1. James Becomes the Gospel
Coverning James Chapter 1:
I have written out the verses of my Bible, Old Testament and New, over and over since I was nineteen, because I love the Word of God flowing through me. I have always known that God’s Word is Life and that I must know what God says, personally to me.
Often, in my pursuit of knowing what God means by what He says, I wrote out every verse containing a particular Greek word, including Old Testament counterparts. That same love of the Word flowing into my heart, just naturally progressed to my wanting to know what the Greek actually said. For that reason, my taking on the task of creating the Jesus Secret version of the New Testament was simply the next heart step. I must know what God actually says.
A New Study. I have placed the Jesus Secret version into a text titled “The Open Scroll,” which I have been working on for some years. In the midst of all my other writing, I do not want completing The Open Scroll to fade into the background. But I find that I must write comments, and that the first comments I wrote were insufficient. Thus the task of creating a cohesive flow of comments for The Open Scroll presented itself to me. I realized that writing those comments on the Gospel Verses would be best served by the same kind of study together that we did in writing The Jesus Secret II.
This is the first of those studies. As with Writing the Jesus Secret, the actual comments that are in The Open Scroll will be in red (bulleted in the print copy), and they will be scattered through a flow of my thinking as I consider what to write.
Knowing the Gospel. As I begin this study, I do not really know what shape it will take, or what kind of comments I will be making. For that reason, the first several lessons will be a discovery of how this whole thing might work. Thus in these lessons, you will find me “thinking aloud” as I search for the path of the Spirit. My purpose in the comments is to show one gospel message passing through all books of the New Testament, anchored and directed by the ruling verses of the Bible.
I have known since I was twenty that the Bible, what God actually says, is lied about all the time. I cannot live by lies about the Word. I want to know the Gospel, and I want that Gospel to Flow into me and through me to others. (The next slide comes after I have completed this study.)
The Flow of Gospel Word. As I have completed this study, The Flow of Gospel Word, I find myself inside of such thankfulness, that God has given to me the cry of my heart since I was nineteen, that I might know the Word of His Gospel. This study will become very quickly more powerful in its Flow than anything I have ever known. And it will establish you, not in the Bible, but inside the God who writes the Bible as the Lord Jesus upon your heart of flesh.
Early on we discover that rather than “ruling over,” the deep thoughts of God rule “under.” God’s thoughts are inside of the Gospel writers bubbling always up as springs of living water, expressing themselves in differing ways in verse after verse. You will also find that this Flow is utterly Biblical, pure out from God, and that it honors the Lord Jesus in every way.
Beginning with James. James is the first New Testament book to be written. The original Greek does not show any antagonism between James and Paul; thus neither does the JSV. It is the mind of good and evil, hostile against the Life of God, that imposes a translation on James’s words that seems to oppose Paul’s gospel.
Not only does James provide us with a gentle wisdom for the Christian life, but he also establishes the core meaning of the Gospel, that God plants His Word inside of us that causes us to be conceived of God as sons. And James’s urgency is that we speak the same Word that is Christ, a word of blessing, that we might know and live out from who we are as sons, in full agreement with Paul and John.
The Whole Picture. We will simply begin with James Chapter 1 and work our way through with verses and comments. As we discover what we are doing, we might change the approach – or not.
• 2 Consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters [a], whenever you might fall into any and all sorts of trials, 3 knowing that the proving of your faith produces steadfastness [remaining under]. 4 Allow steadfastness, then, to work its completion, so that you may be complete and whole, lacking in nothing.
Wow. Right off the bat, James gives the relationship between giving thanks as the entrance into, and completion as the final goal, of the Christian life. The in-between, then, is “the proving (not testing) of our faith.”
Ask and Believe. 5 Now, if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask in the presence of God, the One who gives to all generously without finding fault, and wisdom will be given to him. • 6 Let him ask in faith, however, doubting nothing. For the one who hesitates is like a wave of the sea, being blown and tossed by the wind. 7 One who is hesitant, lacking in confidence, should not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord.
And there you have it, the first two “HOW” verses of the Gospel, “give thanks” (count it all joy) and “ask and believe you have received all you have asked.” This is before Mark writes his gospel with Jesus saying this same thing. Then, James’s next “HOW” will be to speak Christ.
Be Confident. BE CONFIDENT that God gives you what you ask of Him with all certainty and generosity. – But ask of God that which is important to God, the completion of His Word in you. Now, I had already written the Gospel Comments for James. However, by this approach to finding Gospel Word, I see far more clearly immediately. For that reason, I am basically starting over.
• 8 For he is a two-souled man , with two stories of self, wildly unstable in all of his ways.
This is the final verse to bring in before we tackle our comments. James is showing immediately that there is NO such thing as “two lives” in us, Christ versus “sin in the flesh.” We now have two types of “Gospel Word.”
Avoiding Schizophrenia. James 1:1-7 is the Seventh Ruling Verse of the Bible, just worded differently, but with confidence in God as the outflow of the Christian life. Then James 1:8 brings in a necessary and critical definition. If confidence be True, then there cannot be two lives vying for control, back and forth. The whole concept of the “Christian struggle against sin,” James calls “schizophrenia,” wild mental instability full stop.
Let me heed James’s counsel. “Father, I ask for Your wisdom freely given to me so that I might know how to word these gospel comments clearly and succinctly. Thank you, oh God, for I know and am confident that I have received all I have asked, that Your Word might be glorified.”
Two Options Only. Do you see what James has done? He has made the Christian life to be all about a direct and ongoing connection between each one of us and God our Father. And he gives two options only.
Option 1: Ask God directly and with all confidence to show you what He means by what He says. Do it right now.
Option 2: Or go insane, plunge into full mental delusion.
And of truth, most of James’s argument through the rest of his letter is to contrast these two mental states, wisdom, personally from God, flowing through confidence – or – full “Christian” psychosis. And the center of that contest is the human tongue. – Speak Christ! Do not speak sin and death.
Our First Comments. • Ruling Verse 7: Faith acknowledges God and sees Him in all, even that which seems awful. Faith asks for the fulfillment of all Word and never hesitates. Our life is a direct and ongoing relationship with God through faith. We enter through giving thanks (count it all joy). The “proving” of our faith is Christ Jesus, faithful and True, the end is completion.
• Definition: We are NOT double-souled (literally: schizophrenic); we do not have two natures.
My goal is to keep these clear and simple, thus we will have now five categories (adding “Speak Christ”), named at the start of each comment, and to be both concise and complete, that is, to say all that must be said in as few words as possible. I want to keep it personal as well.
Stark Practicality. I am filled with overflowing JOY and excitement. This is the greatest and most wondrous task God has placed before me thus far, to write this series on the flow of Gospel Word in this way, from James 1, in AD 45 to Revelation 22 in AD 97. And I am certain that if we were to include Mark, Matthew, Luke, and Acts, we would find the exact same flow.
James has begun with the great difficulty found in the practicality of the Christian life, and he has made it stark. Yet he must immediately establish the base foundation of the Christian life, which is the nature and being of God, the One who initiates every ongoing moment of that life. James is eliminating the Nicene “gospel” before it ever has the chance to be birthed.
Defining “God.” • 13 Let no one being tested say, “I am being tested by God.” For God cannot be tempted or tested by evils, and He Himself tempts or tests no one [c]. • 14 A human, however, is tested by his own desire and passion being lured by bait and turned in the wrong direction. 15 Then desire and passion, having become pregnant, give birth to sin; and sin, brought to completion, gives birth to death.
Verse 13 entered my consciousness early on and became part of that intense drive over many years to remove from my God all accusation that He knows evil. [c] is the reference that the words “tempt” and “test” are the same Greek word, falsely translated as two different concepts. God’s word is “prove,” to prove Christ True in us.
Defining Sin and Death. Not only does James give us a critical definition of God, that He knows no evil, that the devil lied (who would have thought), but he also gives us a mind-blowing definition of sin and death. James removes the definition of sin from the tree of right and wrong and places it utterly into the mechanism of the Tree of Life, designed inside of us by God. In fact, he places the definition of sin straight into Ruling Verse 7, with the picture of the weeping two-souled Christian.
Let me point out something I see more clearly now. I am placing the leaf arrow (•) at the most important line in a passage, but this allows me to draw my comment from the whole passage, all of which I include in this lesson.
Critical Definitions. • Definition: God does not know evil; doing what is wrong never enters His mind. He never “chooses the good” or “refuses the evil.” God does not know evil. The devil lied. God is Life without death; He is Good all the time.
• Definition: Sin is first defined by the Tree of Life, not by knowing right and wrong. Sin is birthed by the passage of false word through doubt, through the same path by which God intended Life. Sin is everything done after turning one’s back against Jesus and His good speaking as our only Source (See Hebrews 1:3).
• 17 Every good act of giving, and every perfect gift, is from above [from the Source], coming out from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change or shadow of turning.
The Source of Life. • 18 Out from His own desire, He gave birth to us by the Word of truth, for us to be specific firstfruits out from His created beings. – 21 Therefore, having already put off all defilement and the abounding of malice, • receive inside of gentleness the word implanted, which is able to rescue and heal your souls, your story and awareness of self.
Verse 17 is also a definition verse, an expansion of James’s prior definitions, and continuing to make a personal and direct relationship with God to be the Source and cause of the Christian life. Verses 18 and 21 are primarily Life verses. Many lines, of course, can fit into two or more categories, but to keep it simple, we will list it as the main focus.
Seeing Yourself. • 2:10 For whoever manages to keep the entire law, but stumbles in one point, he is now guilty of all. – This is a critical argument Paul used in asserting his gospel.
Now, I have a hard limit on the length of these lessons, and I want to complete James in two lessons. For that reason, we will move right through, building our understanding of what we are doing as we go along.
23 For if anyone is a hearer only of the word, and not a doer, that one is like a man looking at his natural face in a mirror. • 24 For he has perceived himself, gone away, and then immediately forgotten what he looks like. I think this continues as part of Ruling Verse 7, yet it’s also the Covenant, tied with 2 Corinthians 3:18.
Conceived of God. • The Covenant: We CANNOT save ourselves.
• Definition: The word “above” in reference to God does not mean geography, but Source, out from God’s Pro-Knowing, His thoughts concerning all (See Romans 8:29 & Psalm 139).
• Life: God’s Word is planted in us through our faith, as sperm in the womb. The reproduction of life is the central metaphor of God and the Bible. The Spirit of God brings this truth to us clearly through James, the first Gospel book to be sent into the Church. “Out from His own desire, God gives birth to us by His Word.” We are conceived of God; we know Him as our Father.
• The Covenant: The mirror is Christ Jesus, for we see Him alone, the Salvation of God. Seeing Jesus is the only way we perceive ourselves to know what we are. Out from this metamorphosis, then, we act with Love in confidence.
A Complete Picture. 21 Was not Abraham our father declared to be justly innocent, having offered his son Isaac upon the altar? • 22 You see that his faith was synergeoing with his works, and out of his works, his faith became fully complete. 23 And the Scripture was fulfilled that had said, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him into just innocence” (Genesis 15:6), and he was called a friend of God. • 24 You see that out from doing good things for others, a man is declared justly innocent, and not out from faith alone.
James is touching on something very deep here, without giving it full explanation. And now we see that the entirety of Chapters 1 & 2 is a complete picture and cannot be chopped up into pieces.
Reciprocity. Just as we saw the entire gospel upon a closer look at 1 Peter Chapter 1, so we are seeing the entire gospel inside of James Chapters 1-2. By the anointing, these two gave us Paul’s gospel!
God declared Abraham to be justly innocent in 1882 BC. Abraham completed his faith in offering up Isaac in 1834, 48 years later. The “work” of Abraham, for which God swore His oath, was completion, reciprocity, giving back to God what He has first given to us. This completion was the seal of God upon that just innocence that began through faith. In fact, that is what James said, that the earlier pronouncement of just innocence was fulfilled and brought to full completion in the synergeoing of faith and action, the “proving” of our faith.
Faith Energeoes through Love. Whether he realized fully what it meant or not, by selecting Genesis 22 as his proof of faith, James was bringing into the gospel that completion of becoming just like the Lord Jesus Christ in sharing His act of bringing all back to the Father. Abraham offering Isaac is also a picture of 1 John 3:16. Completion is sharing with Jesus in all. Faith energeoes through Love (Galatians).
It has been 48 years since I first heard and believed a word of Life, 48 years of seeking to know this Word inside all of my Bible, yet my eyes were truly blinded. Finally, I see what James actually says. As Jesus said, “An enemy has done this.” Notice also the prominence of the seven “pathways of power” throughout all Gospel Word, as in Entrance and Reciprocity, Connection with and Knowing God as Goodness only.
The Ruling Verse. • Ruling Verse 1: First consider 1 Peter 4:19. God’s faith and His well-doing are two sides of the same thing, inside of each other, even synergeoing together. As we are conceived of God by His Word, Jesus Sent into us, so it is the same with us. Our faith, coming out from God, participates with God in actions of Love, in doing good. This is part of the ruling verse, Romans 8:28 - synergeoing with God, making all good.
The truth is that we are seeing so many connections to all the ruling verses and all types of Gospel Word in a great web of Life and Love. It is hard to differentiate, but we will remain with simplicity in this study.
Defining Faith and the Human. • 26 For just as the body apart from spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.
• Definition: Faith, the faith of the Son of God now ours (see Galatians 2:20), proven and made complete, is faith that has brought forth the actions of Love, God through us (see 1 Corinthians 13). This line also shows us the complete interrelationship of spirit and physic in our outward form, and that death is the splitting apart of heaven and earth.
I would prefer to expand on this, but I will not. It is the overall picture, a bit at a time, that is most important in counteracting all the false reading we once knew.
The Proving of Our Faith. We have been taught to read James completely wrong. The entrance of Word is the beginning of Faith; the actions of Love are the completion of Faith; and the in-between is the proving of that Faith that goes from Source to Completion, God through us into our world.
Most of James, then, is about the in-between, the proving of our faith. Indeed, this is how we are to position Ruling Verse 7, going forth with God in confidence, with Ruling Verse 8, love as Jesus loves, coming right after. And the proving of our faith is to offer back to God that which He has first given to us, just as Jesus did, setting forth our souls for the sake of our brothers and sisters.
Reading for Next Time. The next lesson is “2. James Is about Speaking Christ.” In this lesson, we have done only the first two chapters of James, but we have also given space to understanding what we are doing. In the next lesson, we will complete James 3-5. At the same time, we should be able to make more complete the explanations of the five categories of Gospel Word. And the truth is, this very exercise is forcing me to see clearly, which is what I had hoped.
Great news! The “Secret” portion of my website is completely revamped. All older versions have been removed. Most of the pages are now blank, but I will fill them in as we go through this study. The JSV of James is now all there, the final version. You could read the whole book for next time. Three links on the front page now take you there, including “Gospel Word.”
Let’s Pray Together. “God, our Father, we rejoice in the Word You have given to us, for it is more wonderful than we have ever known. Your Word is a living and energeoing connection with You, causing us to be Your very expression in this world. Your Word makes us to be just like the Lord Jesus, for Your Word is He.
“Father, as James instructed us, we ask You to fulfill all that You mean by what You say in our lives in full completion. And we ask in certain confidence, even in the midst of all strange and painful difficulties, knowing that You give to us all we have asked in overflowing generosity. Father, You cause us to know You; You cause us to Live!
“And Father, just as Abraham gave back to You all that You had given to him, so we do the same. We return to You the very Love and generosity You have given to us, that You might win all Your desire. Father, it’s not about us, it’s about You fulfilled inside of all our brothers and sisters, all who belong to Jesus in this hour. Father, we return to You Your very Word, in full reciprocity, that it might be fulfilled in full in all who call upon Your name. Let us be Your doorway; let us be Your highway. Be FREE, Oh God, to be All-Love through us.
“Oh God, You are so Good, for You have placed the confidence and faith of the Lord Jesus to be the very fabric of our souls. We are confident in You, Oh God, that You are, and You do, all that You speak, inside our being made like Jesus.”