where they were sheltered from rampant paganism, and I just mentioned that. Now they've got this attitude of worldliness that they may not have been so privy to in their safe and comfortable location in Jerusalem. a much greater degree of worldliness that tugs on the sin nature.

Fourth, Satan is extremely busy in this early era trying to thwart that Acts 1-8, the spread of the gospel. And so he is the result, this church was no doubt the result of an actual focus of Satan himself to try to thwart the gospel being spread. Because Satan's focus was on Christ, Christ obviously defeated Satan's attempt at destroying all that God had planned to do in Christ. But now, not having the access to Christ to do that, he now has to go to the most influential believers and start to try to deal with the situation in that way. And so there's no doubt that James and this church would have been dealing with a Yes, a limited creature, that being Satan, but no doubt Satan would have had his focus early and often on those guys in order to thwart Acts 1-8.

So stress, frustration, this is early on, why they're quarreling and fighting, that's some of the ideas there. So last week we talked about the source, we said that's the sin nature, and we said that that sin nature is at war within the new man. Now, these believers didn't know much about the new man, not much at all. In fact, we talked about how James is all about the doing. Paul is all about what the new man is and how that doing gets done. So they didn't understand the fullness of what the new man was and was capable of as it depended upon Christ and beheld him in his word. They were very much on the very beginning stages of this.

But they knew that their sin nature was at war within their members. And we said that was the source from verses 1 of chapter 4, verse 1. And the results of that sin nature at war with them led to this pattern of a desire, a frustration, and then a violence. And we see those two mentioned in verse 2.

You've got the lust, or a great desire. This doesn't mean it's necessarily a sexual lust. that has a larger meaning, and that the desire is an intense longing for to have something that they didn't have. James says that you don't have it, and that leads you to commit murder, have an attitude of murder, have an attitude of hatred, as we talked about last week. You also covet, you envy, and you can't get it. So there's that frustration again, that pattern of here's the desire, here's the frustration, you can't obtain it, and as a result it ends up in fighting and quarreling, and fighting had that meaning of verbal sparring back and forth. You can imagine this group of believers, they were hating, and they were verbally sparring in great ways. Why? Because they had a desire, and they were frustrated that they couldn't get it, and it led to this situation, as James said. And as a further result of these attitudes of lust and envy, they became very frustrated in their prayer life. He says, you don't ask at all. You're not even asking. You don't have because you're not even asking. You're not even spending time talking to the Lord anymore. And when you do, you're asking with the wrong motives for your own pleasure.

And so that's what we looked at last week. And we have this picture of a frustrated group of believers that are struggling with this sin nature and the new man that they now have alive inside their spirit, but they are confused about how the Lord is going to supply their need for and their struggle with lusts and envy and the prayer life itself. So what is this description that we talked about moving into the first verse of today's lesson? He said, you adulteresses. Pretty big word there, and it would have caught them off guard really quickly.

This term carried a lot of Jewish background, and it picks up an interesting metaphor for how they would be perceiving the sin that they were dealing with. So, adulterous pertains to being unfaithful to one's early and true beliefs. And the use of the feminine form here reinforces the biblical energy that James depends on here. The Old Testament frequently portrays the relationship between God and his people in terms of marriage. And so, when James said, you adulteresses, they would have immediately remembered the way that the Old Testament refers to God and His people in terms of marriage. So, let's have a look at Isaiah 54 and just read verses 4 through 6. You seem to be on the ball there, so if you could help us with that one.

Do not be afraid, you will not suffer shame. Do not fear disgrace, you will not be humiliated. You will forget the shame of your youth and remember no more the reproach of your widowhood. For your maker is your husband. The Lord Almighty is his name. The Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer. He is called the God of all the earth. The Lord will call you back as if you were a wife deserted and distressed in spirit. A wife who married young only to be rejected, says your God.

So they have this picture, this imagery, from their Jewish belief. But now, they're learning more about their husband, as it were, and they're learning that this church body is compared, not the same as Israel, but compared to one who rejects the Maker in a similar way, their husband.

And so, it would have struck at the heart. It would have definitely got their attention. There's no doubt about that. They would have studied long and hard about this kind of marriage relationship that they had with the Lord. And for James to label them as adulteresses would have struck instantly. It would have probably caught him off guard a little bit.

And we say here in this next point here that as a jealous lover, God asks that we return to him an exclusive and unwavering love. This idea of flirting with the world is not a part of the new man. Our allegiance to God is to be wholehearted and consistent. Well, that's a tall order. But it's not an order that they hadn't heard before. They would have been familiar with this exact situation. Now they know more about God and they've seen God's grace and His willingness to come as a substitute and solve the sin problem for them.

And so they got a picture into a gracious God in a way that they had never seen as a Jew. not in the fullness of how Christ painted that picture for them as literally their new bridegroom. And that's where Revelation picks up with this imagery again and carries on with these believers who didn't have access to in the book of Revelation, but from our perspective, we know that that marriage relationship with the church and with the bridegroom being Christ himself is picked up and made more specific and more clear as it relates to the body of Christ. But this is not something that they fully understood yet. But they did understand the imagery between Israel and God himself. And they were just at the early stages of having understood the church being the bride and Christ being the bridegroom. But this is all new.

But nonetheless, this was the imagery that began the teaching that Paul John would all pick up on later and expand out. It was not James' job to explain the marriage relationship between Christ and the church, but it started with this metaphor that existed in Jewish times.

He says, friendship with the world. And it's interesting, I think that word friendship is lightly translated in the New American Standard, but it's phileo, right? We know the different types of love in the scripture. We've studied that. This isn't agape love, but it's phileo love.

It's a kind of love that you have for a friend. And that's the love or affection for, literally speaking about the type of love for the world, things, philosophies, our body. You know, to kind of touch on some of the things you mentioned earlier, Al, you can, as an adulteress, you can flirt with and become friends with phileo, have a love and affection for things that are worldly. They can be attitudes, literally things, philosophies, and even this body itself. This body is a part of this world. Right? It will die in this world. It belongs to this world. Our body itself, this physical body, is a part of it. And so, friendship with the world could could be very broadly understood.

I think probably for these Jewish believers, it wasn't necessarily any one specific thing, but we would probably say that these Jewish believers had a desire to be leaders and teachers like they had been in the Jewish body before. I shouldn't say body, but in the Jewish system. to be leaders and teachers so they could obtain all the trappings associated with that. What does that mean? When I was in the Jewish system of Judaism, I saw my system. I knew where I could go. I knew how to study under a rabbi and eventually obtain the power that I needed within the system. I knew how to gain money within the system. I could be well paid as a leader or a teacher.

And so they would have wanted to know, how do I climb the ladder? And they were fussing and fighting about some of these things, very likely. They also probably were very influenced with the pagan hedonism that we talked about last week. That is, being tempted to buy into a hedonistic world system where I need to get what I need to get. I need to get my own life moving forward in the way that I most identify with and desire.

And the pagan world would have said, that's exactly right. And let me show you how you can do that. You can go over here. And you've got commerce and capability within business, and you've got over here, this is a way that you can pleasure yourself anytime in any way. And you can go over here. And so the pagan system had a way to satisfy all the hedonistic desires.

And it would have been very difficult to ignore those. It's no different than today, is it? It doesn't matter the age so much as the availability of sin has always been there, hasn't it? And so we're not saying that these believers had access to something that was greater and more challenging than ourselves. It just simply means that that was the specific issues that they were dealing with at the time. And it led to lust, it led to covetousness, and it led to frustration and eventually led into violence.

And James is trying to attack that perspective by saying you're an adulteress and you made yourself a friend with this system. And the results we'll talk about next. Al? I was just going to say that we say friendship with the world and sometimes that doesn't do anything in my mind. I just think friendship, like casual acquaintance. Yeah, it's actually a love or affection form. Where it's more an attachment to, an entry into the point of view, the world view that the world has.

And I think of Christ's words, you cannot serve God and man. You can't be attached to both. Just like James said in the early part about asking for wisdom, You can't be double-minded about it. That's right. Ian, he's carrying that exact thought into this verse. That's exactly right. You can't bring the world and God in together and say, oh, I'm going to blend them together and I'm going to live in the world, but I'm going to trust God to take care of me for the other things. Yeah, I think that you're right.

The word friendship, I think, is loosely translated, as I mentioned. It is a deeper kind of friendship that could be better rendered as a love and an affection for. We're not talking about the grace-based love of agape here, but we are talking about the kind of love that you would have for a true friend. is the same word that is being communicated here by James as a very deep love for a friend, but it's not motivated in the same way that agape is. So it's a worldly perspective. It's not a divine kind of love, it's a worldly type of love. So, we have that.

What about hostility toward God? Because friendship with the world is hostility with God. So maybe we should say friendship with the world is hostility to God, because that's exactly what James says. So, you know, when you say friendship with the world doesn't really do anything for you, well how about hostility toward God? Because that's what it is. So if somebody says, I can have phileo love for the world and the things of it, and you can say, well, what that equals according to James is hostility towards God.

And it is that double-mindedness that James talked about earlier. But friendly love for the world results in a state of enmity with God. These are battle terms. And we're going to see a few battle terms in war. military terms come out throughout these verses, but this is the first one, this hostility. It creates enmity with God. We cannot be on friendly terms with God if we follow the world's philosophy.

Al, do you want to read Matthew 6.24 for us? It just happens to be what I was saying. That's right. I wanted you to be able to read it since you quoted it.

No one can serve two masters, for either they will hate the one and love the other, or else they'll be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve two masters. So you've got masters again, this idea of military structure, and the enmity that occurs when you serve multiple masters. And so that's what's going on here.

The world wants us to exclude God from all aspects of life, and God wants us to include Him in all parts of life. Without Him, we can do nothing. Les, do you want to read John 15 5 for us? Go ahead, what was your question while she's looking that one up?

I was just going to say, you're saying like military terms. One of the men in our Friday morning Bible study was deeply involved with the military during wartime as well as peacetime. And one of the points that he has made in our Bible study conversations is the military functions efficiently only when people obey the directives that come from above. You depend on the people in your group following the military way, the military thought that they've been trained in and that they're supposed to think like. You're not supposed to branch out and be creative because that puts other members of your squad in danger.

You follow the master. That's right. Authority is absolutely critical. And so this idea of you can't serve two masters because each one of them says, I'm the authority and you follow this if you're one of mine. And the other says, no, I'm the authority, you follow this. That's right.

And just to kind of take that a little bit further, I know that there are a lot of believers, I've been one of them, in the past that says, this idea of authority really, I have an authority issue. I want to be a believer, or I want to be a part of the church, but this idea of authority, I just don't like it. And so I want God to kind of water himself down. And I'm going to use an interpretation that waters God's authority down so that ultimately it's not as demanding. Because James is very demanding. And this is a New Testament book. We find out that James is about the doing and Paul is about the how that gets done. And we find out that that's a restful kind of obedience to an authority, an ultimate authority.

But we bucked that system really early, and I think a lot of the whole hippie movement is a visual picture of how human nature wants to find itself outside of an authority. Well, what's interesting is that there's really no neutrality with regards to authority. No man can actually not have an authority. So, what you do is you just change who that is and where that authority lies. So, the hippie movement did not lack an authority. They became their own authority and they became their own system.

There's not a neutrality saying, you know, I'm just kind of in the middle. I'm not this or I'm not that. Well, you are. You're one or the other. Or, you have created a new authority and you're claiming your own authority as the final authority. So, you can't escape authority. Man cannot escape it. It's just where he places it. he or she places it.

And so that idea of watering God's word down so it's not so authoritative only moves that authority from God's word to potentially your own interpretive perspectives so that you can serve yourself. And I think that's a really important perspective with regards to authority is that you can take God as little as you want. I'll take a little and add it to a system. Well, that system becomes an authoritative perspective that is on par, at least in your mind, with what God is saying. You've just redefined who the authority is. So when people say, I don't really like the way that God has that in mind, I say, well, you like something because there's an authority in this area that you're struggling with that you've just redefined.

And in Romans 1, God talks about trading the truth for a lie. You've moved it from the creator to the creature. So somewhere they've taken a creator authority and they've reidentified that authority into a creature or to something that has been created.

And it's that great exchange that we talk about in Romans 1. Let's move on to the second part of verse four. Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. So here we have a similar way of saying the same thing. We've got a few different terms being added here.

The word wishes here is to desire to have or experience something with the implication of some reasoned planning. So this isn't like, ah, just wish. It's like a kind of a happenstance kind of desire, or just kind of some real, I'm just kind of going with the moment here. This isn't going with the moment kind of wishing. This is a, I've thought this through to some degree, and I'm planning, and I'm using my own personal volition to choose these things. So, you know, wishes here could be a little bit loosely translated as well without a deeper understanding.

If you look at James 3.4, I'm sorry we didn't get to John. Did you have that still? Oh, I'll get it back real quick. I forgot we were going to go into that.

I got on to the authority issue, but let's do, and then Pat, if you could look up James 3.4, which we just started off with. Well, no we didn't. That was the previous chapter. So James 3, 4 for Pat and then John 15. I'm the vine, you are the branches.

He who abides in me and I in him, he bears much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. So we're talking about the fact that the Lord desires the believer to abide and be part of his authority and his perspective and to trust that. And we find out that without that abiding, the believer can do nothing. And so that's the opposite of being at hostility towards God, attempting to solve for your lusts and your covetousness in your own way. The Lord says, abide in me, because apart from me you can do nothing, and that's his desire.

So that's what we were looking at in that last slide. And then to just kind of build on this perspective of the planning or desiring to accomplish something as being a broader definition of wishes, That you can read James 3 for. Look also at ships, although they are so large and are driven by fierce winds, they are turned by a very small rudder wherever the pilot desires. So that word desires is the same word as wishes here. So the New American Standard decided to translate wishes instead of desire.

But in that previous verse we're talking about the tongue. And he uses some nautical imagery to help understand that this is a pilot that's driving a ship with the winds and he's controlling that rudder where he wants it to go. He's making a willful decision about where his tongue leads him. And in the same way, therefore whoever wishes that is willfully desires and plans to accomplish to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. So that's the expanded view of that. And it focuses, like I said, on our volition.

It doesn't mean that we may not have friends who are unbelievers. It doesn't mean that we should move to an isolated island in the middle or a spot in the middle of the wilderness. The issue is our will. We are not to desire friendship with the world. To be on warm terms with the world is to be on warm terms with the enemy of God, which in turn makes us the enemy of God also. So what Macaulay is saying there is that we're not to go create a commune so that we can avoid all all of the world. We're to be in the world and not of it, is what we're told in another scripture.

And so it doesn't mean that we isolate ourselves or that we don't have friends that are unbelievers. It simply means that you do not willfully choose to have phileo love for those things. Does that make sense? So you're amidst them, but you are not choosing to love them with phileo love, because that breeds an attitude of worldliness, and you end up being labeled an adulteress for that.

And that's what James is bringing out here. And here the word enemy, again derived from the word used for hostility, so it's just a derivative of that word that we had in the previous part of this verse for hostility. He just builds on it again, and here it's translated enemy. The opposite of this word is the word we translate So that's the opposite of enemy is the Beloved. Now how many times did James mention Beloved already? And here he uses the opposite of Beloved. So here's the thing. These believers were beloved. He'd already referred to them as such.

But he says, when you go about this attitude and this willful choosing to have a phileo love for the world and its attitudes and its things and its desire to lead, whatever it is that you're making yourself a friend with, you are not being who you are. You are being the opposite of who you are. You are acting in opposition to who you really are. You are acting in opposition to being a beloved.

James 1.16 talks about Beloved. 19.2.5 we see the word Beloved, Beloved, Beloved, and here we've got one who is the opposite of the Beloved, one who is an hostility against.

So we are Beloved, not enemies. It is now unnatural for us to operate as enemies. So in our condition, in our position, we are never enemies with God because we are in Christ and Christ is our representative. In our condition, so long as we have this worldly body, we can make ourselves to act and behave in total opposition to who we are. And when you become friends with the world and you willfully choose to adopt that way of thinking, you are operating in opposition to who you really are.

That's why there's a waging war within your members, in the previous verses that we looked at last week. This creates a serious war. We talked about this spiritual and physical anatomy last week, and I just want to bring it up again. You've got this physical realm that's got this body and it's got the brain, and the brain contains psychological firing of synapses that produce a certain emotion and a certain desire of volition. and we call it the mind, and we've got this very physical realm that science desires to understand.

And then the Bible tells us that it's beyond just the physical. You've got the spiritual realm where you've got a spirit and a soul, and it's attached, it's a part of the body so long as it's on this earth. But then we're also told in the scripture that God dwells in that spiritual place, not in that physical place. Our physical bodies will be removed from our soul and spirit at some point, and God does not dwell in what will be put to death. God dwells in the eternal part of man, that is the spirit and the soul. The sin nature is attached to that physical body, so once this physical body is done away with, We no longer have this waging war that we've had as human beings saved by the Lord. So you can now kind of understand why Paul says he would desire, he can't make up his mind. He longs to be with the body to teach and train them, but yet he equally longs to be with Christ. as far as death is concerned, because it's the war.

And it's interesting that God uses those temptations. We talked about in previous verses about the process of temptation being similar to that of fishing. I don't know if you guys remember that earlier, some of those earlier lessons. But that process of luring ourselves out and tempting ourselves and seeing ourselves get pregnant with sin and then eventually conceive that imagery that we've looked at in the past, that whole process is something that we go through regularly on a daily basis.

And that waging war is best pictured as happening between the physical and the spiritual realm. And that's what these believers were struggling with. And it created a position in their condition, maybe a little wordy there, where they were enemies. And James is saying, you quarrel, you fight, you're an adulteress, and you're an enemy with God because of these things. But let me tell you where the solution starts to reside, and that's what we'll get into in a little bit later with these verses. And so he starts to build the different perspective. I'm gonna have to move a little bit quicker.

Or do you think that scripture speaks to no purpose, is what he says next. Or do you think this is an opinion? Do you presume without particular certainty? Do you have the opinion? Do you think it's possible that scripture speaks to no purpose? Scripture is specifically the written special revelation from God.

We've got this chart below to kind of remind ourselves that we're talking about that lower part of the chart. We're not talking about general revelation, nature, providence, and conscious. Excuse me. We're talking about special and specifically the scripture, the lowercase word as Vern called it last week.

Whereas Jesus Christ is the special revelation is the uppercase word. So special revelation is the word. We've got Jesus who is the word, and then we've got the written word, the lowercase word. And here, James is referring to that lowercase word, the scripture.

Do you think that the scripture speaks to no purpose? In other words, you do all this stuff, but the scripture has a solution for it. Do you think it's not applicable? Do you think it's vain? No purpose at all? He jealously desires the spirit which he has made to dwell in us, is what he then says that scripture communicates. So this is where I've got a few minutes to deal with a bit of a challenging verse. This is probably the most difficult verse in James to translate. And if you were to read all of your translations today, you probably would get a different translation in each of them. I've looked at this fairly closely and feel that I'm doing justice to what the text says in terms of the grammar, but let's back up and think about what are the issues here.

First of all, if we're to go with the New American Standard, which I'm going to convey that we should not, what we're saying here, first of all, the first issue is James didn't have any New Testament scripture referred to, so where is this verse in the Old Testament?

We can't take this verse and search it in any form or fashion and find it in the Old Testament. Remember, James is the first book of the New Testament written. He didn't have any of the New Testament authorship in scripture contained for him to look at yet. So he would have been referring to something in the Old Testament. So, we don't know where this is in the Old Testament.

Second of all, second issue is, where do we ever see the spirit dwelling in the believer in the Old Testament? It says that the Spirit was with them, but He was not in them. So no passages about God making the Holy Spirit indwell people in the Old Testament. So it's impossible to translate the quotation exactly this way, so that New American Standard creates a bit of a theological problem. So what was James doing? Was he referring to the Old Testament believer and a dwelling that we never have seen? Or is he actually summarizing something from the Old Testament and adding some additional revelation to it? And I think that's actually what we see. But let's break it down a little further.

The word he here, and it's going to get a little bit greeky geeky here, but just try to follow along. in your notes. The word he is not in the Greek text, but it's implied from the verb desires. And that's not always wrong. Often the subject is embedded in the verb, but the interpretation would be that God is jealously desiring the Holy Spirit that indwells believers. So that's got some issues. So that's not taught in the Old Testament, and second, it implies that our sin can cause a separation between God the Father and God the Spirit. And that's not true. We know that they are in eternal fellowship with one another, and they don't have a separation.

So here the word, the spirit, the form of the word can function as either the subject or the direct object. In the New American Standard, translators have made the choice to make God the direct object, but the New King James Version translators made the choice to make the spirit the direct object. So in New King James, it says, the spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously. It's a little bit different.

You don't have that conflict between one another. So it seems best to take the noun spirit as a reference, not to our human spirit, but rather to the indwelling Holy Spirit. To speak of the Holy Spirit who dwells in us is normal New Testament usage. The verb dwell refers to a permanent residency.

God is always intolerant of divided allegiances because he is described as a jealous God in Exodus 25, and we have a lot of other passages there. So, Wiest translates it as this, the Spirit, that is the Holy Spirit, who has been caused to make his permanent home in us has a passionate desire, that is, to control us, to the point of envy, that is, of any control and dwelling sin might have over us. So, we have this issue, can the spirit be jealous?

Well, we've got this whole imagery of the marriage and the adulterous, and we see in the Old Testament God being jealous in many cases over his bride in terms of how they chose to be idolatrous. So idolatry is in many cases pictured as the one that they are adulterous with. And it creates a jealousy in God. And so for James to pick up that imagery of the Spirit being jealous about the attitude of worldliness within us, it seems to be a summarization of what the Old Testament taught with God in Israel. And so what we're seeing here, I believe, is a summary of that jealousy of God for his people being an internal thing now at a personal level. And James is identifying with that as these Jewish believers are now struggling with worldliness on an internal, personal scale. So James makes what is more corporate in the Old Testament very personal. as the first book in the New Testament. Yes? I keep looking or thinking back to this first 1 Corinthians 6, 19 and 20.

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your body. So it's just, I guess, another way to look at that, that there's only room for one. The Holy Spirit, you know, in our temple, there's not room for anybody else. That's right. And when you behave differently, as a choice of the will to do so, we saw that in the wishes earlier, you create yourself, you don't create yourself. You make yourself to be something that you're not. And it's not consistent with who you are.

James didn't have access to that verse yet, but that expands on this truth, doesn't it? And Paul really goes into the spiritual dimension of how these things take place and how they get resolved by beholding the Lord through his word. But James is just bringing out very clear do's and don'ts, Old Testament imagery. He's making it personal. And in the next part of the verse, he actually goes into grace.

And just for the sake of time, we probably need to do that. But just as a kind of a follow on to the end, and thanks for bringing that verse up. I think it's a really good one to help expand an understanding of this. So I've translated this verse. I have not translated it, but I've chosen to use the New King James version here.

Or do you think that the scripture speaks to know Perthers? The spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously. So in verse four here, James has accused his readers of spiritual unfaithfulness. If they were not willing to accept this indictment, he asks in verse 5 what they think about the Old Testament passages dealing with God's jealous longing for his people.

Think about that, he says. This is the significance of the introductory conjunction or. So that or, he says, do you think, or rather, we're just reading this out here. Do you think the scripture speaks without reason or intently? So he's just referring and summarizing back to what this jealousy was like for Israel and God. And he says, do you think that had no purpose? And you think that the jealousy doesn't still apply at a personal level? It does. Of course they don't think this.

Consequently, it is necessary to believe that friendship with the world is enmity toward God, and thus it is spiritual unfaithfulness. It's possible to interpret this as being the human spirit as well, because spirit is not capitalized in the Greek text. And some commentators, translators, would have this be the human spirit. But I think with the imagery that's being communicated here with marriage, and adulteresses, and jealousy. It all paints a picture of God being the one who is jealous about the adulterous Israelite. And I think, James, just to stay consistent with the imagery that I see there, I would not choose to go down the path of this being a human spirit. And there's other textual reasons as well, but just to let you know that that translation and that theological perspective does exist. But he gives greater grace, therefore it says God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble.

So this will be our final verse that we look at today. I just went ahead and broke down these words point by point and then tried to summarize a few thoughts from it. Greater. So this is the upper range of a scale of extent with the possible implication of importance in relevant contexts. So here's the thing.

He's saying What you have here, what God gives is far greater. So I'm comparing in context to what it is that you're choosing to do by making friendship with the world. But God's grace on scale to that is far greater. So grace here is the absolutely free expression of the loving kindness of God to men, finding its only motive in the bounty and benevolence of the giver. It's unearned and it's unmerited.

It's a definition that is similar to what we would always use for the word grace here, but what James is doing, and I think it's important here since he's not talking about how the doing gets done, that was Paul's job, He does introduce the source of the solution, and that is God and His grace. And isn't that exactly what we talk about all the time when we think about not living under law, but living under grace, and how Paul extrapolates that perspective for us throughout many of his writings so that we understand that we exist by grace. Verne often references grace as being the Niagara Fall, You know, that scale of the Niagara Fall, we have grace beyond grace.

And James is starting to get that, and he's starting to communicate that right here. He's saying, you've got this problem, but God gives grace that is greater, far greater on scale, much greater. And when we get into Paul, we start getting a better picture of how amazing that grace is. It gets bigger and bigger as we start to understand it. But James introduces it here. He says that God is opposed to the proud.

So here James is actually quoting from a passage in the Old Testament, literally Proverbs 3.34, and he's communicating this idea of opposition.

And here's another military term, to set an army and array against, to arrange in battle order. So you make yourself in hostility toward God, but God sets an army in opposition to the proud. So he's saying your choices, your wishing to be friends with the world and make yourself an adulteress is a proud thing to do. And God sets his opposition against that as an array, as an army. The word is opposed here. But it has that military perspective of how God sets his army up against that. And how does he do that?

By not giving grace to the proud. In pride, you get no grace. But in humility, you do. And that's what the second part of that says. But it gives grace to the humble. So proud being that haughty, arrogant state that I can have both. I can be friends with the world and I can serve two masters. James tells us that God views that as a proud, arrogant, haughty place to be and you do not receive grace in your condition when you take that stance against God.

There's a parallel of sorts with knowledge. I mean, you're talking here about the will and essentially an emotional attachment which then leads to physical attachment. I think of, again, back in the Old Testament, knowledge puffs up. And this is what happens. If I think I know better than God, I never phrase it that way. But I read something in scripture and say, well, that sounds good, but, and my knowledge I think is sufficient to solve the problem, sufficient to live my life.

And really, that ties in with being friendship with the world. Absolutely. Satan loves to say, Oh, did God really say this? Well, was it pride, ultimately, the sin that got a hold of Lucifer? A sense that I can understand it all myself. That's exactly right. And in all instances of pride, it starts with, I know better.

It doesn't matter how, it doesn't matter if it becomes only mental. Dart's head or heart? Yeah. It doesn't matter if it actually gets to be a physical pride, where anyone ever even knows about it or sees that friendship with the world, but it starts internally with the idea that I know better.

I know better than. And here God is saying, I am an opposition. I set up an army, an array, a battle order against that way of thinking. That is not at all the context in which greater grace is given. A greater amount of grace is given. An abundant scale of grace is not given to a prideful attitude, but rather, in contrast to that, it's the humble. So this is a condition of condition or lot, meaning humble, poor, of low degree.

And we saw that these Jewish believers in James 1.9, they were struggling with that issue. Someone read James 1-9 real quick. The last few minutes. You've got three minutes. Sprinting to the finish.

The brother in humble circumstances ought to take pride in his high position. Isn't that interesting? The pride is actually through low and humble means as opposed to the worldly view of pride which would have you achieving great things and having much and knowing much. But here God is saying the pride is actually in being in a state of humility where great grace is given.

Don't you think of Paul when he goes through the list of all his reasons for being proud and then saying, I count all of this as rubbish? They would have loved to have heard that, wouldn't they? They would have loved to have heard Paul's perspective, but at that particular time, Paul was still prideful. You know, Paul was still, you know, not sure exactly where it lines up in terms of the exact timeline, but they would have known Paul as one who was in opposition to them.

But here he turns around and he defines what they're dealing with later, in the book of Philippians there, with going into all the things that he has a right to be prideful about, yet none of those things lead to pride and I count them all as rubbish for the excellency of the knowledge of God.

So he essentially says, I'm proud. I'm proud of the God that I serve. I'm proud of who my commander is. That's right. So let's read these last two quotes and then we'll wrap up. So God has set a high standard of wholehearted love and devotion for his people, but he gives grace that is greater than his right rigorous demand Quoted here in Proverbs, and he reminds us that God opposes the proud, those who pursue their own pleasures.

However, he gives grace to the humble, those who put God's desires first in their lives. He gives grace to withstand the onslaught of the flesh within the world without. And then finally from Macaulay here, God's grace is the only thing that is greater than man's need. There are four concepts about God's grace in this verse.

First, we must realize its availability, He gives. Second, we must realize its adequacy, greater grace. Third, we must realize it can be hindered by pride. Fourth, we must realize its condition, grace to the humble. You want grace? Humility is a prerequisite. And that humility finds itself beholding the Lord through His word. and by doing that you are choosing God's perspective over your own human perspective. Let's pray.

Lord we thank you so much that your grace is available to us and in this verse we see that it's greater grace and Lord that by choosing to To follow the authority outlined in the scripture with regards to who we are, where we've come from, and why we're here, we know that we can be humble and we can find ourselves choosing your divine viewpoint for life. And by doing that, we have access to grace that is beyond any measure. And Lord, we thank you that through Paul we understand that that grace is carried out in the doing as we trust the Lord to do it, and that we rest. And we thank you for the truths that we can combine through the scripture that we have access to today to know that you truly are our life. It's in your name that we pray. Amen.