Gooding, David: 7 - Our Moral Judgement

It is exceedingly kind of you, ladies and gentlemen, to come this afternoon so soon after lunch. Eh, kind and courageous as well, so that we can, hook or by crook, finish, in some sense, the epistle by James. Reminds me of the story of Paul on his way to Rome. After a fortnight of rather bumpy traveling, eh, eventually they were obliged to scramble as best they could to the shore. All of them got there, some on planks, some holding on to bits of wood, flotsam and jetsam, some swimming, some dragging the rest, but they got there in some kind of fashion. I'm afraid our lectures this week have been like that. They were bumpy enough to start with, then in the middle we got out of phase, and here you have come to the rescue, hook or by crook, we've got to scramble up the shore, uh, now in this afternoon's session. You may remember that in these last two days together, we have been thinking that in chapters three, four, and five of this epistle, James talks to us about three major features of the human personality. In chapter three, we saw it was the faculty of speech. Yesterday, in chapter four, we noticed it was our desires and our pleasures. In chapter five, we shall discover this afternoon, it is our moral judgment, our sense of right and wrong. All three of them, we suggested, are the lovely gifts of God given to mankind in the day of his innocence, beautiful gifts of God for which we should never cease to thank him. But all three of these major features of the human personality have been in some part injured, perverted, put out of gear, got out of control, and such like things as a result of the fall. When God saves us, he begins his work of reparation, of reconstitution. But that isn't quite the end of the matter. If we would come to spiritual maturity and to perfection, then these three great departments of our human personality must all of them part by part, be brought under the redeeming grace and power of the Lord Jesus. Now, yesterday we began to consider the second feature, that is our desires and our pleasures. We noticed how God provided man with these wonderful things, desires and pleasures, in the day of his innocence. All of them to be enjoyed under man's control, of course, the control of man's spirit, that spirit in communion with the Father of spirits. Thus was man free to enjoy these desires, these great engines, these motivators of his behavior and attitudes, and the delightful pleasures that God has built in as side effects into our living. Now then we saw how Satan, by his craftiness, put this thing out of joint and got man to think that he could enjoy life to the full if he let God go hang, took no notice of or positively disobeyed his word, and cutting fellowship with God relied solely on his desires, his ambitions, and his pleasures. We noticed how sadly that has come unstuck. By that means, Satan has built what the Bible calls the world. The world doesn't necessarily mean a collection of evil things, things evil in themselves. One of the secrets of Satan's tactics of worldliness is to take the lovely things of life, lovely things that came from the hand of God, and use them to take man's heart away from God. And when that happens, of course, then these lovely things themselves ultimately turn into a disaster. We were thinking about that yesterday, and I want now to pick up at that point and say a few more words about chapter four and then to move into chapter five. We shall not do any formal reading. I ask you, if you will, to open your Bibles now, and what I had proposed to do is just to go over in skeleton fashion the arguments, the material and the arguments that James uses in these remaining verses. It will be very much of a skeleton in order to point out the how what James is writing about and what his main themes and arguments are. The flesh I must leave you to put upon the bones. So if you could open your Bible now to chapter four and verse uh four where it begins, you adulteresses, know you not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? And if you care, follow me down, as we shall be referring to the text from time to time. If thus we have something to do and something in our hands and something to look at, it will help in the valiant fight that you're going to put up against drowsiness and sleep. I myself had a superb lunch, you'll see, and uh, if I go to sleep, pray wake me up in time to go home. So Satan has taken the lovely things of G- uh, that God has given us, our desires and our pleasures, and used it to take man's heart away from the Lord. God's answer to that, of course, is the preaching of the gospel. Not to get rid of our desires, but to redirect them. Not to suppress pleasure, but to offer us true pleasure. We are to remember that finally we shall be admitted to the courts of heaven, where at God's right hand there are pleasures forever more. As believers, we must not give ourselves, and still less the world, the idea that Christianity is a killjoy affair. God is the God, the happy God, who delights to give his people pleasure. So it is that the Lord Jesus in the gospel offers to quench the unbeliever's thirst if he will repent and believe, offering them the water of life and the bread of life to satisfy their thirst and their hunger. But once we have eaten of that living bread and drunk of that living water, it doesn't mean that all our desires and all our pressures are at once put into order, does it? And we were noticing yesterday how possible it is for believers still to find their desires and their pleasures out of gear with the Lord and his word. Possible for a believer to allow the enemy to dangle in front of him not some vicious way of behaving, but lovely things and delightful things. And by that means draw a believer away from the Lord. And our first question this afternoon is, how serious is that when it happens? It is exceedingly serious. It is, says James, spiritual adultery. It is disloyalty of heart to the Lord Jesus. James calls believers who give way to this kind of thing adulteresses, and it's not a very pleasant word, is it? But you see, it is an ugly word that describes an ugly thing. Says Paul, who naturally agrees with James in everything. He says, I have espoused you as a chaste version, virgin to the Lord Jesus, and I am afraid, lest that crafty old serpent, the devil, should corrupt your thoughts from the one single-hearted loyalty to the Lord Jesus. And you'll see that is precisely what Satan tries to do. To get us divided in our hearts, divided in our loyalties to the Lord Jesus. He will try it intellectually. Also, let me give you my expert knowledge on these things. When a girl is not yet engaged, she is open, isn't she, to keep, she is free to keep an open mind. Yes? Shall it be Thomas? Now, there's a lot to be said for Thomas. You'll see, look at his handsome face, you'll see, and his manly stature. But then, he's a bit overbearing. Well, shall it not be Thomas, or shall it be Fred? Now, Fred isn't quite so handsome, but oh, he is kind. You can see it in his eye, you'll see. Make a very nice father to my children, yes. But Fred hasn't got too much to deal with himself. Um, well, what about George? Now, he's got a beautiful Alfa Romeo, you'll see, and it's bright red. Let it be George. Shall it be George? Well, she doesn't know which. There's no sense in hurrying it, my dear. Take your time and make up your mind and choose carefully, of course. Make sure it's a believer, won't you? Um... But while she's not yet engaged, she can keep an open mind. Once she has given her word... she is not free to keep an open mind about the Lord Jesus, about his deity, about his claims on her life. The girl who has been engaged and betrothed to young men, or vice versa, of course, and keeps flirting around with other fellows, she's not giving a sign of being broad-minded. She's giving a sign that she is immoral. And you know, young folks, if I may talk to you, Satan will do his best to get you to be intellectually dishonest, disloyal, intellectually disloyal to the Lord Jesus. Using that lovely thing that God has given you, your intellect. Given, uh, using that lovely thing, the longing, the desire to know. And then craftily taking you and saying, look here, if you're going to satisfy your thirst for knowledge and your inquiring mind, because you are an intelligent young person, aren't you? Not like some of these other dunderheads. You think, you're saying. You're not going to be satisfied with just any old explanation. You, you love to go into the deep things, don't you? So, little by little, and little by little, and little by little, his satanic majesty will siphon off that desire, that intellectual desire. Get it in all sorts of things, lovely in themselves. It could be science, couldn't it? Or physics or chemistry. And chemistry, to be sure, is a noble art. It is a lovely thing to study God's handiwork. It's a tragic thing to let your chemistry, your physics, or your mathematics so absorb you. Little by little, prayer is left, and Bible reading is left, and communion with the Lord Jesus is left. And presently, nothing remains of church fellowship but a formal attendance. And a man ends up at fifty five a brilliant physicist and an absolute dwarf Christian. Does it matter? It matters, says God. It matters, says Christ. It's stealing my very heart's affections. Spiritual adultery. Adultery. It's enmity with God, says James. That's pushing it far, isn't it? You say, can't be true of a believer, enmity with God. Goodness me, it can't because we've been reconciled to God by the death of his son. How can it be enmity with God? But it is, you know. If any man decides, willingly, deliberately, to be a friend of the world, and thereby constitutes himself an enemy of God. He is a dear believer, you'll see. He once was keen for the Lord, but he got involved in fishing. Now, as far as I know, there's nothing wrong in fishing, you know, with a line and a bit of string and a hook on the end. Uh, nothing wrong with it. They are the world's optimists. They're always hoping to catch. I never saw anyone catch anything yet, but never mind. If they enjoy it, it's a lovely hobby and pastime. Uh, nothing wrong in it at all. Ah, but wait a minute. It gets a grip of him. He makes a conscious decision. He abandons a prayer meeting and the study of the word. Little by little, he leaves off his walk with God. Presently, he's scarce to be seen in church at all. He's made a decision to go for fishing in a big way, and if that involves all his weekends and his time and everything, well, he's going for it. You say, well, what does that matter? That's, I mean to say, there's nothing wrong in fishing, is there? Of course there isn't. But now the devil has got him where the enemy intended to get him all the while. Using the lovely things of life, fastening on a man's desires and his pleasures, in order not to lead him nearer the Lord, but to lead him away. That's enemy's work. We have the world, says James, on the one side, and God on the other. If you choose the world side and attitude, you are constituting yourself an enemy of God. And as we saw yesterday, we are not to think that scripture speaks in vain. God longs after the spirit he has caused to dwell in us, to the point of begrudging us, all those lovely things that have taken us away from him. But if God begrudges us those things, and if we're not careful and we are his people, he will discipline us and take them away from us if need be, to bring us to our senses and bring us back. Yet, it remains true of him, he gives more grace. Grace to repent, grace to come back. And James now exhorts us, doesn't he? It's the pur- pur- purpose, you'll see, of verses six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. To point to us believers, if we've got a way in heart and our loyalties have been divided, to call on us to to come back, there is a way back, you'll see. Be subject to God, but resist the devil who has hooked you. Learn to say no. I'm not going further down that road. I'm going to, what verse eight says, draw nigh to God. Ah, to close the gap that has opened up. And to come back to the Lord, get near him. Coming back and nestling by his heart and listening to the heartthrob of God. Draw near to God. Not just some formal mouthing of a few hymns of a Sunday morning, but to come near to the Lord, to hear his very heart throb, to taste again his love. We shall cleanse our hands and purify our hearts. You double-minded, you'll say, there lies the trouble, doesn't it? Double-minded. One minute living for the Lord, but the next minute wanting to live for the world. If we're going to make spiritual maturity, that double-mindedness, that double-heartedness must come to its end, and there'd be a single heart beating for the Lord. Says James, be afflicted, mourn, weep, let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to heaviness. This isn't a recipe for every day of the Christian life, of course not. We were talking yesterday about the lovely things that God has put in our personalities, lovely desires that then he fulfills with lovely gifts, beautiful pleasures. But if it has been that those lovely things have taken us away from the Lord, then you know, rather than the laughter of enjoyment and the cackle of fun, we would be better off breaking our hearts in floods of tears. We would indeed. Coming back to the Lord in genuine repentance and saying sorry, and what fool to have been to have wasted so much of life, Then indeed tears were better than laughter. And when you come back, says James, he will raise you up, and after the rain of the tears, there will come the lovely sunshine of the joy of his presence. He's not wanting to be a killjoy. He who gave us desires and gives us pleasures, assures us that it is at his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. But you can't ultimately have the pleasures if you have no time for the Lord. And they who permanently and finally reject the Lord, they must come where desires will never be satisfied and will haunt them like writhing worms in their very insides for all eternity. By definition, of course. Ultimately, there is no good, no satisfied desire, no thirst quenched, no hunger met, no joy, no real music, apart from the God who made us and longs to redeem us. Now, in verses eleven to twelve come three verses where, or two verses rather, where James seems to be at his habit of suddenly jumping off at a tangent and introducing another subject. Well, this time he's not really doing that. Notice what he says. We are not to speak one against another. The word does not mean to spread false rumors around, like some translations suggest. It merely means to speak against. This is not a f- a a a prohibition against speaking what isn't true of the man. This is a prohibition of sometimes not saying what is true of the man. That is, suppose the man has enga- done something and is at fault. Well, if I'm an elder and I must deal with him, so I must. But if I'm a five-eighth citizen, like I am most of the time, you'll say, it's not my business to go speaking against the brother all around the world. Why should I? The law says I am to love my brother as myself. Suppose you, my brother, had fallen into some fault. Would you like, uh, somebody to be your free advertising agent and herald it from Newcastle to Port Steward? If we really loved our brother, as we should, we shouldn't say more about it than absolute necessity forced us to say, should we? But it seems to me that James is not just thinking about our general faults, for if we take it in this context, these verses have a special force, don't they? James has been discussing the matter of worldliness, and through my, uh, few and evil years, there seems to me to have been few topics where believers speak against each other more than on the question of worldliness. And in particular, criticizing each other on what pleasures they allow themselves. Have you noticed that? I think I can tell you how it comes about. Here's a good man, and before he got converted, he was head over heels in tennis. It was tennis, tennis, tennis, tennis, tennis, tennis, tennis, you'll see, every first like minutes minutes he got. He had no time for God or anything else. And sometimes after the match, he ended up, uh, the worst for wear, you'll see, in the pub. Then he got converted. He came to feel he'd wasted his life, and now he wanted to, to live for the Lord. And he wasn't going to waste his time in tennis. Very good, so he decided not to play tennis. You don't have to if you don't want to, do you? Of course you don't. You'll say. So now he's giving himself full time to the Lord. When over the garden fence, he suddenly sees another brother playing tennis. Oh! And forthwith he decides there's something seriously wrong with his spirituality. He must be worldly. I gave that kind of thing up when I got converted, he says. I see. And then he proceeds to spread it round the earth. You know what? I saw Mr. So-and-So the other day playing tennis. And his friend replies, then he'll never come and preach here again then. Well, you've not come across that kind of thing? I have. If ever of us have been tempted to talk against a brother like that, may I read you James's lesson? My brother, the inspired apostle says, you are not to speak against a brother like that. You say he's doing wrong. Well, suppose he is. The Bible says don't speak against him. You are to love him. And if you start speaking against him and blab it all round about the place, do you know what? You're doing worse than ever he could. You are now positively breaking a straightforward commandment. There isn't a commandment in the Bible that says thou shalt not play tennis. There is a commandment that says you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And if you start criticizing him, you're speaking against the law, says James. How can that be? Well, simply this, the law says thou shalt love your neighbor, and that means that you will not go up and down the country speaking against him. You say, but are we meant to take the law just... Yes, you are, sir. Yes, you are. And if you don't take the law seriously, you're trained by your behavior that you are superior to the law and no better than the law. Worse still, you're in danger of appointing yourself as the judge in the matter. When you're not the judge, says James, there's only one judge, and that is the Lord Jesus himself. He's the judge. And let me add, sir, that other brother mightn't be wrong after all, might he? What is worldliness? You say it's playing tennis. Where did you read that? Well, you said when I play tennis it... Yes, ah, when you play. It wasn't the tennis that was wrong, but the tennis was used by the devil himself to draw your heart away from Christ. That was what was wrong. That doesn't mean that because this dear brother is playing tennis, that that's drawing his heart away from Christ, does it? And how would you know anyway? Who's the judge of whether something is drawing my heart away from the Lord or not? Must it not eventually be the Lord? And who are you? A judge is another man's servant, to his own master he stands or falls, and it is a right impertinence for me to put myself between the Lord and his servants, isn't it? Of course, my dear gray-headed elder, if you see me getting too loving the world too much, as the old hymn has it, yes, you come and have a quiet word in my ear. That's another thing. God be thanked for elders like that. As you gently inquire whether perhaps this or that is taking me away from the Lord. But then you would have the wisdom not to go blamming it around all the place, wouldn't you? But I repeat, James says it's not for us to be judged in the matter. I have enough to judge my own heart in the things that I allow, and make sure that these lovely things, innocent in themselves and good for recreation and whatever they may be, I, I, I, I have enough to guard myself, lest I go over the line and they become means of taking my heart away from the Lord. And you, my brother, I suggest, have got equal enough job to do it for yourself. We must beware of making mere rules, mustn't we? In my day, there was a great deal of, uh, attention drawn to, um, the color of women's stockings, and if they were a certain color, they were worldly, and if they weren't a certain color, they were okay. You'll see it was a very arbitrary rule, and in the end turned out to be a nonsense. Our dear Russian brothers, God bless them, many of them won't wear a tie. They think that's very worldly. I don't know what they think of you, sir. Mm. We must beware of making rules and regulations and then judging other people by them. For a man who seems ne- to be keeping the rules and has never played a game of tennis in his life had better watch out in his business, lest his business take his heart away from the Lord. Yes. But then we move on to another matter, verses thirteen till the end of the chapter, where James warns us not to allow ourselves, even in our business lives, to become independent of the Lord. We so easily get enthused, don't we, and rightly enthused. God has given us ambitions, and right our ambitions. They ought to be ambitions, as Paul put it, we are ambitious to please the Lord, and if God has put into our hands the stewardship of money or capital or factory or firm, and the heavy responsibilities of running the firm well, because upon its smooth and proper running depends the welfare of many a workman, his wife, and family. Let God be given, let us give thanks for men who know how to, to, to manage. Very often the workman goes home to bed and hasn't another ki- care in his head, has he, till tomorrow. Whereas the manager who's got to find the funds for the salaries at the end of the week can spend many a sleepless night. Let's be thankful for the various gifts that God has given. And if God has put us in business or whatever, it's easy for the joy of it, the thrill of it, the excitement of it to carry us away, isn't it? And we've got plans here, and we've got plans there, and this is what we're going to do next year. And what's wrong with that? Well, first, you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, to start off with, do you? Are you proposing to be alive tomorrow? Yes, I hope so. Do you know? You don't know, do you? Why has God left it uncertain? Well, one effect it has is this. That we have to take every single day as a gift from God to which we had no right. We couldn't take it for granted. We are dependent each day upon the Lord. And therefore, that habit of mind that is not, uh, mere pharisaical religion, but constantly reminds itself, if the Lord will, and if we live, we'll do this and that, brings us to a more realistic, uh, confrontation with life, doesn't it? And at the same time, it stops that incipient worldliness, which is the creeping tendency to become independent of the Lord in our lives. For that, after all, is what worldliness is. Getting away from the Lord and the sense of dependence upon him. But with that, we come to our final section, which is chapter five. And I have suggested that the third great feature with which James deals here is the matter of our moral sense, our sense of justice, our sense of right and wrong. A marvelous part of the human personality, is it not, as we said the other day. God could have made us to work like animals or like robots, without free will, and therefore without a true moral judgment. He didn't. He made us higher than bumblebees, did he not? Or even lions in the forest. He made us human beings with a God-given faculty, a sense of right and wrong. A moral sense. You say, where, Mr. Preacher, do you get that out of James chapter five? Well, let's look at the first, uh, verses, verses one to six. It is, as you see, a long denunciation of wicked, unregenerate men, called now upon to weep and howl for your, the miseries that are coming upon you. Men who, according to verse two and three, have stockpiled their riches. In the selfishness and miserlessness of their heart. It's not merely that they've got a change of clothes for every day of the, uh, week and every week of the year. They've got so many clothes that they never use them, and they're packed away in the wardrobe, and they're going moth-eaten and moldy. The... while many are going half naked around the world. They got money so stockpiled that, if you can believe it, that's a, that's a forceful metaphor, isn't it? The very gold is going rusty for lack of use. Stored away and unnecessary. James isn't talking about sensible capitalism, is he? He's talking about what in his day was nothing short of oppression of the poor, racketeering, building up vast fortunes beyond anything that could conceivably be used, let alone needed. While the people who worked for these rich men were scarce paid a living wage. And the cries of the workmen who have reached your fields, and you've swindled them out of their proper wages, says James, has come up into the ears of the Lord Sabioth. And presently the Lord will judge. So James talks to us about the coming of the Lord, does he not? Verse eight. And again, he talks to us about the coming of the Lord throughout the chapter. He is talking then here about the problem of evil in our world. Here it is commercial, economic evil. The oppression of the poor. Evil can take all sorts of forms, can't it? Not just economic evil, political evil, and other kinds. Our world is cursed with it, isn't it? Still, with its lies and its cheating and its double talk, at the lowest and, I might add, at the highest levels of government. The problem of evil. And then, as he comes down the chapter, he talks about the problem of suffering, doesn't he? The problem of suffering and pain. Look at the reference in verse eleven to Job. We know his long, long story. The anguish of a dear man of God who tried to live for the Lord and was overcome by disaster to his house and then his children, and afflicted with torturing disease. The problem of pain. Two major problems in our world. They're not to be laughed at, are they, or treated lightly. They are a problem to unconverted men and women. They can remain problems even to believers. It's an interesting thing, isn't it? The very fact that we can see things wrong shows us that we are moral creatures. Doesn't it? That's Paul's argument in Romans chapter two. Wherefore thou art without excuse, O man, whoever thou art that judges, because you judge and then you go and do the same thing. We've got a conscience, we can, we can see that things are wrong. Here's Mrs. Brown in the supermarket, you see, and she's met Mrs. Smith. Oh, she says, ah, have you heard about Mrs. Jones? No, she's run off, you know, with the baker. Oh. And her companion says, well, she oughtn't to have done that, did she? That's wrong. And the first woman said, yes, but look, he was a brute, her husband was, and I can understand. Oh. So there they are, and the one is accusing, and then the other is excusing, which shows what? That the dear ladies concerned have got a sense of right and wrong, haven't they? Else they wouldn't start to accuse or accuse either. We've got a moral sense, and that moral sense tells us that not only are other people wrong, but very often we're wrong ourselves. Some people have tried to get rid of the difficulty, haven't they? Our atheist friends, if you have any, uh, deny there is a God. They say you don't need to have a God to account for your moral sense. No, what, what do you do then? Well, like a colleague of mine once said in Queens, he said you can have a morality without God. He said, you see, it's a matter of a social contract, really. Uh, I mean, if you put your finger in my eye, I shall reply by putting my finger in your eye, he says. And you'll learn presently that it doesn't pay you to put your finger in my eye, so we shall come to a gentleman's agreement mutually not to put fingers in other people's eyes, you see, and then we shall live happily ever after, can't we? The theory of social contract. So you don't need a God to support all that. And we came to question time, and like a David before a Goliath, I put up my hand and asked if I might have a question, and he said I might. I said, well, I have a bit of a question. My name is Hitler, and I'm proposing to put my finger in your eye and six million others. What will you say to that? I said, I'll point out to you right now, it's no good you're saying you'll put your finger back in my eye. You won't. At this moment, I happen to have got all the tanks and battalions in the world. You won't get anywhere near me. And for the next three or four years, I'm going to have a marvelous time putting my fingers in people's eyes. And then when you think you're going to come back at me and put your finger in mine, you won't, because I shall put my brains out. I shall have had enough of it by then, you see, and enjoyed myself, shoot my brains out, and... and of course there's no be there is there's no God, there's nothing to fear, is there? So I got away with six million murders. And then what do you say to me? He said, I should tell you to go and get lost. Which was one answer, it didn't get very far. You can ask your atheist friend, can't you? If there's no God, if there's no judgment to come. Well, I do sometimes. Come along with me. We'll come to Hitler's gas chambers, come on. And here's a row of people, and they're going to be gassed, uh, tomorrow. And they're pleading with you. Why don't you do something? We want justice! And what will you atheists say? Well, what you'll have to say is this: Well, I'm sorry, it's no good you're crying out like that. You're not going to get justice. You're going to be gassed next Monday. Nothing that anybody can do about it. So you won't get justice in this life, and because there's no God in the next nor life to come, you won't get justice in that life either. You poor fools! Fancy having put your faith in justice. This moral sense, in the end, is a mirage. If there's no God, it is. There is a God, of course, isn't there? And there is a judgment. Oh, marvelous. Some folks don't like to hear about the judgment, do they? When the ancient Israelites heard that there was going to be a judgment, they clapped their hands for sheer joy and asked all the mountains of Morn to join in as well. Clap your hands, said the psalmist, for the Lord is coming, he's coming to. Marvelous. And any right-minded person will agree with the psalmist. Surely they will. You, madam, you don't want evil to go on forever, do you? Don't you clap your hands at the very thought that there's a God of judgment in heaven, and one day he will arise to judge the world in righteousness by the man he has ordained. And evil men like these terrible industrialists who have ground down the poor so wickedly. Don't you rejoice at the fact that they shall be dealt with? Or are you on the side of evil? Yeah, we... Well, that's not for me to give the evangelists advice how to preach the gospel. I do- I never did know how to begin, but... we shouldn't preach the coming judgment as though it were a galalumi thing all the time, should we? We should preach it as a subject over which you ought to clap your hands for very joy. There's going to be a day when God will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he has ordained. Well, then why don't we clap our hands? Well, because... If God came along with the sword and cut the heads off all the unrighteous and left the good, where would your head be, sir? And that's why it makes our gospel so marvelous, isn't it? It has the answer to the predicament, human beings with a conscience, with a moral judgment, capacity to understand right and wrong that comes from God himself, and we're conscious not only has the world sinned, but we have sinned too. And God, we have the answer in the gospel through which we can find forgiveness and peace with God. But that's not quite the end of the topic, is it? Because there's now another problem. Another two problems. Why does God allow evil to go on so long? That was a difficulty for many of the early Christians. They believed in the early infancy of their race that if they behaved themselves in Canaan, God would bless them abundantly, and good behavior would be rewarded with lots of honey and bees and cows and milk. As the nation began to grow older, it began to notice that things weren't quite working out like that, and with alarm the psalmist said, do you know I've been looking around lately, and it isn't the righteous that prosper in the world, it's the ungodly that prosper in the world. How come, God? He said. I thought you said if we kept your commandments, we would prosper and the wicked would be dealt with, and it's the other way round. It's very often the ungodly that are prospering. And the answer came back, yes, yes, yes, but one day God will send the Messiah, and he will judge the world in righteousness. And then the Lord Jesus came, and the early Christians, they believed, and yes, he was the Messiah, and they trusted that he, this was he that was going to deliver Israel forthwith. And the evil oppressors were going to be put down, and the righteous would flourish and have the big chariots and the, uh, uh, and the three-bedroom bungalows and all that kind of thing, we'll say, a- a- and be rewarded for their righteousness while the evil were put down. And they trusted the Lord Jesus and found... that the evil weren't put down. And very often, instead of things getting better, they got worse, but now the believers got persecuted for Christ's sake. How come? And how many of our dear believers in prison, in torture, over many, many years, have cried in their cells, how long, O Lord, how long? Our Lord himself gave a parable to explain it, didn't he? The widow and the unjust judge. She came asking the judge to put things right and avenge her, and the judge didn't. But she kept on coming and coming and coming and coming till at long length he gave way, and he avenged her. And shall not God avenge his elect that cry unto him day and night, said the Lord Jesus? He shall avenge them speedily. How be it, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth? Why not? Because some believers will have grown weary with the waiting. How long, O Lord, do you not avenge us? Why doesn't God put it right sooner? We could think of all sorts of reasons, couldn't we? James says, my brothers, be patient. Be patient, give God time. In your agriculture, you learn how to wait, you don't expect the seed to grow full growth overnight, do you? You wait for the early rain and the latter rain. You have to wait for the year's cycle. Give God patient, give God time, be patient with God. For God is long suffering. Why doesn't he bring judgment at once? He's long suffering, not willing that any should perish. Do you want the Lord to come tonight? Oh yeah, we want the Lord to come tonight. All your relatives saved, sir? Or would you say, no, Lord? Hold on, Lord. There's another reason, isn't there? You know, I've got to learn to be good before I get home to glory. Haven't I now? Huh? How will you know whether I'm good or not? Uh, suppose here there was a big iron box, and inside it was a lump of gold. And I like gold, and if nobody were around, I would be attempted to, um, um, um, take it, you see? I, I, I could think of some uses I could put it to. Some people can't, but I can. Uh, you'll say, um... Now, suppose I knew that there was a device on that box, if I dared touch it as soon as I put a finger on it, I should get a lethal dose of electricity and be no more. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I wouldn't touch the box. It's not that I wasn't tempted to steal the gold, but I didn't want to commit suicide. Would you say I was a very godly good man for that, that I didn't touch the gold? Of course not. The only reason that kept me from touching the gold was not my goodness, it was fear of punishment. And you know, if God punished everybody as soon as they did a sin, there wouldn't be many people left to start with, would they? That wouldn't make people good. To be good and to be proved good, you have to be given the point, the chance of doing something wrong, don't you, and not being punished immediately. And that gives you the test whether you are a really moral person, who even if you could steal the gold and get away with it and nobody ever knew, you still wouldn't take it because you are a moral person and living in the fear of God. And there's an extra test, isn't there? If you could steal it and become managing director of your firm because it was gold in the shape of bonds that you'd nicked by insider trading, and therefore by by doing insider trading, you could rise to be managing director and get a knighthood. Whereas if you refused to do it, you'd get kicked out of your job and be on the dole and suffer for being righteous. Now that would be some test, wouldn't it? To suffer for positively doing what is right. And that also is one of the reasons why God leaves us in this wicked world. To give us the chance to be proved and to tested and to be developed into moral men and women. And finally, the matter of illness. James quotes Job. That lovely man, that righteous man, upright in all his ways, wealthy, of course, God had blessed him, but using his wealth compassionately for the good of the poor, and holy. And he became ill. You say, what do you do? You pray God immediately to heal him. Well, James himself tells us we are allowed, if someone gets ill, to pray. And as it suits his wisdom and his good plan, God is prepared to listen to our praying and heal a brother or sister. That is still true. But you could have prayed for a long while for Job, and nothing would have got better, wouldn't you? I can tell you why. For Job's story tells us why God allowed such thoroughgoing illness to last so long. There came a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before God. And God said to Satan, Satan, have you considered my servant Job? As a matter of fact, I have, he says. Yes, I have actually. Mm. Uh, what do you think of him then? Well, says Satan, sorry to disabuse you, but you think he's one of your trusted people, don't you? He's full of faith and he loves you. That's just because you feather betted him, God, you know, made life easy for him. Best of health, beautiful daughters, lovely sons. Ah. But God, he says, you are, you are deceived if you think that's faith, God. I tell you straight, said Satan, that is no more faith than the man in the moon. That's merely cupboard love, God. It pays him because you feather his nest. Of course he sings you hymns. You let me take away his prosperity and touch his health, and you'll find out whether he has faith in you or not. Curse you to your face. And you say, does God take notice of things like that? Does he take notice when Satan talks like that? He does indeed. I nearly said he's obliged to. God has to justify himself before the intelligentsia of heaven. And if he's going to save you on the grounds of faith that you are a genuine believer, then God is concerned about his character. And if Satan, uh, accuses God and says, no, this isn't genuine faith at all, God is prepared to go to tremendous lengths to demonstrate before principalities and powers that his people's faith is genuine faith. Job didn't seem to know in the early days what was going on. It led to much anguish of heart. Why does the Lord let me suffer? Why? He was serving a greater cause than he knew. His very suffering was clearing the God of the charge of favoritism, demonstrating God to be just, because Job's J- uh, Job's faith was genuine. It's a marvelous thing, isn't it, when God does a miracle and saves his people from their sickness, he's prepared to do it. It can be a bigger marvel, a bigger triumph, when God allows his people to suffer in their anguish, and through it all, they come through and bless God. And refuse to allow any accusation against God or his love. And vindicate God. By their unbroken faith. That's a victory. That not eternity itself. Will ever forget. And our time has run out. But I trust I've said enough to sketch in some of the general lines of the discussion that James brings before us. The Lord give us grace and ever deepening understanding and courage in the big battles of life, until the blessed Redeemer has taken us and in these three great major parts of our personality has brought us to maturity. That one day we may enter his presence with joy and gladness, and upon the sight of him, be like him, and clothed in a perfect and redeemed body, never to feel pain again, a redeemed personality and a redeemed body to the glory of God forever.