How Resistance and Submission Shape Your Spiritual Life Before Christ’s Coming
These passages converge on a single question you cannot escape: by what authority do you live? The religious leaders challenge Jesus about his authority to cleanse the Temple, demanding credentials they can recognize. Jesus responds not with arguments but with a question that exposes their hearts: was John’s baptism from heaven or from human beings? They refuse to answer because both options threaten their position. Meanwhile, James writes to communities fracturing under pressure, telling them to submit to God and resist the devil—a seemingly simple command that reveals the entire architecture of spiritual transformation.
What you’re being invited to see is this: authority is not primarily about credentials or position but about the source you draw from and the power you submit to. The religious leaders had all the recognized authority—they were chief priests, scribes, and elders. Yet they could not recognize divine authority standing before them because they had spent years constructing a system where their authority depended on keeping God at a safe distance. They needed credentials, processes, human validation. The idea that God might act directly, that heaven might break into the Temple courts without their permission, was intolerable. Their question was not genuine inquiry but territorial defense.
Here is where James’s command becomes surgical. Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you (James 4:7-8). This is not generic spiritual advice. It is describing two fundamental postures that determine everything about your inner life. Submission to God means acknowledging that divine authority operates by different logic than human systems. You cannot control it, credential it, or domesticate it. The moment you try, you become like the religious leaders—defending your territory against the very God you claim to serve. But submission also means you have access to a power that does not depend on your performance, your pedigree, or your position. You draw near; God draws near. This is not transaction but mutual approach, the dance of divine-human encounter.
Maximos the Confessor teaches that your natural will—the deepest truth of your human nature—is already oriented toward God, beauty, goodness, and being. The struggle is not that you are fundamentally broken but that your personal mode of choosing (gnomic will) has gotten out of sync with what your nature knows. When James says cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded (James 4:8), he is naming this precise split. Double-mindedness is not moral failure in the usual sense. It is the internal dividedness where part of you knows the truth (natural will) while another part resists it (gnomic will distorted by fear, shame, or the need to control). The religious leaders embodied this perfectly. Part of them knew John’s baptism was from heaven—their natural will recognized divine authority. But their gnomic will, shaped by years of protecting their position, could not align with what they knew.
Notice what James prescribes for this condition: not more striving but grief. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you (James 4:9-10). This is the descent from head to heart that Orthodox tradition calls nepsis—the work of actually feeling what you have been avoiding. You cannot think your way into wholeness. You have to descend into the grief of recognizing how divided you are, how much you have tried to control what only grace can give, how deeply you have relied on human validation instead of divine presence. The religious leaders never made this descent. They stayed in their heads, calculating the political risks of each answer, never touching the sorrow of having spent their lives building a system that could not recognize God.
Gregory of Nyssa writes that “the one who looks upon beauty becomes beautiful.” Your encounter with divine authority does not just teach you about authority—it transforms you into someone who can bear it, making you capable of exercising the very authority you have witnessed. This is why Jesus does not just claim authority; he demonstrates it. He enters the Temple and overturns tables, expelling those who had turned prayer into transaction. Then he teaches there daily, as if the space belonged to him. The religious leaders are left asking by what authority, because they have forgotten that the Temple itself exists only to mediate the divine presence Jesus embodies directly. He is the true Temple. His authority comes from the fact that he is what the Temple was always pointing toward.
James’s warnings about the rich take on new depth here. Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten (James 5:1-2). This is not class warfare but cosmic realism. Wealth concentrates your ability to control circumstances, to insulate yourself from dependence on God or neighbor. The religious leaders were spiritually wealthy—they had authority, position, recognized credentials. Like the financially wealthy, they could avoid the descent into dependence. They did not need to risk drawing near to God because they had constructed a system where they controlled access to God. But wealth—spiritual or material—is rotting even as you cling to it. The gold you have hoarded corrodes, and its corrosion will be evidence against you (James 5:3). What you thought protected you becomes the testimony of your refusal to participate in the mutual self-giving that is reality’s deepest structure.
The Advent context illuminates everything. These passages are read as the Church prepares for Christ’s coming, and the question of authority becomes urgent. By what authority do you prepare? Do you trust human systems, credentials, the validation of those who guard the gates? Or do you risk the descent into dependence, the grief of recognizing your double-mindedness, the vulnerability of drawing near without knowing if you will be received? The religious leaders missed the first coming because they needed authority they could control. They missed the Baptist because he came from the wilderness, not the schools. They missed Jesus because he cleansed the Temple without permission.
Athanasius teaches that “God became human so that humans might become god.” This is the ultimate authority structure—not hierarchy imposed from above but theosis offered from within. Christ assumes your fallen humanity, enters your dividedness, descends into the hell of your double-mindedness. He does not demand you fix yourself before approaching. He meets you in the grief, the confusion, the rotting wealth of your false securities. And from within that encounter, he transforms. You submit not to external rules but to the divine presence that makes you more yourself than you have ever been. You resist the devil not by willpower alone but by the authority that comes from having drawn near to the source.
Here is the practice: when you feel the pull toward control, toward defending your territory, toward needing credentials before you will trust—pause. Descend from your head to your heart. Name the fear underneath. What are you protecting? What would it cost to admit you do not know, to ask a question you might not be able to answer politically? This is the grief James prescribes. Feel it fully, without fixing it. Then, from that place of honest vulnerability, invoke the presence: “Lord Jesus Christ, show me, broken and defensive, your loving kindness.” You are not manufacturing submission. You are removing the obstacles to recognizing the authority already present, the divine life already drawing near.
The cosmic reality at stake is this: creation itself is structured as mutual approach between divine and human. God draws near; you draw near. This is not static hierarchy but dynamic dance, the kenotic love that creates and sustains all things. Every atom is learning this pattern—surrender to the source, resistance to what separates from the source. When you align your personal choosing with this cosmic movement, you participate in the transfiguration of all matter. Your humble descent is microcosm of Christ’s descent into flesh. Your cleansed heart becomes temple where heaven and earth meet.
The religious leaders stand as warning. You can have every recognized credential and still miss the coming. You can guard the gates and lose access to what the gates were meant to reveal. Or you can risk the descent, admit your double-mindedness, grieve what you have trusted instead of God. The devil flees not because you are strong but because you have stopped giving him the divided heart he needs to operate. Submission to God is the most revolutionary act available to you. It overthrows every false authority by recognizing the only authority that creates rather than controls, the beauty that persuades rather than compels, the presence that draws near the moment you stop running.
The Greater Horizon 