Remedies III

 God is not indifferent to the proud. He actively resists them. There is a difference, and not a very subtle or nuanced one, between God actively resisting someone and God merely being indifferent toward them, their actions, and their existence. To put it mildly, God is not a fan of pride. It’s corrosive, destructive, and deadly. Just ask Lucifer.

Pride and servanthood do not mix. Being a proud bondservant of Jesus is just as diametrically opposed as saying you ran across a cold sun, or hot snow. Once one of these things is combined with the other, it changes the nature of it, making it something other than what it was. Hot snow is no longer snow but melted snow that has been turned into boiling water. As far as a cold sun is concerned, that would be the moon, and it’s very different than the sun.

Not only will God not give grace to the proud, but He will actively resist them. The humble, however, He blesses with grace because they acknowledge a need that only His presence in their lives can meet. Once that need is met, the humble do not take credit for their breakthrough or having escaped the shackles of their sin but give all glory and credit to God, as it should be.

Churches today are filled to the brim with spiritual adulterers and adulteresses, and no one calls them on it because the elder board has mortgages to pay and bonuses to dole out, so they are unwilling to upset the apple cart and call it what it is. For every new fad or perversion, we make a new allowance, we carve out an exemption, and we insist that everyone else go along. Otherwise, we will label them unloving. The enemy already knows that compromise has become a mainstay of the modern-day church, so he is pushing the envelope with ever greater fervor, to the point that good and evil become interchangeable, and sin deemed a relic of the past that will nevermore be mentioned among the religious class.

It’s hard to call others to repentance when you, yourself, are living a life of debauchery. It’s hard to tell others to love their wives as Christ loved the church and cherish them for better or worse when you’ve been seeing the new secretary and have already filed divorce papers from your wife of thirty years. Whether they can justify it anecdotally by pointing to some other pastor or preacher who likewise did it, it still does not make it Biblical, nor does it mean that God approves of it. Compromised leaders lead to compromised congregations, and we’ve only just begun to see the damage wrought on what we deem the household of faith.

Why should I submit to God when, for most denominations, that is no longer a prerequisite? I could say because the Bible says to, but you already know the truth of it, and I don’t have to beat a dead horse just to make a point.

The church is in the shape it is in because the opinions of men took precedence over the Word of God. We did not resist the proud as God does, but gave them platforms and praise, deferred to them on spiritual matters while rejecting the Bible, and followed them off the cliff because, unlike the Word, they didn’t insist that we should resist the devil but that we could call a truce, a ceasefire, an armistice, and learn to coexist.

James is laying out the basics. This isn’t special forces; this is basic training. First, humble yourself. Second, submit to God. Third, resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Once you’ve done that, once you’ve resisted the devil and he has fled, the next step is to draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Stopping short along the way and not following through in the outlined order will not garner you the desired results. You make the dough before you put the sauce on it, put the sauce on the dough before you put on the cheese, and complete the pizza before you throw it in the oven. You don’t pick the order in which you do it. There is an explicit order in the Word, and we would do well to follow it.

But I want to draw close to God first then I’ll resist the devil and submit myself to Him. I need some sort of proof, some sort of promissory note. God needs to woo me first, then I’ll consider humbling myself. Once again, that’s not the way it works. Even if you really want it to work, even if you think it may, going out of sequence will keep you spinning your wheels and experiencing little, if any, of the presence of God in your life.

But what about Paul? Exceptions to the rule are just that. The same goes for the thief on the cross. You can’t point to the one time someone didn’t die from biting down on a live wire and use it as the standard, insisting that it’s safe.

In trying to do it out of sequence, in trying to make it up as we go along, and playing it by ear, we’ve proven to everyone that we’ve neither humbled ourselves nor submitted to God. Our pride still has free reign, and it is the pride of man that thinks it knows better than God. It is the pride of man that thinks God will have to bend to his will rather than him bending to God’s will.

Before you start screaming it’s not working, check to see if you followed the directions and did it in the order it was prescribed in the Word. Chances are you didn’t. If you had, you’d be at the point where you drew near to God, and He drew near to you, and you understood true love for the first time in your life.

When God says, “This is the way; walk in it,” and we decide to hoof it on the rocky terrain, we can’t blame Him when we twist our ankles and scrape our knees. That’s when we choose to return to the path He has made smooth or stubbornly press on through the shrubs and the thickets away from our destination.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.