Lookahead: Au contraire, all that the left-brainer Bible Translator Lady did was to believe in Jesus and pray whenever a demonic manifestation happened–that God would protect the people and get rid of the demons.  Then she got the people converted, and taught them to pray for themselves.  The demons postured and threatened and threw temper tantrums along the way, nevertheless they had no choice but to go in the Name of Jesus.  The entire tribe was delivered, followed by neighboring tribes in that region.  

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.  James 4:1-3

The capstone verses that come later in this chapter, and encapsulate the primary focus of Chapter 4 are 6-7:  “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.” Submit yourselves, then, to God.

Side Note:  Per Bible Hub, “submit” is hupotassó ὑποτάσσω: to arrange under, to subordinate; to subject, put in subjection; to subject oneself, to obey; to submit to one’s control; to yield to one’s admonition or advice; be subject to.  

I like the first definition.  It connotes making a deliberate decision to purposely arrange oneself under someone else in a servant position.

So here’s the sticky behavior that happens when we don’t submit: 

1.  desires battle within us

2.  fights and quarrels erupt among us spurred on by these unhealthy desires

3.  unfulfilled desires motivate us to kill!

4.  we experience frustrated coveting

5.  more strife happens due to frustration

7.  we do everything with the wrong motives

8.  we experience unanswered prayer due to bad comm due to sinful behavior.

What on earth was going on in James’ Home Church?  Everything from snarky speech patterns to murder?  I’ve been in the Unpacking James Series for so long, I couldn’t remember his church’s backstory.  So went back to the “Who Really Wrote the Book of James?” posts.  Then I remembered that James was not targeting people in a home church with this letter, plus he may have even been a traveling evangelist.  

James of God and of the LORD, Jesus Christ, a servant to the twelve tribes in the dispersion, Greetings. James 1:1

Therefore, I believe that the James who wrote the book was a missionary/evangelist type.  He was concerned with serving and reaching converted Jews everywhere. However, there is also another potential explanation for James’ greeting.  Suppose James was trying to reach the 3000+ who had been converted during Pentecost?  These people had come to Jerusalem from many diverse places to celebrate First Fruits and the Feast of Weeks, and they had been converted by the Holy Spirit—and baptized.  Represented people groups included:  Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs. Acts 2:9-11  These converted Jews all went back home after the holiday was over.  Maybe James’ letter was for them. 😊

In sum, James wasn’t writing to a local body of believers;  he was writing to the Jews in the dispersion or diaspora.  That people group might have been a mixed bag, morally speaking.  Depending on where James traveled to, there might or might not have been a community or body of believers.  But we know that there was a large worldly influence on the recipients of his epistle.  And there’s a possibility that, later on, James was actually killed by the general populace whom he was witnessing to.  

One Tradition in the Russian Orthodox Church is that James was crucified by…pagans: 

After the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the lot fell to James to preach the Gospel of Christ in Eleutheropolis and the surrounding areas, and then in Egypt…With great power in word and in deed, James disseminated the saving news of the incarnate Word of God, destroying idolatry, driving demons out of men, and healing every infirmity and disease in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. His labor and zeal were crowned with great success. Many pagans came to believe in Christ, churches were built and organized, and priests and bishops were ordained. James suffered in the Egyptian town of Ostracina, being crucified by the pagans.¹ 

Regardless of the locale, the recipients of James’ letter were spiritually immature.  In fact, he asks:    

You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.  James 4:4 

Tough words. But “adulterous people” was actually a metaphor that God employed extensively in the Old Testament. 

The first time that the LORD use the “adultery” term in the symbolic sense was probably Jeremiah 3:8.  (Obviously, it’s used, in the literal sense, in several “Ten Commandments” references.)  God’s words through the prophet Jeremiah: 

And I saw, when for all the causes whereby backsliding Israel committed adultery I had put her away, and given her a bill of divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah feared not, but went and played the harlot also.

The Greek word in the Septuagint (Greek Old Testament translation of Jeremiah 3:8) compares to James 4:4…

μοιχάω, moichaō

impf mp ind 3rd sg

he/she/it-was-being-COMMIT-ed-ADULTERY

(https://www.motorera.com/greek/lexicon/em.html and https://en.katabiblon.com/us/index.php?text=LXX&book=Jer&ch=3 – really helpful websites; hint: copy/paste first three or four letters of Greek word right into your Browser Find feature to locate word on page; katabiblon features linked text with definition pop-ups) 

Adjective form is μοιχοὶ, moichoi which is also the word that used in James 1:4.  It means, an adulterer; metaph. one who is faithless toward God, ungodly, apostate (per Blue Letter Bible).

So James’ audience may have been adulterers in the worldly sense, but there’s also an important implication that they were drifting away from God spiritually in favor of worldly pursuits that represented enmity against God. 

Additionally, often in the Old Testament, God associated adultery (and playing the harlot) with going after false idols.  And things go down hill in a heartbeat when people’s focus gets off the real and only God, and onto fake gods.   

Romans 1:22-32   Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things. Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason God gave them up to vile passions…And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting; …covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife…who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them. (my underline)

This toxic behavior that Paul specified sounds familiar! The behavior described in James 4 included coveting, fighting and quarreling with evil intentions (strife and maliciousness), unhealthy desires for what others have (envy), and killing (murder).  

I read a very insightful book over the past couple of weeks by Joanne Shetler, called The Word Came With Power.  I had never heard a deliverance testimony quite like it.  In the 1980’s Shetler was called to be a missionary in the Philippines, specifically to the Balangao, a tribe of former head hunters.  The interesting thing about this tribe was that they were, en masse, in constant communication with demonic entities whom they faithfully served out of sheer terror.  For example, the demons were always threatening to kill family members if the people didn’t drop everything immediately and sacrifice pigs and chickens.  And people were actually dying in situations of non-compliance! When a rainbow appeared, that was a sign of ultimate doom for whatever building project they were working on.  The people would immediately tear it down and start from scratch–even if they were putting the final touches on a building structure.  If the tribesmen inadvertently walked over the demon’s unmarked subterranean “dwelling spaces” in the jungle, the former had to race back to the village and start sacrificing.  Any delay resulted in reprisal.  The demons communicated their wishes through multiple mediums who submitted to them in a fright-filled existence.  The oppression was so widespread that I wondered why God chose a quietly unassuming, studious, bible-translating Missionary Lady–instead of the modern-day equivalent of, say,  an Elijah.

Now that Elijah was one imposing guy–wearing a cloak made of rough animal skins that he girded up around his waist–leaving his legs free to outrun, e.g., chariots;  someone who stopped the rain for (as many as) 1278 days with his prayers to God, and called down fire from heaven just because–primed for another Prophets-of-Baal encounter in which he dispensed 400+ of them.  

Au contraire, all that the left-brainer Bible Translator Lady did was to believe in Jesus and pray whenever a demonic manifestation happened–that God would protect the people and get rid of the demons.  Then she got the people converted, and taught them to pray for themselves.  The demons postured and threatened and threw temper tantrums along the way, nevertheless they had no choice but to go in the Name of Jesus.  The entire tribe was delivered, followed by neighboring tribes in that region.  

The book was riveting in the sense that you can’t make this stuff up–an entire community of hundreds of people were held sway by demons.  So this shows us how bad it can get when people get too friendly with the world.  When people submit to false gods instead of the One and Only Most High God, they open the door to all kinds of demon-inspired behavior, if not actual demons.  But every bit of this behavior–most importantly spiritual adultery and false god worship–can be easily dealt with by submitting to God then praying with the right motives.  We don’t need an Elijah-type to come barreling in and call down fire.    

Back to the original premise–the people to whom James was writing might have been worldly, immoral people.  But we know from previous chapters that they were probably new believers who in the process of sorting things.  They were, after all, praying to God–though ineffectually:  When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.  Also, James may have been talking about literal behavior and sins that they were committing; however, these may also be figurative references, or behavior in the spiritual sense.  Regardless…the fact that they were tending toward a back-slidden state wasn’t the end of the world.  They just needed some minor course corrections (e.g., like the Balangao’s, believe in Jesus and pray…that God would protect the people and get rid of the demons in His Mighty Name).  Plus James 4:6-7.     

To be continued (clarified even more) in next post…

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¹https://easternfaith.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/holy-apostle-james-son-of-alphaeus/