Week 51 James 4
Verse eleven has three sentences:
Don’t speak evil against each other.
If you criticize and judge each other, then you are criticizing and judging God’s law.
But your job is to obey the law, not to judge whether it applies to you.
The third sentence is the one I’m interested in: a guy’s job is to look at the Lord’s law and to do it (not to judge whether it applies to him).
I check the sentence in a couple of other versions:
When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it
If you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge of it.
The question is: when it comes to the Lord’s law what’s my role?
And there are two (basic) answers: a) my job is to assess & evaluate a law – weigh it’s pros & cons – and then decide whether to do what it says. Or else b) my job is to look at a law and then do what it says.
I think what James is driving-at is that if I get to choose whether I’ll do a law or not do it then I’ve become The Law Decider (in other words…I in actual fact am now The Lawmaker).
It’s hard to know how many people choose a) but James’ recommendation is pretty clear: the smart choice is b) – doing what the law says.
Note: quote from James 4:11 (NLT NIV & NASB)