Testing, Adversity, and Spiritual Growth; James 1:13-16
The idea of "counting it all joy," 1:2, relates to the principle of happiness that God has to share with us, that He provides for us. Jesus said, "My joy I give to you," so we can have the very joy, the tranquillity, the inner peace and happiness that Jesus Christ Himself had. That is ours as well, God has provided it for us, but it doesn't happen overnight. It is based upon something, the fact that we know something. We know principles, principles of suffering, adversity, testing, all of these things are part of it. So joy is directly related to gratitude. As we continue to grow spiritually what happens is that gratitude becomes an orientation of our souls. As we begin to learn doctrine and learn how God works in our lives and how God controls things and what Scripture says, and we learn some things about grace, and God's unmerited favour. We don't have to be wrapped up in trying to always seek God's approval; it is already there because at the moment of salvation we were given the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. That moves us from a position of condemnation to one of justification, and we always have God's approval, we don't have to earn it through our behaviour. That is called grace orientation and we have applied that to the whole concept of what love is. These are all part of the tools that God has given us, the spiritual skills that God has provided for us which we call the ten stress-busters. These erect a wall around the soul because we are constantly running into two forms of tests, adversity and prosperity.
We find ourselves down in verse 13 in the middle of a paragraph that began in verse 12 and extends down through verse 18. James shifts gears in verse 13 and gives us a warning. It is a mandate. NASB "Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am being tempted by God'; for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone." The verse starts with a negative adjective MEDEIS [Mhdeij] which means "No one." That is followed by the present active imperative, third person singular of LEGO [legw]. The reason we talk about the parsing of a verb here and break that down is because it tells us something. The present imperative tells us that the writer is emphasizing continuous action, that this is supposed to be something that characterizes your life. The active voice means that the subject performs the action, so this always emphasizes volition in the active voice, that you the believer are the one who performs this action. So this is a prohibition, that you are to make sure that you don't slip into a position where you begin to blame God for the problems in your life. "Let no one say when he is tempted…." "When he is tempted" in the English is a translation of the passive participle of the Greek verb PEIRAZO [peirazw]. That is the verb form. The noun form is PEIRASMOS [peirasmoj]. This is translated "trial" but it also means "temptation," and there is a difference between those two words—one word; two concepts. The sense of trial or test has to do with the test in the garden related to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In chapter three of Genesis we see the other side of the meaning of PEIRASMOS when we see it in the form of temptation when the serpent comes to Eve. Eve looked at the fruit and saw that it was good to eat, it was attractive, and there was an inner desire to break the prohibition. That is temptation. So we see there is an objective sense where God will test us just to see whether or not we will do what He says to do or not. But that is different from temptation which is that inner attraction to do that which is wrong. So this one word has two different meanings and we have to carefully look at the context to see what the writer is talking about and which side he is discussing. What we see is that the sin nature in every believer is the internal source of temptation.
What is the purpose and role of suffering and testing in the life of the believer? There are two basic categories of suffering: deserved suffering and undeserved suffering. Under deserved suffering we suffer first of all primarily because we are sinners and we make bad decisions. This entails the law of volitional responsibility. Every single human being is responsible for his actions and will reap the consequences of his decisions and we have the law of divine discipline. Hebrews 12:5. Then we have undeserved suffering, which is nothing more than suffering by association. We suffer consequences all the time from other people's bad decisions—from government officials, family members, people we work for, management, etc. The first kind of undeserved suffering is from association with the cosmic system, Satan's system for trying to rule the world and bring peace and order and stability in the world totally apart from God. Ever since the fall Satan has been in control of planet earth, he is the prince and the power of the air; and you as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ are the enemy of Satan and his system and are the particular target of all of Satan's team. That does not mean that Satan is personally after every single believer, he is not omnipresent. Satan heads a vast organization of demons who are out there involved in all sorts of schemes to try to distract Christians from obedience to God, from Bible class, from advancing in the spiritual life. The cosmic system is all of the ideology that Satan promotes to give us a rationale or justification for our sin nature and independence from God. The second reason that we have undeserved suffering is association with other sinners. Every time we encounter any form of adversity or suffering or any form of prosperity that gives us once again that option: positive volition; negative volition. Are we going to use divine viewpoint and solve the problems through the filling of the Holy Spirit, the application of biblical principles, or are we going to opt for human viewpoint solutions and the sin nature?
Outside pressures of life can be represented in two categories of adversity, the law of volitional responsibility or divine discipline, which we might also call self-induced misery, and suffering for blessing. Suffering for blessing can be undeserved suffering, suffering from association which because we are in fellowship and under the filling of the Holy Spirit we can apply doctrine and advance. Stress is what you do to yourself; adversity is what the circumstances of life do to you. Stress is the result of volition, it is how you respond to those tests. You have the options. Positive volition: divine viewpoint using the stress-busters; negative volition: human viewpoint techniques to solve the problems. Stress in the soul always results from sin nature control of your life and will destroy your spiritual life and any spiritual growth that you have ever accumulated. Stress causes carnality, backsliding, moral and immoral degeneracy, and it will completely destroy any capacity for life, love and happiness. It eats away at the soul, destroying the inner spiritual strength that you have accumulated over time from any doctrine that you have learned. Stress perpetuated in the soul means failure to glorify God and therefore failure in the spiritual life—you will never achieve all that God has provided for you.
What kinds of adversities set up these tests (for us to blame God for in verse 13)?
a) Social adversity. This could be defined in terms of the loss of social life, loss of friends, broken romance, marital problems, personality conflicts, injustice or injuries from others who we thought were our friends.
b) Historical disaster. This would include economic recession, economic depression, warfare, diplomatic defeat, loss of establishment principles amongst the populace of the nation, loss of freedom, going through the violence of revolution, being the victim of terrorism or persecution.
c) Criminal disaster, where you become the victim of a crime.
d) Vilification disaster, where you become the victim of gossip, slander, maligning, judging, etc.
e) Rejection. This may be part of social disaster where you are isolated socially, or maybe it is a business situation where you lose your job and are treated unfairly, accused of practices which are untrue, victim of prejudice, you are rejected by someone you love.
f) Weather disasters. Hurricanes, tornados, flooding, drought, etc.
g) Health.
h) Death or loss of loved ones.
James 1:13 NASB "Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am being tempted by God'; for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone." The second half of the verse gets us into the principle of God's character, that God is perfect righteousness. The tests are designed to demonstrate the approval of our character. God is not in the business of putting us in these situations to tear us down but always in the business of putting us in situations to reveal the doctrine that is there or to get our focus back on Him so that we are motivated to learn doctrine and grow so that the character of Christ will be demonstrated in our lives. God's goal for our lives is to make us like Jesus Christ.