Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. James 4:7
Oh, if it were only that easy! Our text today contains all the advice we need to achieve our greatest purposes and defeat our worst enemy. All we have to do is obey this verse and we will be victorious and vibrant Christians. So why doesn’t it happen? I know it doesn’t happen easily with me, and I can’t imagine it happening easily with you. Is our text inaccurate? That can’t be, because it is the Word of God. So what’s wrong? <BR> Submitting ourselves to God is pretty tough, because it means letting go of ourselves. For most of us, we consider ourselves submitting to God when we try to obey the Ten Commandments, when we read the Bible and pray, when we fellowship with the Lord’s people, when we treat our neighbour kindly, serve our employer faithfully, and deal with others honestly. All that is good, actually very good. But submitting ourselves to God is much more than that. It means surrendering our lives, our hopes and dreams, our personal ambitions totally to God. That’s not easy, because we are so self-centred, and so wrapped up in a self-centred world, that it is contrary to our nature to think and act that way. But to the extent that we submit ourselves to God, God blesses us with the very best for our lives here and for eternity. It is always in our best interests to submit ourselves to God.
It is also not easy to resist the devil, especially these days. We are constantly bombarded with temptations, with those things that appeal to our fleshly desires, with those things that appeal to our personal egos, with things that erode our love for our Lord and our trust in His power and goodness. We live in a world that is increasingly taken up with the devil’s lies and is awash in the devil’s program to destroy the influence of God’s Word and God’s people. We have seen evil prevail and flourish beyond what we could ever have imagined only a few decades ago. Christians are pressured mercilessly to go along with this evil or at the least to turn a blind eye to it. But if we are to resist the devil, we are also to resist his works.
If we are submitted to God as we should be, we will be the target of the devil, just as the Lord Jesus was as He was about to begin His earthly ministry. The response of the Lord Jesus to the devil’s attacks should be our pattern for resisting the devil: He quoted the Scriptures. In order for us to quote the Scriptures, we must read them, learn them, and commit them to our memories and to our hearts. The great reformer Martin Luther was once so aware of the devil’s opposition and presence that he threw his inkwell at the wall where he felt the devil’s presence to be. Is that how we should resist the devil? While I would not criticize anyone for directly challenging the devil as brother Luther did, I am convinced that the best way is to recite the Word of God – and to recite it directly to the devil if we feel so led – just like the Lord Jesus did.
God has promised us ultimate victory over the devil and his works. But we can experience daily victories as we submit to God and appreciate His Word. – Jim MacIntosh