James 2:8 says, If, however, you are fulfilling the royal law, according to the Scripture “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well.
Then James 2:12–13 tells you, So speak and so act, as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. For judgment will be merciless to one who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.
Do you understand what James is trying to say? Everything is based on divine spiritual laws. Whether you understand it or not, God has a reason and He has a law and those laws work because there are reasons behind them.
God has laws, and behind the laws are reasons, whether we understand them or not. Some of these laws operate on a very low plane(the natural realm), and some of them operate on a higher plane ( the spiritual realm).
We have laws in the natural realm about fire, how it burns, and what combustion will do. If the combustion is too rapid, we call it an explosion. We have laws that govern water. Yet, there must be some higher laws and principles that can be in operation.
The Scripture tells about men who were able to pray; and because they prayed, hungry lions shut their mouths and denied all their savage, ferocious tendencies to destroy.
Men walked about on the coals of a furnace, so hot that the flames and the heat destroyed the men who came to throw them in.
Prayer caused men to walk on water as though it were a sea of glass. Prayers brought the dead back to life again, and healed bodies which were sick with long illnesses.
Prayer has done many things that seem quite unusual. It has defied other laws. With the law and the principle of prayer and of faith, God turns things loose.
God just provided the law of faith and prayer so that we can lay hold upon the promises, and a provision that God had made would be turned loose for us.
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Jesus does not need to make some fresh decision to die on a cross every time a sinner repents. It was done once for all, it was once accomplished, and a person only needs to believe it, and something takes place that is the greatest of all miracles: a new birth, a change of heart, a change of nature, a change of heredity, until the human heredity gives way to the divine nature and the divine heredity.
James 2:12–13 speaks of a royal law by which God deals. God must deal with us, but not with our sense of justice, for a sense of justice is a thing that no human being really knows how to minister.
If you lived in ancient Babylon or one of the ancient cities of the world such as Nineveh, you would be amazed at the way they ministered justice. At the approach of the city of Nineveh, there was a pile of human skulls taken from every corner of the world. They knew how to intimidate and put fear in people.
The people of Nineveh were so wicked that you can understand the reason Jonah did not want to go and preach to them. Jonah must have thought that if God was going to destroy them, the quicker He did it the better. He did not want to bring any mercy to them at all. The strange thing is that after he preached to them, they survived about two hundred years before the wickedness overcame them and they were really destroyed under the judgments of God.
Those ancient cities had many beggars who sat with their hands or feet cut off or their eyes put out or their tongues cut out, because justice was very swift by Babylonian law. It was an eye for an eye. If someone stole something, they saw to it that he did not steal again—they cut his hands off. Many offenses were worthy of death.
Things have changed; now there is a strange sense of justice. The innocent is called guilty and the guilty innocent. Laws are created, and yet you wonder if those laws really exist at all. Where do they exist?
You can have justice in the United States, or you can have mercy, either one. If you have enough money to afford it, you can have mercy. You can buy it. It can be bought.
Oh, what a sense of righteousness we need. But times have changed. A great many things have changed. If you could repeal all of the laws that exist right now and go back to Old Testament law, as far as crimes are concerned, there would be only a few chapters, and if they were swiftly executed, you would eliminate nine-tenths of the crime in the United States within four or five years time.
“But,” you say, “I don’t want to live under primitive times: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” No, you live under something else. Now people can literally get away with murder. You have that kind of justice here in America.
Babylon was different. When you came into the city you saw the cripples. I would not want that kind of justice either, would you? I would not want to see people who had made one mistake crippled permanently.
Yet God said in the Kingdom there would be the lame and the halt and the blind, and what the Bible was really talking about were the people who had suffered because of their sins and their crimes and who were left mutilated, wounded, and maimed, as the penalties of justice were executed so swiftly and so destructively upon a person in those days.
When we come into the realm of God, and we seek first the Kingdom of God, there are laws and principles operating there, also. These are more realistic and more binding than any other laws; because whether it is ancient Babylon or today, we can have little confidence in man’s justice. But God is operating differently.
You may say, “You’re bringing us back under law.” Yes, but it is law on the highest plane, not Moses’ law, but the royal law spoken of in James. The royal law said you should love your neighbor as yourself, and you are to so speak and so act, as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty (James 2:8, 12).
“Law of liberty, what kind of a law is that? If you’re under law, you’re not under liberty.” Yes, there is a law of liberty. And that law of liberty in Christ is worded this way: “you will be judged without mercy if you show no mercy; you will be judged with mercy if you show mercy” (James 2:13).
The Lord’s Prayer picks up this principle. As a man stands looking for the mercy of God, he says, “Forgive me my trespasses as I forgive those who have trespassed against me.” He can believe God to do it because it is in his heart.
When you stand and pray, forgive men; because if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive your trespasses (Matthew 6:14). You come up to a divine law that says your own spirit will determine the nature of God’s dealings upon you.
These laws and principles say, “If you have love, the love comes back.” Blessed are the merciful; for they shall obtain mercy. Matthew 5:7. These are principles and laws. The blessings, the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount are only teaching that same thing.
In the Old Testament David knew it: Psalm 18: 25 With the kind and merciful You will show Yourself kind and merciful, with an upright man You will show Yourself upright, 26 With the pure You will show Yourself pure, and with the perverse You will show Yourself contrary.
God resists the proud. Judge not lest ye be judged. With the judgment that ye mete it shall be measured to you again. (Matthew 7:1, 2).
Read the parable of the king who was taking account of his many creditors. One man owed him so much money that he was going to have him sold with his family for the debt. The man fell down and begged him, “Have mercy on me, and I will pay you all.” So he let him go. But that man who was forgiven, went out and found another fellow who owed him a small amount, and he showed him no mercy. He had him thrown into prison. When the king heard about it he said, “Take that man and put him in prison. Sell all that he has. Sell his family into slavery.” Why? He said, “You should have shown mercy. You had so much mercy given to you; why couldn’t you show it to another?” (Matthew 18:23–34). This is the way God will deal.
You say, “Well, God has forgiven me my sin.” It is forgiven; but God has a way of demanding that your spirit shall face every action you make that is unfair, unforgiving, unmerciful, or unloving. You will get it back again. He also has a way of saying that what you sow, you will reap; and that was written to Christians and not to sinners: … whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. Galatians 6:7b. The chapter continues: if you sow to the flesh, to the flesh you will reap corruption (Galatians 6:8). That is not for a sinner. A sinner does not sow to his flesh and reap corruption. He is already dead in his trespasses and sins. He does not reap death; he is already dead. But the Christian, if he sows to the Spirit, in the Spirit he will reap life everlasting. The rewards and the blessings that come back to his spirit are fantastic. God begins to bless him.
“Well,” you say, “I know I deserve something better. They can’t do that to me-I deserve this!” Good. Demand, by all means, demand what you deserve because that is what you will get.
It pays to be loving, to be kind, and to be forgiving. You say, “Oh, I can’t get over it. I loaned somebody some money, and every time I see him in church I have a struggle with that. He never paid me back!”
Forgive and forget about it. You are only hurting yourself because the harshness in your own spirit is bringing that thing back repeatedly to you, and you are paying too great a price for bitterness of spirit. You cannot do it.
Think of all the things Jesus is trying to teach us here about love. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. John 13:35. You say, “It isn’t practical.” I know, it is not practical. Give. No one is encouraged to give, and yet God says, “Give, and it shall be given unto you; heaped up, shaken down, and running over, shall men give to your bosom” (Luke 6:38).
He did not even say anything about God; but you turn loose a principle. You turn loose a principle in love; you turn loose a principle in mercy. You turn loose a principle, a divine law.
God is love. I cannot move in Him unless I move in love, and the moment that I move in that love toward my brethren, toward the whole world, then it starts coming back to me again. Yet, invariably, Christians are tempted to judge one another very harshly. Something takes hold of them.
The early church had the same problems. What would it have been like to go to church and hear Paul preach, and remember that your father or your mother or your grandmother had been taken to prison and killed; and that man standing there talking to you, preaching to you, was responsible? Wouldn’t it have been hard to be submissive to an apostle who had killed your own grandmother? Could you do it? “O God, strike that Saul of Tarsus down.” He did, but not the way the Christian was tempted to pray; because when God struck him down, he got up another man. When God struck Saul down, that was really the end of Saul, but God had a different way of destroying His enemies than maybe the Christians realized. The amazing thing is how much mercy they were ready to show and how much grace they were ready to give.
In the same manner, you cannot be living in this day without mercy, without mercifulness in your heart. I am continually finding that: When a man’s ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies be at peace with him. Proverbs 16:7.
Men may hate you viciously, and you wonder why you don’t run into more trouble and more opposition, but it seems as if it comes just so far, and God just makes the opposition evaporate. When a man openly opposes you, pray for him and bless him. You may not want to pray and bless him. You may just want to let him get it, whatever he is going to get, and the quicker he gets it the better. No, pray for him, and desire the Lord to bless him. When he is criticizing you, you know how well you could chop him down; but when it comes right down to it, bless him. You do not want the Lord to chop you down. You cannot afford anything but just to be merciful. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Matthew 5:7.
How much bitterness reacts upon the individual! You may not think so, but it does. People destroy themselves on these principles and laws that God has laid down. I made a study of jealousy in the Bible, and was amazed how many men, who were deeply jealous of a saint or a child of God or someone who was trying to serve the Lord, died by the very mechanism or plan that they had designed for another. Haman was hung on his own gallows. King Saul fell on his sword, the one with which he had tried to kill David. On and on, are examples of jealous men who died by the very means they intended for someone else. The Scriptures say a man will fall in the very hole that he digs to lay a trap for another (Proverbs 26:27, 28:10). You cannot afford to be angry.
The Word speaks of love: about loving one another. It is right on this point that people are defeated. They say, “Why was I defeated? I was worshiping God; I was serving God. What was it that knocked me out?” They do not realize that nine times out of ten it was born of their own emotions that they allowed, which started coming back in a vicious way according to the laws of God. When God tells us to love the brethren, He means it.
Pray and open your heart to love the brethren. That is the one way by which we are identified as Christians (John 13:35). Do not ever get the idea, “Well, I was born of God, and I have love.” Love is not a static emotion or a quality of character; it can be big, or it can be small, depending upon how you train it and what you do with it.
Paul told the Thessalonians something about love that you must never forget. And may the Lord cause you to increase and abound in love for one another, and for all men, just as we also do for you; so that He may establish your hearts unblamable in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all His saints. I Thessalonians 3:12–13. What has he said about love? You can increase in it, and you can abound in it. It is as though it is a dimension in which you can choose to live. This should be your choice. You can have faith for it.
Lord, I believe that I am going to walk in more love and abound in that love. Love will not remain an emotion with me, but love will become an activity, a way of life. It will become a course of action in which I engage continually.
Love is not going to be just a passing emotion or thought, but always I will inject love into everything I do and in everything I say. Every response toward people, I am going to season with love, because that love will be an antidote which will take away bitterness; it will take away fear; it will take away doubt, the defensiveness, and the rebellion. All these negative emotions, will be counteracted if I inject love into the situation.
Do you have some enemies that you are going to sprinkle liberally with a good bit of love? Have things been bothering you lately, working on you? You cannot have an unforgiving spirit. You cannot be like the old man who fought with his neighbor for years. Finally, when he took sick and was about to die, he called in his neighbor and said, “Neighbor, it is not good that we fight like this. I may be dying. I want you to forgive me, and I want us to be friends.” So his neighbor reached down and shook his hand and said, “We’ll be friends, and you’re forgiven.” The man answered, “Ah, that’s a relief to me. But if I get well, God help you.” You cannot be that way.
You know what you will have to do, the way that you will have to treat others. It will come back—like a boomerang. Love is like that; it is hard to get rid of love—like the fellow who bought a new boomerang and had an awful time because he couldn’t throw the old one away—that’s true of love. You just keep giving it and ministering, and it will come back to you again and again.
Blessed are the merciful; they will obtain mercy. He who has been merciless will also be judged without mercy. It is a royal law. God made it to be so. You determine what happens to you next month by your feelings and emotions today and yesterday. Open your heart. God will help you to see it.
There is such a thing as striving in faith because you have victory or striving in despair. But God has not made us to be rats in a corner. (When you corner a rat, he will fight you every time; he will turn and be ready to bite you). We are not rats in a corner. We are not fighting because we are cornered, but we are fighting to prevail in the victory of the Lord Jesus Christ in all things. We have every good thing set before us.
It is time for a whole new attitude, or at least a renewal of a good attitude. There is such sadness, such a heaviness that people carry because they are not reckoning on the provision of the Lord.
O God, deliver our soul that we shall not be oppressed by the passing scene, but we shall reckon on the assurance of the victory wrought in the past that is valid now and gives promise of the unlimited future in the name of the Lord.
We can despise the passing scene. Hebrews eleven talks about those who wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; they lived in caves and holes in the earth and wandered through the deserts and on the mountains. What does God say about them? “What a bunch of riffraff?” No. He says, “Of these the world was not worthy” (Hebrews 11:38). The passing scene did not matter. The thing that did count was that they were hanging onto promises of God. You say, “Well, where in the world are they now?” Seeing you are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every weight and the sin which does so easily beset you. Run with patience the race that is set before you in the Lord (Hebrews 12:1).
Oh, renew your hands in the Lord. Strengthen yourself in the Lord. Be girded about with the praise and the strength of the Lord. Say to yourself, “Who am I?” and answer back. “I’m the royal son of the King. I am one of the sheep of His pasture. I’m a child of His table. Feed me, Lord, feed me. Delight in me, Lord. You redeemed me at such a great cost; now delight in me; enjoy me, Lord, even as I in turn enjoy and rejoice in You my Lord.”