We round out James 4 by continuing to dig deeply into the technicalities of the Greek linguistics. We re-visit his story to find the one study-lens that shifts James’ “Do not speak evil of one another” from a stern tone to a humble one. We see that life really is just a vapor, and we talk about how sin does and does not look when it comes to God’s wisdom.

The Technicalities

I want to circle back around to the story that we looked at in the very beginning of studying this book together – the one in John 7 where we find James in his hometo wn with his brothers in the Galilean region where Jesus also happened to be staying. The Jews’ Feast of Tabernacles was about to take place, the most popular and arguably the most important of three annual festivals in which the Jewish people traveled to Judea to celebrate in person together.

“You better leave here and head that way,” James and his brothers said to Jesus, taunting Him. “You sure seem to want the public attention. Don’t hide here in secret. The whole world is in Judea – go and show off there.”

A couple of things are happening here, especially in light of what we just studied together in the first part of James 4. First, everyone was packing up and preparing to make the trip to Jerusalem. Everyone, that is, except Jesus. The text doesn’t outrightly say it, but you can assume that, in that alone, Jesus’ brothers were silently judging Him for how they thought that He was (or, in this case, was not) worshiping God by attending (or not attending) a sacred feast. Second is what you can assume was happening behind the scenes among his brothers – the types of conversations they were having about their brother whom, the text makes clear, they did not believe to be the Messiah. And, even further, the conversation they had after this interaction with Him on their way to celebrate the feast He had just indicated that He would not be attending. Further still? I can only imagine what people said to them upon their arrival. Things like, “Hey, what’s up with your brother?” “He’s the Messiah?” And, if they taunted Him like that at home, I can only imagine how they may have responded.

With that in mind, look at James 4:11.

“Brothers and sisters, don’t speak against each other. Don’t slander your brother, don’t speak evil about him, don’t defame him. When you do,” he says, “you’re judging the law of love as something that does not apply to you. You stop doing and start judging, and, by the way, there is only one Judge (and it’s not you).”

A cross-reference for James 4:12 points over to Romans 14:4-8 and drives this point home. If you take a look at it, you’ll see that James is carrying on the conversation he started with the special treatment of important people in James 2 – that believers aren’t just in danger of judging the way a person looks when they come to church, they are also in danger of judging what other Christians do once they get there. And, again, although the text doesn’t say it outrightly, I believe that James’ experience as being Jesus’ actual blood half-brother who did not believe Him frames the tone in which we read this text because of the grace with which Jesus met Him in His glory as the resurrected Christ. He didn’t have to appear to James individually and specifically, the way that 1 Corinthians 15:7 describes, but He chose to appear to Him because He gives more grace. Remembering that shifts the tone in which we read this part of James’ letter from stern to humble. Meek, even because he changed his mind about Jesus. Remember that about the meekness of wisdom from James 3:13? James eventually turned from his John 7 judging (because he could no longer deny that his brother was, indeed, the Messiah). And, in meekness and humility from having learned such a dramatic lesson in grace and mercy, he teaches us to do the same.

Jesus could have judged James for judging Him. He could have maintained that separation and that distance that James first established between them. Instead, He bridged the separation-gap. He gave more grace.

And with that, James shifts from one “do not be a doer of” topic to another. This one? Don’t presume you know about tomorrow, and he uses a Greek word for “tomorrow,” which can be translated as both “morning air” and “unconscious breathing.” In other words, he warns against bragging about your dreams, goals, and plans for tomorrow when you don’t even know if you will be breathing its morning air. Our lives are like a morning haze that burns off quickly. Because of that, he says, you should reframe your plans and the way in which you phrase them because it’s not about what you want to do (as we already discovered at length in the first part of James 4). It’s about what God has determined for you to do. “If He wills it,” you should say, “then I’ll do it. Beyond that, I know nothing with certainty.”

But the most curious thing about this passage is the fact that James doesn’t just say, “Don’t brag about your plans.” He says specifically, “Don’t brag about your plans to go and make a profit.” And I find that especially curious as he transitions into chapter five and the future miseries that imminently await the rich and the ones who have done that – gone out and made a profit. And it swings us right back to James 1:9-11 and the vanishing vapor in which not only our breath disappears, but also those riches we just spent all that time planning for and anticipating.

Turns out, those riches will rot. Take a look over at Matthew 6:19 when Jesus is speaking from the mountain to the multitudes with a “do not do” of His own: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal.” The destruction of the rust that Jesus describes is the same vanishing word from James 4:14. It all disappears, eventually. Your riches will rot. Your coins will canker and corrode (which, for what it’s worth if you dug along with me in the first part of James 3, that corroding word can be literally translated from the two compound words which make it as “poisonous venom throughout”). And, James says, that rusty poison itself will be the proof of your sin and will consume your flesh like fire (hello, James 3:5-6). Because it’s the coins that you rob other people of in your greed that poison-rust most quickly, and those people that you took them from are the ones crying out to God in their own trial because of your greed (and, by the way, they aren’t the ones in sin, so God hears their prayer).

“You have murdered and condemned good and innocent people,” James warns again of the future misery of chasing plans for profit and greed. “Their cries have reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth” – a name of God that points right back to the wars and fighting of James 4 because the Lord of Sabaoth is the Lord of the armies of Israel who maintain His cause in war. I also want you to note a specific translation that’s rendered in a few different Bible versions of this verse – that render “good and innocent people” as “The Righteous One” and suggest the word as a possible reference to the death of Jesus (hold that thought).

To wrap this section up, You will have treasure heaped up in the last days, James warns. There will be a reward in the end. The question remains, is it rotten, cankered, and altogether poisonous? Or is it Matthew 6:20 treasure in heaven where the moth does not chew, the rust does not canker, and the thief cannot steal? Because wherever your treasure is? That’s where your heart is. And, God willing, in the end? It’s with Him and His glory.

Making it Personal

With all the talk about doing and avoiding, judging or loving, celebrating feasts or skipping them, making plans or hoping for them, the key to making this entire passage personal lies in the words of James 4:17 and the person who knows to do good and does not do it. To that person and that person alone, it is sin.

You may have heard my story of waiting for a decade to become a mother. It was something that was partly by choice, partly not. Partly by choice in the sense that my husband and I believed that God told us to do nothing by way of medical intervention or help and to simply wait for His miracle instead. And partly not by choice in the fact that my body just wouldn’t get pregnant on its own for a full ten years.

It wasn’t until we were four years into our wait that we finally started doing the fertility tests. I was poked and prodded as doctors tested every theory. I read articles and got acupuncture and listened to stories and explored every old wives’ tale. I took my temperature and tracked my ovulation and was injected with dye. There were ultrasounds and scans and exams to boot. The results showed that there was a low-percentage chance that we would ever get pregnant on our own.

“What are you going to do?” It was the inevitable question that was always asked by well-meaning friends after sharing that kind of news. We had three options in front of us: artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, or adoption. But we chose option number four: do nothing.

We knew, deep down inside, that we were not supposed to do anything but wait for His miracle and simply trust that God would make our baby in His time. It’s really important that I communicate this – that the choice to do nothing did not come from a place of research into our options. It wasn’t rooted in what we did or did not agree with scientifically, our views of the possible moral or ethical implications of those things, what we could afford financially, or the statistical probabilities of their success. Our decision to wait was strictly in response to our asking God for wisdom and His giving it.

That said, because we were so convinced in the “do nothing” wisdom that God spoke to us, I absolutely believed (and still believe) that, had we gone down the road of adoption or in-vitro or other fertility helps, they would have failed. I would have been out that much more money and in that much more heartache, doing exactly as James describes in James 5:1 – weeping and howling from my misery of not getting the thing that God didn’t promise He would give me to begin with.

Now, listen: fertility help and medical assistance? Those things aren’t salvation issues. But not obeying the wisdom that God gave us? That’s a sin issue. We knew that God told us very specifically what to do. To ignore that wisdom and do the opposite? To us, it would be sin. To the average woman, pursuing adoption or in-vitro fertilization or other medical interventions to help assist in pregnancy is not a matter of sin. But it was to my husband and I because God told us very specifically to not do those things.

That said, do you remember last week when I talked about how Bible teachers don’t have the luxury of glossing over the hard things? This verse, James 4:17, is one of those hard things simply because of the other verses it is associated with, namely, Luke 12:47 and Deuteronomy 25:2 (which is where my “hold that thought” note on James 5:6 and murdering the Righteous One now comes into play). Both of those cross-references are about beaten servants who disobeyed their masters, and the Deuteronomy verse even describes a disobedient servant being forced to lie down in the presence of a judge to receive his beating.

Talk about the hard Bible topics – that’s it! We’re there! Forced to lie down? To be beaten because of disobedience? Many people frame those types of verses and wonder aloud: What kind of God does that? But you have to remember that we live in an entirely different generation and culture, two thousand years removed from this one – the culture in which God chose to write His Word and to send His Son. It was the same culture that crucified Him. With that footing, you have to understand that the “beating” word in Luke 12:47 is the same word used in Luke 22:63 – after Jesus was arrested and before He was crucified, the men who held Him mocked Him and beat Him. And the “beaten” from Deuteronomy 25:2? It describes hitting and striking, and it also means “to pierce through.” And, in John 19:34, after Jesus died, one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear to prove His death.

The black-and-white truth of it is that disobedience to the wisdom you asked God for in James 1 (and wisdom that He gave you) is sin. But He gives more grace. He doesn’t just give you the wisdom and leave you to the doing of it. Take a look back at Deuteronomy 25:2 one more time. The “beaten” word in the verse has one more really fascinating usage that I believe obedience to God’s wisdom hinges upon. You can see it in 1 Samuel 24:5, where it says in the King James Version that the heart of David smote him because he had cut Saul’s robe. The Hebrew language for that specific usage of the “beaten” word was that his heart was beating so forcefully that “it struck his internal breast.” Cutting a piece of Saul’s robe while he was relieving himself inside a cave seemed innocent enough. That part wasn’t sin. The sin was in the fact that David crossed a line that he knew he shouldn’t have crossed.

I’m sure you know that feeling of your heart thumping way down deep in your chest when you know what you’re supposed to do. It might even be happening to you now as God presses on an obedience issue that you’ve been avoiding – something that you are too scared to do, so you don’t. Or you just want the thing that God has said “No” to so badly that you have just ignored the “No” (and it’s not going well for you now). That’s the sin part. It’s in the knowing and not doing.

If you take another look at Deuteronomy 25:2, you’ll see one detail at the end of the verse that describes the person being beaten with a certain number of blows according to their guilt. Charles Spurgeon explains it in relation to James 4:17 as the sin of not doing is in proportion to your knowledge. In other words, every minute that you leave something that God has told you to do undone piles on the guilt of your sin. You don’t know if you will breathe morning air tomorrow. So, if you’re holding out on your doing? Today’s the day.

Do you remember in the Making it Personal part of James 2:14-16 when we talked about the doing of faith and asking God how He wants you to walk your faith out, then running as fast as you can to do it? It’s been four weeks since then. Have you taken the steps to do (or stop doing)? Is your heart beating out of your chest right now? Don’t wait a second longer. Today’s the day for doing.

Thanks so much for listening!