Henry Krabbendam - James - World Evangelical Alliance

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3. REQUIREMENTS FOR VICTORY (4:1-10)
a. Self-knowledge (4:1-5)
(1) Where do wars and where do battles among you come from?
Is it not from the pleasures that are on the warpath in your
members? (2) You desire and do not have: (so) you murder.
And you envy and cannot obtain: (so) you fight and make war.
You do not have because you do not ask. (3) You ask and do not
receive because you ask wrongly in order to spend it on your
pleasures. (4) Adulteresses! Do you not know that the friendship
of the world is hostility towards God? So whoever decides to be
a friend of the world constitutes himself as an enemy of God. (5)
Or do you think that Scripture speaks to no effect? The spirit
that he made to dwell in us yearns enviously.
(1) Nature of One’s Condition (4:1)
The themes that we encounter in this third part of Section III, which covers
James 3:1-4:10, are understandably far from new, but they are developed in a
comprehensive and focused fashion. “The rhetoric,” in which James couches
his message, especially in the first few verses, “is polished and powerful”
(Brosend, 105). James states that there are constant wars (Mt. 24:6) and battles
(2 Cor. 7:4; 2 Tim. 2:23) among you (emphasis added). More precisely,
taking as a given that armed conflict and the use of the sword are “alive and
well,” he asks bluntly where they come from. The reader does not even receive
the opportunity to deny their existence. He “is left only to answer to
their origin” (Brosend, 106). From a spiritual perspective the whole covenant
community evidently resembled quite a savage war zone (Compare 1 Cor.
9:7) and a ravaged battlefield (Compare 2 Tim. 2:23), all part of a lifestyle
marked by the moral depravity that had its ugly start in envy and ambition
(Phillips, 128)! Monstrous hostilities, 309 originating in rancorous animosities,
if not bitter hatreds, and consisting of skirmishes, clashes and pitched battles,
in short, both “a continuing state of hostility” and “outbursts of antagonism”
(Motyer, 141), appeared to be the order of the day. Apparently the Christian
community, which should be a showplace of peace, is characterized by trench
warfare that routinely erupts into hand-to-hand combat (Kistemaker, 130). 310
309 Decidedly not just between the haves and the have-nots, as Brosend, 113, argues.
310 Manton, 325, holds that the terminology of “wars and battles” must be taken literally, and
concludes from this that James does not address believers only, but the whole nation of Israel
as an instrument of persecution (With a reference to Hebrews 10:34). However, the context