NOTES for Jam 1:7
There are many Christians in the world who are, with more or less sincerity, convinced that God acts only in the Church and speaks only to them, to Christians. It is hard to say when such a conviction appeared in the church environment. It has existed as long as Christianity itself. The source of this certainty is connected with perceiving Christianity as a new religion given by God in order to renew the world through those who become its adherents. Then everything is logical: if God created a new, only true religion, all other religions are by definition untrue.
God is not there and cannot be there. He is only in Christianity, though at this stage in our time people normally point not to Christianity, but to some particular Christian denomination to which the speaker belongs. Everyone else is outside God, outside the Kingdom, and outside salvation. Meanwhile, Christianity was not conceived or created by its Founder as a new religion. It was founded as a new life, life in the Kingdom that the Savior brought into the world. And He Himself never said that His activity and His circle of fellowship would be limited only to His followers, or that He would never go beyond the boundaries of His Church.
Of course, those who have already entered the Church do not need to look for a meeting with Him in some other way. In His Church there is everything necessary and sufficient for full communion with Him. But there are other people in the world who have not yet entered the Church, and perhaps never will, at least during their earthly life. There may be many reasons for that, and it is not for us to judge them. It is important only to remember that Christianity is precisely new life. Life of the Kingdom. Life in fullness and without boundaries.
Life that objectively cannot be limited by any earthly framework. Nor by heavenly ones either, for from the beginning God wants no one to perish and every sinner to turn and be saved. The coming of Christ is not a religious event, nor even only a spiritual event in the human sense; it is an event of universal, cosmic scale. His coming, like the appearance of the Kingdom in the world, objectively and quite really changed everything and touched everyone.
The breath of the Kingdom blows in the world, touching every sincere seeker of truth. That means God's hand can now reach absolutely everyone. Of course, this was possible for God before, in pre-Christian times. But now He has the opportunity to work with each person in an environment that spiritually corresponds fully to the nature of His work. And every good thing a person has in life comes from one source. There is no other: God is one, the Messiah is one, and the Kingdom is also one.