Love and Rejection; James 2:8; Lev.
An important principle in understanding dispensationalism is that in dispensationalism
there is the principle of hermeneutics that any time there is a mandate in one particular
age that mandate does not continue into the next era or dispensation unless it
is repeated. What we find in Leviticus 19:18 as well as in the Sermon on the
Mount in Luke chapter 10, as well as in James 2:8-10 and Romans 16 is a
repetition of this principle that we are to love others as ourselves. Eight time in the New Testament this verse is quoted from the Old
Testament, which indicates how important it is. In dispensations there are two
issues that concern theologians. One is called continuity, the other is called
discontinuity. Continuity means that there are some things that continue
through every era. For example, salvation has always been by faith alone in
Christ alone. In the Old Testament they anticipated the fulfilment of the
promise of salvation and the coming of Messiah. There were not only the
promises to look forward to but there were the teachings through types in the
tabernacle, the sacrifices and the furniture. This is continuity. In the New
Testament salvation is still by faith alone in Christ alone but now we look
back to the fulfilment of those promises as they were fulfilled by the death of
Jesus Christ on the cross. But then there are some things that are
discontinued, they do not continue through every dispensation. For example,
there were certain sacrifices during the era of the Gentiles in the Old
Testament. There were many more sacrifices given during the age of the Mosaic law and the age of
James
2:7, 8 NASB “Do they not blaspheme the fair name by which you have
been called?
For spiritual growth we
have to use our volition, and that is application of doctrine. We have been
learning doctrine, the Holy Spirit has been storing it, it is categorized in
the soul, and we have learned all kinds of different things. We’ve learned
rebound, confession of sin, the filling of the Holy Spirit, the faith-rest
drill, have memorized half a dozen promises, and all of a sudden there comes a
situation in life where we are threatened by something or someone. So we say,
Okay there is a promise here, God says, “Fear thou not, for I am with thee; be
not dismayed, for I am thy God; I will strengthen thee, yea, I will help theee, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my
righteousness.” So we are not going to respond in fear, we are going to let God
handle the situation, we are going to mix that promise
with faith and exercise the faith-rest drill. That is what James says: hear it
and do it. You hear it, and that is the process of getting it into epignosis; the
doing is the application. You apply it in terms of the faith-rest drill, in
terms of confession, in terms of exercising impersonal love for all mankind,
you apply it in terms of inner happiness, you apply it
in terms of a personal sense of eternal destiny. That is application.
What we are talking about
in this study is application in the realm of love. The stress-busters involved
in this category is the love triplex, which includes personal love for God—the
motivation. For love to have any value in life it has to be based on integrity.
When we have personal love for God it is God’s integrity that has the value. So
God is the only worthy object of personal love in life because He is the only
one who has absolute and perfect integrity because He is perfect righteousness.
That becomes the basis for impersonal love for all mankind. Why? We love others
because of who God is—He is the model, His essence provides the stability for
us—we base our impersonal love on the essence of God. This is why we have to
spend a lot of time talking about who God is and His
character. We have to understand what God’s love is like and that is what we
model our love like, because God had to exercise impersonal love for all
mankind when He sent His Son to die on
the cross for our sins. When God sent Jesus Christ to die on the cross for our
sins he exemplified for us the characteristics of impersonal love. God’s
impersonal love for all mankind, then, becomes a model of the active side of
impersonal love. It isn’t just that God didn’t have any mental attitude sins
toward us, but that God actively did things. There was initiation, dedication,
commitment, concentration. All of these are part of impersonal love. Our
impersonal love toward all mankind reflects His impersonal love. So we have
learned that there is an active as well as a passive aspect to impersonal love.
The active is initiating that which is best for the object and the passive is
the absence of any mental attitude sins which in the end become
self-destructive in human relationships.
The situation that
presents itself here in James chapter two for application is one that is very
common and is destructive in the life of many believers. So we will take some
time to analyse this and see how in one particular arena we can use impersonal love
for all mankind to avoid converting the outside pressure of adversity into the
inside pressure of stress in the soul, and that is in the arena of rejection.
With the rich man that comes into the assembly it is not that his richness, his
wealth, the fact that he has an abundance of material possession and details of
life that makes him bad, it is his attitude toward the believer. This is
describes in v. 6, “Is it not the rich who oppress you and personally drag you
into court?” So the rich man oppresses them, there is persecution here, there
is hostility and ridicule, and this is all part of rejection. So we will try to
come to grips with what rejection is, how it works itself out in everyday life,
and then see how impersonal love for all mankind handles that so that we can
avoid converting it into stress.
Rejection
1) Rejection is defined as being forsaken, attacked,
ignored, persecuted, made the object of ridicule, bullied emotionally or
physically, being repudiated, eliminated, denied, or being set aside. It can
take the form of being laid off at work, being fired; it can take a passive
form or an active form. Rejection can also be defined as negative volition and
refusing to acknowledge, believe, or accept doctrine; but for the purpose of
this study we are looking at rejection in terms of personal rejection.
2) The person who is being rejected is the rejectee; the person who is doing the rejecting is the
rejector. Whether you are the rejectee or the
rejector both have serious problems in relationship to handling adversity and
stress. The rejector can be reacting to a situation, rejecting out of
motivation from the sin nature and converting that outside pressure of
adversity into inside pressure of stress and rejection. The rejector reacts to
real or perceived threats and rejects someone. If is is
imagined then the rejectee has the problem of how he
is going to handle the rejector, and they can react. Maybe it was an imagined
threat, insult or slight, and the rejector thinks it is real and says or does
something out of malice or anger fear of rejection, and hurts the rejectee. Now the rejectee is the
one who reacts again and it creates a vicious cycle. In passive rejection a
person is rejected by someone else. The person being rejected maybe rejected
because they had done something wrong, or they be rejected and have done
nothing wrong. Jesus Christ was rejected and He did nothing wrong. Our ultimate
model for handling rejection is the Lord because He was rejected and was
perfectly innocent, and he exemplifies on the cross how to handle rejection. In
active rejection you are the one who is doing the rejecting. Sometimes the
rejector is blamed for being wrong when in reality that person may not be at
fault at all. Very few believers are properly prepared doctrinally to handle
rejection. It probably hits the core of our being more than anything else and
makes us feel a little more uncomfortable, and so we have to deal with those
emotions that are generated. It is not having those emotions
generated that is the problem. If somebody walks up and kicks you in the
leg it is going to hurt. There’s nothing wrong with hurting; what may be wrong
is how you handle it. You handle it either through the sin nature or thorough
the stress-busters.
3) Rejection is often a matter of the individual
perception of reality. If you have somebody who is not very mature either
emotionally or spiritually and they are operating on the arrogance skills such
as self-absorption, then their perception of reality it is going to be very
warped. They are going to have a distorted view of reality and they may
interpret x-event as being an insult. The perception is as much the reality as
the reality. Rejection may be real or it may be imagined, and so we have to
deal with issues of objectivity, hypersensitivity (which is very often the
problem), subjectivity, self-absorption and all kinds of reaction. Too much
emphasis is placed on defending our own integrity, defending ourselves in a
situation where we are not really at fault and nobody perceives it that way,
and we begin to complain about somebody treating us unjustly. Then we come into
the whole issue of victimization. All victimization is is
a psycho-babble way of shifting the blame for the problems in our lives and the
way we handle them. The fact is, we all live in a fallen world and so bad
things are going to happen to us. There is going to be undeserved suffering and
there are going to be things that people say and do whether intentional or
unintentional that hurt our feelings. So we have to develop some maturity, some
objectivity, and we have to get rid of that self-absorption and apply some
doctrine and not wear our feelings on our shirt sleeves so that we can get past
the rejection problem. In some cases the perception of reality becomes so distorted
that the believer who assumes that he or she is being rejected is in actuality
the rejector. They have brought about the circumstances that caused the
rejector to take the position they have so that they feel rejected. If they had
not done what they did initially then the other person would not have rejected
them and put them in that position. It becomes very difficult. Sometimes the
person who appears to be at fault is not at fault at all. All too often what we
discover today is that the victim of rejection and the one who is rejecting are
fragmented in their souls. This is either the unbeliever who has no doctrine or
the believer who has doctrine but is not using it, is operating under the sin
nature and so has converted all this adversity to stress in the soul; and they
are the double-minded believer of James 1:8.
How we handle problems in
life on the sin nature. It can be very deceptive, it can look good, it can feel even better. Yet what we are doing is not
trusting God, we are trusting the flesh and we are
destroying ourselves from the inside out. We develop habit patterns. We start
off in childhood and we learn how to handle problems, how it makes us fell so
that we feel better. It is either going to come from the area of weakness and
we are going to create habit patterns of handling adversity through either
mental attitude sins—dwelling upon how we are going to get revenge; revenge
motivation, hatred, anger—or through sins of the tongue—we begin to gossip and
malign—and that is how we relieve that pressure, that outside pressure of those
circumstances. From the area of strength we operate on the basis of human good
and self-righteousness, so we are going to try to cover it up with the cloak of
morality and religion. Some believers when they are experiencing the problem of
rejection react to those who are rejecting them, and then they intensify all of
their problems through the functions related to the sin nature. This is what
happens. As you go through childhood you begin to develop these patterns and
then they become habits.
The difference between
this, trying to give a little bit of the divine viewpoint perspective on how
sin and volition is the root of all of our problems, and human viewpoint
psychology, is that psychology says a) it is not really your fault, and the
blame is shifted to the environment. It is something your parents did, etc. It
is the rejector who is at fault, not how you have responded; b) psychology says
you have to understand how all of this happened in your life before you can handle
the problem. That is psychology; the Bible says all the problems are
volitional, we have these habit patterns all our lives, they are ingrained but
they are not unsolvable. They are all resolvable through the grace of God and
we have to unlearn all these bad habit patterns. That is the whole process of
renovating our thinking. We have to learn how to think, and then on the basis
of that thinking, the doctrine that is in our souls, we construct that mirror
of doctrine in our souls. That gives us objectivity, clarity of thought; and
when we have the courage to look at ourselves in that mirror and the light of
God’s Word we begin to see how we developed all of these various habits of
dealing with problems in life on the basis of the sin nature. Once we see that
through the ministry of God the Holy Spirit we see how to apply Bible doctrine
to that situation so that we can quit converting it into stress and start
having the inner happiness that God has for us, and stability and joy in the
midst of the trials and tests.
So human viewpoint
psychology says it is environment, you have to understand all the dynamics and
all the issues, and then you are basically a victim and there is a shift of
responsibility. The Bible is just the opposite, it is not the environment, it is your volition. You don’t have to understand all the
dynamics you just have to understand the solution. In many ways you are not
going to understand why you do the things you do, other than just basically it
is the sin nature, so you start from where you are today and don’t worry about
what somebody did to you as a child even if it was devastating and terrible.
The issue is volition. Do you want to handle the problems in your life God’s
way, or do you want to handle them your own way, the way you feel the most
comfortable? Sometimes applying doctrine doesn’t make you comfortable. In fact,
sometimes the right solution is the most difficult solution. Sometimes the
right solution is going to feel like the worst solution, but it is the biblical
solution. That is why we can’t trust our feelings, because they are subjective
and not trustworthy.
The dangers of being rejected
When we get rejected, especially if it is a
harsh rejection what happens is that somebody you admire, respect, love,
suddenly doesn’t want to have anything to do with you or they do something that
hurts you. Is it real or imagined? The issue is, how
are you going to respond? The issue now is positive volition or negative
volition. You can blame others and become bitter, vindictive, implacable,
revengeful, or you can turn it into self-pity and go home and cry and be
depressed. Or you can choose to go into various stages where you just isolate
yourself in some form of denial—it really didn’t happen and you deny all the
issues related to it, and instead of facing reality you are hiding the
reality—and it begins to develop a whole series of complications that threaten
the very integrity of your own soul. Life always becomes complicated when we
start reacting to outside pressure. It fragments the soul, and that means that
mental attitude sins, sins of the tongue and overt sins are destroying us on
the inside.
We need to look at this in
terms of the sin nature. You have an unbeliever, he doesn’t know any doctrine.
Maybe it is just a child, maybe a teenager or an adult, and they don’t have any
doctrine to apply to the situation. All of a sudden there is rejection. Now
they have a choice about how they are going to respond. They start off reacting
from the sin nature from the area of weakness. Somebody has opposed them so
they can operate on mental attitude sins. They become angry, they start having
hatred toward the person who has rejected them. Then they begin to harbour bitterness.
Remember what Leviticus
The next person is a
believer and he says, Okay I’m not going to respond out of anger or hatred, I’m
going to do good. But what happened initially was that this person responded
out of personal sins and they’re angry. Now they are out of fellowship. They
are still guilty because they responded in anger, that wasn’t the right thing
to do; but rather than confessing their sin, applying doctrine and getting back
into a position of strength, they operate from their position of strength in
terms of human good. And this area always has an affinity for the trends toward
asceticism and legalism. Another thing we need to note about human good is that
it has a mix of establishment principles and human viewpoint thinking. That mix
can go throughout the whole spectrum. It can be five per cent establishment and
ninety per cent bad human viewpoint thinking, or it can be ninety-five per cent
establishment and five per cent bad human viewpoint
thinking. So if it is 95% establishment you look at it from the outside and say
they are really handling this problem well. But they’re not because the source
is the sin nature, not the use of the stress-busters under the filling of the
Holy Spirit. The result is that this person who perhaps has grown up as a kid
in an awful environment and feels rejected now wants to compensate. His area of
weakness doesn’t come into play but he decides to compensate with human good.
He’s going to find a model to look up to, so he picks his teacher. The teacher
has a great influence on the kid, he does well in
school, really tries to perform for the teacher and makes good grades. Everybody
looks at this kid who reaches college, graduates, goes into a profession, and rises
to the top of his profession. So everybody says, ‘Look at the lousy environment
he came from. He has made good decisions and rose to the top and has handled
everything in his life.’ On the outside it looks good, but the issue is that he
has been doing it all under the power of the sin nature, operating from the
area of strength that comes from human good. It is going to look good, it might
even feel good, and it is going to impress everybody. But on the inside there is
fragmentation, self-destruction and arrogance.
So we need to understand that
just because you are doing good things and handling them well and it seems to
work and it feels good, that doesn’t mean you are operating on the power of God
the Holy Spirit because you can handle problems from the area of weakness or
the area of strength in your sin nature. The end result is always going to be self-destruction
because in the long run you can’t handle life’s problems by anything other than
the certainty of God’s Word and the sufficiency of God’s Word and the power of
God the Holy Spirit. That is why we keep coming back to these stress-busters to
show how it makes a difference, how it changes the way
we handle rejection.