James 1

James 1:1-27

Division 1. (James 1:1-27.)The power of faith. In the epistle to the twelve tribes it is remarkable, and cannot be without its meaning, that the writer should be James, or Jacob, as the word is. It is the letter of a New Testament Jacob, who has learned the lesson, in fact, which Jacob in his day was so slow to learn, but which was the lesson of his life -the lesson which turned him from a Jacob into Israel, “a prince with God.” But what was that lesson? It was the lesson contained in the word “Bethel,” “the house of God;” God seen in it in His desire to come near to man, yea, to have an abiding place with him. The door of the house is open to him in vision, and a ladder let down, upon which the angels ascend and descend in the exercise of gracious ministry. There is not, of course, the nearness which we apprehend in the house of God. It is but the rudimentary idea of it; and upon Jacob’s spirit there is the awe of it, rather than any sense of nearness; yet he says, “If God will be with me,” and promises that he will set up God’s house for Him, which, in fact, however little the manner of it might be in Jacob’s thought, man was to do.

But what Jacob has to realize is the ways that become this house. He is, alas, Jacob still.

His footing with God he would fain put on the ground of a bargain, a coarse idea of what was to come afterwards for his descendants -the legal covenant. Yet the true thought of holiness such as becomes God’s house is scarcely in his mind at all. He is still Jacob “the supplanter,” or “heel-catcher,” one who lays hold with his hand for his own advantage, with small scruple. He has to suffer long the consequences of this. Even when he seeks God’s blessing, as we know he did seek, yet the grasp of the hand is seen. He cannot trust God to give. He bargains keenly with his careless brother, as afterwards he bargains with Laban also for his daughter, and gets overreached in it. When he comes back into th land, he is to meet the consequences of his early wrong-doing.

He bows before his “lord Esau,” whom he would conciliate with a gift. But for God to meet him, there must be, first of all, what we find in Peniel, where the wrestling is at last not on his side, but on God’s, although he can wrestle sufficiently in withstanding God to find himself, to his cost, with a dislocated thigh. Even so, it is a way of blessing. The wrestler can now only cling, but it is just as he learns how to cling and not to wrestle, -that is, the way of faith instead of the way of works, -his blessing comes. James has learnt the lesson. It is faith that he upholds ever. He joys in that humiliation in which, whatever the trial of it, he is cast upon God and finds Him for his need. He has learnt that God “giveth to all liberally and upbraideth not,” and thus to ask that it shall be given him. Is it not all through just the creature taking his true place with God; and therefore, because God is good, finding the blessing of it? Here faith is fruitful indeed, and finds its recompense.

1. James then writes as “the bondman of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ to the twelve tribes that are of the dispersion, greeting.” It is the salutation which we find in the letter from Jerusalem with regard to the question of law to the Gentiles, and we have no wishing them grace and peace, according to the customary form with Paul, and also with Peter. Grace is indeed mentioned but twice in the epistle. It is practical conduct, evidently, that is in question all through, and not even the springs of conduct; for faith gives us hardly that. Faith is the channel, and not the spring. Grace is the spring, and only that.

But he is writing to those who, as the twelve tribes of the dispersion, are showing how God has been wrestling with them, and He would show them now the way of blessing from it. They are to account it all joy when they fall into various temptations, knowing that the proving of their faith worketh patience. This is what it always means, this working of God with His own, which is but to bring out the faith in which He delights, and to produce in them that subjection to His hand and will which is all that is needed for blessing. “Let patience have its perfect work,” then we are “perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” How blessed an assurance is this! and yet how hard we find it often -the exercise of this patience -which detects in us too that element of distrust which makes the hardness of it! Perfect apprehension of the Father’s cup will make us ask with the perfect Example, who needed no putting down for exaltation, “The cup which My Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?” That question is unanswerable when once we know this Father, and that He is ours. “Perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” -how wonderful an assurance it is, and how simple it seems, the way to it! It is simplicity itself; but the trouble is, we are not simple. How short a creed is involved in it! -nothing but the most simple and evident orthodoxy! God is almighty, all-wise, all-good; and God is for us. What must be the issue of that? 2. The blessedness of prayer comes in naturally as a corollary to this, and the thing that above all we lack, in that exercise of patience of which the apostle has just spoken, is evidently wisdom. If God’s will is all, the great point is to know His will. And for this we want, not simply knowledge as to this matter or that matter, but wisdom -the power to apply the truth we have, so as to see how God is working, to discern His ways. Little for us, indeed, is there to do when we are in the presence of God, although it may please Him in His grace to put something into our hands; and then, of course, it is a joy to have the privilege of serving Him in it. But the first thing for all this is guidance, that wisdom which is not always either the conscious application of this or that principle, but which becomes to one habituated to it almost an instinct, as we may say; although, indeed, it has a far higher character than this; and sometimes, too, the wisdom is really unconscious altogether.

We do better than we know just because we are given up into the hands of this higher Wisdom to work through us. God would not make machinery of us. He uses heart, mind, everything for Himself -uses us according to our nature, never loses sight of that nature which He has given us; but then it pertains just to this wisdom to realize creature nothingness, and that God’s ways, after all, are not discerned everywhere -that they are too wonderful for us, and that the greatest possible wisdom is often that of just committing ourselves into His hands, assured that we have His guidance because we seek His guidance, and He cannot disappoint the faith that counts on Him. This may have its counterfeit, it is true, and we must realize that. How easy it is just to get upon our knees and ask God to lead us, and then follow our hasty impulses after all! Who shall save us from the mistaking one of those things for the other? How can we give an answer to this? It is in the sanctuary that we must learn it. It is in drawing near to God, there, where the pride of man is humbled and the impulses of nature find complete control.

There is no absolute rule by which we can discern what wisdom is. We are to ask God “who giveth to all liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given” us. In inspiration we cannot but remember how prophets spoke more wisely than they knew, so that they had to look at their own prophecies to find that which was in them, which they had not discovered; and such may be with us the far-reaching result of our actions that, if led of Him, we shall find that we have acted much better than we knew. He “giveth liberally.” There is in such grace as this of which we are speaking a largeness and breadth which show it to be divine; and thus the simplest, poorest child of God, the one most consciously ignorant, just in the consciousness of that ignorance may both act and speak so of the ability that God giveth that the highest wisdom amongst men shall not come near it for the excellence that is in it; and true faith is just of this character, that it makes God all, and draws thus out of the full fountain, never seeking it in vain. Thus the apostle insists upon it here that he who asks should “ask in faith, nothing doubting.” Is it hard to do that? We are told immediately how it is that it is hard -whence the doubt comes. “He that doubteth is like a wave of the sea, driven of the wind and tossed” -open to the influences of things around, which the eye contemplates the moment God is not before it. The apostle is very emphatic here. Let not that man think that he shall receive anything from the Lord." But of what is he speaking? Not of the exercises that an honest soul may have in discerning what the way of the Lord is, but the instability which results from a double mind, the strife of our own wills with God’s will, the desire to have Him act according to our mind instead of desiring to act according to His mind. It is plain that we are not in the way to get wisdom so.

Yet how much of our prayer is often just this kind of strife with God! and how often there is a thought that if we had only energy of faith in this way, we might really in some sense bend Him to our will! But that would be no blessedness. His will is that which is perfect. To call ours “imperfect” would be to put honor on it. No doubt there are things which God is indeed ready to give, which yet He waits for us to have faith in Him about, and He may keep us waiting until we have more the faith that honors Him; but this is a different matter altogether. If we ask wisdom, how can He deny us? But if that means wisdom to carry out some self-devised way or plan, the wisdom that He gives, if we are in earnest, must be wisdom to abandon it. Thus it is as the Lord has said: “If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done for you.” There is where our will is such a grand success, when His words abide in us, when they mold and govern us, when they are that upon which we live, and thus become the very sap and substance of our thoughts. Then, indeed, shall we know what the power of prayer is; and Jacob’s power with the angel, when he prevailed, was the power he found after his own strength was broken down, and there was but the clinging to God for blessing -blessing in which He always delights, and which He cannot deny us. 3. Now we have the place in which this puts us morally. The brother of low degree glories in his exaltation. The gospel fills up the valleys as surely as it levels the mountains. This exaltation is not for a moment and to pass away, while the earthly things that exalt men necessarily pass. Thus the rich, if he be indeed the possessor of faith, glories in his humiliation -in that mercy of God which has made him conscious of the transitoriness of all here, so that in the very things he has he is but Another’s steward.

For him, also, there has been a higher exaltation, which makes him content that the other should pass, as pass he knows it will. If the things do not die, we die out of them; and how quickly the comeliness passes even from that which still exists! There is but one unfading inheritance where all is eternally as fresh as at the beginning. This is faith’s realization, and for it that which passes has thus the stamp of vanity upon it at all times. 4. But there are trials that come from these various conditions of life through which we pass. The poor man may find his poverty a trial; and he has a nature still within him which may easily feel the solicitation of things around; but the temptation has its own part under the hand of God, in giving him, in his endurance of it, that “crown of life which the Lord hath promised to them that love Him.” He may have lost his life, as the Lord expresses it, in this world, but he shall keep it unto life eternal, and find it there in what triumphant fashion -“shall reign in life,” as the apostle has taught us to say! But then, as to the solicitation, there is a careful guard here. When a man is tempted, he must not say, “I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil things, and Himself tempteth no one with evil.” The trial of faith is a very different thing. The devil solicits with evil; but then he finds in us that which he counts upon as being ready to yield to the temptation; and, in fact, any one is tempted when he is drawn away and enticed by his own lust. This is the only thing that can make him accessible. God is over all in the way of permitting the external solicitation, but the internal is of man himself. There, he is master of himself, and thus responsible for the issue ever being against him. Here, that which begins in pleasure ends naturally in death. “Lust, when it hath conceived, bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it is completed, bringeth forth death.”*
5. Now we are once more brought back to a realization of how, indeed, God is for us, and who He is that is thus for us. “Every good gift and every perfect gift” comes down from Him, and there is no possibility of change, no shadow of turning, with Him. Nothing that is from Him is other than a good gift if we will only use it and value it as such. He is “the Father of lights,” Himself Light; the display of this light is seen in His ways with us -a wondrous spectrum indeed, in which the glory of the light is displayed in its many-colored rays! With these we are familiar as the jewels of the priest’s breastplate, the embodiment of the light in those gems upon which the names of the tribes were engravers. We have them again in the jewels of the eternal city, the perfect display of God’s attributes upon which all is founded there, and which, therefore, gives indeed an eternal foundation -God displayed in His own nature; -who can change this in any one respect?

How blessed to be able in faith to trace Him in this way! -righteousness is now seen, in some sense, as distinct from love, so that we may even in our folly be questioning whether love be in it. But these different rays are but the various display of that which in itself is one -love in light and light in love, never divorced from one another.

Can we be even righteous in that in which we show not love? or can that be love which has not righteousness in it? Here is the nature which we have received from “the Father of lights” Himself, for “according to His own will He begat us by the word of truth,” and the children manifest the Father.* But what, then, must He be in all His dealings with these children that He has begotten? How can there be any contradiction, in any of His ways, to that love in which He has begotten them for Himself? And we are those, the apostle intimates, who are a kind of first-fruits of His creatures -those in whom His creative thought as to man has first come rightly to its bloom and manifestation. How wonderful a being is man in that respect, when we see him in the Man Christ Jesus, and realize this to have been God’s thought from the beginning: man, with whom God dwells forever, and in whom the divine heart can find response and hold communion!
Let us therefore answer to this, exhorts the apostle. “Let every one be swift to hear,” ready to take the place of those who need instruction; “slow to speak,” as conscious of infirmity; “slow to wrath,” because of the weakness of an impulsive nature, the wrath of man working not the righteousness of God; thus, laying “aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness,” we are ready to “receive with meekness the engrafted Word which is able to save” our souls. The Word which we receive is the Word which characterizes our nature itself. It is the engrafted Word, that in which the old stock and the old fruits are judged, and which gives in its reception the competency for fruit which is to God’s taste. Thus the power of salvation -that is, of our deliverance from the various things which beset us by the way -is found in that word of God. which He has given us. By it the divine nature grows, and the soul is delivered from the power of things around by the blessing which is ministered to it. It is only as abiding in the good that we can resist the evil. It is only in the enjoyment of what is ours that we can be really weaned and separated from all that, while in us, is yet contrary to us. But of this Word, then, we have to be “doers,” and “not hearers only.” It is impossible rightly to hear without there being effect of it; and how, one would think, could there be possibility of deceiving oneself after this fashion? Yet there is what answers to the figure here, a man beholding his natural face as in a mirror, and going away, straightway to forget what manner of man he is. But to him in whom the word of God, as that by which he has been begotten, has become his very nature, -an engrafted Word, it remains for him a law the most absolute that can be, -the law of his nature, thus a law of liberty; for there is no liberty like that of doing that which it is in our very nature to do. Thus there is abiding in it. The Word is that in which the soul finds its chosen portion and delight. It is a law without legality; it is a sweet attraction which wins, not drives.

Such an one cannot be a forgetful hearer of that which so completely holds and captivates him. He is thus “a doer of the work;” for a man will do according to that which is in his heart, as “out of the heart,” also, “the mouth speaketh.” So out of the heart will come the work, and such an one shall be blessed indeed in his doing, happy in the activity itself, happy in the fruit of that activity. On the other hand, anything that counts for religion which does not reach to this is vain, if the tongue is not bridled by it, if there is no activity of love that goes out in a scene so calculated by its need to draw it out. “Pure and undefiled religion before God, even the Father,” (how well the reminder of that name comes in here!) “is this, to visit the orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.”* \