Verses 1-26
Chapter 2
2:1 My brothers, you
cannot really believe that you have faith in our glorious Lord Jesus
Christ, and yet continue to have respect of persons.
Respect of persons is the New Testament phrase for undue and
unfair partiality; it means pandering to someone, because he is rich or
influential or popular. It is a fault which the New Testament
consistently condemns. It is a fault of which the orthodox Jewish
leaders completely acquitted Jesus. Even they were bound to admit that
there was no respect of persons with him (Luke 20:21; Mark 12:14; Matthew 22:16).
After his vision of the sheet with the clean and unclean animals upon
it, the lesson that Peter learned was that with God there is no respect
of persons (Acts 10:34).
It was Paul's conviction that Gentile and Jew stand under a like
judgment in the sight of God, for with God there is no favouritism (Romans 2:11). This is a truth which Paul urges on his people again and again (Ephesians 6:9; Colossians 3:25).
The word itself is curious--prosopolempsia (Greek #4382). The noun comes from the expression prosopon (Greek #4383) lambanein (Greek #2983). Prosopon (Greek #4383) is the "face"; and lambanein (Greek #2983)
here means "to lift up." The expression in Greek is a literal
translation of a Hebrew phrase. To lift up a person's countenance was to
regard him with favour, in contradistinction perhaps to casting down
his countenance.
Originally it was not a bad word at all; it simply meant to
accept a person with favour. Malachi asks if the governor will be
pleased with the people and will accept their persons, if they bring him
blemished offerings (Malachi 1:8-9).
But the word rapidly acquired a bad sense. It soon began to mean, not
so much to favour a person, as to show favouritism, to allow oneself to
be unduly influenced by a person's social status or prestige or power or
wealth. Malachi goes on to condemn that very sin when God accuses the
people of not keeping his ways and of being partial in their judgments (Malachi 2:9).
The great characteristic of God is his complete impartiality. In the
Law it was written, "You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall
not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness
shall you judge your neighbour" (Leviticus 19:15).
There is a necessary emphasis here. A person may be unjust because of
the snobbery which truckles to the rich; and may be equally unjust
because of the inverted snobbery which glorifies the poor. "The Lord,"
said Ben Sirach, "is judge and with him is no respect of persons" (Sirach 35:12).
The Old and New Testaments unite in condemning that partiality
of judgment and favouritism of treatment which comes of giving undue
weight to a man's social standing, wealth or worldly influence. And it
is a fault to which every one is more or less liable. "The rich and the
poor meet together," says Proverbs, "the Lord is the maker of them all" (Proverbs 22:2).
"It is not meet," says Ben Sirach, "to despise the poor man that hath
understanding; neither is it fitting to magnify a sinful man that is
rich" (Sirach 10:23). We do well to remember that it is just as much respect of persons to truckle to the mob as it is to pander to a tyrant.
2:2-4 For, if a man
comes into your assembly with his fingers covered with gold rings and
dressed in elegant clothes and a poor man comes in dressed in shabby
clothes, and you pay special attention to the man who is dressed in
elegant clothes and you say to him: "Will you sit here, please?" and you
say to the poor man, "You stand there!" or, "Squat on the floor beside
my footstool!" have you not drawn distinctions within your minds, and
have you not become judges whose thoughts are evil?
It is James' fear that snobbery may invade the Church. He draws
a picture of two men entering the Christian assembly. The one is
well-dressed and his fingers are covered with gold rings. The more
ostentatious of the ancients wore rings on every finger except the
middle one, and wore far more than one on each finger. They even hired
rings to wear when they wished to give an impression of special wealth.
"We adorn our fingers with rings," said Seneca, "and we distribute gems
over every joint." Clement of Alexandria recommends that a Christian
should wear only one ring, and that he should wear it on his little
finger. It ought to have on it a religious emblem, such as a dove, a
fish or an anchor; and the justification for wearing it is that it might
be used as a seal.
So, then, into the Christian assembly comes an elegantly dressed
and much beringed man. The other is a poor man, dressed in poor clothes
because he has no others to wear and unadorned by any jewels. The rich
man is ushered to a special seat with all ceremony and respect; while
the poor man is bidden to stand, or to squat on the floor, beside the
footstool of the well-to-do.
That the picture is not overdrawn is seen from certain
instructions in some early service order books. Ropes quotes a typical
passage from the Ethiopia Statutes of the Apostles: "If any other man or
woman enters in fine clothes, either a man of the district or from
other districts, being brethren, thou, presbyter, while thou speakest
the word which is concerning God, or while thou hearest or readest, thou
shalt not respect persons, nor leave thy ministering to command places
for them, but remain quiet, for the brethren shall receive them, and if
they have no place for them, the lover of brothers and sisters, will
rise, and leave a place for them ... And if a poor man or woman of the
district or of other districts should come in and there is no place for
them, thou, presbyter, make place for such with all thy heart, even if
thou wilt sit on the ground, that there should not be the respecting of
the person of man but of God." Here is the same picture. It is even
suggested that the leader of the service might be liable, when a rich
man entered, to stop the service and to conduct him to a special seat.
There is no doubt that there must have been social problems in
the early church. The Church was the only place in the ancient world
where social distinctions did not exist. There must have been a certain
initial awkwardness when a master found himself sitting next his slave
or when a master arrived at a service in which his slave was actually
the leader and the dispenser of the Sacrament. The gap between the
slave, who in law was nothing more than a living tool, and the master
was so wide as to cause problems of approach on either side. Further, in
its early days the Church was predominantly poor and humble; and
therefore if a rich man was converted and came to the Christian
fellowship, there must have been a very real temptation to make a fuss
of him and treat him as a special trophy for Christ.
The Church must be the one place where all distinctions are
wiped out. There can be no distinctions of rank and prestige when men
meet in the presence of the King of glory. There can be no distinctions
of merit when men meet in the presence of the supreme holiness of God.
In his presence all earthly distinctions are less than the dust and all
earthly righteousness is as filthy rags. In the presence of God all men
are one.
In James 2:4 there is a problem of translation. The word diekrithete (Greek #1252)
can have two meanings: (i) It can mean, "You are wavering in your
judgments, if you act like that." That is to say, "If you pay special
honour to the rich, you are torn between the standards of the world and
the standards of God and you can't make up your mind which you are going
to apply." (ii) It may mean, "You are guilty of making class
distinctions which in the Christian fellowship should not exist." We
prefer the second meaning, because James goes on to say, "If you do
that, you are judges whose thoughts are evil." That is to say, "You are
breaking the commandment of him who said, 'Judge not that you be not
judged'" (Matthew 7:1).
2:5-7 Listen, my dear
brothers. Did God not choose those who are poor by the world's valuation
to be rich because of their faith and to be heirs of the Kingdom which
he has promised to those who love him? But you dishonour the poor man.
Do not the rich oppress you, and is it not they who drag you to the
law-courts? And is it not they who abuse the fair name by which you have
been called?
"God," said Abraham Lincoln, "must love the common people
because he made so many of them." Christianity has always had a special
message for the poor. In Jesus' first sermon in the synagogue at
Nazareth his claim was: "He has anointed me to preach good news to the
poor" (Luke 4:18).
His answer to John's puzzled inquiries as to whether or not he was
God's Chosen One culminated in the claim: "The poor have good news
preached to them" (Matthew 11:5). The first of the Beatitudes was "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matthew 5:3). And Luke is even more definite: "Blessed are you poor; for yours is the Kingdom of God (Luke 6:20).
During the ministry of Jesus, when he was banished from the synagogues
and took to the open road and the hillside and the seaside, it was the
crowds of common men and women to whom his message came. In the days of
the early church it was to the crowds that the street preachers
preached. In fact the message of Christianity was that those who
mattered to no one else mattered intensely to God. "For consider your
call, brethren," wrote Paul to the Corinthians, "not many of you were
wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many
were of noble birth" (1 Corinthians 1:26).
It is not that Christ and the Church do not want the great and
the rich and the wise and the mighty; we must beware of an inverted
snobbery, as we have already seen. But it was the simple fact that the
gospel offered so much to the poor and demanded so much from the rich,
that it was the poor who were swept into the Church. It was, in fact,
the common people who heard Jesus gladly and the rich young ruler who
went sorrowfully away because he had great possessions. James is not
shutting the door on the rich--far from that. He is saying that the
gospel of Christ is specially dear to the poor and that in it there is a
welcome for the man who has none to welcome him, and that through it
there is a value set on the man whom the world regards as valueless.
In the society which James inhabited the rich oppressed the
poor. They dragged them to the law-courts. No doubt this was for debt.
At the bottom end of the social scale men were so poor that they could
hardly live and moneylenders were plentiful and extortionate. In the
ancient world there was a custom of summary arrest. If a creditor met a
debtor on the street, he could seize him by the neck of his robe, nearly
throttling him, and literally drag him to the law-courts. That is what
the rich did to the poor. They had no sympathy; all they wanted was the
uttermost farthing. It is not riches that James is condemning; it is the
conduct of riches without sympathy.
It is the rich who abuse the name by which the Christians are
called. It may be the name Christian by which the heathen first called
the followers of Christ at Antioch and which was given at first as a
jest. It may be the name of Christ, which was pronounced over a
Christian on the day of his baptism. The word James uses for called
(epikaleisthai, Greek #1941)
is the word used for a wife taking her husband's name in marriage or
for a child being called after his father. The Christian takes the name
of Christ; he is called after Christ. It is as if he was married to
Christ, or born and christened into the family of Christ.
The rich and the masters would have many a reason for insulting
the name Christian. A slave who became a Christian would have a new
independence; he would no longer cringe at his master's power,
punishment would cease to terrorize him and he would meet his master
clad in a new manhood. He would have a new honesty. That would make him a
better slave, but it would also mean he could no longer be his master's
instrument in sharp practice and petty dishonesty as once he might have
been. He would have a new sense of worship; and on the Lord's Day he
would insist on leaving work aside in order that he might worship with
the people of God. There would be ample opportunity for a master to find
reasons for insulting the name of Christian and cursing the name of
Christ.
2:8-11 If you
perfectly keep the royal law, as the Scripture has it: "You must love
your neighbour as yourself," you do well. But if you treat people with
respect of persons, such conduct is sin and you stand convicted by the
law as transgressors. For, if a man keeps the whole law and yet fails to
keep it in one point, he becomes guilty of transgressing the law as a
whole. For he who said, "Do not commit adultery," also said, "Do not
kill." If you do not commit adultery but kill, you become a transgressor
of the law.
The connection of thought with the previous passage is this.
James has been condemning those who pay special attention to the rich
man who enters the Church. "But," they might answer, "the law tells me
to love my neighbour as myself. Therefore we are under duty to welcome
the man when he comes to Church." "Very well," answers James, "If you
are really welcoming the man because you love him as you do yourself,
and you wish to give him the welcome you yourself would wish to receive,
that is fine. But, if you are giving him this special welcome because
he is a rich man, that is respect of persons and that is wrong--and so
far from keeping the law, you are in fact breaking it. You don't love
your neighbour, or you would not neglect the poor man. What you love is
wealth--and that is not what the law commands."
James calls the great injunction to love our neighbour as
ourselves the royal law. There can be various meanings of the phrase. It
may mean the law which is of supreme excellence; it may mean the law
which is given by the King of the kings; it may mean the king of all
laws; it may mean the law that makes men kings and is fit for kings. To
keep that greatest law is to become king of oneself and a king among
men. It is a law fit for those who are royal, and able to make men
royal.
James goes on to lay down a great principle about the law of
God. To break any part of it is to become a transgressor. The Jew was
very apt to regard the law as a series of detached injunctions. To keep
one was to gain credit; to break one was to incur debt. A man could add
up the ones he kept and subtract the ones he broke and so emerge with a
credit or a debit balance. There was a Rabbinic saying, "Whoever fulfils
only one law, good is appointed to him; his days are prolonged and he
will inherit the land." Again many of the Rabbis held that "the Sabbath
weighs against all precepts," and to keep it was to keep the law.
As James saw it, the whole law was the will of God; to break any
part of it was to infringe that will and therefore to be guilty of sin.
That is perfectly true. To break any part of the law is to become a
transgressor in principle. Even under human justice a man becomes a
criminal when he has broken one law. So James argues: "No matter how
good you may be in other directions, if you treat people with respect of
persons, you have acted against the will of God and you are a
transgressor."
There is a great truth here which is both relevant and
practical. We may put it much more simply. A man may be in nearly all
respects a good man; and yet he may spoil himself by one fault. He may
be moral in his action, pure in his speech, meticulous in his devotion.
But he may be hard and self-righteous; rigid and unsympathetic; and, if
so, his goodness is spoiled.
We do well to remember that, though we may claim to have done
many a good thing and to have resisted many an evil thing, there may be
something in us by which everything is spoiled.
2:12-13 So speak and
so act as those who are going to be judged under the law of liberty. For
he who acts without mercy will have judgment without mercy. Mercy
triumphs over judgment.
As he comes to the end of a section, James reminds his readers of two great facts of the Christian life.
(i) The Christian lives under the law of liberty, and it is by
the law of liberty he will be judged. What he means is this. Unlike the
Pharisee and the orthodox Jew, the Christian is not a man whose life is
governed by the external pressure of a whole series of rules and
regulations imposed on him from without. He is governed by the inner
compulsion of love. He follows the right way, the way of love to God and
love to men, not because any external law compels him to do so nor
because any threat of punishment frightens him into doing so, but
because the love of Christ within his heart makes him desire to do so.
(ii) The Christian must ever remember that only he who shows
mercy will find mercy. This is a principle which runs through all
Scripture. Ben Sirach wrote, "Forgive thy neighbour the hurt that he
hath done thee, so shall thy sins also be forgiven. One man beareth
hatred against another, and doth he seek pardon from the Lord? He
showeth no mercy to a man who is like himself; and doth he ask
forgiveness for his own sins?" (Sirach 28:2-5). Jesus said, "Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy" (Matthew 5:7).
"If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will
forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither
will your Father forgive your trespasses" (Matthew 6:14-15). "Judge not that you be not judged, for with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged" (Matthew 7:1-2).
He tells of the condemnation which fell upon the unforgiving servant
and ends the parable by saving, "So, also, my heavenly Father will do to
every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart" (Matthew 18:22-35).
Scripture teaching is agreed that he who would find mercy must
himself be merciful. And James goes even further, for in the end he says
that mercy triumphs over judgment; by which he means that in the day of
judgment the man who has shown mercy will find that his mercy has even
blotted out his own sin.
2:14-26 My brothers,
what use is it if a man claims to have faith and has no deeds to show?
Are you going to claim that his faith is able to save him? If a brother
or sister has nothing to wear, and if they have not enough for their
daily food, and if one of you says to them, "Go in peace! Be warmed and
fed!" and yet does not give them the essentials of bodily existence,
what use is that? So, if faith too has no deeds to show, by itself it is
dead.
But someone may well
say, "Have you faith?" My answer is, "I have deeds. Show me your faith
apart from your deeds, and I will show you my faith by means of my
deeds." You say that you believe that there is one God. Excellent! The
demons also believe the same thing--and shudder in terror.
Do you wish for proof,
you empty creature, that faith without deeds is ineffective? Was not
our father Abraham proved righteous in virtue of deeds when he was ready
to offer Isaac his own son upon the altar? You see how his faith
co-operated with his deeds and how his faith was completed by his deeds,
and so there was fulfilled the passage of Scripture which says,
"Abraham believed in God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness,
for he was the friend of God." You see that it is by deeds that a man is
proved righteous, and not only by faith.
In the same way was
Rahab the harlot not also proved righteous by deeds, when she received
the messengers and sent them away by another way? For just as the body
without breath is dead, so faith without works is dead.
This is a passage which we must take as a whole before we look
at it in parts, for it is so often used in an attempt to show that James
and Paul were completely at variance. It is apparently Paul's emphasis
that a man is saved by faith alone and that deeds do not come into the
process at all. "For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from
works of law" (Romans 3:28).
"A man is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus
Christ...because by works of the law shall no one be justified" (Galatians 2:16).
It is often argued that James is not simply differing from Paul but is
flatly contradicting him. This is a matter we must investigate.
(i) We begin by noting that James' emphasis is in fact a
universal New Testament emphasis. It was the preaching of John the
Baptist that men should prove the reality of their repentance by the
excellence of their deeds (Matthew 3:8; Luke 3:8). It was Jesus' preaching that men should so live that the world might see their good works and give the glory to God (Matthew 5:16).
He insisted that it was by their fruits that men must be known and that
a faith which expressed itself in words only could never take the place
of one which expressed itself in the doing of the will of God (Matthew 7:15-21).
Nor is this emphasis missing from Paul himself. Apart from
anything else, there can be few teachers who have ever stressed the
ethical effect of Christianity as Paul does. However doctrinal and
theological his letters may be, they never fail to end with a section in
which the expression of Christianity in deeds is insisted upon. Apart
from that general custom Paul repeatedly makes clear the importance he
attaches to deeds as part of the Christian life. He speaks of God who
will render to every man according to his works (Romans 2:6). He insists that every one of us shall give account of himself to God (Romans 14:12). He urges men to put off the works of darkness and put on the armour of light (Romans 13:12). Every man shall receive his own reward according to his labour (1 Corinthians 3:8).
We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ so that every one
may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body (2 Corinthians 5:10). The Christian has to put off the old nature and all its deeds (Colossians 3:9).
The fact that Christianity must be ethically demonstrated is an
essential part of the Christian faith throughout the New Testament.
(ii) The fact remains that James reads as if he were at variance
with Paul; for in spite of all that we have said Paul's main emphasis
is upon grace and faith and James' upon action and works. But this must
be said--what James is condemning is not Paulinism but a perversion of
it. The essential Pauline position in one sentence was: "Believe in the
Lord Jesus and you will be saved" (Acts 16:31).
But clearly the significance we attach to this demand will entirely
depend on the meaning we attach to believe. There are two kinds of
belief.
There is belief which is purely intellectual. For instance, I
believe that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle
equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides; and if I had to, I
could prove it--but it makes no difference to my life and living. I
accept it, but it has no effect upon me.
There is another kind of belief. I believe that five and five
make ten, and, therefore, I will resolutely refuse to pay more than ten
pence for two fivepenny bars of chocolate. I take that fact, not only
into my mind, but into my life and action.
What James is arguing against is the first kind of belief, the
acceptance of a fact without allowing it to have any influence upon
life. The devils are intellectually convinced of the existence of God;
they, in fact, tremble before him; but their belief does not alter them
in the slightest. What Paul held was the second kind of belief For him
to believe in Jesus meant to take that belief into every section of life
and to live by it.
It is easy to pervert Paulinism and to emasculate believe of all
effective meaning; and it is not really Paulinism but a misunderstood
form of it that James condemns. He is condemning profession without
practice and with that condemnation Paul would have entirely agreed.
(iii) Even allowing for that, there is still a difference
between James and Paul--they begin at different times in the Christian
life. Paul begins at the very beginning. He insists that no man can ever
earn the forgiveness of God. The initial step must come from the free
grace of God; a man can only accept the forgiveness which God offers him
in Jesus Christ.
James begins much later with the professing Christian, the man
who claims to be already forgiven and in a new relationship with God.
Such a man, James rightly says, must live a new life for he is a new
creature. He has been justified; he must now show that he is sanctified
With that Paul would have entirely agreed.
The fact is that no man can be saved by works; but equally no
man can be saved without producing works. By far the best analogy is
that of a great human love. He who is loved is certain that he does not
deserve to be loved; but he is also certain that he must spend his life
trying to be worthy of that love.
The difference between James and Paul is a difference of
starting-point. Paul starts with the great basic fact of the forgiveness
of God which no man can earn or deserve; James starts with the
professing Christian and insists that a man must prove his Christianity
by his deeds. We are not saved by deeds; we are saved for deeds; these
are the twin truths of the Christian life. Paul's emphasis is on the
first and James' is on the second. In fact they do not contradict but
complement each other; and the message of both is essential to the
Christian faith in its fullest form. As the paraphrase has it:
Let all who hold this faith and hope
In holy deeds abound;
Thus faith approves itself sincere,
By active virtue crown'd.
Profession And Practice (James 2:14-17)
2:14-17 My brothers,
what use is it, if a man claims to have faith and has no deeds to show?
Are you going to claim that his faith is able to save him? If a brother
or sister has nothing to wear and if they have not enough for their
daily food, and if one of you says to them, "Go in peace! Be warmed and
fed!" and yet does not give them the essentials of bodily existence,
what use is that? So, if faith too has no deeds to show, by itself it is
dead.
The one thing that James cannot stand is profession without
practice, words without deeds. He chooses a vivid illustration of what
he means. Suppose a man to have neither clothes to protect him nor food
to feed him; and suppose his so-called friend to express the sincerest
sympathy for his sad plight; and suppose that sympathy stops with words
and no effort is made to alleviate the plight of the unfortunate man,
what use is that? What use is sympathy without some attempt to turn that
sympathy into practical effect? Faith without deeds is dead. This is a
passage which would appeal specially to a Jew.
(i) To a Jew almsgiving was of paramount importance. So much so
that righteousness and almsgiving mean one and the same thing.
Almsgiving was considered to be a man's one defence when he was judged
by God. "Water will quench a flaming fire," writes Ben Sirach, "and alms
maketh an atonement for sin" (Sirach 3:30).
In Tobit it is written, "Everyone who occupieth himself in alms shall
behold the face of God, as it is written, I will behold thy face by
almsgiving" (Tobit 4:8-10).
When the leaders of the Jerusalem Church agreed that Paul should go to
the Gentiles the one injunction laid upon him was not to forget the poor
(Galatians 2:10). This stress on practical help was one of the great and lovely marks of Jewish piety.
(ii) There was a strain of Greek religion to which this stress
on sympathy and almsgiving was quite alien. The Stoics aimed at
apatheia, the complete absence of feeling. The aim of life was serenity.
Emotion disturbs serenity. The way to perfect calm was to annihilate
all emotion. Pity was a mere disturbance of the detached philosophic
calm in which a man should aim to live. So Epictetus lays it down that
only he who disobeys the divine command will ever feel grief or pity
(Discourses 3: 24, 43). When Virgil in the Georgics (2: 498) draws the
picture of the perfectly happy man, he has no pity for the poor and no
grief for the sorrowing, for such emotions would only upset his own
serenity. This is the very opposite of the Jewish point of view. For the
Stoic blessedness meant being wrapped up in his own philosophic
detachment and calm; for the Jew it meant actively sharing in the
misfortunes of others.
(iii) In his approach to this subject James is profoundly right.
There is nothing more dangerous than the repeated experiencing of a
fine emotion with no attempt to put it into action. It is a fact that
every time a man feels a noble impulse without taking action, he becomes
less likely ever to take action. In a sense it is true to say that a
man has no right to feel sympathy unless he at least tries to put that
sympathy into action. An emotion is not something in which to luxuriate;
it is something which at the cost of effort and of toil and of
discipline and of sacrifice must be turned into the stuff of life.
Not "either Or", But "both And" (James 2:18-19)
2:18-19 But some one
may well say, "Have you faith?" My answer is, "I have deeds. Show me
your faith apart from your deeds and I will show you my faith by means
of my deeds." You say that you believe there is one God. Excellent! The
demons also believe the same thing--and shudder in terror.
James is thinking of a possible objector who says, "Faith is a
fine thing; and works are fine things. They are both perfectly genuine
manifestations of real religion. But the one man does not necessarily
possess both. One man will have faith and another will have works. Well,
then, you carry on with your works and I will carry on with my faith;
and we are both being truly religious in our own way." The objector's
view is that faith and works are alternative expressions of the
Christian religion. James will have none of it. It is not a case of
either faith or works; it is necessarily a case of both faith and works.
In many ways Christianity is falsely represented as an "either or" when it must properly be a "both and".
(i) In the well-proportioned life there must be thought and
action. It is tempting and it is common to think that one may be either a
man of thought or a man of action. The man of thought will sit in his
study thinking great thoughts; the man of action will be out in the
world doing great deeds. But that is wrong. The thinker is only half a
man unless he turns his thoughts into deeds. He will scarcely even
inspire men to action unless he comes down into the battle and shares
the arena with them. As Kipling had it:
O England is a garden and such gardens are not made
By saying, "O how beautiful," and sitting in the shade;
While better men than we began their working lives
By digging weeds from garden paths with broken dinner knives.
Nor can anyone be a real man of action unless he has thought out the great principles on which his deeds are founded.
(ii) In the well-proportioned life there must be prayer and
effort. Again it is tempting to divide men into two classes--the saints
who spend life secluded on their knees in constant devotion and the
toilers who labour in the dust and the heat of the day. But it will not
do. It is said that Martin Luther was close friends with another monk.
The other was as fully persuaded of the necessity of the Reformation as
Luther was. So they made an arrangement. Luther would go down into the
world and fight the battle there; the other would remain in his cell
praying for the success of Luther's labours. But one night the monk had a
dream. In it he saw a single reaper engaged on the impossible task of
reaping an immense field by himself The lonely reaper turned his head
and the monk saw his face was the face of Martin Luther; and he knew
that he must leave his cell and his prayers and go to help. It is, of
course, true that there are some who, because of age or bodily weakness,
can do nothing other than pray; and their prayers are indeed a strength
and a support. But if any normal person thinks that prayer can be a
substitute for effort, his prayers are merely a way of escape. Prayer
and effort must go hand in hand.
(iii) In any well-proportioned life there must be faith and
deeds. It is only through deeds that faith can prove and demonstrate
itself; and it is only through faith that deeds will be attempted and
done. Faith is bound to overflow into action; and action begins only
when a man has faith in some great cause or principle which God has
presented to him.
The Proof Of Faith (James 2:20-26)
2:20-26 Do you wish
for proof, you empty creature, that faith without deeds is ineffective?
Our father Abraham was proved righteous in consequence of deeds, when he
was ready to offer Isaac his son upon the altar. You see how his faith
co-operated with his deeds and how his faith was completed by his deeds,
and so there was fulfilled the passage of Scripture which says,
"Abraham believed in God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness
and he was called the friend of God." You see that it is by deeds that a
man is proved righteous and not only by faith. In the same way was
Rahab the harlot not also proved righteous by deeds, when she received
the messengers and sent them away by another way? For just as the body
without the breath is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.
James offers two illustrations of the point of view on which he
is insisting. Abraham is the great example of faith; but Abraham's
faith was proved by his willingness to sacrifice Isaac at the apparent
demand of God. Rahab was a famous figure in Jewish legend. She had
sheltered the spies sent to spy out the Promised Land (Joshua 2:1-21).
Later legend said that she became a proselyte to the Jewish faith, that
she married Joshua and that she was a direct ancestress of many priests
and prophets, including Ezekiel and Jeremiah. It was her treatment of
the spies which proved that she had faith.
Paul and James are both right here. Unless Abraham had had faith
he would never have answered the summons of God. Unless Rahab had had
faith, she would never have taken the risk of identifying her future
with the fortunes of Israel. And yet, unless Abraham had been prepared
to obey God to the uttermost, his faith would have been unreal; and
unless Rahab had been prepared to risk all to help the spies, her faith
would have been useless.
These two examples show that faith and deeds are not opposites;
they are, in fact, inseparables. No man will ever be moved to action
without faith; and no man's faith is genuine unless it moves him to
action. Faith and deeds are opposite sides of a man's experience of God.
-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)