Hebrew, James, and Jude

There is a resounding call in Hebrews, which we cannot forget without going astray: "Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach" (13:13). This is a summons to serve Christ the Redeemer-King fully and faithfully, without compromise. In our time, it calls for a break, not only with the prevailing culture of humanistic statism and its messianic claims and pretensions, but also a wayward church that has made itself the handmaiden to Christ's enemies. When James, in his epistle, says that faith without works is dead, he tells us that faith is not a mere matter of words, but it is of necessity a matter of life. We are dead men if we no longer can breathe, and we are spiritually dead if our faith is unaccompanied by works. Too many churches are like graveyards because too many members have no living faith. "Pure religion and undefiled" requires Christian charity and action. Anything short of this is a self-delusion. James's letter is a corrective the church needs badly. Jude similarly recalls us to Jesus Christ's apostolic commission, "Remember ye the words which have been spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ" (v. 17). Jude's letter is usually classified as an apocalyptic tract, but we cannot forget that all the Bible speaks of a division between fallen and redeemed humanity, between the saved and the lost, of the necessity for a new creation beginning with us, and of the inescapable triumph of the Kingdom of God.