After the Exodus from Egypt, after God had miraculously delivered the people from slavery and then had given them the Law at Mount Sinai, the plan was for them to enter the land of Canaan. That was the whole point of the Exodus; God didn’t deliver His people from Egypt just to let them wander around indefinitely on the Sinai Peninsula. The point was to lead them into the Promised Land. But right at the borders of Canaan, they lost their nerve. They saw the difficulties ahead and realized that they didn’t have the strength in themselves to do it. They refused to enter the land, and, because of their rebellion and lack of faith, came under God’s judgment.
A little later, they changed their minds. They said, “we made a mistake; we were wrong; so let’s get going.” But it was too late. God had told them not to do it, that they couldn’t possibly succeed without His blessing. But they decided to go anyway. Years later, looking back on that incident, Moses says: “So all of you strapped on your battle gear, and thought it easy to go up into the hill country. The Lord said to me, ‘Say to them, “Do not go up and do not fight, for I am not in the midst of you; otherwise you will be defeated by your enemies.’ Although I told you, you would not listen. You rebelled against the command of the Lord and presumptuously went up into the hill country” (Deuteronomy 1:41b-43). And they suffered a crushing defeat. God was no longer with them, but they went out presumptuously, forgetting how weak they were in themselves, forgetting that everything they’d accomplished since they left Egypt had been done through God’s power.
James, in these verses, is confronting the sin of presumption. Over the past few sermons, we’ve seen his emphasis on the importance of humility, which is seeing and acknowledging the truth about ourselves. Sinful pride is just the opposite of humility. It’s a distorted vision of ourselves. When we’re puffed up with pride, we’ve lost sight of the truth and have become captivated by an illusion. We’ve forgotten the truth about who we are in relation to God. Presumption is acting on this distorted view of ourselves, acting with pride and arrogance. When we speak and act presumptuously, we’ve forgotten who we are and who God is. James wants us to recognize this sin for what it is and then resist it by humbling ourselves before God.
The first thing he says, in verses 11-12, is that when we engage in malicious, judgmental gossip, we’re forgetting our relationship to the law: “Whoever speaks evil against another or judges another, speaks evil against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge.” James told us in chapter one what our primary obligation is in relation to the law: “But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves” (1:22). In the same passage, he refers to this word as the “law of liberty” (1:25), and in chapter two he refers to it as the “royal law,” which says “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (2:8). This is the law he’s had in mind all through the letter, the word of the gospel that sets us free, the law of liberty which enables us to love one another within the body of Christ.
So, here in chapter four, he’s saying two things: 1) when we engage in malicious, judgmental gossip we’re not being doers of the law. We’re not doing what the law tells us to do, which is to love our neighbor as ourselves. We’re acting in a malicious, destructive, unloving way. We’re judging the law, in the sense that we think we have the right to pick and choose between the things it says. We’re deciding to ignore God’s command to love our neighbor as ourselves. And, 2) we’re usurping God’s place as the only lawgiver and judge. We’re engaging in something that we have no right to do, something we’re not qualified to do: “There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbor?” He’s saying that when we engage in malicious, judgmental gossip we’ve forgotten that we are not God, and we’ve begun to think that we have the right to choose which parts of God’s law we’re going to obey.
This doesn’t mean we should just accept whatever anyone does without ever expressing an opinion about it. There are times when someone is caught in a sin and we’re called to confront them about it. Jesus gives these instructions in Matthew 18: “If a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell him – work it out between the two of you. If he listens, you’ve made a friend. If he won’t listen, take one or two others along so that the presence of witnesses will keep things honest, and try again. If he still won’t listen, tell the church. If he won’t listen to the church, you’ll have to start over from scratch, confront him with the need for repentance, and offer again God’s forgiving love” (The Message). Jesus is emphasizing two things in giving these instructions: 1) He wants to promote healing and restoration in relationships. 2) He wants to preserve unity in the church (which is the thing He especially prayed for in His High Priestly Prayer in John 17). When we confront sin in this way, we’re acting in love, with a desire to bring healing and maintain unity.
When we engage in things like gossip and backbiting, we produce just the opposite effect, the sorts of things Jesus is seeking to guard against in Matthew 18: 1) We cause alienation in relationships. 2) We often say spiteful things that we wouldn’t say to a person’s face. 3) We undermine the unity of the body of Christ. We harm the church, we harm others, and we harm ourselves (because we’re guilty of sin, which leads us further and further away from God unless we repent). These kinds of things tend to feed on themselves, so that we become more and more disgruntled, more bitter and resentful over time. According to James, we’re speaking presumptuously, and it both harms the church and destroys us spiritually. We’ve forgotten that we’re called to be doers of the law, not judges.
The second thing, in verses 13-14, is that when we boast about the future we’re forgetting the uncertainty and fragility of life in this fallen world: “And now I have a word for you who brashly announce, ‘Today – at the latest, tomorrow – we’re off to such and such a city for the year. We’re going to start a business and make a lot of money.’ You don’t know the first thing about tomorrow. You’re nothing but a wisp of fog, catching a brief bit of sun before disappearing” (The Message). Notice what he’s criticizing here. He’s not condemning the idea of going into business to make money. He’s condemning the attitude that presumes to know the future, that doesn’t take God’s lordship into account. He’s condemning the practice of setting goals and making plans without considering the possibility that God may have something else in mind. Proverbs 27:1 says something very similar: “Don’t brashly announce what you’re going to do tomorrow; you don’t know the first thing about tomorrow” (The Message).
Our lives in this world are brief and uncertain. This is a frequent theme in Scripture. “A voice says, ‘Cry out!’ and I said, ‘What shall I cry?’ All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass” (Isaiah 40:6-7). Psalm 90 emphasizes the shortness of our lives in the light of God’s eternity: “You turn us back to dust, and say, ‘Turn back, you mortals’.... You sweep them away; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning; in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.” In the light of this truth, the psalmist prays: “So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.” He’s saying, “Teach us to live in the light of your eternity and the shortness of our lives on this earth, so that we may become wise.” Living wisely as God’s people means living in the light of the fact that the future is uncertain; we are all going to die one day, and we don’t know when. The attitude James is criticizing is one that forgets all this, that refuses to take it into account. It presumes on the future and boasts of all the things it’s going to accomplish. When we engage in this kind of boasting, we’ve forgotten who we are as creatures of God living in a fallen world.
James solution is in verses 15-17: we need to remember the truth and act on it. He calls us to stir ourselves, to remind ourselves about what is true. In our forgetfulness we’ve lost sight of what life in this world means; we’ve lost sight of who God is and who we are. So James calls us to stir ourselves up through remembrance of the truth. If we see things clearly, we won’t fall into the sin of presumption.
First, remember that our calling is to be doers of the law, not judges: “Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.” Here it is in The Message: “In fact, if you know the right thing to do and don’t do it, that, for you, is evil.” Just knowing a lot of things about God’s Word won’t do us much good if we don’t respond in obedience. Learning more about God isn’t an end in itself; we learn more about God so that we can worship Him more truly for who He is and also stir ourselves up to obedience. Our primary obligation in relation to God’s law is obedience.
And, second, remember that our lives in this world are short and uncertain, so subject all your plans and dreams to the will of God: “make it a habit to say, ‘If the Master wills it and we’re still alive, we’ll do this or that’” (The Message). Does this mean it’s wrong to make plans? Are those churches that set goals and objectives for their ministry guilty of the sin of presumption? No. James isn’t condemning the value of planning and setting goals. He’s saying that everything we do needs to be done in the light of the uncertainty of the future, the fact that the future is not under our control. So we make our plans, looking to Him for wisdom and direction, and subjecting them to His sovereign will. He may have other things in mind that we’re unable to see at the moment, so we say, “if the Lord wills....”
The order for night prayer in The Liturgy of the Hours puts these things in perspective. It begins with a time of self examination: where, in the day that has now come to an end, have I been guilty of sin? In what ways have I been a mere hearer of the Word and not a doer? Before I go to bed I want to confess these things in God’s presence. Then there’s a short psalm and scripture reading, then this: “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit,” the words from Psalm 31:5 that Jesus said on the cross. In going to sleep, we give up control of the next several hours. So we offer up control to God, in the light of the certainty that one day we’re going to do the same in death. “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit; you have redeemed us, Lord God of truth.” This is followed by the song of Simeon, when he offered himself up to the Lord in the temple: “Lord, now you let your servant go in peace; your word has been fulfilled; my own eyes have seen your salvation....” God had promised that he would see Christ before he died. So, when he saw Jesus, Simeon said to the Lord, “now I can depart this world in peace, for you have kept your promise.” All these things are reminders that life in this world is short and uncertain. Each time we give up control of our lives in sleep, we do it as people who will one day lie down in death. The prayer time ends with these words: “May the all powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death. Amen.” The whole thing only takes about 5-7 minutes, but it’s a great way of remembering, again and again, these things that we so easily and quickly forget.
What James is calling us to in these verses is the same thing we’ve seen over the past few sermons: humility. Presumption and arrogance go together. When we act with presumption, we’ve forgotten the truth, and humility is simply seeing the truth about ourselves and about God. When we know who we are and who God is, we don’t act with presumption: we don’t speak maliciously about each other, and we don’t brag about what we’re going to do in the future. We subject our speech and our future plans to God’s lordship. And as we do this, God makes Himself known to us.
Listen to these words by Jean-Pierre de Caussade, a man who lived in the late 17th and early 18th centuries: “God reveals himself to the humble in small things – ‘He has filled the hungry with good things’ (Luke 1:53) – but the proud, who only attach importance to outward appearances, cannot see him even in big ones” (The Sacrament of the Present Moment, p. 3). People who are in the habit of speaking presumptuously don’t perceive God when He comes near; they’re not attentive to the ways He makes Himself known and even when they do pay attention they’re looking for all the wrong things. They’ve lost sight of who they are and who God is; they’ve become blinded by their own pride and conceit. James is calling us to humble ourselves before God, to stir ourselves up by remembering the truth. And then, as we do this, God will make Himself known to us, often in small, surprising ways. But because we’re attentive to Him and willing to accept His ways, we’ll come to know Him better. Because we keep bringing ourselves back to the truth about who He is and what it means to live in this world as His people, He will give us small foretastes of His presence, in anticipation of that day when we will see Him face to face.
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