Proud or Humble
1 What is the source of wars and fights among you? Don’t they come from your passions f that wage war within you? 2 You desire and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and wage war. You do not have because you do not ask. 3 You ask and don’t receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures. g
4 You adulterous people! Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? So whoever wants to be the friend of the world becomes the enemy of God. h 5 Or do you think it’s without reason that the Scripture says: The spirit he made to dwell in us envies intensely? ,i
6 But he gives greater grace. Therefore he says:
God resists the proud,
but gives grace to the humble. ,j
7 Therefore, submit to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. k 8 Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. l 9 Be miserable and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. m 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
11 Don’t criticize one another, brothers and sisters. Anyone who defames or judges a fellow believer defames and judges the law. If you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. n 12 There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor? o
Our Will and God’s Will
13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.” p 14 Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring—what your life will be! For you are like vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes. q
15 Instead, you should say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” 16 But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. r 17 So it is sin to know the good and yet not do it. s
4:1–3. Continuing his analysis of the quarrels that have broken out among his readers, James now traces the source of these bitter disputes to evil desires. Sin, James has reminded us, comes from within, from our “own evil desire” (1:14); so too the specific sin of quarrelsomeness. These desires are fighting within us, waging “war against the soul,” as Peter puts it (1 Pt 2:11), and this fighting within also results in fighting with others (4:1). Rather than becoming frustrated through the attempt to gain things on our own, we should ask God in prayer for what we need (4:2). If we still do not find ourselves receiving what we ask for, then we should check our motives: perhaps our prayers are oriented too much around our own selfish pleasures and not enough around the will of God and the needs of others (4:3).
C. A call for repentance (4:4–10). 4:4–5. In a startling change of tone, James abandons his customary “my brothers and sisters” to address his readers as “you adulterous people!” (4:4). This change signals a shift in focus. James has been analyzing the sin of envy and its resultant quarrelsomeness; now he calls for a radical departure from that sin. To flirt with the world is to commit spiritual adultery against the Lord (4:4). There are a number of interpretative challenges in 4:5 (see the CSB footnote). The interpretation that best seems to fit the context is that the Jewish Christians whom James is calling on the carpet have a natural inclination toward jealousy and self-serving interests.
4:6–10. But God’s grace is more than sufficient to meet the need, should his people humble themselves and abandon their pride (4:6). Therefore, those who mistreat others for the sake of selfish gain need to “submit to God” (4:7) and “humble yourselves before the Lord” (4:10). These commands frame three pairs of imperatives in 4:7–9. First, they must “resist the devil” and “draw near to God.” Each is accompanied by a promise: the devil will flee, and God will draw near (see also 1 Pt 5:5–9, which has many parallels to Jms 4:6–10). Second, like OT priests, they are to “cleanse [their] hands”—to seek forgiveness for, and put away, outward sins. And at the same time, their inner attitude must be made right—their hearts are to be purified. Third, using the language of the OT prophets (see Jl 2:12), James commands them to mourn deeply and sincerely for the sin that separates them from God. They must adopt a spirit of humility (4:10) to overcome the spirit of jealousy (4:5).
D. Arrogance and the critical tongue (4:11–12). James now returns to sins of speech. He condemns criticism and defamation (4:11; cf. Nm 21:5; Ps 101:5; 1 Pt 2:12; 3:16). From the stress on judging, it is probable that James has particularly in mind the judgmental criticism of others that was doubtless accompanying the quarrels and arguments in the church. This kind of criticism is wrong because it assumes that we are in a position to render ultimate verdicts over people, a prerogative that is God’s alone (4:12). By criticizing others, we do not fulfill the law of love of neighbor (see 2:8) but break it.
A. Recognizing who we are before God (4:13–17). James addresses self-confident, wealthy people who have decided where they are going, how long they will stay, what they will do there, and even what the outcome of their efforts will be (4:13). James has nothing against making plans, but he does condemn the arrogance of those who think they can make their plans without reference to God. James reminds them of the brevity of life (4:14). Their security in their plans has severed their dependence on God.