James 4:1-12
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What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” 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. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 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.
Do not speak evil against one another, brothers. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?
Jacob continues from James 3:17-18
But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.
contrast this to how Jacob questions the believers about their selfish desires (hedonism)
selfish desires result in: fights and quarrels. False wisdom (3:16) leads to jealousy and selfish ambitions
peace, loving, considerate, submissive — is the exact opposite of the envious, selfish, ambitious
The seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher Spinoza observed: “I have often wondered that persons who make boast of professing the Christian religion—namely love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men—should quarrel with such rancorous animosity and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues which they profess, is the readiest criteria of their faith.”
Douglas J. Moo, The Letter of James, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Leicester, England: Eerdmans; Apollos, 2000), 181.
My prayer vs LORD’s prayer
“It’s all about me.
Hallowed, defended, honored, respected, and glorified be my name.
My kingdom come.
My will be done.
Give me this day and every day forever my needs and every want.
Forgive me my debts but don’t ask me to forgive others—judge others for me.
May I enjoy the pleasures of temptation.
Deliver me from anything hard or difficult.”
hedonism greco-roman worldview, the selfish pursuit of pleasure above all else
the struggles wracking the community are the product of envious desires to get what they don’t have. James 3:14-16
But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and tell lies against the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where there is jealousy and selfish ambition, there is disorder and every evil practice.
Chiastic structure
Fights and quarrels
come from selfish desires
selfish desires leads to
Fights and quarrels
you ask. But you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures
the prodigal son freely spending all of his fathers inheritance
Hort comments: “God bestows not gifts only, but the enjoyment of them: but the enjoyment which contributes to nothing beyond itself is not what He gives in answer to prayer; and petitions to Him which have no better end in view are not prayers.”
The call of repentance in verse 4 is one of the most strongly worded calls in the NT.
The call to repentance in vv. 4–10 would then relate particularly to the selfish envy and divisiveness that James has analyzed in 4:1–3
The prophets frequently compare the relationship between Yahweh and his people to a marriage relationship. See, for instance, Isa. 54:5–6: “ ‘For your Maker is your husband—the Lord Almighty is his name—the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth. The Lord will call you back as if you were a wife deserted and distressed in spirit—a wife who married young, only to be rejected,’ says your God.”
Accordingly, therefore, when Israel’s relationship with the Lord is threatened by her idolatry, she can be accused of committing adultery; see Jer. 3:20: “ ‘But like a woman unfaithful to her husband, so you have been unfaithful to me, O house of Israel,’ declares the Lord” (see also Isa. 57:3; Ezek. 16:38; 23:45). But it is in Hosea that this imagery reaches its pinnacle. The Lord commands Hosea to marry a prostitute so that her unfaithfulness might poignantly and painfully reveal the tragic alliance of Israel with foreign gods. Israel, God claims, has “been unfaithful,” going after other lovers, Baal and other false gods (Hos. 2:5–7). This marital imagery for the covenant relationship between God and Israel is picked up by Jesus, who called those who rejected him “a wicked and adulterous generation” (Matt. 12:39; 16:4).
But their tendency to imitate the world by discriminating against people (2:1–13), by speaking negatively of others (3:1–12), by exhibiting “bitter envy” and “selfish ambition” (3:13–18), and by pursuing their own destructive pleasures (4:1–3) amounted to just that.
James introduces this note via his quotation from Prov. 3:34: “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” (This text is quoted also in 1 Pet. 5:5, another example of the close relationship between James and 1 Peter.) The humility introduced in this quotation becomes the dominant motif in the commands in vv. 7–10. God’s gift of sustaining grace is enjoyed only by those willing to admit their need and accept the gift
They must repent of both this external behavior—wash your hands—and the internal attitude that leads to such behavior—purify your hearts. The imagery of both “washing” and “purifying” stems from the OT provisions for priestly purity in ministering the things of the Lord (the verbs have this sense in the three verses where they occur together: Num. 31:23; 2 Chron. 29:15; Isa. 66:17). But both verbs had come to be applied more broadly to ethical purity as well. James also reflects the OT in using “hands” and “heart” to denote both deed and disposition. The psalmist required “clean hands and a pure heart” for those who would stand before the Lord (Ps. 24:3–4); James asks the same of those who would “come near to God.”
Jesus reflected this tradition when he said, “Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep” (Luke 6:25b). A carefree, “devil-may-care” attitude is typical of those who are “friends with the world.”
They live the hedonist philosophy “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” a worldview that ignores the terrifying reality of God’s judgment. But even the committed Christian can slip into a casual attitude toward sin, perhaps presuming too much on God’s forgiving and merciful nature.
To “humble ourselves before the Lord” means to recognize our own spiritual poverty, to acknowledge consequently our desperate need of God’s help, and to submit to his commanding will for our lives. This humility is beautifully exemplified in the tax-collector of Jesus’ parable, who, deeply conscious of his sin, called out to God for mercy. In response, Jesus pronounces him justified, and summarizes: “everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 18:14
lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they prostitute themselves after their gods, and they sacrifice to their gods, and they invite you, and you eat their sacrifice,
But he answered and said to them, “An evil and adulterous generation desires a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah!
An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, and a sign will not be given to it except the sign of Jonah!” And he left them and went away.
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him, because everything that is in the world—the desire of the flesh and the desire of the eyes and the arrogance of material possessions—is not from the Father, but is from the world. And the world is passing away, and its desire, but the one who does the will of God remains forever.
Don’t be fooled, this is not a fair conflict, Satan is the dust beneath a gnat’s foot floating in the infinite ocean of God’s creation. There is no balance here between good and evil, the scales are immeasurably weightier in favour of good, and God alone is good
So Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.
And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.
We note that verse 8 is not saying “you cleanse your hands you sinful”, which would infer that the sinful one cleanses his own hands. Rather, the Greek text, devoid of any punctuation reads “He will draw near to you, cleansing your hands, you sinful; and purifying your hearts…” Notice that the nearest subject is God Who draws near, “He will draw near to you”. Thus the cleansing work is done by God when we receive His offer of right relationship. We note once again that submission to God gives us access to the strength needed to resist Satan (v.7). Devoid of the strength of God’s Spirit no one can resist Satan.
Therefore, “Do not speak evil of one another” is the correct translation. Meaning, don’t falsely accuse one another, don’t bear false witness against one another, don’t slander one another etc.
