The Royal Law; James 2:8
John 13:34 NASB
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have
loved you, that you also love one another. [35] By this all men will know that
you are My disciples, if you have love for one
another.”
Again, we have to clarify
what we mean by love. Love is not the romantic sentimental, superficial, warm
fuzzy feeling that most associate with love. You can’t go around having those kind of emotional feelings that you have toward your wife or
your best friend or someone you know intimately toward everybody. That is
impossible. There may be three or four people in your lifetime that you truly
develop deep, serious love for. So this is not mandating a person love because
you can’t know everybody. Jesus said that this new command in v. 35 is going to
be the evidence of the believer advancing to spiritual maturity in the church
age. Because we are all members of the royal family, then, this mandate becomes
the royal law because it is associated with the King of kings and Lord of lords
and His family, the church, the royal family of God.
John
Psalm 11:7 NASB
“For the LORD is righteous, He loves righteousness.” Because God is
+R, He can only love +R. He can only have personal love
for +R. Man, however, is –R. He lacks the absolute
righteousness of God. So God cannot have a personal love for –R
because there is no personal affinity between His perfect righteousness and
man’s relative righteousness. So God’s love for man is unconditional and
impersonal because it is not based on personal attractiveness in the object of
love, which is every single human being from then point of birth because they
have been imputed Adam’s original sin, they have a sin nature and they commit
personal sins. Isaiah 64:6 NASB “…all our righteous deeds are like a
filthy garment.” So God cannot have rapport with us as unbelievers and He
cannot love us personally. So His love for the human race since the fall is
impersonal.
Impersonal love is a
non-emotional, unconditional regard for the entire human race that does not
requite intimacy, friendship, attractiveness, or even acquaintance with the
specific object of love. Why? It is not based on the object of love, it is
based on the who you are and who God is and what God
has done for us. The word “impersonal” is used because it emphasizes the fact
that personal knowledge and intimacy is not a factor in this kind of love. We
may not know anything about the individual, yet we are still mandated to love
them. The adjective “unconditional” emphasizes that this kind of love endures
without placing conditions or qualifications on the object of love. In essence
this is saying that no matter what the other person does my love for them is
going to continue at the same intensity, with the same characteristics, no
matter how antagonistic they are to me, no matter how hateful they are to me,
no matter how much grief they cost me, no matter how hard they make my life. It
may be necessary for me to distance myself from them for a number of different
valid reasons but nevertheless I am still going to treat them and deal with
them in unconditional love. This is why this can’t happen on our own. This can
only be a product of the doctrine that is in our soul and it takes time to
develop the maturity to get to this point. Despite rejection, antagonism,
hostility, physical or emotional attack, even being taken advantage of on a
continuous basis, unconditional love is continuously applied to the person.
Let’s define love. Love is
not an emotion, not sentimentalism, not romantic warm fuzzies.
Love seeks the absolute highest and best for its object. These two words
“highest’ and “best” are valuers. Whose values are you going to use to define
what is the highest and best for the object of love.
You have two options: human viewpoints of what is highest and best, and divine
viewpoint concepts of what is highest and best. So if you are going to exercise
the kind of love that seeks the highest and best it needs to be defined by
divine viewpoint absolute standards. What happens when people try to exercise
unconditional love on the basis of relativistic human viewpoint standards is
that they get themselves in a real trap. Sometimes this happens in a family or
in a marriage, especially where there is a very unhealthy system of physical
bullying or some other horrible situation and they put themselves under a guilt
trip that they have to stay there and continue to endure that, even in the
midst of a life-threatening situation. That is trying to use human viewpoint
guilt manipulation, it is using a human viewpoint standard, and it is not
following the absolute standards of Scripture. When we define love as seeking
the highest and best for its object we must make sure that what we mean by
highest and best reflects the divine viewpoint’s absolute standard related to
God’s grace, salvation, spiritual life blessing, and the plan of God for the
believer’s life as expressed in the Scriptures. Make sure you don’t succumb at
some point to relativistic human viewpoint systems based on emotions, sentiment
and personal opinion or pop-psychology, because that will really created a
mess, a lot of confusion and a lot of trouble. This is why when we come to
talking about love and the love triplex, that this is related to spiritual
adulthood and not spiritual infancy.
Let us remind ourselves of
man’s basic attitude to God as a fallen creature. We are hostile to God, we are
at enmity with God, we reject God, we are obnoxious to God, we are rebellious,
hateful, resentful, continually taking advantage of the grace provisions of God
in terms of air, water, shelter, food, the climate He provides so that we can
have agriculture, all of which have been provided for human sustenance whether
believer or unbeliever, all of which comes under the category of common grace.
Yet the Bible says that man is at enmity with God, not just neutral. Now what
characteristics do we discern in terms of how God operates toward hateful,
resentful, antagonistic, rebellious creatures. John
So we are isolating eight
different characteristics that describe the kind of love that God demonstrated
to us at the cross, and this is going to be added to our understanding of
impersonal/ unconditional love as not merely being an absence of mental
attitude sins and having a relaxed mental attitude and having an attitude of
graciousness, but it is going to have these characteristics as well:
1) It is initiating. God’s love initiated the solution,
not man. Initiation means that God’s love took charge to provide the perfect
solution necessary to restore the relationship that would be broken by Adam’s
original sin. This initiating love took place in eternity past through
antecedent grace. Antecedent refers to that which is prior to, that which precedes. This refers to the initial act of God’s unmerited
favour in outlining the plan of salvation.
2) It is aggressive action. It asserts itself with
confidence and boldness. Why can impersonal love do this? Because it does not
operate from a position of weakness that is threatened by rejection. The
problem with personal love is that if our personal love is based on conditions
of acceptance and intimacy with its object, and that object of personal love
rejects us and there is that element of contingency there, then we will feel
rejected and hurt and so there is always that tendency to want to hold back a
little bit in terms of self-protection. But we can be aggressive in impersonal
love because we are not trying to curry favour or generate approbation or find
security in the response of someone else. Because of God’s omniscience He knew
the entire problem and on the basis of that He provided everything necessary to
resolve the problem. So because our strength is in the work of God, who He is
and our relationship to Him, then our relationship to other people in terms of
love can be aggressive because we are not looking to them to meet any of our
needs. We are relying upon God and that puts us in a position of strength.
3) It is characterized by humility. Humility is based
upon grace orientation. It does not seek its own personal glory but takes on
the attitude of a servant to do whatsoever is necessary. In the case of God it
included incarnation, the voluntary restriction of the use of divine attributes
in order to fulfil the plan of God. It involved sacrifice, the undeserved
imputation of human sin in order to solve the problem of sin in the human race.
Remember, the suffering that Jesus Christ encountered on the cross was more
intense, more agonizing, more excruciating that any suffering, any rejection,
any heartache, torment or pain than you or I can ever imagine. And He was
sustained through the filling of God the Holy Spirit, and that is our example.
He demonstrated that these principles, stress-busters, problem-solving devices,
work and can handle any situation.
4) It is characterized by intensity. There was a zealous
determination on the part of God to achieve the goal of salvation and to
overcome all obstacles. Since God is omnipotent He is able to accomplish
whatever is necessary to fulfil His perfect plan for the human race.
Unconditional, impersonal love has an intensity about
it.
5) It is faithful or steadfastly loyal. Our loyalty is
not to the object of our love, it is to God. God’s loyalty is to His own
character, to His own integrity, to the promises He made to man in terms of
salvation. God strongly desires for all men to come to a saving knowledge of
Jesus Christ.
6) It is consecrated. This means that it is set apart for
the purpose of God’s glory. That is why we have impersonal love for all
mankind. It exemplifies in us the impersonal love that God has for all mankind,
and it brings glory and honor to Him. Jesus Christ,
in terms of God’s impersonal love for all mankind, is solemnly set apart for
the purpose of being the exclusive means of salvation for the church. As such,
Jesus Christ is loyal to the plan and purposes of God and He set Himself apart
despite all obstacles and distractions to provide salvation for every human
being. Secondly, His goal is to bring every believer to maturity in Christ.
7) It is dedicated. Dedication means that Jesus Christ
committed Himself t the task of service, sacrifice, salvation and
sanctification despite the pain and suffering that it would bring Him.
8) It is devoted. This means to give or apply one’s time,
intention and self entirely to a particular activity, cause or person. The
priority for Jesus Christ was to go to the cross and to endure the suffering in
order to pay the penalty for our sins.
We have looked at those
words and now need to connect them with adjectives that we picked up in
Leviticus 19. We connect with that a minus mental attitude sins, also respect
for privacy, private possessions, ownership of property, a prohibition of
murder, absence of slander, and a respect for all men despite their physical
deformities, handicaps or unlovely physical demeanour. If we put all of that
together we have a picture of unconditional and impersonal love that is in
human terms impossible to fulfil. Yet we need to understand what those
characteristics and qualities are because it is mandated of us to exercise that
kind of love in order to resolve personal testing.
We need to go back to
James to see what he is talking about in chapter two. What James is describing
is a people test. In James chapter one we saw that as believers as we advance
to spiritual maturity we go through evaluation testing—DOKIMION [dokimion], translated approval; it means evaluation. We go
through evaluation testing in order to evaluate the doctrine that is in our
souls, and that is necessary to advance us to spiritual maturity. So we go
through evaluation testing. There are four categories of evaluation testing.
First of all there is thought testing; secondly, people testing; third, system testing; fourth, disaster testing. James is using a people
test as an illustration here of application of doctrine, in James chapter two.
The people test involves a man who comes into the assembly who has been
oppressing them. He is abusing the sheep. So there is oppression and rejection
experienced by these believers that he is addressing, and they are going to
handle oppression and rejection by operating on subjectivity and using their
human viewpoint sinful practices and approaches to the problem in order perhaps
to alleviate any other future oppression or abuse.
So now we have to review
the issue of testing here. Testing can come in the form of adversity or prosperity.
A test is an opportunity for us to show what we know.
Adversity and Stress
1) Adversity is the outside pressure on the soul and
stress is the inside pressure.
2) Adversity is what the circumstances of life do to you;
stress is what you do to yourself.
3) Adversity is inevitable, you cannot avoid it; stress
is optional.
4) Stress is always the result of sin nature control of
the soul and failure to handle adversity or prosperity through the gracious
provision of the ten stress-busters.
5) The stress-busters allow the believer to face any
situation in life and remain poised, stable, and in control of the situation no
matter how horrible or agonizing, without giving in to the sin nature. When you
give in to the sin nature you have stress in the soul and fragmentation.
6) Sin nature control means arrogance and the operation
of the three arrogance skills, either in overt arrogance or disguised as
pseudo-humility.
The point that we are
looking at is this. When you encounter the test be it adversity or prosperity you
have a choice at that point. You can respond negatively and let the sin nature
take over, or you can respond positively by applying one of the ten problem-solving
devices or stress-busters.