Reversionism and Recovery; James 4:4
Stage Five: hardened negative volition. This doesn't mean that you can't reverse, there is always recovery possible, but at this stage recovery through the grace principle of 1 John 1:9 becomes less and less likely. Romans 16:18 NASB "For such men are slaves, not of our Lord Christ but of their own appetites…" The word "appetite" is the Greek word KOILIA [koilia] which sometimes means simply the womb, sometimes the belly, but it often represents the internal desires and affections or emotions in the soul. So it talks about those lustful desires and appetites which we would call emotions. So we become slaves to our emotions rather than to the Lord Jesus Christ and that leads to hardened negative volition, and then that leads to the sixth stage.
Stage six: blackout of the soul. This is when the believer is now covered in darkness experientially. He is walking in darkness, he is never in the light. He has separated himself from Bible class, never gets involved with the truth because what happens is that at somewhere around stage five he begins to look somewhere else for friends, associates because it is too uncomfortable to be around these people who are always putting their focus on God and talking about doctrine. Ephesians 4:17 talks about this as the futility of the mind. It is developing a vacuum in the soul where the soul is just sucking in all the false thinking that it can. NASB "So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, [18] being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart." So at this stage the believer moves from a covert to an overt alignment with human viewpoint thinking. At this stage he becomes an enemy of the cross. It is characteristic of alignment with human viewpoint thinking: walking in the darkness 1 John 1:6; 2:11, Scripture uses various terms for this: hardening the heart, hardening the neck, hardening the face. Proverbs 21:29-31; Nehemiah 9:16, 17. At this point the believer is undistinguishable from a believer. For all intents and purposes he looks and acts like an unbeliever, you can't tell any difference between him and the unbeliever. 1 John 2:15 NASB "Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him." So at this stage there is no love for God anymore, all of the love is toward something in the created order and all of the affection has been completely reversed.
Stage seven: scar-tissue in the soul. This is a calloused conscience, a calloused soul. It is also called hardening of the heart in John 14:20. In this stage the believer completely resists the conviction of the Holy Spirit, is resistant to doctrine, and sets his direction firmly against God. This culminates in the final process which is the complete reversal where the life is turned around and starts heading off in the opposite direction. It doesn't happen over night but there is always a corrective.
Stage eight: reverse process reversionism. This is where the believer is said to leave his first love, Revelation 2:4, 5. He is called the enemy of God in James 4:4; the enemy of the cross, Philippians 3:18; a hater of God in John 15:23; and double-minded or fragmented in James 1:8.
So this describes the whole process of reversionism, but there is recovery and that is what James is going to address in verse 7, "Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. [8] Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded." All of thee imperatives are direct to the volition of the believer. Cleansing the hands refers to 1 John 1:9, confession. As long as we are alive God has a plan for our life. No matter how much we have failed, no matter how many bad decisions we have made in life there is always the opportunity for grace recovery. There is nothing we can do in life that is too great for the grace of God or the power of God to reverse the process so that we can begin to recover and go back in the direction of spiritual growth. The issue always comes down to studying the Word of God and learning the Word of God and letting our thinking be transposed.
The whole issue of cosmic thinking
1) The word "cosmos" [KOSMOS / kosmoj] relates to the devil's domain which is planet earth. Satan is called the prince of the power of the air, he is the god of this age, and he is the one who is in control of the earth right now. So all of his systems of cosmic thinking, no matter how many there might be, ultimately all relate to Satan's domain and they are all under girded by the same arrogance that he expressed in his fall, that he should be like God.
2) Satan gained his first victory in the garden of Eden when he convinced Adam to reject God's decree that "if you eat from the fruit you will die." Adam decided that he could only know truth on the basis of empiricism, he couldn't know truth on the basis of revelation. So he rejected God's revelation and that set the course and he ends up in sin. Adam's sin was wilful and so Satan gained his first victory by convincing Adam to think about his environment differently than the way God had interpreted his environment. There were certain things Adam could have learned about his environment and there were something he did learn about his environment empirically through observation and looking around. But Adam could not correctly interpret his environment apart from revelation. When Adam looked at the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he would not have discerned any difference between that fruit and all of the other fruit if God had not interpreted his environment for him and said that he could not eat that fruit, and that of he did he would instantly die. So revelation is always necessary for man to correctly interpret and understand his circumstances. You always have to have divine viewpoint in order to correctly understand your environment. But Satan convinced Adam that he could think independently of God and come to truth as a result of empiricism.
3) Adam and the woman became the first citizens in Satan's kingdom because at that point they became spiritually dead. Being spiritually dead means that you are a citizen of Satan's domain. That domain has its own philosophy of life.
4) The first act was that they tried to solve their problems on the basis of their own limited resources, so they went out and sewed fig leaves together to try to cover up the consequences of their sin. So we see in that initial sin in the garden all the characteristics that take place in the first stages of reversionism: self-absorption, self-indulgence, self-justification, and self-deception.
5) So since Adam's fall every human being is born into the kingdom of Satan, the domain of Satan, and we learn to think like "our father the devil." We think just like Satan in terms of arrogance, and this is what under girds all cosmic thinking.
6) Once we believe in Jesus Christ we are transferred from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of God's beloved Son.
7) This means that the believer is no longer spiritually dead but he is spiritually alive, though spiritually ignorant. Just like a new-born baby he has no comprehension of the world he is in. All of the ideas that fill up the mentality of his soul are human viewpoint and false. So he has to go through a massive re-education. We have to learn how to think as God wants us to think and not think on the basis of rationalism and empiricism and mysticism or any other forms of human viewpoint thinking.
8) This means that God in grace has once again, just like He did with Adam in the garden, has interpreted reality for us. He has told us how we are to analyse, evaluate and interpret reality, and that is given through Bible doctrine, through the Word of God.
9) When the believer goes into reversionism he completely rejects truth and the result then is slavery. Remember what Jesus said to the Pharisees: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." If you reject the truth the opposite is slavery, slavery to the sin nature, to the lusts of the sin nature, slavery to the passions and emotions of the soul. This is the characteristic of those who are friends of the world. The friend of the world makes himself the enemy of God.