Love and Rejection
James 2:8; Leviticus 19:18
An important principle in understanding dispensationalism is that in dispensationalism there is the principle of hermeneutics that any time there is a mandate in one particular age that mandate does not continue into the next era or dispensation unless it is repeated. What we find in Leviticus 19:18 as well as in the Sermon on the Mount in Luke chapter 10, as well as in James 2:8-10 and Romans 16 is a repetition of this principle that we are to love others as ourselves. Eight time in the New Testament this verse is quoted from the Old Testament, which indicates how important it is. In dispensations there are two issues that concern theologians. One is called continuity, the other is called discontinuity. Continuity means that there are some things that continue through every era. For example, salvation has always been by faith alone in Christ alone. In the Old Testament they anticipated the fulfilment of the promise of salvation and the coming of Messiah. There were not only the promises to look forward to but there were the teachings through types in the tabernacle, the sacrifices and the furniture. This is continuity. In the New Testament salvation is still by faith alone in Christ alone but now we look back to the fulfilment of those promises as they were fulfilled by the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. But then there are some things that are discontinued, they do not continue through every dispensation. For example, there were certain sacrifices during the era of the Gentiles in the Old Testament. There were many more sacrifices given during the age of the Mosaic law and the age of Israel. All animal sacrifice ended with the cross. However, when Jesus comes to establish the Millennial kingdom at the second coming there is going to be a rebuilt temple (described in Ezekiel chapters 44ff) and there will be a restoration of animal sacrifices during the Millennial kingdom. Just as we have the memorial supper today with the Lord's table, looking back to the cross, there will be a restoration of just a few—not as many as during the era of the Mosaic law—animal sacrifices as a memorial for Israel, looking back to the cross. So in every dispensation there is a change in relationship to animal sacrifice. But when we come to the royal law, the law of impersonal or unconditional love, it continues through every single dispensation. That means that in terms of interpretation we can go to the Sermon on the Mount and look at the characteristics there, even though it may be in a message of the Lord's that applies more directly to the Millennial kingdom, He gives examples of what impersonal love looks like. Impersonal love is going to look the same in every dispensation. So it is legitimate to go to Luke 10, Matthew 5 and other passages and analyse how the Lord applies the passage because the principle never changes, its application never changes.
James 2:7, 8 NASB "Do they not blaspheme the fair name by which you have been called? If, however, you are fulfilling the royal law according to the Scripture, "YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF," you are doing well." We have seen that they were going through testing and James is using the example of people testing. People testing can be one of the worst—how we are handling the testing related to people. Here we have a particular type of people testing which focuses on the broad category of rejection. Rejection can be manifested in many different ways. It can be real or it can be imagined and we have to look at this.
For spiritual growth we have to use our volition, and that is application of doctrine. We have been learning doctrine, the Holy Spirit has been storing it, it is categorized in the soul, and we have learned all kinds of different things. We've learned rebound, confession of sin, the filling of the Holy Spirit, the faith-rest drill, have memorized half a dozen promises, and all of a sudden there comes a situation in life where we are threatened by something or someone. So we say, Okay there is a promise here, God says, "Fear thou not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God; I will strengthen thee, yea, I will help theee, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness." So we are not going to respond in fear, we are going to let God handle the situation, we are going to mix that promise with faith and exercise the faith-rest drill. That is what James says: hear it and do it. You hear it, and that is the process of getting it into epignosis; the doing is the application. You apply it in terms of the faith-rest drill, in terms of confession, in terms of exercising impersonal love for all mankind, you apply it in terms of inner happiness, you apply it in terms of a personal sense of eternal destiny. That is application.
What we are talking about in this study is application in the realm of love. The stress-busters involved in this category is the love triplex, which includes personal love for God—the motivation. For love to have any value in life it has to be based on integrity. When we have personal love for God it is God's integrity that has the value. So God is the only worthy object of personal love in life because He is the only one who has absolute and perfect integrity because He is perfect righteousness. That becomes the basis for impersonal love for all mankind. Why? We love others because of who God is—He is the model, His essence provides the stability for us—we base our impersonal love on the essence of God. This is why we have to spend a lot of time talking about who God is and His character. We have to understand what God's love is like and that is what we model our love like, because God had to exercise impersonal love for all mankind when He sent His Son to die on the cross for our sins. When God sent Jesus Christ to die on the cross for our sins he exemplified for us the characteristics of impersonal love. God's impersonal love for all mankind, then, becomes a model of the active side of impersonal love. It isn't just that God didn't have any mental attitude sins toward us, but that God actively did things. There was initiation, dedication, commitment, concentration. All of these are part of impersonal love. Our impersonal love toward all mankind reflects His impersonal love. So we have learned that there is an active as well as a passive aspect to impersonal love. The active is initiating that which is best for the object and the passive is the absence of any mental attitude sins which in the end become self-destructive in human relationships.
The situation that presents itself here in James chapter two for application is one that is very common and is destructive in the life of many believers. So we will take some time to analyse this and see how in one particular arena we can use impersonal love for all mankind to avoid converting the outside pressure of adversity into the inside pressure of stress in the soul, and that is in the arena of rejection. With the rich man that comes into the assembly it is not that his richness, his wealth, the fact that he has an abundance of material possession and details of life that makes him bad, it is his attitude toward the believer. This is describes in v. 6, "Is it not the rich who oppress you and personally drag you into court?" So the rich man oppresses them, there is persecution here, there is hostility and ridicule, and this is all part of rejection. So we will try to come to grips with what rejection is, how it works itself out in everyday life, and then see how impersonal love for all mankind handles that so that we can avoid converting it into stress.
Rejection
1) Rejection is defined as being forsaken, attacked, ignored, persecuted, made the object of ridicule, bullied emotionally or physically, being repudiated, eliminated, denied, or being set aside. It can take the form of being laid off at work, being fired; it can take a passive form or an active form. Rejection can also be defined as negative volition and refusing to acknowledge, believe, or accept doctrine; but for the purpose of this study we are looking at rejection in terms of personal rejection.
2) The person who is being rejected is the rejectee; the person who is doing the rejecting is the rejector. Whether you are the rejectee or the rejector both have serious problems in relationship to handling adversity and stress. The rejector can be reacting to a situation, rejecting out of motivation from the sin nature and converting that outside pressure of adversity into inside pressure of stress and rejection. The rejector reacts to real or perceived threats and rejects someone. If is is imagined then the rejectee has the problem of how he is going to handle the rejector, and they can react. Maybe it was an imagined threat, insult or slight, and the rejector thinks it is real and says or does something out of malice or anger fear of rejection, and hurts the rejectee. Now the rejectee is the one who reacts again and it creates a vicious cycle. In passive rejection a person is rejected by someone else. The person being rejected maybe rejected because they had done something wrong, or they be rejected and have done nothing wrong. Jesus Christ was rejected and He did nothing wrong. Our ultimate model for handling rejection is the Lord because He was rejected and was perfectly innocent, and he exemplifies on the cross how to handle rejection. In active rejection you are the one who is doing the rejecting. Sometimes the rejector is blamed for being wrong when in reality that person may not be at fault at all. Very few believers are properly prepared doctrinally to handle rejection. It probably hits the core of our being more than anything else and makes us feel a little more uncomfortable, and so we have to deal with those emotions that are generated. It is not having those emotions generated that is the problem. If somebody walks up and kicks you in the leg it is going to hurt. There's nothing wrong with hurting; what may be wrong is how you handle it. You handle it either through the sin nature or thorough the stress-busters.
3) Rejection is often a matter of the individual perception of reality. If you have somebody who is not very mature either emotionally or spiritually and they are operating on the arrogance skills such as self-absorption, then their perception of reality it is going to be very warped. They are going to have a distorted view of reality and they may interpret x-event as being an insult. The perception is as much the reality as the reality. Rejection may be real or it may be imagined, and so we have to deal with issues of objectivity, hypersensitivity (which is very often the problem), subjectivity, self-absorption and all kinds of reaction. Too much emphasis is placed on defending our own integrity, defending ourselves in a situation where we are not really at fault and nobody perceives it that way, and we begin to complain about somebody treating us unjustly. Then we come into the whole issue of victimization. All victimization is is a psycho-babble way of shifting the blame for the problems in our lives and the way we handle them. The fact is, we all live in a fallen world and so bad things are going to happen to us. There is going to be undeserved suffering and there are going to be things that people say and do whether intentional or unintentional that hurt our feelings. So we have to develop some maturity, some objectivity, and we have to get rid of that self-absorption and apply some doctrine and not wear our feelings on our shirt sleeves so that we can get past the rejection problem. In some cases the perception of reality becomes so distorted that the believer who assumes that he or she is being rejected is in actuality the rejector. They have brought about the circumstances that caused the rejector to take the position they have so that they feel rejected. If they had not done what they did initially then the other person would not have rejected them and put them in that position. It becomes very difficult. Sometimes the person who appears to be at fault is not at fault at all. All too often what we discover today is that the victim of rejection and the one who is rejecting are fragmented in their souls. This is either the unbeliever who has no doctrine or the believer who has doctrine but is not using it, is operating under the sin nature and so has converted all this adversity to stress in the soul; and they are the double-minded believer of James 1:8.
How we handle problems in life on the sin nature. It can be very deceptive, it can look good, it can feel even better. Yet what we are doing is not trusting God, we are trusting the flesh and we are destroying ourselves from the inside out. We develop habit patterns. We start off in childhood and we learn how to handle problems, how it makes us fell so that we feel better. It is either going to come from the area of weakness and we are going to create habit patterns of handling adversity through either mental attitude sins—dwelling upon how we are going to get revenge; revenge motivation, hatred, anger—or through sins of the tongue—we begin to gossip and malign—and that is how we relieve that pressure, that outside pressure of those circumstances. From the area of strength we operate on the basis of human good and self-righteousness, so we are going to try to cover it up with the cloak of morality and religion. Some believers when they are experiencing the problem of rejection react to those who are rejecting them, and then they intensify all of their problems through the functions related to the sin nature. This is what happens. As you go through childhood you begin to develop these patterns and then they become habits.
The difference between this, trying to give a little bit of the divine viewpoint perspective on how sin and volition is the root of all of our problems, and human viewpoint psychology, is that psychology says a) it is not really your fault, and the blame is shifted to the environment. It is something your parents did, etc. It is the rejector who is at fault, not how you have responded; b) psychology says you have to understand how all of this happened in your life before you can handle the problem. That is psychology; the Bible says all the problems are volitional, we have these habit patterns all our lives, they are ingrained but they are not unsolvable. They are all resolvable through the grace of God and we have to unlearn all these bad habit patterns. That is the whole process of renovating our thinking. We have to learn how to think, and then on the basis of that thinking, the doctrine that is in our souls, we construct that mirror of doctrine in our souls. That gives us objectivity, clarity of thought; and when we have the courage to look at ourselves in that mirror and the light of God's Word we begin to see how we developed all of these various habits of dealing with problems in life on the basis of the sin nature. Once we see that through the ministry of God the Holy Spirit we see how to apply Bible doctrine to that situation so that we can quit converting it into stress and start having the inner happiness that God has for us, and stability and joy in the midst of the trials and tests.
So human viewpoint psychology says it is environment, you have to understand all the dynamics and all the issues, and then you are basically a victim and there is a shift of responsibility. The Bible is just the opposite, it is not the environment, it is your volition. You don't have to understand all the dynamics you just have to understand the solution. In many ways you are not going to understand why you do the things you do, other than just basically it is the sin nature, so you start from where you are today and don't worry about what somebody did to you as a child even if it was devastating and terrible. The issue is volition. Do you want to handle the problems in your life God's way, or do you want to handle them your own way, the way you feel the most comfortable? Sometimes applying doctrine doesn't make you comfortable. In fact, sometimes the right solution is the most difficult solution. Sometimes the right solution is going to feel like the worst solution, but it is the biblical solution. That is why we can't trust our feelings, because they are subjective and not trustworthy.
The dangers of being rejected
When we get rejected, especially if it is a harsh rejection what happens is that somebody you admire, respect, love, suddenly doesn't want to have anything to do with you or they do something that hurts you. Is it real or imagined? The issue is, how are you going to respond? The issue now is positive volition or negative volition. You can blame others and become bitter, vindictive, implacable, revengeful, or you can turn it into self-pity and go home and cry and be depressed. Or you can choose to go into various stages where you just isolate yourself in some form of denial—it really didn't happen and you deny all the issues related to it, and instead of facing reality you are hiding the reality—and it begins to develop a whole series of complications that threaten the very integrity of your own soul. Life always becomes complicated when we start reacting to outside pressure. It fragments the soul, and that means that mental attitude sins, sins of the tongue and overt sins are destroying us on the inside.
We need to look at this in terms of the sin nature. You have an unbeliever, he doesn't know any doctrine. Maybe it is just a child, maybe a teenager or an adult, and they don't have any doctrine to apply to the situation. All of a sudden there is rejection. Now they have a choice about how they are going to respond. They start off reacting from the sin nature from the area of weakness. Somebody has opposed them so they can operate on mental attitude sins. They become angry, they start having hatred toward the person who has rejected them. Then they begin to harbour bitterness. Remember what Leviticus 18:19 says in its entire context. The verse says, "You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD." So the person who is the rejector here is the neighbour, and you not to harbour any feelings of vindictiveness or bear a grudge. That is operating on an area of weakness.
The next person is a believer and he says, Okay I'm not going to respond out of anger or hatred, I'm going to do good. But what happened initially was that this person responded out of personal sins and they're angry. Now they are out of fellowship. They are still guilty because they responded in anger, that wasn't the right thing to do; but rather than confessing their sin, applying doctrine and getting back into a position of strength, they operate from their position of strength in terms of human good. And this area always has an affinity for the trends toward asceticism and legalism. Another thing we need to note about human good is that it has a mix of establishment principles and human viewpoint thinking. That mix can go throughout the whole spectrum. It can be five per cent establishment and ninety per cent bad human viewpoint thinking, or it can be ninety-five per cent establishment and five per cent bad human viewpoint thinking. So if it is 95% establishment you look at it from the outside and say they are really handling this problem well. But they're not because the source is the sin nature, not the use of the stress-busters under the filling of the Holy Spirit. The result is that this person who perhaps has grown up as a kid in an awful environment and feels rejected now wants to compensate. His area of weakness doesn't come into play but he decides to compensate with human good. He's going to find a model to look up to, so he picks his teacher. The teacher has a great influence on the kid, he does well in school, really tries to perform for the teacher and makes good grades. Everybody looks at this kid who reaches college, graduates, goes into a profession, and rises to the top of his profession. So everybody says, 'Look at the lousy environment he came from. He has made good decisions and rose to the top and has handled everything in his life.' On the outside it looks good, but the issue is that he has been doing it all under the power of the sin nature, operating from the area of strength that comes from human good. It is going to look good, it might even feel good, and it is going to impress everybody. But on the inside there is fragmentation, self-destruction and arrogance.
So we need to understand that just because you are doing good things and handling them well and it seems to work and it feels good, that doesn't mean you are operating on the power of God the Holy Spirit because you can handle problems from the area of weakness or the area of strength in your sin nature. The end result is always going to be self-destruction because in the long run you can't handle life's problems by anything other than the certainty of God's Word and the sufficiency of God's Word and the power of God the Holy Spirit. That is why we keep coming back to these stress-busters to show how it makes a difference, how it changes the way we handle rejection.