BIG IDEA:
DON’T USURP THE ROLE OF GOD AS JUDGE OR MASTER PLANNER
INTRODUCTION:
A lot of times Christians try to play God without even realizing the folly of what they are doing.
Craig Blomberg: Despite formal parallels with 5:1–6, the present section really is not about wealth or poverty but about the temptations of autonomous planning more generally and thus a failure to take God’s will into account. . .
Main Idea: Christians should not plan for the future as if they are in complete control of their own lives but should consistently make a healthy allowance for God’s sovereignty. Awareness of this principle makes failure to implement it all the more culpable.
Ralph Martin: In the search for a thematic thread binding these apparently disparate sections (cf. Blevins’ chapter title: he considers the issues under two heads, namely, divine sovereignty and human responsibility, with submission to God the major emphasis) there is another suggestion to be made. James has already devoted much of his writing to the use and abuse of the tongue. We propose that these pericopes are a continuation and an application of the same topic, with a variation. . .
Now he returns to this general theme by commenting on the different areas of social life where the tongue betrays a proud spirit. When his audience indulges in derogatory words and insults directed against the brothers (4:11–12; cf. Ps 50:20, where slander against one’s brother is held up to reproof) this evil speaking is seen as an offense against God’s law and against God himself. He is the only one who can be rightly regarded as the all-knowing person and so able rightly to judge (4:12). This is one manifestation of the sin of presumption.
Another area where the arrogance of the tongue shows itself is when plans and proposals for future business transactions, involving travel, sojourn, and prosperity, are entered into (for the ease and safety of travel in the empire, see Casson, Travel, 127, chap. 11; and for Syro-Palestine in particular, Maynard-Reid, Poverty and Wealth, 72–77). Note that James is not condemning the desire to get rich; rather what concerns him is the hyper-activity and mobility these persons evince—akin to the thought in Sir 38:24–34, which, however, gives a more sympathetic picture of those devoted to their work — and the fact that they look to the future without reference to divine providence (4:13–15). It is in their words, cast in oratio recta as an index of their godless character, that their true selves stand revealed. The piling up of future tenses in πορευσόμεθα . . . ποιήσομεν . . . ἐμπορευσόμεθα . . . κερδήσομεν has a powerful literary effect (with alliterations in the verbs and the presence of a rhythmical structure including a chiasmus, formed from the verb endings, and homoioteleuton), and well illustrates and enforces the writer’s point against the bourgeois “men of affairs” (Vouga, 122) on whom he has trained his sights. Their presumption lies in their pretended control over their future, to which they really have no claim (v 14). Overlooked by them are both the uncertainty and brevity of life (marked by alliterative participles φαινομένη . . . ἀφανιζομένη, “appearing . . . disappearing”). They ignore too the providence of God, who holds all human prospects for the future in his hands (see Luke 12:16–21).
I. (:11-12) DON’T USURP GOD’S ROLE AS JUDGE
Craig Blomberg: Christians should reject slander as one particularly insidious manifestation of strife (vv. 11–12).
- Slandering fellow believers slanders God’s law, which prohibits such action (v. 11a).
- This usurps God’s role as sole judge by placing believers in a position of judging God’s law instead of obeying it ( 11b–12).
Thomas Lea: Human pride leads to disparaging criticism of others. . . When we slander our neighbors, we show our opposition to the law of love and imply that we are exempt from observing it. . . A slanderous Christian attempts to play the role of God.
Dan McCartney: Slander and judgmentalism are close cousins. Many slanderers probably are unaware that they are spreading falsehood; they believe their negative accusations and censorious remarks to be reasonably well founded, and they may even see themselves as having a special calling to inform the world of someone’s evil or to preserve a church’s purity by excising its less-than-perfect members. To spread accusations or publish unproven allegations is, however, in effect to act as a sentencing judge, but without authorization and probably also without adequate information. Slander indirectly imposes censure because the wider community is implicitly being encouraged to ostracize the accused person, who may very well be innocent. But the more important issue is that no individual in the community is in any position to judge the spiritual condition of another.1 This does not mean that one should never denounce sin or criticize fellow believers (cf. Moo 2000: 198)—here James himself is doing so—but that one should not spread abroad accusations, cast aspersions, or defame or denigrate persons or their motives.
A. (:11a) Example of Usurping God’s Role as Judge = Slander
“Do not speak against one another, brethren. He who speaks against a brother,
or judges his brother, speaks against the law, and judges the law;”
Note emphasis on the relationship we enjoy as “brothers”
Dale Allison: The call not to speak against others or to judge them takes readers back to the condemnation of social conflict in vv. 1-2 and forms an inclusio. Slander and judging manifest and foster personal ‘conflicts and disputes’ (v. 1), just as shunning the role of judge undoes enmity.
R. Kent Hughes: Literally the command is, “Do not speak down on one another, brothers,” or “Do not speak against one another, brethren” (NASB). Slander is malicious speech that is untrue. But the command here forbids any speech (whether it is true or false) that runs down another person. . .
In point of fact, it is the Christian’s duty to exercise judgment. For example, we are to beware of false prophets (Matthew 7:15). How can we determine a false prophet except by judging him against the standard of the Word of God? Likewise we are told, “You will recognize them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). Recognition hinges on careful judgment. We are to judge adultery, murder, lying, and theft as sins, and if anyone does these things, we must judge them as being sinful! Jesus said, “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment” (John 7:24). What the Scriptures forbid is judgmentalism, a critical and censorious spirit that judges everyone and everything, seeking to run others down.
Alexander Ross: The spirit of humility cannot exist alongside the spirit which speaks against the brethren; such censoriousness in speech leads to one of the worst forms of pride; the man who is guilty of it does not merely criticize his brother but really criticizes the Law of God, that is, no doubt chiefly the Royal Law of love (2:8).
Curtis Vaughan: This is another way in which the worldly mind expresses itself.
Ralph Martin: Any attitude that shows disdain or contempt for others reflects pride on the part of the one who adopts the scornful attitude.
Alec Motyer: James tells us how we should regard the law. God has given us his ‘royal law’ (2:8) that we should love our neighbours. What happens, then, when we desert the path of love for that of criticism and denigration? Outwardly we speak against a brother and neighbour, actually we speak evil against the law (11). First, we break the law as a precept which we were meant to obey. It commands love; we respond with defamatory talk’. Secondly, we set ourselves up as knowing better than the law, we judge the law. In effect we say that the law is mistaken in commanding love. It ought rather to have commanded criticism—and if we were lawgivers it would do so. The law no longer expresses the highest values as far as we are concerned. We know values—those of ‘talking down’ to our brothers—which are higher still. And, thirdly, we take up a new position, not a doer of the law but a judge. We seek to usurp the authority of God himself.
B. (:11b) Explanation of Our Responsibility to Obey the Law, Not Judge It
“but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge of it.”
Daniel Doriani: Much judgment involves a decision to take a position superior to another, to dominate them. Envy and ambition, the sins that most contradict humility, cause slander and judgment.
John MacArthur: Since slander is a violation of the law of love, a slanderer speaks against the law and condemns the law, thus showing utter disregard for the divine standard. And if you place yourself above God’s law, warns James, you are not a doer of the law but a judge of it. The unimaginable implication of that is that the one who disregards God’s law in effect claims to be superior to the law of God, not to be bound by it or to be subject to its authority. By such fearful disrespect the sinner judges the law as unworthy of his attention, affection, obedience, submission—all of which is blasphemy against God.
David Nystrom: We often judge inappropriately. When we use slander, misinform for ulterior motive, or seek what appears to our eyes to be “the good,” we are doing more than sinning against our neighbor. We are breaking trust with God; and in so doing, we are, in fact, judging ourselves. We demonstrate our lack of understanding of God our Father, and we place ourselves in jeopardy.
John Painter: Any form of speaking that is destructive of the other person qualifies. This is especially true of slander, which implies that the negative criticism is not based on reality and misrepresents the other person. The use of the reciprocal “one another” suggests that a situation of leadership rivalry again surfaces here. Addressing the readers as “brothers [and sisters]” forcefully emphasizes the inappropriateness of this bitter rivalry. Indeed, it now becomes apparent that such behavior is an attack on the law.
C. (:12) Exclusivity of God’s Role as Lawgiver and Judge
“There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the One who is able to save and to
destroy; but who are you who judge your neighbor?”
Warren Wiersbe: James was not forbidding us to use discrimination or even to evaluate people. Christian need to have discernment (Phil. 1:9-10), but they must not act like God in passing judgment. We must first examine our own lives, and then try to help others (Matt. 7:1-5).
John MacArthur: The desire to usurp the place of God has been the essence of every sin ever committed. Sin seeks to dethrone God, to remove Him as supreme Lawgiver and Judge and rule in His place. Because it asserts that the sinner is above God’s law, as noted in the previous point, sin strikes a murderous blow at the very person of God Himself.
Alec Motyer: To disobey his law is to contradict him. To value our opinions above the law is to value ourselves above him. To take up the position of judge is to elbow him off his throne. Where now is the humility and lowliness before God which is the essence and key to the heavenly wisdom?
II. (:13-17) DON’T USURP GOD’S ROLE AS MASTER PLANNER
Craig Blomberg: Planning apart from God’s Will (4:13–17)
A. Christians should not presume to know the future but should always leave room for God’s will to overrule theirs (vv. 13–15).
- The wrong attitude is to pronounce confidently on all coming events (vv. 13–14).
- The right attitude is to plan but to make allowance for God’s will to change those plans (v. 15).
B. Such presumption about the future is in fact boasting in one’s own arrogance (vv. 16–17).
- For Christians, all such boasting is particularly evil (v. 16).
- This is because Christians know better (v. 17).
Thomas Lea: It is easy for Christians to make plans and goals, expecting God to fall in line with them. It is easy to plan our lives as if we controlled the future and had unlimited authority over all factors affecting our life. It is quite simple to plan our lives as if God does not exist. This paragraph warns against such self-centered planning. Worldly living does not always show itself in hatred for God. Sometimes it appears in the form of disregarding God as we plan life’s daily activities.
Dan McCartney: It is true that today there are merchants who claim to be Christians, and they may very well need to be reminded of the tenuousness of life and transitoriness of wealth. Planning for the future is wise, not evil, but planning without acknowledging or consulting God, or without reference to his ethical precepts, or, even worse, boasting of one’s independent planning (4:16) is both foolish and wicked.
Robert Plummer: James rebukes human presumption in planning. Humans so easily forget that each day of life (and any abilities or gifts associated with life) are from God and may be withdrawn by the Creator at any moment. James says bluntly, “you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (v. 14; cf. Mt 6:27). Such a truth should not make us fearful, since we serve a loving heavenly Father (Mt 7:9-11). Instead, realizing our contingency and frailty should make us humble, conscious of our moment by moment dependence on God. Sometimes this dependence should be expressed explicitly by voicing the qualification, “If it is the Lord’s will . . .” (Jas 4:15). But even if that qualification is not on our lips, it must be on our hearts.
A. (:13-14) Presumption Regarding Our Future Represents a Failure to Submit to the Sovereign Will of God
- Presumptuous Plans
“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow, we shall go to such and
such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business
and make a profit.'”
Dan McCartney: “Come now” is an interjection that James seems to use with the force of an upbraiding call to attention. Each of the two sections (4:13–17; 5:1–6) is introduced with this call, with a vocative, very much like Jesus’s woe oracles in Matt. 23:13–29 and Luke 11:42–52. In no way is James mincing words in these paragraphs.
Curtis Vaughan: In Palestine the Jews generally adhered to the agricultural life; but in the Dispersion they were frequently merchants and bankers.
Craig Blomberg: This verse does introduce, however, the concept that wealth allows people an independence from God that can be dangerous for their spiritual state, and James wishes to convict people about this arrogant autonomy. . . “As so often in James, it is speech as revealing the orientation of the heart that is the special target.” And who is this group? They are the people who plan their lives, their futures, without thought of God and his plans or sovereignty. The general statements of “today or tomorrow” and “such and such” reveal that James writes this about anyone who makes any plans separate from God.
Peter Davids: These merchants are making typical plans: setting the time of departure, selecting “such and such a city”, determining the length of stay (ἐνιαυτόν), and projecting the profit from the venture. Their plans are firm and expectations certain in their own eyes. There is nothing unusual about the situation, for merchants did this daily all over the Greco-Roman world, nor is anything apparently unethical. What bothers James is simply the presumption that one could so determine his future and the fact that these plans move on an entirely worldly plane in which the chief value is financial profit.
Daniel Doriani: James says such speech is presumptuous and arrogant in several ways.
- It presumes we will live as long as we please.
- It presumes we can make whatever plans we please: we can go today or tomorrow; the choice is ours.
- It presumes we have the capacity to execute whatever plan we conceive. We declare that we will make a profit.
This way of thinking forgets three things.
- It forgets our ignorance. We think we can plan a year in advance and come and go as we please, but we do not even know what tomorrow will bring.
- It forgets our frailty. James says: “Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (4:14). We think we can master our destiny, but our lives are as insubstantial and fleeting as the morning mist, that appears and disappears in hours. . .
- Presumptuous planning also forgets our dependence on God. Our frailty and ignorance lead to the conclusion that we should say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that” (4:15 ESV).
John MacArthur: Like Satan’s five self-centered “I wills” (Isa. 14:13–14) that caused his fall, the businessmen’s statement contains five presumptuous elements indicating their ill-advised confidence.
- First, they chose their own time, today or tomorrow.
- Second, they chose their own location for doing business, such and such a city.
- Third, they chose their own duration, deciding to spend a year there.
- Fourth, they chose their own enterprise, to engage in business (literally,” to travel into an area for trade”).
- Finally, they chose their own goal or objective, to make a profit. James is not attacking their profit motive, but their exclusion of God. Allowing for no contingencies, they planned as if they were omniscient, omnipotent, and invulnerable.
- Limited Knowledge or Control over Your Future
“Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow.”
Ralph Martin: All humanity—the merchants included—is incapable of seeing into the future, and so no one knows what the future holds. Rather the question is, how does one approach life in the light of not knowing the outcome? The incorrect, i.e., foolish, way is to assume that all will transpire as planned. The more sensible attitude—because it alone is safe—is to assume that whatever happens is under the control of God. James is not suggesting that Christians are to go around in fear that disaster will surely take place. What he is requiring his readers to consider is that a trust in God and not a well-thought-out plan for aggrandizement and gain is the only way to face the future. To live in the recognition that God—not the human being—is in control is to choose a Christian life of humility before God; to live as though we ourselves—not God—have the final say is to adopt a proud and haughty attitude.
David Nystrom: For James the real question is how to approach life when the outcome is uncertain. His answer is to trust in God’s graciousness, not in human plans. This is, in fact, one of the central messages of the Old Testament prophets. To trust in one’s own devices is foolish in light of the fact that one can trust in God.
- Uncertain Lifespan – Its Brevity and Frailty
“You are just a vapor that appears for a little while
and then vanishes away.”
Dale Allison: James sets the uncertainty of every person’s future over against the current self-assurance of the short-sighted rich, who think themselves masters of their fate. Presumably their financial success has bred confidence in their own powers. James counters with common sense. In the words of Erasmus, “Life is in itself very, very short, and so many accidents, so many diseases make it thoroughly uncertain as well. And here you are, as if you had a treaty with death, speeding over land and sea to prepare some provision for your old age, which you will perhaps never reach since no one can guarantee even his own tomorrow.”
Alexander Ross: The uncertainty and brevity of human life should lead us to humble dependence on the will of God.
John MacArthur: The Psalms also stress the transitory nature of human life. “As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years,” wrote Moses,” or if due to strength, eighty years, yet their pride is but labor and sorrow; for soon it is gone and we fly away” (Ps. 90:10). “My days are like a lengthened shadow,” the psalmist mourned, “and I wither away like grass” (Ps. 102:11). Summing up the Bible’s teaching on the brevity of human life, David wrote, “As for man, his days are like grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourishes. When the wind has passed over it, it is no more, and its place acknowledges it no longer” (Ps. 103:15–16; cf. Isa. 40:6–8; 1 Pet. 1:24).
Their ignorance of the future and the frailty and brevity of human life should give pause to those who foolishly ignore God’s will.
B. (:15) Submission to the Will of God is the Proper Perspective Towards the Future
“Instead, you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills,
we shall live and also do this or that.'”
Craig Blomberg: This expression should be interpreted neither as a pious addendum to be repeated mindlessly nor as an expression of fatalism that excuses us from taking responsibility for our actions. Rather, it ought to convict our hearts of God’s sovereignty in every area of our lives even as we seek to please him by following his will as best as we can discern it.
Daniel Doriani: Planning is entirely proper as long we confess that God is sovereign and that we are frail, ignorant, and dependent upon him. The phrase “Lord willing” is no magical incantation. It does not ensure our humility. But the suffix “If the Lord wills” is helpful. It reminds us that our plans, even our lives, are as frail as the mist. Thus we plan, hoping that God will use the process so that our aspirations match his purposes.
Indeed, to refuse to plan may be a sign of sloth. It is easier to drift along with adequate food and funds, doing what others want, taking whatever comes along, hardly troubling over the future, as long as we have enough food and enough fun. But the Lord expects us to do more than take whatever pleasures each day affords.
Sadly, James says, much of our planning is boastful or arrogant. He writes: “As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil” (James 4:16). The boaster forgets God. He thinks he is the master of history. He presumes he can trade and make money when he does not even know if he will be alive tomorrow. Such planning manifests ambition for wealth (3:14, 16), since trade was the way to become wealthy in the first century. (People purchased land to stay wealthy). The desire to get rich to spend it on our own pleasures is a primary sign of the envy that James forbids (3:14; 4:3).
George Guthrie: The appropriate response to the veiled nature of the future is humble submission—an attitude implicit in the conditional clause “if it is the Lord’s will.”
Alec Motyer: James is not trying to banish planning from our lives, but only that sort of self-sufficient, self-important planning that keeps God for Sunday but looks on Monday to Saturday as mine. Certainly the words ‘God willing’ or their equivalents are not to become a fetish, or used as a protective talisman. John Calvin aptly notes that ‘we read everywhere in the Scriptures that the holy servants of God spoke unconditionally of future things, when yet they had it as a fixed principle in their minds that they could do nothing without the permission of God’. C. L. Mitton goes to the central point when he contrasts ‘evil doers’ who make the transience of life ‘an excuse for snatching all the pleasure out of it while there is time’, while ‘others use it as an excuse for doing nothing’, but ‘James refers to it as a reason why men should be humble before God’. Once more it is this key factor of the lowly walk with God that is threatened. Our initial determination is to commit ourselves decisively to God’s side (7), to live in close fellowship with him (8a), to purge our lives and our hearts (8b), to come to the place of wholesale repentance (9) and so to humble ourselves before God. All this can be lost, however, if, once outside the doors of our private room, we take the reins of life into our own hands, we forget our ignorance, frailty and dependence and plan our day, our week and next year as if we were lords of earth and time, and there was no God in heaven. To be sure the words ‘If the Lord wills’ can be a protective superstition; but they can also be the sweetest and most comfortable reassurance to a humble and trustful spirit.
C. (:16) Presumption Represents Arrogant Boasting
“But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.”
John MacArthur: Kauchaomai (boast) can mean “to be loud-mouthed,” or “to speak loudly,” either in legitimate rejoicing (e.g., Rom. 5:2–3, 11) or in touting one’s own accomplishments (e.g., 1 Cor. 1:19). The context indicates James has the latter meaning in mind in this passage. Alazoneia (arrogance) comes from a root word meaning “to wander about” and reflects empty pretense. It was sometimes used to describe charlatans who traveled around selling phony goods. Taken together, the two words picture someone bragging pretentiously about something he doesn’t have and can’t obtain. Such is the arrogance, James says, of those who deny the will of God.
Dan McCartney: Note the irony here: the merchants in view are proud when they ought to be ashamed. A mind-set of independence from God is the opposite of faith; it is both foolish and wicked.
Ralph Martin: They not only omit God from their plan-making (4:13) but they boast about their presumed independence as well.
D. (:17) Failure to Obey the Truth is Always Sin
“Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do, and does not do it, to him it is sin.”
Dan McCartney: James has simply moved from a particular problem to a general principle. The merchants in question ought to know better, and thus they sin when they make plans without reference to God. Certainly, believers know better, yet often they act and plan as though God were not in the picture. It is therefore legitimate to apply the proverb broadly: in every dimension of life, to neglect doing what we know we should do, or to neglect to seek to know what God would have us do, is as much a sin as doing what we already know we should not.
Alec Motyer: Verse 17 finds James at his abrupt best! He moves without preparatory warning from the particular of verse 16 to the general of verse 17, from the evil of the sin of arrogance to a searching statement of the principle of the sin of omission. In fact, the whole idea of sinning by default has never been given more pointed expression. It is a principle which exposes the insufficiency of even our best accomplishments, and makes us realize that we are never more than unprofitable servants. ‘We may be able’, says C. L. Mitton, ‘to avoid committing forbidden evil; but who can ever seize positively every opportunity of doing good?’