One Lawgiver and Judge
James 4
1. What causes wars, and what causes fightings among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? 2. You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war. You do not have, because you do not ask. 3. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. 4. Unfaithful creatures! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. 5. Or do you suppose it is in vain that the scripture says, "He yearns jealously over the spirit which he has made to dwell in us"? 6. But he gives more grace; therefore it says, "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble." 7. Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. 8. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you men of double mind. 9. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to dejection. 10. Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you. 11. Do not speak evil against one another, brethren. He that speaks evil against a brother or judges his brother, 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. 12. There is one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you that you judge your neighbor? 13. Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and get gain"; 14. whereas you do not know about tomorrow. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. 15. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we shall live and we shall do this or that." 16. As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. 17. Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
This is the entire Chapter 4 of James! He doesn’t waste words, does he? He is economical in quantity, but the words he chooses pack a lot of punch! He really leaves no question as to what is expected of us! He makes it clear that God wants all of us—our hearts, our minds, our bodies and our souls. And He doesn’t like to share! He will not allow one part of our being to be devoted to anyone or anything on this earth, in this life. Only Him.
And why not! He made us. No one in this world owns us. So we should not submit to anyone. We shouldn’t sign over our souls to sin by judging others, by speaking falsely about them, by thinking too highly of ourselves, by setting our own course apart from God and His example through Jesus Christ.
He doesn’t want our arrogance and sense of self-importance to keep us from remembering who is in charge! We act like spoiled children, and expect God to respond. We throw a temper tantrum, and assume He will relent. We run off into the world and set our own course, and then we can’t understand why things don’t work out! We look at others and see their “success” by this world’s standards and jealously long after what they have.
We must consciously and deliberately banish all evil and sin from our lives if we expect eternal life in heaven. By turning off offensive t.v. shows, by not speaking or thinking inappropriately, by not desiring what is wrong or sinful, by being satisfied and content with the blessings beyond imagining which God has bestowed upon us—it doesn’t get much better than eternal life!
There is one lawgiver and judge. And he’s the one I worry about offending. He’s the one whose opinion matters to me. His is the only Word I want to hear, every day of my life.
I hope you spend your day seeking the counsel of God, choosing His friendship and love over that of this world. Because God doesn’t like to share!
Mary
