The Friend Of God’s People - James 2:25-26 Series

James 2:20 You foolish man, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless? 21 Was not our ancestor Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? 22 You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. 23 And the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and he was called God’s friend. 24 You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone. 25 In the same way, was not even Rahab the prostitute considered righteous for what she did when she gave lodging to the spies and sent them off in a different direction? 26 As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.

Introduction

Have you ever seen faith?

Luke 5:20 When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.”

Jesus forgave all of his sins because He saw their faith. When Jesus saw their faith, what was it exactly that He was seeing? What does faith look like? That’s a very important question to answer because there is a kind of faith that won’t save you. James calls it dead faith. You will spend eternity in either heaven or hell based on whether you have saving faith or dead faith. And so it is vitally important for us to have a crystal clear understanding of what saving faith looks like. So to help us with that, in this chapter James sets up the canvas and gets out his brushes and paints four striking portraits. The first two are ugly. They are portraits of dead faith. One is a hideous picture of so-called faith that does not result in loving people. The second one is an even more hideous picture of belief in true doctrine that does not result in loving and trusting God.

Those are the ugly portraits of dead faith - the other two portraits are beautiful. They are both pictures of saving faith. The first one we looked at last week - the portrait of Abraham’s faith. That is a picture of faith that loves and trusts God so much that it would willingly give up its most precious earthly treasure if God gives the word. A person with that kind of faith is called God’s friend. And we devoted our whole study last week to that concept of friendship with God through faith.

And when we talk about friendship with God, we are not talking about that kind of shallow, over-familiarity where people think of God as a peer, or their buddy in the sky, and they don’t have reverence or fear or awe of Him. A biblical understanding of friendship with God does not in any way minimize or diminish God’s greatness, because God is both our friend and our King. And for that reason, the most fundamental expression of our friendship with Him is obeying Him.

John 15:14 You are my friends if you do what I command.

The main way we express our friendship with Jesus is by doing what He commands. And what does He command? What did James say is the royal, supreme law of Scripture? Love your neighbor as yourself (James 2:8). So James has one final portrait he needs to paint for us to fill out our understanding of what true, saving faith looks like. Now that he gave us the picture of the vertical aspect (which results in preferring God above every earthly treasure), now he is going to show us the horizontal aspect - the effect trusting God has on the way you treat God’s people. (And that order is crucial, by the way. First faith, then love – always. First you trust God, only then you can truly love people.) And James wants us to take a look at a woman whose life is the ideal portrait of that aspect of saving faith. Her name was Rahab.

Rahab’s Story

Just to give you a little historical background, when God rescued His people from their slavery in Egypt, they went directly to the Promised Land. And they could have occupied the Promised Land right then. The reason they didn’t was when they saw the Canaanites they were so scared that they didn’t feel like they could trust God to give them victory. The Canaanite warriors were huge people, and their cities were fortified with massive walls. And so when the 12 scouts came back from scoping out the land, 10 of them said, “If we go to war against those people they will squash us like bugs.” The other two scouts were Joshua and Caleb, and they trusted God. But the 10 cowards spread their bad report all through the ranks of Israel, and everyone went along with them. It is a lot easier to spread fear than faith. It is a lot easier to pull people in the direction of cowardice then in the direction of courage. And so the people reverted to their favorite pastime.