Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: “Are You an Antinomian?”

**James 4:11-12**

So we’ve been away from James for three or four weeks. Now we return to our exposition of that epistle. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. James 4:11 and 12. And the topic—the title of the sermon is “Are You an Antinomian?”

“Do not speak evil of one another, brethren. He who speaks evil of a brother and judges his brother speaks evil of the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge. There is one lawgiver who is able to save and to destroy. Who are you to judge another?”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your scriptures. We thank you for the gift of the Holy Spirit based on the work of our Savior, forgiving our sins and ascending to your right hand and sending forth the promise of the Spirit to us to open this word to us, to transform us by it, to bring us Jesus through it, and to cause us to increasingly be intentional in our following of him and reflecting of his bright glory into this world.

Bless us now with an understanding of this text that might go into the depths of our being and transform us. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

You may be seated.

So here in this section of James, he returns in verses 11 and 12 to the tongue. This, of course, has been a common topic throughout the book. And what I’ve tried to do as we’ve gone through it is show kind of a theme or several themes that are going throughout the book. These things are not just some isolated set of maxims here and there. These have a common thread to them, and one of those common threads is the tongue and the difficulty we have with the tongue and the difficulty those sins with the tongue cause to the body of Christ.

It has been said by people that the tongue is the Achilles heel of the Christian. And my intent today is to make you feel bad, to bring guilt to you and to myself, so that the word of God, having struck us, might also then cause us to be resurrected in joy. You may not have any trouble with this particular sin, but I know most of you know me, and so what we hope to do is put this in a little different context than what we’re normally used to.

This is a common sin which is a devastating sin. Remember that what James is talking about. He’s writing to this persecuted church that had to leave. They want righteousness, justice, God’s order in the world. He’s telling them, “Yeah, that’s what God has intended. But the means whereby you achieve that are exceedingly important.”

Up to now, he’s said that the tongue relates to the body—and I believe that means corporately as well as individually—and that the tongue can be a means of peace within the body or it can be a means of disorder. And then he went on to talk about murdering people being driven by envy and selfish ambition. And the question for commentators is: is that literal murder or is that murder of our brother in terms of slaying with our tongue?

And here, at least following up that section, we have this reference back to the tongue. So whether there was actual murder—a kind of insurrectionist murder of persecuting church or Jews or the state—we don’t know for certain. It could be, and we’ve seen that in our country with the anti-abortion movement. But we know that this kind of murder—murder of one’s reputation—is certainly also at least encapsulated in the warnings he’s given us so far.

Now, I’m making all kinds of mistakes in this outline. One is that I’m using a 25-cent word at the beginning: antinomianism. It’s a big word, and I’m sure that there are technical ways of looking at this and defining it, not everybody would agree. But I’m just using the simplest definition of the term: nomos, from which nomianism comes, means law. So antinomianism means against law. This is in contrast to the Reformed view since the time of the Reformation, that God’s law is significant to our lives and that there’s no great disjunction between grace and law.

But in our day and age, there are many people that don’t really have much use for the law. And so you could refer to them as being against law, antinomian. Or you could use the word autonomy, right? Autonomi: nomi is law, auto is self. So we’re a law unto ourselves, right?

And when Christian Reconstruction began in the early 80s, you know, they focused on a word which had other meanings earlier in history, but for the sake of that particular movement, Greg Bahnsen’s book *Theonomic Ethics* was a big deal to that movement. So theonomic: theos is God, nomi is law—so God’s law. And the point of the book and much of what Reconstruction was about was asserting again the significance of law in the life of the believer.

There has been confusion about this, which I’ll address in a couple of minutes. And I think it’s a bit ironic, and this is why I chose the title I did. If you’re at this church, a member of this church, you certainly wouldn’t consider yourself an antinomian. Even if you didn’t know the term, you wouldn’t consider yourself against law. You know, we talk about law. And so the point of the question here is: it may surprise us the relationship that certain sins of the tongue have to antinomianism. That’s how James addresses it in the text before us.

So it’s a warning to us not to be hypocrites, to assert our adherence and love for God’s law, and at the same time to be practically anti-law, anti-God’s law, by the way we treat one another with our tongues.

So this addresses a very common sin and yet gives us an exceedingly important basis or underlying sinful base for what we do with our tongues. It’s very important, I think, therefore for us. Now, it’s important in a couple of other ways as well. Remember what James is doing: he’s saying, “Here is how righteousness and justice become manifest in the world. This is the way you should go about doing it.”

And so what this means is that how you talk about other brothers in the church, about them, to them—whatever—has a significance for effecting the manifestation of God’s kingdom in the world. It seems like the world is just falling down around us these days, and it seems to talk about bad speech about each other, seems a little ingrown in some ways, right? I mean, it seems like, “Golly, Dennis, do you know what? Do you ever read the newspaper?”

Well, yeah, I do. And it’s because I have a hunger and thirst for righteousness, God’s justice in the world, that this sermon is important to me. And I hope it’s important to you for that same reason.

What, of course, the purpose of this is—it’s talking about a sin that can kind of destroy or be a caustic acid to the body of the church in its local manifestation or in a broader citywide church manifestation. And so the church is ultimately, you know, the place that God shines forth from Zion and manifests change in the world. And so it’s exceedingly important that we don’t devour one another, right?

So that’s, I think, the significance of this in terms of eschatology. And you know, desiring a theocracy—not in the sense of the church ruling the world, but some people kind of didn’t like the connotations of theonomic, so they use the term theocracy, that just means God’s rule. And that’s what we want. Now, it doesn’t mean a theocracy in the sense of how Islam uses it, which is really an ecclesiocracy where the church rules the country. So we want that, and these verses are very important for accomplishing that today, just as it was in the time of the churches that James wrote to.

It’s significant and interesting that the very reconstructionists who, you know, kind of gave us Christian ethics—you know, they were known for that—and they were also known for being bitter of tongue toward each other. That’s interesting. And you know, may it never be said of us.

One other factor here, you know, in terms of church growth: the church wants to grow as an organism for lots of reasons. And if we build on Jason Farley’s imagery from last week, if the aroma of your house is stinky, and I don’t mean stinky diapers, but if it’s bad, people aren’t going to want to go to your house. And if the aroma of a local church is bad and people, when they come here, start to hear backbiting, they’re not going to want to be here. Why would they?

And beyond that, even if they don’t know what’s going on, God does. He’s got little lambs, and he’s going to put them in different churches. And I think the biggest determination of that is: why would he put a little lamb into a group of sheep that are biting and devouring one another?

Now, I’m not saying that’s what we have here, but I’m talking about the relationship of what seems like just a nice little moral lesson about the tongue to church growth, evangelism, missionality, the manifestation of the kingdom of Christ—all that stuff.

Now, I’ve once more—one of my common critiques is long introductions—but I wanted to set this up so that as we talk about the particular sin that’s addressed here, we’d see the big significance to it.

One last point before we go to the text. Many people are concerned these days—I know I am—about what appears to be a lawlessness on the part of much of our current administration. And President Obama doesn’t seem to be very concerned about what the law says. He just enforces certain parts, doesn’t enforce others, and does things however he wants to do them. And there’s a lot of, you know, pushback in conservative circles against that. And I imagine some of you are critical of that.

But, you know, he doesn’t affirm that he believes in law, really. I mean, the leftist political movements for the last 200 years have seen law primarily as an obstacle to progress. So, you know, it’s in his nature not really necessarily to think highly of law. But what about us? Our nature, our words are that we believe in God’s law, right?

And so if you get upset with the President, or whoever it is, the Governor, the goofy judge here that overturned the marriage definition—that’s okay to get upset about that. But think about yourself. And I tell myself, “Think about yourself, Dennis. Are you practically being against the law of God by sins of speech?”

So that’s kind of what this is all about and where we’re going.

Let’s now actually turn to the text itself and begin to talk about this.

## Command and Presenting Problem

So the first point in your outline is command and presenting problem. So presenting problem, right? You’re talking to somebody—they’ve got a problem and they want to fix this, but behind that usually there’s other stuff.

So the presenting problem that James is addressing is apparently an attitude of a lot of backbiting, a lot of angry words, a lot of slander going on. And that’s the presenting problem of the church. Now, he’s going to go deeper to these churches and talk about why that is going on or at least the relationship of it to law and God. But that’s the problem.

And so we have a specific command at the beginning of these two verses. The command is quite simple: “Do not speak evil of one another.” Brethren. He uses the term “brethren” or “brothers” three times in the beginning portion of that verse. So he’s talking about a body of people, the aroma of a family, brothers and sisters in Christ. And he’s giving them a very simple command: “Don’t speak evil of one another. Don’t speak against one another.”

This word is only used six times, I believe, in the New Testament, and three of those are here. So this is where it is. The other couple of references I’m going to read: First is 1 Peter 2:12. And Peter says, “Having your conduct honorable among the Gentiles, that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works which they observe glorify God in the day of visitation.”

So this speaking against is now what we’re to expect, you know, from opponents of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So right away, that tells us that this sin in the church—it’s as if, you know, the persecutors of the church are actually active and present within the brothers and sisters themselves.

1 Peter 3:16: “Having a good conscience, that when they defame you as evildoers, those who revile your good conduct in Christ may be ashamed.” So again, this sin is put in the hands of persecutors. It’s described that way.

So we’ve got these three uses here where it’s talking about what happens within the church. And then the two other uses of this are about persecution of the church, defiling our name, slandering us—like we’re seeing more and more of in the press and media. So again, every time you watch television or listen to the radio or listen to music and Christianity is being defamed or speaking evil of us—yeah, it’s good not to like that and to be aware of it.

But right away, maybe this week at least, it will trigger a reaction in me and a reaction in you to say, “Are we joining in that? Are we doing that same thing by backbiting and talking about each other and speaking against each other in the church?”

The only other occurrences in Romans 1:27 to 2. We all know what Romans 1 is about. Romans 1, the last half of the chapter is about, you know, homosexuals, and we get all worked up about that. But he goes right on to give a list of other sins that accompany these things. And among them is this speaking evil against another.

So in Romans 1, it’s actually put in the same line of sins as, you know, the ones that we think are so much of an affront to God and to how he’s created us as the wrong use of our sexuality. So I think that’s instructive in terms of the significance of this again.

Now, what does the word actually mean? Well, that’s a little more difficult to say. And again, I think I have problems with the outline here. I may not. We’ll see.

So another word for this might be slander. Don’t slander your brother. In my day and age, it was “don’t run somebody else down, right?” You’re talking to somebody, you’re running down somebody else. You’re talking bad about them. Or it could be actually directly addressed to the person—you’re speaking things that tear them down rather than that build them up.

I’ve got “talking smack” on here as a possible similar phrase. I don’t know if that’s right or not. Can you talk smack behind somebody’s back? That rhymes. I don’t know. I didn’t come up with the phrase. I was told that yesterday by a young man. I don’t know if it’s right or not, but I’m going to use it, and I use it a lot later in the outline. This is like talking smack about other people, maybe directly to them or behind their back.

Running somebody down, tailbearing, right? Disparaging, defaming, disdaining another—those are synonyms for what’s being talked about here.

Lensky—Richard C. Lensky. It’s funny, Hobby is here today. I thought about Hobby last night as I put the outline in its final form. And Hobby, years ago, gave the church a set of Lensky’s commentaries on the New Testament. Lensky, Richard C. Lensky, was a German-born American citizen, naturalized American, who wrote a commentary on the New Testament. He’s a Greek exegete, and I’ve always recommended him in terms of exegetical commentaries for work in the New Testament. And Lensky’s translation—Hobby gave that to the church—and so it’s in the church library if you want to read along in James as we’re continuing to preach through it.

But Lensky translated it: “Stop talking against each other, brothers.” Reminding us that we’re supposed to be in each other’s corner. That’s another way of thinking about it. You know, what you’re supposed to do is you’re supposed to be in each other’s corner. You’re supposed to be supporting one another. We’re supposed to be encouragers to each other. And instead of that, what’s going on is people are just talking back about each other.

So that seems to be what’s going on here.

Couple of other verses—you know, this is frequently spoken of in the scriptures. I’ll just give you a couple: Psalm 50:20 and following. “You sit and speak against your brother. You slander your own mother’s son. These things you have done, and I kept silent. You thought that I was altogether like you. But I will rebuke you and set them in order before your eyes.”

Now consider this, you who forget God. So in Psalm, if you do that, you’re not having God in your thoughts. That’s the fool who forgets God. He says, “Consider this, you who forget God, lest I tear you in pieces, and there be none to deliver. Whoever offers praise glorifies me. And to him who orders his conduct aright, I will show the salvation of God.”

So there’s blessings out there if we can turn from this sin. But there’s tremendous judgment. He’ll tear us in pieces. In fact, we’ll do it to ourselves—a church that’s dominated by this kind of problem of speaking against one another.

So that’s Psalm 50.

Another reference is Psalm 101:5 and 6, which says, “Whoever secretly slanders his neighbor, him I will destroy.” Now, you can’t get any bigger than that, right? If you secretly slander your neighbor, him I will destroy.

Now, what it means, of course, is—I mean, we all may do this sin. God forgives us. But if your habit is to secretly slander your neighbor, God will destroy you because he wants his church, his community, to manifest the kingdom of Christ in the world. And he’s—we sang a song earlier about the vengeance of love or something. Well, that’s what it is. His love for the church, for the bride of Christ, is so great that if you secretly slander your brother, he will destroy you.

“The one who has a haughty look and a proud heart, him I will not endure.” So remember that in the flow of James’s arguments here, he has just said in verses 8, 9, and 10 that your problem is your haughtiness. You need to humble yourself before God. Come to full-blown repentance because you’re prideful.

So that’s just picking up what that Old Testament scripture says as well. And again, here the opposite: “My eyes shall be on the faithful of the land that they may dwell with me. He who walks in a perfect way, he shall serve me.”

So again, God doesn’t just, you know, tell us the bad part of it. He says there’s a positive out there. And by way of the parallelism here, he says that the faithful ones are the ones who don’t slander someone secretly. So his definition of the ones that he’ll bless, his definition of faithfulness in this particular verse in the scriptures, is somebody that doesn’t talk behind people’s back, right? Pretty straightforward.

Now, what’s going on? And I, as I said before, in James, he talks about murder. He talks about—in context—people that in his setting he was writing to, people that had selfish ambition and envy. And remember, envy isn’t coveting. Envy says, “I want what you have. I can’t have it. I’ll kill you, or I’ll take it from you. I’ll destroy it.”

And so, you know, these rulers, these other men who are competing with the pastors of the Jacobian churches—Jacobian because James is actually Jacob, right?—so those churches that James is writing to, you know, they’re being envied by selfishly ambitious people, and those people are trying to tear them down. And that—I don’t think murder is usually what’s going on, certainly not in the context of the church.

But what they are doing is destroying people’s reputation. That’s the worst part of it, you know? If you’re in a church for 20, 30 years and you hear enough, you know, talking behind people’s back about somebody, people’s reputation can be totally, you know, obliterated. And pretty soon you’ve got half the church that you don’t really want to have a whole lot to do with them because you’ve sort of alienated them over the 15, 20 years.

Well, anyway, Proverbs 22:1 says this: “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, loving favor rather than silver and gold.” So, you all want to win the lottery, right? Well, more important than great riches is a good name. Your reputation really is so much of what you have, right?

And so the problem with speaking against one another—either sinfully directly to people or behind one another’s back, the problem with running each other down in various forms—is you’re destroying people’s reputation. And when you do that, you put a serious kink in the effectiveness of the ministry that each one of us exercises in the church, in our families, and in the community.

So it’s very important.

## Judging the Law

Now, he says as well that you’re not only speaking against one another, right? He goes on to say, “He who speaks evil of a brother and judges his brother,” and he’s going to make a point. So now he connects up judging a brother with the speaking evil of a brother. And it’s very important for what he’s going with this in terms of God’s law.

Now, you know, these verses are frequently used—as well as a few others in the New Testament—to say we’re never supposed to make discernments, evaluations. Judging is always bad in the sense of general discerning or speaking about what we think is right and what we think is wrong. And that’s not what’s going on here.

Remember, James has just judged them, right? James has just told them, you know, and he’s going to now move on to the rich in the next chapter. Next week we’ll hear about those that don’t account God in their plans and stuff. So he’s doing a lot of evaluation and judging. Now, he is, you know, writing inspired by the Holy Spirit, but Jesus says, “Not just ‘judge not lest you be judged’ but he also says to ‘judge with righteous judgment.’”

So this statement is significant for the flow of the argument, but I wanted to read from Lensky’s commentary. He points out: what does it mean here? How is he using the term “judge”? And you know, some commentators say it means passing a private judgment on a brother. So you don’t go through processes. You just make a unilateral declaration of this person being bad, having done this sin or that sin. You don’t go through Matthew 18 with it. You don’t overlook a matter. You speak against them in a judgmental fashion.

Here’s what Lensky says: “James himself states the kind of judging he refers to, namely that of running down a brother. To think that this refers to all judging would destroy the entire epistle as well as all apostolic denunciations of the sins of the readers. Preachers are to voice God’s law and God’s judgment on evil conduct in no uncertain terms. And he gives a couple of references there.

“And brothers must likewise correct each other. It’s clear from the Bible, right? But the judging that goes beyond this and aims only at tearing down the good name of a brother by imputing to him false motives and intents is an entirely different matter. It is a flagrant usurpation as if we had the power to send to heaven or to hell according to any law which we may be pleased to set up.”

So this is where it’s related, you know, to what we’re trying to do—is essentially destroy the reputation of another.

Okay. So this moves us into the next section of these verses in which he addresses the underlying problem.

So he’s correcting people who are tearing each other down. And he relates this to judging. That’s the kind of judging he’s talking about. And then he makes the next logical step in his argument. And he says that he who does this speaks evil of law and judges law.

## The Connection to Law

“But if you judge law, you are not a doer of law but a judge.” Now, I read it that way instead of “the law” because it’s significant here that the definite article “the” is not there, you know. So this expands really what he’s saying. If he said “the law,” then we could say—we could might think he’s talking about Mosaic law and only Mosaic law. But he uses the general term. Now he’s going to talk about the lawgiver, so this is God’s law, but he doesn’t restrict it to Mosaic law, right?

So law as James has talked about earlier is a comprehensive term involving all of the scriptures that culminate in the coming of Jesus Christ, who is the embodiment of this law.

So what he’s saying is: when you do this, he doesn’t say you’re not being very loving or you’re not following Leviticus 19. He could do that, and he’s done that actually earlier in the epistle. But here he takes a different tack. Here, what he says is the problem is much more serious than that. The problem is you’re against law. You’re against God’s law. You’re a practical antinomian.

And so if you run people down and don’t make corrections and try not to do that and repent when you do, then you’re a practicing antinomian is what he’s saying. He doesn’t care what you call yourself. Theocrat, theonomic, reconstructionist, transformationalist, whatever it is, Reformed—it doesn’t make any difference. You’re not Reformed. You’re just a practical antinomian. You’re speaking against law itself.

Now, there’s a couple of senses, I think, to this. What does he mean “you’re speaking against law”?

Well, first, they are actually violating portions of the law—and specifically the Mosaic law. Leviticus 19 is the heart of the Pentateuch, and at the middle of Leviticus 19 are these verses 16 and following.

“You shall not go about as a talebearer among your people, nor shall you take a stand against the life of your neighbor.” See that connection again between slander and murder. When you go about as a talebearer, you’re taking a position against their life. You really—it’s as if you’re trying to kill them, maybe through poison slowly, right? Like they do in Perry Mason or whatever.

But you, but you know, he connects up those two things in Leviticus 19:16. And it’s a specific commandment just as it’s a commandment here to stop doing it. It’s a commandment in the law, and the center of the law in Leviticus 19.

The very center of it is to love your neighbor, as we’ll see in just a minute. And the context for that means that loving your neighbor in Leviticus 19, in God’s law—which is the second great commandment, right?—loving your neighbor means not talking smack about him. It means not running him down. It’s that simple. There’s that one-to-one equation.

He goes on to say, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart.” Why does he say that? Because that’s what happens either at the beginning or the end of a long series of tailbearing. You end up hating somebody. Maybe that’s why you did it in the first place. Usually not. But you get there as you engage in this sin.

“You shall not hate your neighbor in your heart. What does it say in opposition to this? He says, “You shall surely rebuke your neighbor.” You’re judging, but now you’re taking your judging in the proper way that God has given you to do it, which means going to him and rebuking him, seeing if it’s really a sin, working the thing out, rather than talking about him to other people or just, you know, drive-by saying, “You’re a jerk,” and moving on and saying, “I’m not going to talk about it.”

Those are you—so, you know, this is really pretty simple stuff. But the significance of it is that it’s the heart of the Pentateuch. It’s the heart of the exposition of the law in Leviticus 19.

The heart of it is to love your neighbor as yourself. Which he goes on in verse 18 to say: “You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the children of your people.” See, does that sound familiar to us as we engage in this sin? You end up bearing grudges, or you’re bearing a grudge and that’s why you do it.

He says, “Don’t do it. Don’t do that. Don’t bear a grudge against your people. But you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”

So there it is. And James says here: if you’re judging the law, you’re not doing the law. Well, what are you supposed to do in terms of the law? You’re supposed to love God and love your neighbor. And specifically, he’s already told us what that love looks like.

Love, earlier, has been described as being those who help other people to positively engage in—for instance, relieving the widows or orphans in their distress. So you’re not doing law. You’re actually anti-law. You’re antinomian when you go about sins of speech relative to your brothers and sisters in the church.

So that’s one aspect. They’re actually breaking the law, right?

There’s another aspect to this. The other aspect has to do with more of a philosophical or overall perception of what law is.

And unfortunately, in our evangelical culture, law has gotten such a bad name that we think of it as constricting. We think of it as a prohibition against us, right?

What does James call law or the law in this epistle? Well, he’s called it the royal law. It’s the mark of royalty in the kingdom. And he’s called it the law of liberty. It’s the law that frees us and protects us through its various provisions.

So one reason why you’re violating law by attacking your brother or sister—surreptitiously or directly—is because you’re ignoring the safeguards of the law.

Let’s say you went to court and the judge says, “I don’t really got to hear the evidence, or I don’t really like that guy. I don’t want to hear his evidence. I’m just going to make my judgment.”

Now, God sets up judges in the church and in the state, and in the law he puts restrictions on what we can do, right? He tightly restricts those who are going to sit in judgment on you. Evidentiary matters, different connections of certain punishments, what a crime is—all that stuff is spelled out in the law of God. And those are restrictions.

Well, if a judge or a session have those kind of restrictions placed upon it, and now you’re going to usurp some kind of private judgment against a person with no restrictions at all on you, you can see how that violates the very purpose of law.

The purpose of law is to protect us, right? It’s that old movie again, *A Man for All Seasons*. You know, the guy’s son says, “I’ll tear down every law if it’s stopping us from doing what we should do.” And the guy says, “Well, you tear down every law in England, and then you turn around and the devil is there. What do you do?”

The laws are protection to us. It’s not some great restriction. It keeps you safe with laws of evidence, who can judge and who can’t judge. And so when we slander one another—directly, indirectly—when we talk smack about each other, when we run each other down, we’re running down law itself. We’re not letting law perform its function, which is to protect us, you know, from ungodly attacks and to keep us in the context of a community that exercises love one toward the other.

So the royal law—and what does he say? If you really fulfill the royal law according to the scriptures, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. That’s Leviticus 19:18 that I just read. So he’s already told them, right?

When we quote an Old Testament passage, it’s sort of like humming one verse or the chorus, and we’re supposed to fill in the rest of the song. And so when he told him that earlier—that the royal law, the law in the context of the king’s family, right—that law includes not being a talebearer, not bearing grudges, not hating your brother in your heart, and positively going to your neighbor. And it doesn’t mean to rebuke him in the sense of, you know, what we think of as rebuke. It means to speak frankly with your brother, to have forthright speech with your brother about the problems that you perceive, which may or may not be true. And even if they are, how do you go about resolving them, right?

So all that he’s already told us is part of the royal law of love when he quotes Leviticus 19:18 in James 2:8, and then again in James 1:25: “He who looks into the perfect law of liberty continues in it, not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the word, right?”

And that’s just what he says again here.

So the law brings liberty. It’s connected to liberty and the protection of who we are. And so when we ignore the law—or law—and we just make private judgments, come to preemptory, summary sort of judgments about each other, and talk about each other behind each other’s backs to other people, or just tell them “you’re a jerk”—you know, that is absolutely corrosive acid to the life of the church because it gets rid of—it’s an attack on law itself. It is antinomianism. That’s what it is.

Okay. So he says that in the next section here, then: “you speak evil of the law and you judge the law.”

## The Ultimate Issue

And then he really gets to the rest of the argument. “But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of law but a judge.”

And then this is where it really is. This is the crushing blow in what he says here: “There is one lawgiver who is able to save and to destroy. Who are you to judge another?”

Now, now that’s the third—that’s the deep motivation for their slander or the deep connection that he wants them to make. Not only are they slandering or speaking against their brother, they’re judging law and rejecting it. And when they do that, you can’t reject law without rejecting the one who gives the law—which is God himself. And when you do that, you’re rejecting the one who can save and destroy. He’s going to tear you in pieces.

You know, what does he—he’s already talked to this earlier in this epistle, right? He’s connected up the sins of the Jacobian churches to the devil, right? Poison on their tongues just like the devil.

Well, this is the same thing here. He’s saying you’re just like the serpent. You’re rejecting God’s authority, and you’re encouraging autonomy. And that’s what you’re doing. You’re determining for yourself good and evil.

So not only are you striking out at your brother or sister, you’re striking out at the law. And what that means is you’re striking out at God, you silly little person who is able to save and destroy you. And you’re being just like the devil.

In fact, that’s what the word “devil” means: a slanderer, double-tongued one, right? So, so that’s the real culmination of his line of logical argumentation here.

Is that just like he’s asked earlier in the chapter or in the epistle, “Are you a friend of God?” I’ve talked a couple weeks ago about “Are you an enemy of God?” And here, “Are you a judge of God?”

That’s what’s happening when you tear each other down. When we tear each other down, we’re being a judge of God himself. We’re placing ourselves over him.

Quote from—I think this is Lensky again. I’m not sure. “This flagrant, arrogant judging usurps God’s authority, sets aside his law and judgment and presumes to set up law and judgment on its own. It is the fallen man at work, plain and simple, determining for himself good and evil. ‘I’m going to rule the world. I’m going to do what I want to do.’”

## The Solution

What’s the solution? Well, he tells us the solution. No, you know, stop it. That’s part of the solution. Don’t do that, right? But he says the other thing is: when you do, when you sin against the law that way, you’re not a doer of the law. You’re not a doer of law.

Well, what does the law say? Love your neighbor as yourself.

So if you’ve got people you’re tending to talk about, start partying with them. Get together. Have a good time, right? It’s really tough to slander people that you know pretty well, you know. You just see them here, maybe it’s pretty easy. But if you get together, share some entertainment, go out for dinner, go to a movie—then talk about when you start to build relationships, right, you’re much less likely to slander those people.

Now, the slander drives relationships apart. So you’re going to have to work hard at building the relationship back. Sin destroys relationships. Repentance should begin to heal relationships, bring them back together, right?

So the solution is: put off slandering, backbiting, running each other down, and put on being a doer of the law—love your neighbor as yourself. Not just by abstaining from gossip, but from positively saying, “How can I help you?” Thinking about the person and trying to minister to them.

So that’s a big part of the solution here. Again, what’s the aroma? Try to create an aroma that’s pleasant—like a bouquet of flowers—with that person, rather than an odiferous aroma.

I had a bad tooth years ago, and the dentist takes the cap off, or whatever it was. “Whoa, that’s quite odiferous. Quite stinky.” Well, think of whatever the worst smell you can think of. That rotten tooth was pretty bad. Think of it. You’ve smelled bad things, you know? That’s what this is like. The aroma of that kind of church is anything but appealing and attractive.

## Practical Backbiting in the Church

Well, let me conclude by talking about some practical, typical backbiting in the church now. When you listen to a list like this, you can do a couple different things, right?

One, you can think about somebody else. “Yeah, they sure do that one. They sure do that one, right?”

Two, you can think about what people have said to you about other people. So if you’re a hearer of this stuff, and the Bible says a lot about that—a countenance, a frowning countenance will stop gossip. So you don’t engage it. You kind of evidence disapproval. But you might just think about, “Yeah, I heard somebody say that to me. I know he’s doing that.”

Or what I really want you to think about is yourself. And I want me to think about myself. Is this what we do? Which ones of these typical means? There’s a lot of others, of course. I just chose these—which ones of these things are we prone to do?

You know, so that’s how I want you to think about it. Maybe that God brings other people to mind, but just pray for the Holy Spirit to bring yourself to mind on any of these, okay?

**First, there’s cowardly smack talk.** What is this? It’s very important. Leviticus 19, what does he say? Don’t bear a grudge, don’t hate your brother, don’t backbite. But go forthrightly and speak with him.

We’re cowards. We don’t want to do the forthright thing. It is uncomfortable for us. Now, it’s easy if we get all angry and just blow up at somebody. But if we want to do it right, it takes some courage.

So a lot of times it’s a coward or it’s that part of us that acts cowardly with no courage that ends up smacktalking other people. “He won’t listen. Smack talk. Well, I can justify talking to somebody else about it, cuz I’ve tried talking to that guy. He won’t—he won’t listen to me.”

Well, let’s go talk to him together. The other person can say, “But that’s another excuse for smack talk. He won’t listen. Why should I do it?”

You know, and some of this stuff is found in the crucial conversations material. Villain, victim, right? “He won’t listen.”

**Unbelieving smack talk.** At the base of going about doing things God’s way rather than our way is belief in that God is—that he’s given us his word and revelation. But if we really don’t believe that, well, why shouldn’t we smack talk?

So sometimes we do it just because we think, “Well, that’s how it works. This is worldliness.” James has warned us about worldliness earlier in the epistle. But, you know, if that’s where you find yourself, you should be honest about it, right? And then talk, you know, with a pastor, community group leader, whatever it is. “Yeah, I know I’m acting real worldly. I’m using the world’s tactics in terms of the politics of the local church.”

So it can be just unbelief, right?

**Envious smack talk.** As I mentioned earlier, you end up smacking somebody because you know you’re envious of them and can’t have what they have. So you tear them down. Best way to get up is to tear somebody else down, and then you’re up in relationship to them. But you’re really no—you haven’t progressed at all. In fact, you’ve sunk lower.

But envy.

**Pious smack talk.** This is a big one, right? You know, “Well, I’ve got a prayer request. This person, you know, and you tell them who the person is, and ‘I got this problem with them,’ and you then do the tailbearing thing. You do the smack talk, running them down thing, but you share it as a prayer request, a concern. ‘This is on my heart.’ And it’s a way to paper over what is going on, which is a violation of what James tells us here and a violation of the law of love in Leviticus 19.”

So you got that pious kind of “please pray for me.”

**Drive-by smack talk.** This is where I don’t want to discuss it, but you’re “you’re a lousy jerk.” See you. Drive-by shooting, you know. So this is what we do too to each other. Just make a comment and take off.

You know, when Leviticus says to talk frankly with your brother about things, the idea is it’s just like Matthew 18. There’s supposed to be a dialogue going on, right?

So you got drive-by smack talk.

**Positioned or partial truth smack talk.** So to justify what we do, then, is we tell people truth. We tell them certain portions of a thing that happened, that we observe somebody else doing. But we don’t tell them all the truth. We leave out the crucial detail, as to which was an important part of the story as to what unfolded.

I this happened to me very recently, you know. And it’s or positioning the truth. You take certain elements of the truth and you stress those when you’re talking to somebody to make the person you’re talking about look bad and to make yourself look good.

Now, for some of us, this is a common thing we do. And I want you to think about it this week. Take this list home. Think about it. Think, “What am I doing?” Ask your wife what you’re doing. She’ll tell you. Wives, ask your husbands. Or if you really want to get brave, parents, ask your children. They hear stuff, okay?

A position to partial truth.

**Blameshifting smack talk.** So now you know you’re in trouble, but you’re going to blame somebody else. You’ll talk about somebody else to get the blame off of yourself. It’s scapegoating, but it’s still a motivation.

And this happens.

**Piling on smack talk.** And this is the most sad of all. You know, if in a community or church somebody has been routinely talked about behind their back long enough, the reputation is junk. And when their reputation becomes junk—jaded by all the, you know, speaking against one another, jaded by that stuff—well, then you can pile on pretty easily.

I mean, everybody knows that person’s a jerk, right? Nobody’s really talked to them. But after a couple of years, everybody says, “Oh, yeah, they’re jerks.” You’ve killed their reputation, which is the most important thing they have in life. And you’ve reduced their ability to minister in the power of the Holy Spirit for the well-being of the church.

And as a result, now the nice side of this, we serve a God of resurrection, correct? I mean, right? This pretty bad stuff, pretty corrosive acid, pretty debilitating for a local church or in your own particular life or the life of somebody that you sinned against in this way, right?

But hey, we serve a God that gets calls us together and says, “Repent. I’m anxious, I’m eager to forgive you, to empower you, to help you not do the stuff you’ve done. I don’t care how often it’s characterized your life. We can turn it around. You and me, Holy Spirit and you, turn the thing around with the help also, many times, of other people, right?”

So we serve a God of resurrection. Reputations can be reborn. We can be reborn with positive speech about each other, fulfilling the loyal love, love bringing liberty back to a relationship or to a community.

A church that’s characterized by running each other down, man, that’s a restrictive, you know, tight little “watch your back” community. And what we should be doing, we should be those that have each other’s back, right? That’s who we’re supposed to be.

Part of having each other’s back is bringing correction when it’s needed. Courageously, forthrightly, lovingly, but bringing correction. All right.

So common problem. There are some, and there’s other things as well, of course.

## Conclusion

Finally, in conclusion: “Be careful, little mouth, what you say,” right?

Do people still sing this song? We sing it with our kids. “Oh, be careful, little mouth, what you say. Do you know it? No. Let’s sing it.”

“Oh, be careful, little mouth, what you say.
For the Father up above is looking down in love.
Oh, be careful, little mouth, what you say.”

And along with it:

“Oh, be careful, little ears, what you hear.
For the Father up above is looking down in love.
Oh, be careful, little ears, what you hear.”

Yeah, he’s looking down in love. He loves his church. And if you’re not careful what you say or what you listen to, in his love, he may well bring vengeance for the sake of his bride.

So may the Lord God cause us to be a group of people that use our tongues to build each other up, not tear each other down, whose profession of a delight in the law of God is met by that law forming the content of our speech, bringing liberty and royalty to this church.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for this text and we thank you for the broad-reaching aspects of it and yet the very specific details of it as well. Bless us this week. Help us not to forget what we hear today. Help us throughout this week to meditate on these things, to look over the list, to do a little mouth analysis or check of ourselves by talking to our friends.

Bless us, Father, as a church that we may have a fragrant aroma here. That aroma coming from the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. In his name we pray. Amen.