James Chapter 4

From The Open Bible Project

4:1 Where do wars and fightings among you come from? Don't they come from your pleasures that war in your members?

• (1) He advances the same argument, condemning certain other causes of wars and contentions, that is, unbridled pleasures and uncontrolled lusts, by their effects, for so much as the Lord does worthily make them come to no effect, so that they bring nothing to them in whom they reside, but incurable torments.

4:2 You lust, and don't have. You kill, covet, and can't obtain. You fight and make war. You don't have, because you don't ask.

• (2) He reprehends them by name, who are not ashamed to make God the minister and helper of their lusts and pleasures, in asking things which are either in themselves unlawful or being lawful, ask for them out of wicked motives and uses.

4:3 You ask, and don't receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it for your pleasures.

4:4 You adulterers and adulteresses, don't you know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

• (3) Another reason why such unbridled lusts and pleasures are utterly to be condemned, that is, because he who gives himself to the world divorces himself from God, and breaks the band of that holy and spiritual marriage.

4:5 Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, "The Spirit who lives in us yearns jealously"?

• (4) The taking away of an objection: in deed our minds run headlong into these vices, but we ought so much the more diligently take heed of them: whose care and study shall not be in vain, seeing that God resists the stubborn and gives the grace to the modest and humble that surmounts all those vices.

4:6 But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, "God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble."[9]

4:7 Be subject therefore to God. But resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

• (5) The conclusion: We must set the positive virtues against those vices, and therefore whereas we obeyed the suggestions of the devil, we must submit our minds to God and resist the devil with a certain and assured hope of victory. In short, we must endeavour to come near to God by purity and sincerity of life.

4:8 Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

4:9 Lament, mourn, and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to gloom.

• (6) He goes on in the same comparison of opposites, and contrasts those profane joys with an earnest sorrow of mind, and pride and arrogancy with holy modesty.
• (a) By this word the Greeks mean a heaviness joined with shamefacedness, which is to be seen in a cast down countenance, and settled as it were upon the ground.

4:10 Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he will exalt you.

4:11 Don't speak against one another, brothers. He who speaks against a brother and judges his brother, speaks against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge.

• (7) He reprehends most sharply another double mischief of pride. The one is, in that the proud and arrogant will have other men to live according to their will and pleasure. Therefore they do most arrogantly condemn whatever does not please them: which cannot be done without great injury to our only lawmaker. For through this his laws are found fault with, as not carefully enough written, and men challenge that to themselves which properly belongs to God alone, in that they lay a law upon men’s consciences.

4:12 Only one is the lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge another?

4:13 Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow let's go into this city, and spend a year there, trade, and make a profit."

• (8) The other fault is this: That men do so confidently determine on these and those matters and businesses, as though every moment of their life did not depend on God.

4:14 Whereas you don't know what your life will be like tomorrow. For what is your life? For you are a vapor, that appears for a little time, and then vanishes away.

4:15 For you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will both live, and do this or that."

4:16 But now you glory in your boasting. All such boasting is evil.

4:17 To him therefore who knows to do good, and doesn't do it, to him it is sin.

• (9) The conclusion of all the former treatise. The knowledge of the will of God does not only not at all profit, unless the life be answerable unto it, but also makes the sins far more grievous.