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Part 5: Your Temptation

James 1:2-4, 12-18

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of temptation from James 1:2-4 and verses 12-18.


I’d like to begin this morning by thanking you for the warmth of your hospitality, the many personal kindnesses, the efficiency Tom Dolch has shown at every step, Herb May for taking me out for a meal, Peter Magellan for driving me up from Washington and back to Baltimore, and many quiet kindnesses. I’m very grateful, not least, I have to say, for this book for my daughter. I barely mentioned her dilemma, and suddenly there’s a book. That seems to be typical of the way the men at Fourth work, and I’m very grateful to you for all of those matters.

I should say, too, I’m just grateful to find a group of men, cross-generational with a mix of backgrounds, who want to think through the Word of God. You have no idea how refreshing that is to me. That is not everywhere in the country, you must understand, and to walk up and down a hall and hear men arguing theology and its application to life.… Amen! Yes!

That’s what the church ought to be doing when it’s alive, and it’s really nice to hear fathers and sons arguing and talking about the gospel. It really is. Some of you have been saints for 50 years, and others of you have been converted six months. It really is wonderful to see the church of God working as it ought to be working, and I must say I’ve been very grateful to be here.

This morning I want to direct your attention to the book of James, chapter 1, verses 12 to 18. I understand Pastor Norris has been expounding James. I found that out only yesterday, so this is what the King James Version and Peter would have called stirring up your minds by way of remembrance. Otherwise known as sacred review. James, chapter 1, verses 12 to 18. Hear, then, brothers, the Word of God.

“Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial because, when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him. When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when by his own evil desire he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.”

So reads God’s most Holy Word.

I know a chap from England who, about 30 years ago, felt called to Christian ministry, underwent some training, and in due course, became pastor of an independent church in that country. He was an extraordinarily gifted speaker, but in due course, he got caught out in adultery and was defrocked.

He immigrated to Canada where I met him as a fellow seminary student taking graduate courses at a theological institution in Toronto. None of us knew his background. He didn’t let on, and the checking hadn’t been all that good. In due course, he became pastor of another church in Canada, and you know how North Americans are. They like English accents, so he had a leg up anyway. It’s just the opposite over there. I go over there, and they don’t really appreciate my accent, but they come over here, and we appreciate theirs. It doesn’t seem fair to me, but it’s the way it works.

He was, again, a very effective speaker and things began to grow and happen. He seemed to be gospel-centered, but in fact, he got caught out in adultery and was defrocked. He disappeared from my view. I moved to the West Coast and became a pastor 3,000 miles away. I didn’t know what had happened to him, but in fact, he immigrated to the United States.

Years passed. I was in church planting and pastoring, and I went to England for three years and came back and taught for three years in Vancouver. Then, lo and behold, in God’s mysterious purposes, I moved to Chicago. When I moved to Chicago to start teaching at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, we started looking around for a church in the area.

The seminary said, “Well, Don, if you don’t have any deep commitments in this area already and you don’t know where you’re going, actually you could help us out a great deal. There’s a church in Libertyville, a Free Church, which has just gone through a terrible time. Their minister has just been caught out in adultery. If you would fill in there in the transition, they’re a hurting, broken people.”

I went and filled in and found out (you guessed it) … Today, he’s selling computers in Indiana (thank God he’s not in the ministry), but if you talk to him, he’s full of deep resentments and cynicism, and he says 1 Corinthians 10:13 isn’t true. First Corinthians 10:13 says God will not allow you to be tempted above what you are able, but will, with the temptation, make a way of escape that you may be able to bear it. “It’s not true,” he says. “I wasn’t able to bear it. God is a liar.” That’s what he says.

He is not the only person who has blamed God. It is very easy in the shock of bereavement to blame God, especially when the death seems so reversed. We have words in English for children who have lost their parents. They are orphans. We have a word for a wife who has lost her husband. A widow. We have a word for a husband who has lost a wife. A widower. We don’t have a word for parents who have lost children. It just seems so unnatural, but I am sure in a crowd this size some of you have lost children.

There are people who go through terrible things of one sort or another, testings, or overt temptations. They collapse under them. They nurture their bitterness. I’ve known men who have seen their wives go into Alzheimer’s and just become bitter people. “This isn’t the woman I married.” Haven’t you?

On the other hand, there are plenty of fascinating accounts of Christians whose lives show most brilliantly under duress the more pressure you apply to them the more they display grace. I don’t know if you know Norman and Pat Anderson. Sir Norman and Pat Anderson in Britain. He and his wife became missionaries in the Near East. Then, in World War II because he had learned Arabic so fluently, he was part of British counterintelligence.

Eventually, he became professor of oriental law at London University and was knighted. A godly, evangelical theologian who wrote as many evangelical books as he did legal books and books on Islam. A visiting lecturer at Harvard and MIT. World famous. A lay-chair of the Senate of the Church of England.

Norman and Pat lost all three of their children like Joseph Bailey. The first one was a medical doctor. She went out to what was then the Congo, and in the terrible struggles of what brought that country into its present form of Zaire, she was gang-raped, furloughed home, and moved to California to take some more medical training so she could go back. She tripped, fell down some stairs, knocked herself out, and drowned in her own spittle.

The last one died in ‘71. He was an undergraduate at Cambridge. At the age of 21, Hugh Anderson died of a brain tumor. He was president of the union, which in British Oxbridge terms, is chief student in the university. It’s a debating society that is the seedbed for all the major politicians. Some people were already touting him as a future prime minister of England. At his death, six cabinet ministers appeared.

Pat Anderson couldn’t talk about this for two years, but the people they have touched by their lives, gentleness. A few years ago, Pat started suffering from Alzheimer’s. Last March, I was briefly in England and saw Sir Norman, already 82 or 83, looking after his wife when he could for a three-week stint and then she’d go in the hospital while he got some rest. Then he’d come out and he’d look after her again. He said, “My only prayer now is that I outlive Pat.” Sir Norman died a few weeks ago, and Pat is still alive. Yet, in all my knowledge of him, I can’t find a trace of bitterness. I just can’t.

What is the difference between these two kinds of people? Which kind would you rather be? You may not suffer exactly like any one of them. You may not face temptations exactly like any one of them, but face temptations you will and face trials you will, and the longer you live, the more you’re going to face. What kind of person would you rather be?

Oh, I know there are discriminations of grace. There are antecedent background characteristics and all alike. Nevertheless, this passage, I think, gives us three exceedingly important principles to bear in mind when we confront trial and temptation.

1. When you are struggling under trial, remember the Christian’s goals.

Verse 12: “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial because, when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.” In a sense, this passage already picks up something earlier in the chapter, verses 2 to 4.

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” There, steadfastness or perseverance or endurance is seen as the product of testing and the necessary ingredient that goes into spiritual maturity.

If you cherish the thought of being spiritually mature, you will value the virtue of perseverance, and if you value the virtue of perseverance, you will recognize, even as you are going through things, this is for your good. James is not saying these things are good in and of themselves, nor is he describing what it might be like in an alternative universe, in the new heaven and the new earth where there is no sin, where there is no corruption, where there is no decay, where there is no temptation.

He is describing things as they are here. Granted that this is a fallen world order, granted that this is where we live, then the tests, the temptations, the trials may not be good in themselves, but they can have extraordinarily good results. James mentions two specific goals: perseverance itself, endurance (as an athlete endures to build up endurance, endurance becomes a kind of mediate goal) and the crown of life. He says, “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial because, when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.”

Here, again, there is a wonderful emphasis on the future. The crown of life. If you do not hunger for the crown of life, none of this will mean much to you. If the whole of your existence is bound up with being as comfortable and as prosperous during your three-score years and ten as possible, then none of this is of any value to you.

If, on the other hand, you do recognize with your whole heart, ultimately, the Christian’s destiny is to stand before the living God and hear the “Well done” of the Master and enter into the joy of the Lord forever and forever and forever, it is simply idiotic not to live life with that kind of stance in mind.

Two or three years ago, I was leading some noon-hour evangelistic Bible studies at Bell Labs. The AT&T Bell Labs in Naperville had about 2,000 scientists. About two-thirds of them are doctoral people. Nobody has less than a master’s degree in science. One of the chaps in the switching unit (37 scientists working on switches) asked me if I would come around and lead some noon-hour evangelistic Bible studies, so I went in assuming as usual in this sort of case that two-thirds of the people there don’t know the Bible has two testaments, and that was about right.

There was one chap who was sort of a failed Catholic and had seminary training in Aquinas and wanted to argue about Thomism. There were two devout Hindus and one or two failed Protestants. All the rest knew nothing about anything. As we talked about a number of things, I sort of laid out the large structures of biblical Christianity.

Each day I spoke for 35 minutes and had about 20 minutes for give and take and discussion. As I laid out these things, there was an Indian chap there, a Hindu, who said, “Do I hear you rightly?” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Are you saying we should live in the light of what will be in eternity?” I said, “Yes, but why are you asking the question?”

He said, “Most of us in this place have as a kind of goal ahead of us being 65, and this being 65 constrains us. We have certain projects we’d like to get done. Some of us have certain goals about where we’d like to rise to in the organization. This place has two or three Nobel laureates, and some of us have aspirations.

We know what we’d like to do, where we’d like to go, how far we’d like to push, and then after that, we foresee in a little blurred way more time with the grandchildren and relaxing a little bit, maybe writing a book or two we’ve been thinking about for some time. That’s where we’re going, and all of our lives are shaped by this, but you’re saying, if you think 50 billion years into the future, then that should also shape the first 65. Is that right?”

I said, “Preach it, brother.” Isn’t that elementary Christianity? I don’t think I’ve ever heard it so eloquently expressed as by that Hindu on whom these lights were dawning. It’s just sensible. People say, “Don, you shouldn’t say these things. You’re going to make people so heavenly-minded they’ll be no earthly good.” I don’t think that’s a great temptation for most people that I can see. It seems to me we’re more likely to be so earthly-minded we’re good for neither heaven nor earth.

In fact, from a biblical point of view, I haven’t met anybody who is going around saying, “I’m so homesick for heaven I think I’ll beat up my wife,” or “I’m so homesick for heaven I think I’ll cheat on her.” Have you ever met anybody like that? Oh, no. This sort of orientation revolutionizes all of your ethics and your values and your priorities.

When you start looking at it in Scripture, it is everywhere. I’ve been taking some students this term in a Greek class through 1 Peter, and it hit me again as we worked through the Greek text of 1 Peter just how often you have these motive clauses that are bound up with the eternal inheritance. Just look at chapter 1 of 1 Peter.

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.

In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”

Somehow, I don’t think the Western church has come to terms with just how located we are in the present and how distorting that is to all of the biblical revelation. Historically, of course, it’s often when churches go through terrible persecution or when they are in terrible poverty that they develop a spirituality of the future.

Part of our problem is, relatively speaking, we are so comfortable we are not driven to think about the future, but if, instead, we go back to the Word of God and see how often the Bible gives as its motive clause this eternal weight of glory, it will revolutionize all we say and do. “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial because, when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.”

You say, “Ah! What about this question of rewards? I read these texts and it just sounds a wee bit as if it’s threatening Pauline notions of justification by faith, isn’t it? All these questions of rewards? Parables that talk about ruling one city or five cities or ten cities? Laying up treasures in heaven? Tit for tat?”

I don’t think that’s the way the New Testament talks about rewards. I think there are two perspectives that help us a great deal to understand what James is saying, what Jesus says, and what Paul says in this regard. The first is elucidated by an illustration well articulated by C.S. Lewis on commensurate rewards.

He pictures two men. One wants to have sex, so he goes to the red-light district of town, pays his money, and has his reward. The other falls in love with a wonderful young woman, and he courts her, and he woos her, and he’s gracious toward her, and he wins her affections. Finally, they get married and he has his reward. What’s the difference?

The difference is what he calls a distinction between commensurate and incommensurate rewards. On the one hand, you pay money for something that should not be bought or sold. The reward is incommensurate. It is grotesque. In the other, the reward is simply the ongoing extrapolation of a relationship that is already right and good and clean. It is commensurate.

So also, God takes dirty, sinful people, and he begins to work in them by the power of his Spirit. He gives us a taste for heaven, and by his grace, he works in us to will and to do of his good purpose so that we do acts of righteousness, good deeds, and heaven is not payment for them. That would be incommensurate. Rather, heaven is commensurate reward. It’s an ongoing of this relationship that is more of the same.

It is the consummation of the same as sex in marriage is the consummation of a developing relationship. You can think of it as reward, and in a certain context it is, but it is not grotesque. It is not incommensurate. In any case, Paul explicitly says in Romans, “Our rewards are reckoned by grace, for what have you but what you received?” All of this, we are told, is for those who love him. In a sense, it is this love for God that must be built up to an enduring love.

Alec Motyer, an old Anglican minister in Britain, a godly man.… For those of you who read commentaries, you really must buy his commentary on Isaiah. It’s the best commentary on Isaiah I’ve ever read. J. Alec Motyer. He tells of a time when an old man in his congregation, bereaved as he buried his wife, says quietly to Alec, “It must be that the Lord still has something for me to do. Else, why has he left me here?”

Alec put his arm around his shoulder and said, “My dear brother, God has not left you to do anything except to love him still.” That’s wonderfully shrewd. It’s not, of course, that Alec was saying he didn’t have anything to do at all. He’s saying the categories were wrong, for at the end of the day, our life is not measured before God primarily in terms of what we perform but whether we love him still.

Alec has this ability to get to the heart of things. When it was not clear whether or not my disease was going to take me out a few years ago, I flew to England for some editorial meetings, and we were on this editor’s panel together. Some of the people were asking how this disease was going, and I said I really wasn’t sure. Alec came up to me and put his hand on my arm, and he said, “Brother, we’re all mortal; we’re all under sentence of death,” and walked away.

From anybody else that would have been.… Well, he would have become Job’s fourth comforter. But from Alec that was exactly right. We are all under sentence of death. Put things in perspective. Let’s not have any pity parties. It was exactly what I needed to hear at the time. There is a whole orientation of life, in other words, that turns under this perspective: when you are struggling under trial, remember the Christians’ goals.

When I was an undergraduate at McGill University, I heard a man come to the McGill Christian Fellowship group and expound the opening verses of James 1. He came to verse 2. “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.”

In those days, we were still using the King James Version. “Brethren, when ye fall into divers temptations …” Some of us, being young and eager, decided we should take this word from the Lord very seriously, and we quietly covenanted together that whenever we heard anyone else in our covenanting group complaining, we would remind him of this text. Well, you can guess what happened. Someone wandered onto the campus innocently the next day. “Ugh. Math exam at 10.”

“Count it all joy, brethren, when you fall into divers temptations.” Somebody else was having trouble with his girlfriend. “Count it all joy when you fall into divers temptations.” Somebody was finding it difficult to pay bills. “Count it all joy when you fall into divers temptations.” It wasn’t even godly! We were scoring points.

Gradually, in the mercy of God, it moved beyond the point of undergraduate exuberance to the place where we took it as a word from God. It started off we were intimidated to complain because we knew someone would clobber us with James 1:2, which was not normally good counseling procedure. Nevertheless, it did have the effect of cleaning up the way we looked at things.

We started looking for ways to be thankful, and we started noticing, in the context, this is to develop perseverance. In the course of about six months, the whole MCF (McGill Christian Fellowship) was transformed. In the four years I was an undergraduate there, that was the year we saw more conversions than the other three years combined. The opposite of complaining, of being me-centered, of murmuring, is being thankful. “Count is all joy, brothers, when you fall under various trials and temptations.”

Why? When you are struggling under trial, remember the Christian’s goals. If your goal is fundamentally to be comfortable, you cannot make this coherent, but if your goal is to be well-pleasing to God, to develop character, to be conformed into the likeness of Christ, then suddenly what Paul says in Philippians 3 begins to make sense. I want to know him and the fellowship of his sufferings being made conformable to his death. It is suddenly no longer pious talk. It is sensible. It is sane. It is coherent in the light of eternity.

2. When you confess God’s sovereignty, do not confuse God’s motives.

Verses 13 to 15: “When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when by his own evil desire he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”

There is a problem in understanding this text in English because the root word behind test or trial and behind temptation is the same in the original, so you always have to sort things out by way of context. The context alone determines the exact shading. I suspect James plunges from one to the other because he is writing as we experience these things.

We can make categorical distinctions between a trial and an actual temptation to do evil, but in experience, our trials are precisely the occasions very often for being tempted to do evil, at least in attitude. It becomes quite easy to use the same word and move rapidly without warning from one to the other. The same events that are opportunities to go forward are temptations to go backward. Trial becomes temptation because it finds an answering chord within us.

Clearly, in this sense then, God does offer trials. Despite the health-wealth-power preachers who think God’s sole business in life is to make life as comfortable for us as possible, God often brings us trials. In fact, in any biblical view of God, there is nothing that befalls us outside the sphere of God’s sovereignty.

I know it’s a fallen world order and one can introduce questions of secondary causality and have long theological debates on the nature of God’s sovereignty in a world where there is evil and suffering, and in another context, I would be happy to talk about those things at length. Here, John simply assumes them and cuts to the heart.

He says, “Listen. God does test people in the sense he purposely brings them into situations where their willingness to obey him is tested, where their metal is refined.” Do we not read in Genesis 22 that God tested Abraham? In Judges 2:22, God tested Israel. We saw in 2 Chronicles 32, God tests King Hezekiah.

Although God may do this to prove his servant’s faith and to lower their pride and to foster endurance, he never does so to induce sin. Never, never, never. He never does so to destroy their faith. Never, never, never. The reason is given for us in verse 13. “For God cannot be tempted by evil …” You say, “How is that an answer? What is the logic? God doesn’t tempt anyone because he can’t be tempted?”

The point that must be understood is that temptation is an impulse to sin, and since God is not susceptible to any such desire for evil, he cannot possibly be seen as desiring that it be brought out in us. If he is the very definition of holiness, if he cannot be tempted because he knows no impulse to sin, then how could you possibly imagine he would desire to trick us or fool us?

No. A true account of temptation in this fallen order is then set forth in verses 14 and 15. “Each one is tempted when by his own evil desire he is dragged away and enticed.” Dragged away and enticed.… The language is probably fishing terminology like bait on a hook. Hooked and dragged away.

The point of the passage is to stress individual responsibility. Here, there is no, “Oh, the Devil made me do it,” or “Who was I to oppose the sovereignty of God?” No. “Each one is tempted when by his own evil desire he is dragged away and enticed.” Of course, the Devil may well be involved, and you cannot escape the sphere of God’s sovereignty, but it is an elementary axiom of Scripture that at the end of the day you do what you want to do. That is the grounding of human accountability in Scripture. You do what you want to do.

In this terrible picture of sin in verse 15, the desire is evil, but the sin has not yet been committed. Rather, by an act of will, we ascent to the desire, and the sin is committed. Notice the terminology. The mother is the desire. The child that the mother spawns is sin. When that child grows up it turns into death. Thus, the mother (desire) gives birth, finally, to death. The imagery is grotesque. Giving birth to death. It’s as if the mother gives birth to a stillborn creation.

Here, in other words, is a kind of degeneracy that moves from evil desire to being snookered by sin, giving birth to the act itself, and sin, finally, turns into death. What is James’ point? It is, when you confess God’s sovereignty do not confuse God’s motives. That was the problem of this chap from Britain who I mentioned in the beginning.

He flirted with sin. He took no elementary precautions. He did not make himself part of an accountability group. He did not even follow Don Loveday’s lectures, which he heard as well as I, to stay behind the desk. Then he turned around and blamed God. When you confess God’s sovereignty, do not confuse God’s motives. The greatest demonstration of what God wants of you is that he sent his Son.

3. When you feel abandoned and crushed, do not forget God’s goodness.

Verses 16 to 18. Verse 16 is transitional. “Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers.” Do not allow yourself to wallow in rebellious self-pity or in accusing terms. Don’t be fooled. No, no, no. God, far from being the one who tempts you, is in reality the source of every good gift (verses 17 and 18). “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights.”

In other words, God’s sovereignty is such that, although in some ways he stands behind good and evil, he stands behind good and evil asymmetrically. In the Scripture, the evil can never escape the outermost bounds of God’s sovereignty. God is still God. This is not a dualistic universe, but there are always secondary causalities.

There is always a Devil. There is always us and our desire. There are always secondary causalities, but God stands behind good so that, finally, if any good is done, the praise is directly attributable to him. He stands behind good and evil asymmetrically, which means you can trust him in the evil but you praise him for the good.

That is common in Scripture. That is everywhere, and it is exactly what James says here, isn’t it? You don’t confuse God’s motives. On the other hand, in the third place, you do recognize everything you have that is good is from God. When you feel abandoned and crushed, do not forget God’s goodness.

The general point of verse 17 is clear. The heavenly lights probably mean the sun and the moon and the starts. Listen. If he is the God so powerful that he controls the whole universe and, yet, who transcends the universe, he does not change like the shifting shadows that they cast. This most stable element in the whole universe that we can imagine still shifts and changes with the turning of the spheres.

He is changeless. He cannot deny himself. He is unqualifiedly good. He is perfectly wise. He never makes mistakes. He is beyond reproach. He is above blemish and changeless in this. Understand, then, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”

Then, James says, if you want to see the culminating blessing, and it’s wonderful enough to think how God provides us with resources and with fellowship and family.… Most of us have enough food and friendship. How many times have we been safe on the highway under God’s providence when we might have gotten wiped out? Sometimes somebody else’s idiocy and sometimes our own? How many times, when someone else has been taken out with a disease and we have been spared? We have so many things to be thankful for.

You travel a little bit in the so-called third world, the Two-Thirds World, and see the sheer level of degradation in some parts of the world, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have been born there than here. You’re not better than others. I’ve traveled fairly widely, and the first thing that hits me every time I go to a really poor country.… I don’t mean a developing nation. I mean one of the nations in the bottom 10.

One of the things that hits me every time is the smell. All the reading in the world doesn’t protect you from that. It doesn’t warn you in advance, does it? Even the ability to have clean water and wash.… It’s a wonderful gift. You come away from these experiences and you’re not looking now for showers with piped in list or hot and cold running purple bubbles coming up. Just clean water you can drink and wash and feel clean.

He’s the God of all of it, and he could with perfect justice write us all off, and there would be no sin or malice attributable to him. We’ve lost our rights biblically speaking. He doesn’t owe us any of these things. We have them because he’s a gracious God. That’s all. But beyond all of that, he says (verse 18), “He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.”

Some have argued this is referring to God’s creative act of humankind at the beginning (“He spoke and the world came into being”), but that is very unlikely. The firstfruits language in the New Testament is bound up with the new birth. Moreover, this expression, give birth to, arises only twice in the New Testament. The other time is in verse 15, and the contrast is explicit.

“After desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin.” Desire gives birth to sin. God, by his Word of Truth, gives birth to life, the life from God, eternal life. Everything that is the opposite of the death that sins brings. Moreover, the expression, Word of Truth, is used five times in the New Testament, and it is always bound up with the gospel. What is in view is not God’s powerful creative word at the beginning as wonderful as that is. This is the gospel, as in Ephesians 1:13.

“And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation.” So the grandest gift this Father of lights has given us is the Word of Truth and the new birth that Word has engendered. That is why, when you travel to the poorest of the poor countries and you find brothers and sisters in Christ, they are the richest of the rich compared with many, many in the West who have temporal blessings and nothing more.

Again, you see, God is calling us to look at things eternally, to look at things from his vantage point, for at the end of the day, we are firstfruits of all he created. We are firstfruits of the new heaven and the new earth. On the last day, there will be a new heaven and a new earth. There will be no more death and no more tears and no more sorrow. No more bitterness and no more sin, and we brothers, are firstfruits of that. So James says, when you feel abandoned and crushed, do not forget God’s goodness.

When I went off to seminary in 1967, I started hearing stories about my mum and dad that I hadn’t heard. I spring from a denominational group in Canada that is not known down here. It’s an entirely Canadian group. It’s called the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptists in Canada. This was a group of churches that was finally organized only in 1953.

Its heritage came from Canadian Baptists who had been there for yonks, and it split during the 1927 controversies with the same kind of modernist fundamentalist debates you had at Princeton generating Westminster and so forth. This was the Canadian side of all of this. In these debates, at which time McMaster University was veering off to the left in the same way Princeton was veering off to the left, the hero of the hour from the point of view of confessional orthodoxy was T.T. Shields of Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto.

Shields was sometimes called Canada’s Spurgeon. He was an extraordinarily powerful and gifted preacher. He saw in his lifetime thousands converted, and he penetrated to the heart of this issue, and he clarified it. It caused a split at the time, but in my view, at the time it had to be done. It was one of those cases where there was just too much at stake to duck.

Things scattered a little bit, and they came together with churches forming up in unions and associations and so on again, as there has been some realignments among Presbyterian circles at various times in American history. During this time, there was one fundamental difference between Spurgeon and Shields. Spurgeon died at the age of 57 or 58. Shields lived to his late 80s, and he became a bit of a nasty, old man. He really did become a bitter chap.

He was far more defined by what he was against toward the end of his life than by what he was for. Nevertheless, he was still a great preacher, and when he was preaching the gospel, you just thanked God for his power for he was a powerful man in Canada until he died three decades later.

During that time, my parents came under his influence. They attended the seminary he had founded as a kind of foil to McMaster. Eventually, they were part of a small union before the Fellowship was invented that were sending people out to plant churches. My father became pastor of an English-speaking Baptist church in Montreal; felt called to the French side, and at the age of 26 started to teach himself French. Gradually, he planted a French church in Montreal and then moved on to Drummondville and planted a church in the eastern townships.

During that time, they had just moved on to Drummondville. I was just a baby at the time in the 40s. Some of the turmoil connected with T.T. Shields was perking in a serious way, and Dad, on an issue where he thought principle was at stake, voted quietly on a matter against Shields. Shields was so angry that money that had been pledged from the entire association of churches to help Dad buy a building for which Dad had already signed on the basis of this pledge, Shields said he was going to redirect.

Dad, unlike his son, was the mildest of men, but he wrote an eight-page letter which I have found in his files to all of the pastors of all of the churches who had pledged money. Very coolly, without a trace of venom, he lays out the history of the decisions that have been made, and without blaming anyone and without even naming Shields, he simply says, “Now because of recent circumstances, it transpires this money may not be sent to us. If it really is the intent of you and your leadership and your churches to send this money to us, I suggest you send it to us directly so it is not diverted,” and 95 percent of the money came in.

If Shields was angry before, hell has no fury as a man who sees money diverted. I heard none of this. When I was a boy, I heard about the great man Shields. I can remember my mother outlining for me some of the points of Shields’ sermons she had heard 30 years earlier. Shields had a very famous sermon on Other Little Ships, and my mother outlined the poem and worked out the application of the text to my life as a boy. I remember that!

Shields was right up there near Spurgeon and Calvin before I went to seminary. Then, when I got to seminary, I heard the whole thing laid out and saw some of the primary documents. The chap who was teaching this course ended up by saying, “One of the first things when I get to heaven that I want to see is Tom Carson’s crown.” My dad! I went home. I said, “Dad, there are some things you haven’t been telling me.” I laid out what I had heard. “How much of this is true?” He said, “Well, that’s about the way it was.” I said, “How come you never told me this stuff?”

He said, “For two reasons. First, you’re a son of the manse, and in the manse you see all kinds of garbage. You see squabbles in the church and so on. You have expectations placed on you by people who think minister’s sons are bound to be little saints. There are enough pressures on a son of the manse that the last thing you needed to do when you were growing up was face all kinds of really difficult things that mature Christians find tough to take.

You just weren’t old enough to take it. You needed to be protected from it. Secondly, we needed to protect ourselves, so your mother and I resolved we would never, ever, ever say a bad word about T.T. Shields, and we have kept our vow.” My parents were not great people, as the world counts greatness, but I bless God for their heritage.

When you feel abandoned and crushed, do not forget God’s goodness. We are not in a game in which we’re scoring points to see how many people will think nice thoughts of us. We serve one Master. He is the judge. Live with eternity’s values in view. “He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.” Amen.

 

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.