James 4:1–10

Original Meaning

Prayers Offered in Anger and Desire (4:1–3)

AT THE END of chapter 3 James laid before his readers a positive summation: A harvest of righteousness is promised those who are peacemakers. The rich agricultural image of the verse is particularly striking, given the heavy reliance on horticultural language James has chosen to employ. Here he turns his probing eye once again to the debilitating effects of the philosophy of false wisdom: “What causes fights and quarrels among you?” James knows full well the answer, so this and the other question in verse 1 are rhetorical in nature.

James returns to the problem of the tongue and compares the effects of the tongue under the influence of false wisdom with rather serious parallels: “fights” (polemoi) and “quarrels” (machai).3 Along with his earlier description James paints a picture of a Christian community deeply divided, composed of a variety of groups, some of them marked by different combinations of unwholesome practices. The church is beset by jealousy, selfish ambition, slander, anger, a willingness to depart from received teaching, and a host of other ills that follow the pattern of their culture.

The fact that James refers to no specific dispute might signal to us a situation so rife with tensions that the church was at a standstill. In any event, the conflict is clearly within the Christian community,4 as this is certainly the meaning of en hymin (“among you”). In other words, certain teachers had won a following by offering a philosophy that encouraged the pursuit of status as taught by society and unbridled by any authentic Christian witness. This in turn allowed a false belief to germinate and flourish that all of one’s old prejudices could exist and thrive within the church. For this reason some were showing favoritism, while others were exploiting the poor. Arrayed against these were believers loyal to the gospel, who correctly understood the threat. The members of this group reacted variously to those following the teachers of false wisdom—some wanting peace at any price, others advocating a fight for the soul of the church.

In the second part of verse 1, James wisely points to a two-layered interpretation, just like the one sustained throughout 3:1–12. Just as there are mixed within each of us as individuals motives and emotions wholesome and unwholesome, so within the Christian community there is a wide variety of impulses. James says their disputes come from the desires (hedone) within them. The rabbis believed that the impulses, the yeṣarim, had their seats in various organs or “members” of the human body; therefore, the members of the body were “at war” with one another—pulled one way by conscience, then another way by the evil desire.5

This image is not unknown elsewhere in the New Testament. First Peter 2:11 speaks of “sinful desires,” which “war against your soul.” In Romans 7:22–23 Paul speaks of the two “laws” within him: “For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war … and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members” (cf. also Gal. 5:17). In speaking of these “desires” we might have expected James to use the term epithymia, as he did in James 1:14–15. But hedone, like epithymia, while semantically neutral, can (as here) carry a negative meaning, such as “sinful passion.”6 The term is used in 4 Maccabees 1:25–26: “And there is in pleasure a malicious disposition.” If this passage is the background for the use of hedone here, then James’s point is that such a person strives against God. However, in Titus 3:3 hedone and epithymia appear as synonyms, so the use of hedone here may be due to stylistic reasons.

It is the passions, or more properly the decision to cultivate rather than control the passions, that have contributed to the problems within the church. These passions (untrammeled desire for power and authority, a desire for popularity within the eyes of the powerful, etc.) constitute a state of double-mindedness. The members of the congregation are pushed this way and that, first by their conscience, then by the evil impulse.

In verse 2a James punctuates his message by noting that unrestrained desire can never be fulfilled. His words “You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want” refers to present difficulties. Several commentators have attempted to see “murder” (phoneuete) as metaphorical.7 Martin desires to treat it literally, but his reconstruction is not convincing.8 Yet we must agree that the term can and perhaps should be understood literally, even if we do not know the particulars. It is possible, as Martin suggests, that various positions on Roman rule existed within the church, just as it is beyond doubt that various positions on Roman culture were present. Certainly the poor saw those who collaborated with the Romans as traitors. It is significant that James adds the reason for this killing as covetousness. If “killing” is the tool that still does not bring the desired result, then James is explaining that violence is never a solution worthy of pursuit. To choose the path of violence is to place oneself within a vicious cycle of retribution. Only the peace offered by God can stop such a tragic web of circumstances.

But there are other difficulties with verse 2. The standard edition of the Greek text sees three propositions here: “You desire and you do not have; you murder and you are jealous and you cannot get what you want; you quarrel and you fight.” This rendering is followed by the NIV and places “murder/kill” in the role of a preliminary condition that results in unrequited desire. Many commentators prefer a different punctuation, one that sees this verse composed of two parallel statements of cause and effect: “You desire and you do not have, so you murder; you are jealous and you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight.” Murder, then, becomes a consequence of desire that is not realized, rather than a constituent part of that desire. This mitigates the force of the argument for seeing murder as literal.

That last part of verse 2 contains a theme we have already seen (1:5). Here James must be expecting his readers to think in ultimate terms. What they want is not status, but rather what they hope status will bring to them: a sense of wholeness, joy, and peace. James asserts that believers do not have what they are seeking because they have been searching for it in alleys that are blind and in fields that are infertile. They should ask God, who gives wisdom (1:5), and this is a wisdom that results in wholeness and peace.

In Matthew 7:7 Jesus gave an unconditional promise that prayer would be answered. James in verse 3 makes explicit what Jesus left implicit: You do not receive because you ask God not for wisdom, but for selfish pleasures that by definition are not in the interests of the Christian community. Much has been made of the curious use of the middle and active voices in 4:2–3.9 But the significant point is that the readers of James ask with the wrong motives, and therefore for the wrong things.

According to the Old Testament, God answered the prayers of the just, because they were offered in righteousness. Note Psalm 34:14–17:

Turn from evil and do good;

seek peace and pursue it.

The eyes of the LORD are on the righteous

and his ears are attentive to their cry;

the face of the LORD is against those who do evil….

The righteous cry out, and the LORD hears them….”

James points out that the “prayers” his readers have offered are marked by their desire for “pleasures.” The Greek word for “spend” here is dapanao, which here has a negative connotation, just as it did in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:13–14). The prayer was not answered positively because, in part, the prayer assumed a certain arrogance, the presumption that the one praying knew what was best. God’s wisdom is often at odds with our own, and this was the case here. What is needed, of course, is patience and a willingness to be molded by God. These were evidently absent from James’s readers.

Bridging Contexts

THE CENTRAL THRUST of this passage is aptly expressed in verse 7, “Submit yourselves, then, to God.” In order to make this point James employs two devices that require some explication. The first is associated with the idiomatic expression “Come near”; the second is the meaning of the imagery of temple and sacrifice, which James calls upon in order to make his appeal.

Come near. With this phrase James taps into the language of eschatology, in which the phrase “come near” means “has arrived.” When in Mark 1:15 Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is near,” he means that with his activity the kingdom of God has begun to arrive. He does not mean that it is on its way. The point is made in Lamentations 4:18:

Men stalked us at every step

so we could not walk in our streets.

Our end was near, our days were numbered,

for our end had come.

The phrase is also used relative to sacrifice. To “come near to present the offerings” (Lev. 21:21) means being so close to the altar that a sacrifice can be offered on it. To “come near to God,” then, is more than simply to resolve to improve one’s spiritual life. It is fully to enter the presence of God, to reside there, to be comfortable there, to be at home. James uses this imagery because he wishes to remind his readers of God’s longing to know them. The challenge is no less daunting, nor is the importance any less grave, as we consider the significance of this language and its meaning for the modern period. To “abide” in the presence of God, and for God to “abide” in us, as John’s Gospel puts it, is the task before us.

Temple and sacrifice. When James says, “Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded…. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up” (4:8–10), he is employing the image of the temple and the language of sacrifice. The Hebrews pictured repugnance to the pollution of sin in the moral realm in terms of aversion to dirtiness in the physical realm. The Old Testament temple ritual contained a double distinction that was rooted in this imagery of physical pollution: “You must distinguish between the holy and the common, between the unclean and the clean” (Lev. 10:10). In the Old Testament the unclean was “that which disqualified a person from participation in worship, so that in effect he was debarred from the presence of God.”19

Sacrifice was the process by which this barrier was eliminated. Items that were unclean were unfit for use by Jews.20 Clean items were acceptable, and such items were divided into “the holy” (acceptable for and dedicated to God) and “the common” (acceptable for everyday use). Persons rendered unclean were not allowed access to the sanctuary and were therefore symbolically denied access to God. Sin relegated the offender barred from God’s presence. In a passage replete with temple imagery, Isaiah expresses horror, for he has seen God and instinctively senses his own unworthiness and imagines impending catastrophe:

“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.”

Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.” (Isa. 6:5–7)

The stain of sin extended beyond the individual because the Hebrews recognized the communal nature of human existence. Sin, therefore, had the capacity to defile the very land of Israel.

Do not pollute the land where you are. Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it. Do not defile the land where you live and where I dwell, for I, the LORD, dwell among the Israelites. (Num. 35:33–34)

It is God’s desire to live among his people, and together God and people form community. Defilement makes this difficult, if not impossible. The theological richness of the vista we have encountered here is such that associated with sacrifice are four ideas that express different but interpenetrating aspects of the role of sacrifice within Israel.21 Each of them has bearing on this section of James: community, offering, power, and commemoration. In employing the images of washing, purity, and drawing near to God, James is building upon these ideas. His community was no community at all, but was fraught with divisions that needed to be mended. Sacrifice was needed to cleanse the community and effect this healing, and so James asks his readers to sacrifice their self-interest by submitting to God. James knows that the power to heal his community resides in God alone. He used the language of sacrifice to remind his community of this power.

(1) One of the more curious features of the Old Testament image of sacrifice was its connection to community. Sacrifice was an integral part of any ceremony celebrating the covenant between God and his people, for they were, collectively, his people.

Moses took half of the blood and put it in bowls, and the other half he sprinkled on the altar. Then he opened the Book of the Covenant and read it to the people. They responded, “We will do everything the LORD has said; we will obey.”

Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, “This is the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you in accordance with these words.” (Ex. 24:6–8)

Sacrifice, then, was a necessary precursor that pointed toward the essential unity of the people involved. The covenant was with God, but it was a covenant of the people as a whole, not only of the people as a collection of individuals. At this point it is easy to see why James chose the language of sacrifice. His community, ostensibly a “covenanted” community, evinced few of the hallmarks of such a community. They were a fractious, judgmental, and self-interested group of individuals. This sacrifice imagery was intended to remind them of the vision for community that resided in both the idea and the living reality of the covenant. They were invited not only to remember, but also in the present to experience the presence of God in and among them. In so doing they would gain God’s wisdom, and in due time his peace and righteousness.

But sacrifice imagery also casts its influence into the modern period, for we are culturally far more enamored of individualism than were even the targets of James’s rebuke. The challenge is to apply the message and meaning of sacrifice to our own day. Enamored as we are of individualism, evangelicals often find it easier to argue for structural change than to submit themselves to the hard work of learning to live together in community.

(2) Sacrifice was also a symbol of loyalty and gratitude to God, offered by his people out of gratitude for his forgiveness. The sacrifice was neither bribe nor payment, for the Hebrews were well aware that neither would be efficacious. The sacrifice was to be without blemish, a symbol of the desire of the penitent to be similarly pure. But even here there was a corporate dimension: “If the anointed priest sins, bringing guilt on the people, he must bring to the LORD a young bull without defect as a sin offering for the sin he has committed” (Lev. 4:3). Here we see not only the forgiving nature of God, but also the influence of a leader. If the priest sinned, the stain of his sin could spread to the entire people. This was the darker side of community.

Just as in James’s day there were leaders whose actions sullied the larger community, so today there are such leaders. To these leaders and to their followers God offers his forgiveness, trusting that in gratitude we will embrace it.

(3) The rite of sacrifice in the Old Testament was connected to the release and explosion of power, for blood stood for life. A passage in Leviticus demonstrates that certain offerings have the ability to render holy whatever comes into physical contact with them: “The sin offering is to be slaughtered before the LORD in the place the burnt offering is slaughtered; it is most holy…. Whatever touches any of the flesh will become holy” (Lev. 6:25, 27). In John 6:53–56 Jesus elaborated on this theme:

Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.”

Here Jesus speaks of the power of his sacrificial blood to render holy.

In connection with this theme James weaves together a number of others. He points out that we do not receive from God when we ask, for we are asking for the wrong things (James 4:3). Last term a student approached me, aware only that I am a professor, and asked me for assistance on a mathematics problem. For as long as I can remember, mathematics has made as much sense to me as voodoo. Of me she was asking the wrong question. Her question proved that she did not know me. Similarly, our determination to ask God for the wrong things only underscores how little we know of God.

This realization, then, allows James to take us to the next step—a call for humility (4:6). The attitude of humility allows us clearer vision, to see our own need for God and to perceive his answer. Thus adorned, we are ready to enter his presence (4:8). It is important to note that purity is not required as a precondition. Purity systems often suffer from a dangerous misconstrual. In practice they tend toward the expectation of purity as a precondition for instead of the purpose of the sacrificial rite. “Unclean” becomes misidentified with “common.”

It is for this reason that Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt. 9:12–13). Jesus here quotes Hosea 6:6, and in doing so emphasizes that sacrifice involves cleansing. There is no point in reserving sacrifice only for those already clean. Furthermore, sacrifice is not an end, it is a means to allow for the development of godly character (here mercy as emblematic of the character of God) within his people. For our purposes the point is that forgiveness of God is available, no matter how sullied we find ourselves to be.

(4) In the annual Passover celebration, and particularly in the sacrifice associated with it, Israel commemorated her liberation from slavery in Egypt. It does not seem unjustified to see James urging his congregation to break free from the shackles of bondage to false wisdom that they have willingly but perhaps unwittingly taken on.

This idea of purity saw further developments within certain quarters of Judaism. The New Testament speaks of the “tradition of the elders” (Matt. 15:1–2), a purity system observed by the Pharisees that existed in oral form at the time of Jesus and was reduced to writing between A.D. 160–200 in a written document known as the Mishnah.22 The Mishnah and therefore its precursor, the oral law, had as their object the “preservation, cultivation and application to life of ‘the Law’ (Torah)….”23 There is a strenuous debate concerning the degree to which the Mishnah reflects the actual teachings and practices of Pharisees in first-century Palestine, and in fact what we can actually know about these Pharisees.24 What we can say is that first-century Pharisees were interested in preserving holiness in part by preserving purity.

The oral tradition served as a first warning device, a barrier around Torah. Torah declares that no work is to be done on Sabbath. Mishnah asks the question, “What, precisely, constitutes work?” and answers it. To follow Mishnah means that the sanctity of Torah will remain intact. Of course, Jesus had little use for this tradition (“Why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? … You nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition”; Matt. 15:3, 6); he even had the temerity to break the Torah injunction concerning rest on the Sabbath. Jesus complained that in its desire to preserve the holiness of God, Judaism had excluded most of its adherents from drawing near to God for cleansing. Some traditions within the Judaism of his day failed to see that compassion, not purity as separation, is at the heart of God’s character. The point for Jesus and for James is that drawing near to God need not be done only in a state of purity. Drawing near to God is done because of a desire and even a resolve to become and continue to live clean and pure before God. The heavy use of temple imagery in James 4 is designed to recall this practice of atonement.

Contemporary Significance

BY PRESSING INTO service the image of sacrifice and the language of drawing near to God, James has deftly pointed our attention toward forgiveness, community, and submission to God. It is in relation to this last that he counsels us to resist the devil. Many other themes in this passage have been discussed already (the pride and effects of false wisdom, the corrupting power of sin, leadership and the abuse of power), so that drawing near to God, forgiveness, and community will occupy our discussion here. But there is another reason. James has devoted a great deal of space to error within the church, and in this passage he discusses the forgiveness available to us. Therefore, coming near to God is the central thrust of the passage.

This passage implores us to draw near to God in order to be forgiven. The appeal is general, but especially it is directed to leaders within the church who are misusing their position and status. The “fights and quarrels” mentioned in verse 1 are the result of following internal desires, desires often in conflict with the purposes of God. As an antidote James advocates forgiveness. Forgiveness is a complicated business. Some of us find it difficult to forgive others, and some of us cannot, it seems, forgive ourselves. All of us need to be reminded of the love of our Father in heaven, who has forgiven us. Forgiveness also allows for the development of true community, which is James’s hope here. Finally, James speaks of resisting the devil.

God is forgiving; he washes us clean. In his powerful and alluring novel Atticus, Ron Hansen offers a masterful retelling of Jesus’ parable of the love and forgiveness that God lavishly bestows on us. Atticus, a sixty-seven-year-old Colorado cattleman, has two sons. The older son, Frank, is married and a state senator. The younger one, Scott, is brilliant but impetuous. Some years before, Scott had lost control of the family car on a winter day, and in the resulting crash his mother was killed. After spending some time in mental hospitals, Scott drifted to Mexico, where he led a scarred, profligate life. At Christmas he returns home, and in the midst of his father’s inquiry about his life and activity, Scott says:

I just am Dad. You’ve got one son who’s a huge success any Father’d be proud of, and you’ve got one son who’s a slacker and using up your hard-earned cash on just getting by from week to week. Hell, I’m forty years old. You oughta be used to me being a failure by now.25

Shortly after this interchange Scott goes for a walk and comes upon the vehicle in which his mother died. Atticus, growing concerned, looks for his son and finds him sitting in the car. Tenderly but painfully Hansen allows us to understand the depth of Scott’s self-loathing, and part of the reason he believes he is beyond forgiveness.

The milkwhite Thunderbird [was] just as it was sixteen years ago when Scott took Serena to the store. The high speed of the accident had destroyed one headlight and crumpled up the right fender and hood like writing paper meant to be thrown away. The right wheel titled on its axle as though it had not been fully bolted on, and the rubber tire shredded from it like black clothing scraps.

Atticus walked around to the driver’s side and opened the door. The iron complained at his pull but Scott did not look up, he stayed as he was, in his father’s red plaid hunting coat, just sitting there, one wrist atop the big steering wheel, his right hand gingerly touching the windshield glass where it was crushed and spiderwebbed on the passenger’s side. A milky light was filtering through the half-inch screen of snow. Atticus asked, “You okay?”

Scott pressed his cold-reddened fingertips into a crack and said, “Wondered if her hair was still there. Crows must be nesting with it.”26

Soon Scott returns to Mexico, and in an effort to escape his problems but with an astonishing lack of sensitivity to his family, he fakes his own suicide. He then watches from a distance as Atticus searches for clues in the Mexican village where Scott has lived.

You’ve put him through hell, I thought, again and again….

I felt humiliatingly unequal to his faithfulness, his loyalty, his love, as if I were heir to some foreign genes that my father had no part in.27

Finally, however, the truth comes out, and Scott reveals to his father that he is, indeed, alive.

I asked, “Will you forgive me?” And I felt forgiven even as I said it….

His shifty second son was there, found and alive, and if there was hurt in his face and he seemed to have visited every room in hell, it hardly mattered now; Atticus was flooded with joy. He’s had his mind set on just one thing and got surprised by the far better.28

To the great disappointment of Atticus, Scott seemed to express no interest in coming home to Colorado. Nearly a year passed, and then one day, the son returns.

Looking for the flush of a second bloom from his wife’s perennials, Atticus got his sheep shears and knelt in the garden in June, cutting back the penstemon, rockcress, stork’s-bills, and daisies. A soft rain began to fall as he heaped the green clippings on gunnysack and hauled it out back to the compost pile, and then he heard a far-car on the highway. Why he didn’t know, but Atticus walked to the front yard, taking off his gloves, and he saw a yellow taxi heading toward the house. And while his son was still a long way off, his father rushed out to greet him.29

In humility, James says, come near to God, and he will come near to you. As Atticus forgave Scott and wished only to lift him up, so God will forgive you, and he will lift you up.

Forgiving others. It is often difficult to forgive others, especially if someone has been the author of great personal tragedy. The relatives of murder victims tell television interviewers that they want the death penalty meted out. There is within us a bent to revenge and a desire for “justice” that is sometimes at odds with the gospel. Some months ago I was speaking with an old friend, and our discussion turned to his conversation with a mutual friend who had suffered a great personal tragedy at the hands of a criminal. My friend said, “I asked him how he felt about the perpetrator, and he said, ‘I have forgiven him.’ That is not natural,” my friend added; “it is not normal.” He is right.

In his book Improving Your Serve, Charles R. Swindoll tells the story of Aaron, a seminary student who took a job as a bus driver in order to pay his tuition. A small gang of “tough kids” got on his bus and refused to pay the fare. After several days of this behavior, Aaron spotted a policeman, pulled over, and reported the situation to the officer. The officer made them pay and got off the bus. A few minutes later Aaron was attacked by the gang. When he awoke, the bus was empty, blood was all over his shirt, two teeth were missing, his eyes were swollen, and his money was gone. Aaron decided to press charges. Swindoll continues:

In walked Aaron and his attorney plus the angry gang members who glared across the room in his direction. Suddenly he was seized with a whole new series of thoughts. Not bitter ones, but compassionate ones! … After there had been a plea of guilty, Aaron (to the surprise of his attorney and everybody else in the courtroom) stood to his feet and requested permission to speak. “Your honor, I would like you to total up all the days of punishment against these men—all the time sentenced against them—and I request that you allow me to go to jail in their place.” The judge didn’t know whether to spit or wind his watch. Both attorneys were stunned. As Aaron looked over at the gang members (whose mouths and eyes looked like saucers), he smiled and said quietly, “It’s because I forgive you.”

The dumbfounded judge, when he reached a level of composure, said rather firmly, “Young man, you’re out of order. This sort of thing has never happened before!” To which the young man replied with genius insight: “Oh, yes, it has, your honor…. Yes, it has. It happened over nineteen centuries ago when a man from Galilee paid the penalty that all mankind deserved.”30

Swindoll concludes that through personal pain and assault, Aaron learned the beauty of forgiveness, as God has forgiven us.

Forgiving ourselves. In the early to middle 1980s I worked with youth in the San Francisco Bay area. During one eighteen-month span I came to know several teenage women who had been the victims of sexual abuse as children. One young woman was Sarah. After I had known her for about a month, it became clear to me that she wanted to tell me something. She began to say that she had done something bad, so bad that God could never forgive her. I assured her that God always forgives. Over the course of a few weeks she told me of certain things she had done, none of which were startling. Finally, she revealed that as a child she had been sexually abused. The event was long past. The police had been informed, and the perpetrator, a relative, was in jail. But in her eyes she felt she was somehow responsible. “I must have done something to encourage him,” she said. She also felt guilty for causing the imprisonment of a relative. She was absolutely certain, she said, that God could never forgive her for such evil.

Several years ago a young lady became dear to my wife and me. We first met Ruth when she was sixteen. Her parents had divorced when she was an infant, and she had just come to live with her father. It soon became clear to us that there was a deep shadow cast over Ruth’s life, and before long she confided in us. Ruth had been sexually abused by a series of men in her mother’s life following the divorce. The pain of these experiences had seared her. Like many victims of this most aggressive and twisted of evils, Ruth somehow felt responsible. What must she have done to deserve this? Had she somehow enticed these men? Was it all just a fantasy, and if so, what kind of person was she?

Ruth was a victim of what has been labeled Self-Inflicted Violence Syndrome (SIV) or Self-Mutilation Syndrome.31 She would slash her wrists, purposely burn herself, or lacerate her legs. These were not attempts at suicide, nor, she said, were they cries for attention. In fact, she usually tried to hide her handiwork. Ruth suffered a form of self-induced mental torture; she simply could not get the emotional pain out of her mind. When this pain became too intense, she would mutilate herself, for this intense physical pain afforded a buffer, an alternative that crowded out her emotional pain. Over the space of seven years Ruth would begin and then withdraw from therapy, because therapy forced her to confront the memories and emotional pain. In the midst of this multiyear struggle, Ruth questioned the forgiveness of God. Ruth had committed her life to the Lord, but she harbored doubts that anyone, especially a God of holiness, could forgive her.

In my first year teaching at North Park I encountered a wonderful, bright young student. Mary was twenty-one, unmarried, and the mother of a four-year-old son. After seven weeks of class had transpired, she came to see me in my office. She wanted, she said, to “talk about God.” I asked her what experience she had with the Christian faith. She told me that as a child she had attended a Christian after-school program, but that the pastor of the sponsoring church told her that the pants she sometimes wore proved that “she was evil,” and Mary did not go back. As she told this story, she began to cry. If God considered her wardrobe “evil,” what must he think of an unwed seventeen-year-old mother? She told me that she had been searching for God, praying to God that she might find someone with whom she could talk about God; but, she said, “I am so evil God does not listen to my prayers.”

“Mary,” I said, “what are we doing right now?” During the next hour I was able to assure her that God was a God of forgiveness and that he wants us to come near him so we can be washed clean.

In all three of the above situations, the women in one way or another expressed the difficulty of experiencing God’s forgiveness. Yet it seems obvious to me that an equally difficult struggle was the ability of each to forgive herself of real or imagined guilt.

Leadership and forgiveness. James lodges a stern warning in reminding us that friendship with the world is enmity toward God. This warning is addressed to those in leadership positions in addition to those who follow. In this fashion he links an overly healthy desire to accommodate with the world with the error of misdirected leadership. In his church, leaders had advocated that the sin of favoritism was not, in fact, sin, but that certain cultural norms were fully commensurate with the gospel. This position James attacked, even while offering to those preaching it, and to those seduced by it, the promise of God’s forgiveness.

It is a sad commentary that the modern church is not bereft of parallels. Tom F. Driver, a one-time student of Paul Tillich, remembers his mentor: “I felt that his apologia was not addressed to unbelievers nearly so much as to persons like me who had been Christian all our lives and had now come to a time when we did not really know what Christianity was about, for it seemed at odds with our culture.”32 This, of course, is quite the point. The bane and blindness of liberal Christianity includes the assumption that there should be a warm joining of hands between culture and Christianity. But the Bible often compels us to stand for values radically at odds with those of our culture. To suppose otherwise is to misunderstand Scripture at the most basic level. As James says, “friendship with the world is hatred toward God” (4:4).

The bane and blindness of conservative Christianity is to assume that the only dangers are on the left. The shoals on the evangelical right can be those of zeal, of excoriation, or of numbness. In our zeal for truth, evangelicals often offer the spectacle of religious cannibalism, as we devour one another. The divisive battle current in the Southern Baptist denomination is a case in point.33 Evangelicals are also guilty of a blanket excoriation of the world. “Friendship with the world” refers to embracing the standards of the world. But there are not infrequent points of correspondence. Christians should affirm what is true and worthwhile in our culture instead of offering churlish blanket condemnations.

Evangelicals are also prone to inaction. The atrophied silence of evangelical churches during the civil rights movement stands as a mute witness of shame. The biblical principles that evangelicals claim to hold so dear—the principles of righteousness and justice to which James gave voice when he said, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” (1:27)—were in large measure ignored. Instead we opted for the safe course of measured inaction, sanctioned by the winds of American political conservatism. We became “numb,” to use Walter Bruegemann’s phrase.34

We easily become “numb.” In the prologue to his book Whereon to Stand, Daniel Berrigan writes:

How bloodstained is our lifetime … [the] throwaway lives, the anonymous poor, the multitudes commonly considered of no worth … As for those who teach or preach or remain silent and so consent … we must speak of a crime, a sin.35

The journal First Things reports that a group of Episcopalian priests in Brooklyn are alleged to have imported young men from Brazil to engage in acts of a grotesque sexual nature. The story broke, predictably, in Penthouse magazine.36 Penthouse quoted Long Island Bishop Orris G. “Jay” Walker, “If they were consenting adults, my position is that they were certainly free to take that action.” Penthouse offered this bitterly ironic observation: These men became “playthings for priests whose commitment to the Scriptures had long ago been replaced by a pursuit of pleasure that would have fit nicely in Sodom and Gomorrah.”37 When Penthouse offers such a critique of Christian leaders, the situation is dark indeed.

A number of Episcopalian bishops have responded by issuing a statement called, “Where It Is Corrupt, Purify It.” The statement alludes to the Richter trial, which concluded that the Episcopal Church has no “core doctrine” in the area of human sexuality; therefore, the ordination of active homosexuals violates neither the doctrine nor the discipline of the church. The ruling has sparked strong protest, particularly as the idea of “core doctrine” seems to have been created for this response.38 The statement by the bishops also cites the long-term position of the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Reverend Edmond L. Browning: “In this Church there shall be no outcasts.” As the protesting bishops imply, this is a naive statement. The Bible certainly teaches compassion for all, but the Bible also teaches the corrosive power of sin.

The statement by the bishops offers this trenchant observation: “In a Church in which nearly half of the active bishops have declared their support—in principle—of the ordination of non-celibate homosexual persons, we must not be surprised when some of their clergy take them at their word.”39 The statement by the bishops further issues a call for the Episcopal Church to “provide clear and binding standards regarding the sexual behavior of clergy.” The bishops acknowledge that grave error has occurred and suggest an attitude of humility and a process pointing to forgiveness.40

In each of these cases, whether the sin involved is one of commission or omission, what is required, as James pointed out long ago, is humility—humility before God’s will revealed in Scripture, humility before the Lord, and humility before others. The sacrifice of Jesus can wash us clean, if we will draw near.

Community. James 4:1–10 offers a strong call to community, and especially community created by a spirit of humility and forgiveness.41 The Bridging Contexts section has demonstrated the critical significance of the need to create strong community, and especially of repentance and forgiveness as a means to establish such a community. Certainly the congregation to which James wrote needed such direction.

Our world is awash in facsimiles of true community. An avenue often attempted by evangelicals in America is that of reforming the state. In his warmly positive review of Guenter Lewy’s Why America Needs Religion: Secular Modernity and Its Discontents, J. Budziszewski emphasizes a point that Lewy himself notes when he quotes from the document “Evangelicals and Catholics Together”: “To propose that securing civil virtue is the purpose of religion is blasphemous. To deny that securing civil virtue is a benefit of religion is blindness.”42 It seems odd that Lewy not only sees the need for religious underpinnings to effect a moral society, he even understands that it takes an active belief in God to animate these moral principles. When he began writing the book, Lewy writes, he was a “secular humanist” bent on demonstrating the superfluous nature of religious values. But in his research, he came to see the importance of these values and to eschew the label “secular humanist” for “nontheist.”

Even so, Lewy points us in the right direction. Far too often evangelical Christians decry the paucity of moral values in this country and seek structural change. This may take the form of legislative action to bar certain kinds of medical procedures, or it may simply be idle talk about the need for prayer in the public schools. While these are not wrong-headed, they are incomplete answers. Ron Sider points out that evangelicals are “all over the waterfront”43 on these issues. Evangelicals are zealous conservatives when attacking programs they do not like, arguing for limited government. “Then, when the issues change to abortion, euthanasia, and pornography, the same people loudly demand vigorous government action.”44

Sider claims that evangelicals need to work out carefully the specific policy implications of biblical faith. We need, he says, an evangelical political philosophy. At this point I become nervous, for as we have seen, institutions, and particularly political institutions, while morally neutral, are easily co-opted by Satan and for this reason cannot blindly be trusted. Sider actually provides an example. The Reagan administration skillfully manipulated the American people over the question of school prayer during the 1984 campaign. In an effort to secure the vote of the religious right, the campaign

decided to stage a fake drive to pass a constitutional amendment on school prayer. But first they asked a conservative senator to do a head count. When he reported insufficient votes to pass the bill, the Reagan staffer replied, “Good, we just wanted to make sure that it could not pass before we began the battle.” The whole House then rallied the leaders of the Religious Right and promised to twist arms to pass the bill on the prayer amendment. But it was all a farce. Evangelicals did not understand either the politics or the substance of the issue.

Sider argues that evangelicals need to “articulate a view of government, human rights, the relation of church and state, democracy, private ownership and market economies, civil society (especially the family), and the like.”45 He is correct, as long as we adopt a biblical view of government. Government is not the body of Christ, nor can we expect it to be. When evangelicals confuse Christian faith with certain political interests, they are choosing friendship with the world over friendship with God. They are mistaking the possibility of an external framework for the deeper values that only the church of Jesus Christ can inspire.

Lewy’s solution is one of externals—embracing the “morals” of religious faith without necessitating the living faith itself. Many centuries ago in ancient Israel such a code was developed; it may be found in the book of Proverbs, which offers sterling wisdom for the pragmatic and even boring realities of life. For example, “Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth” (Prov. 10:4). This is good advice, and it should be followed. But life at times confronts us with painful realities for which the book of Proverbs offers little salve.

A powerful example is the story of Job. As the story begins, Satan claims that Job fears God only because God has rewarded him for being so industrious. “You have blessed the work of his hands…. But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face” (Job 1:10–11). The challenge of Satan to God is whether or not there is any authentic faith in Job. There is no necessary impulse in the system enshrined in Proverbs to drive human beings into a living relationship with God. Such a system could, with profit, remain simply external.

Job’s friends certainly seem to believe in this external cause and effect worldview of Proverbs: “Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished?” Eliphaz asks Job (Job 4:7). This view God found wanting. If tragedy strikes, the only cause Job’s friends can conceive of is sin. Their world is simple: The good are blessed, the wicked are not. But life is not always so simple. Cicero once observed, “Laws bereft of moral quality are worthless.”46 Unless there is some set of deeply held beliefs that animate the moral character of law, the law and the moral system that law seeks to create remain external. The book of Job serves to remind us that religious mores are good, but without the living faith within, they are hollow if elegant shells.

Evangelicals must do more than work for structural change, for structures are weak and easily co-opted by Satan. The heart must change, for without these deeper values, the law is external. James implores us to draw near to God, not merely to adopt moral guidelines of which God would approve.

Resist the devil. When James says, “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you,” he is aligning himself with solid biblical teaching. Satan can be resisted, primarily because he is weaker than God. I recall my Old Testament professor in seminary remarking that the entrance of the serpent in Genesis 3 is unspectacular when compared to the resplendence of God’s activity in Genesis 1 and 2, because the Bible wishes to stress the overwhelming majesty of God. In the New Testament, as we have seen,47 Satan’s power has been vastly curtailed after the resurrection of Jesus. The rabbis also thought of the power of Satan as strong, but a power from which the study of Torah offered protection: “Raba said, Though God created the Yetzer ha-Ra, He created the Law, as an antidote [lit. spice] against it.”48 The question is, of course, whether the devil “flees” today.

As a young graduate student in the San Francisco area in 1981, I took a class on prayer from Robert Munger, the pastor emeritus of First Presbyterian Church, Berkeley, and of University Presbyterian Church, Seattle. An essential element of the course was a time of prayer in small groups of three, in which we shared concerns and prayed for one another. After perhaps six weeks one of the members of my group of three missed a class. This left me alone with a woman in her mid-thirties. As we went off to pray, she told me a story that seemed to me fantastic. The night before, she said, she was awakened at 1:00 A.M. to hear her young son screaming in his bedroom. She rushed to his room, only to encounter what she described as a malevolent presence inhabiting the room and choking the life out of her son. She struggled against this presence, picked up her son, ran from the house, and she had not been back.

She then paused for several long seconds before adding, “I used to be a witch.” She admitted she had been active with wiccans in the San Francisco area for many years before she became a Christian. In fact, over her fireplace mantle was hanging a macramé weaving of the zodiac symbol, the very one she had used as a part of her previous religious activity as a witch. She felt certain that this symbol was somehow involved. She then asked me, “What do you think I should do?” Realizing I was in over my head, I said, “I think you should tell this to Dr. Munger.” In the weeks that followed, this woman told me that Dr. Munger had spoken with her, that they had prayed together, and that she knew that the devil had fled before the onslaught of prayer and her growing confidence in the presence and power of Christ.

In the opening pages of his book Christian Missions and the Judgment of God, David M. Paton many decades ago offered this sage commentary:

But let our confidence be sober, and rooted in a Faith that knows all about Evil. Our world is one world—in God’s design…. [My] father … said once that passing through Shanghai in 1935 had finally convinced him of the existence of the Devil, for in the appalling nexus of evil in Shanghai there seemed to him to be something at work beyond what could be accounted for by the follies and wickedness of mankind.

The Devil, then, must also be given his due. Mr. C. S. Lewis suggested in the preface to the Screwtape Letters that it is equally dangerous to our race to display either too much or too little interest in the Devil. Interested too deeply, we assign to the operations of the Devil events which can be adequately explained by common or garden sin, abnormal psychology and the like, and indulge in those orgies of witch-hunting which stain the history of the Church. Scornfully enlightened, and ignoring the well-authenticated phenomena of demon-possession (whether in the Gospel accounts of Palestine or in modern Africa or China), we allow the Devil a wider field for his operations by the very fact that we are off our guard. Both these attitudes are common; and not to be imitated. We may usefully preserve … that proper agnosticism without which there can be no true faith; only, if we allow for the operations of the Devil, let us be very clear that God is sovereign.49

Satan at times operates boldly and personally, at other times more slyly and through structures of power and authority. At still other times, such as in a cutting word unerringly directed, the fringe of his evil is felt; but this periphery points to the full weight of his malevolence. It must not be taken too lightly or too seriously, as Lewis has said. And it must be remembered that God is sovereign and that the devil will flee if resisted.

Original Meaning

The Bane of Compromise (4:4–6)

IN VERSE 4 James adopts the mantle of elder and offers a rebuke as to errant children. By designating them “adulterous people,” he recalls a frequent Old Testament rebuke,10 offers an echo of the teaching of Jesus in Matthew 12:39, and artfully holds out to his readers inclusion even as he wields the whip of chastisement. James is trying to shame them by reminding them of their commitment to the faith.

James’s reference to friendship with the world closely parallels a phrase employed by Paul in 2 Timothy 3:4 (“lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God”) and by John in 1 John 2:15 (“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”). We are, then, in touch with a broad tradition. “The world” here assumes its semantic function as the forces and elements opposed to God, or, more precisely, the whole complex of human institutions, values, and traditions that knowingly or unwittingly are arrayed against God.11

Martin notes that the choice to be apart from God is deliberate.12 While the grammar may support this, the thrust of James’s argument does not. True, some choose friendship with the world in the full knowledge that this constitutes enmity with God, and some of these continue to maintain the facade of a relationship with the Christian community. Perhaps James suspects this of the teachers he opposes. But many choose friendship with the world without realizing that it means enmity with God. This is probably his chief point, for the phrase “adulterous generation” is always used in Scripture of those who assume they are in a covenant relationship with God. Why else would James seek to win them back by argument and then rebuke?

Like the prophets of old James wants his audience to wake up, rub the sleep from their eyes, look in the mirror (1:23), and see themselves as they really are. What has appeared to them as sound teaching and practice is actually apostasy. It amounts to the worship of a false god. There is no middle ground where one can stand and remain unsullied (1:27). To continue to follow this false teaching is no mere trifle; it is to join hands with evil. They have not sensed the dire straits in which they stand, and James sounds for them the warning klaxon.

Verse 5 presents at least two problems of interpretation. (1) What Scripture does James have in mind, for there is no Old Testament text to correspond to the quote. In the next verse James cites Proverbs 3:34, but this verse hardly suffices here. It is possible that we have here a loose paraphrase of Exodus 34:14: “Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.” It is also possible that James here summarizes the many Old Testament passages that speak of the jealousy of God when the worship and ultimate allegiance on the part of human beings is in view. James’s point is that God earnestly desires his spirit to reside in us.13

(2) This leads us to another problem: What is the subject and what is the object of the verb “longs for” (epipothei)? The NIV has chosen to muddy the waters by conflating two consecutive Greek terms, phthonon (“envy, jealousy”) and epipothei. It is best to treat phthonon as an adverb (“with envy, with jealousy”) and to see “God” as the subject and “the spirit” as the object of the verb. This leaves us with the following translation: “Out of jealousy he longs for the spirit that he made to live in us.” This is the interpretation chosen by the NRSV (cf. NIV text note). Other renderings are, of course, possible and grammatically defensible. The subject could be the Holy Spirit, in which case the translation would be, “The Holy Spirit that he sent to live in us desires us for himself alone.” This, however, leaves us not distantly removed from where we find ourselves if God is the subject.14 In any case, the point is, plainly, that God desires with all of his heart for us to come home and to live with and in him, for us to ask for his wisdom. Instead, we follow the wisdom of the world, whether knowingly or unwittingly, and by following that errant path we can never achieve what we truly seek.

In verse 6 James holds out a lifeline to those who have apparently been ignorant of the gravity of their situation. God’s grace, he says, is still available and abundant for them. God’s demands can be harsh, but he always provides the means to follow him. This holds true even in the case of those active in cultivating a friendship with the world. James probably has in view a panoply of gifts, such as wisdom, the Holy Spirit, forgiveness, salvation, Jesus Christ himself, and many others.

The Scripture James quotes here is Proverbs 3:34: “He mocks proud mockers but gives grace to the humble.” He uses this verse as the headwaters for a cascade of ten commands. Its thrust is that God opposes the proud because they seem to have little interest in anyone but themselves, often exploiting the poor; and that God grants grace to the poor and needy because they trust in him, having no other recourse (1:6, 12; 2:5; 5:8). In this case the proud and arrogant have already shown their stripes: They have demonstrated favoritism based on wealth and status as the Roman world demanded, and they have therefore unveiled themselves as the friends of that world and at enmity with God. Further, they have arrogated themselves the right to proclaim as faith a functional denial of the very teaching of Jesus, specifically the law of love.