Growing Slowly Wise

 

I’m pleased to announce that my book on the Epistle of James has been reprinted in both e-book and paperback formats. It can be found on Amazon, Apple Books and other online sites.  I’m especially pleased to use one of our son Josh’s Idaho photographs for the cover. That’s long been my desire.

I pray that God will use this book to enrich the lives of those who read it and that God’s Spirit will produce in them that quality of life that can best be described as beautiful. 

Here’s a portion of my Introduction to the book:

 

“If the Epistle is ‘of straw’ then there is within that straw a very hearty firm, nourishing, but as yet uninterpreted and unthreshed grain.”—Johann Gottfried Herder

 

Martin Luther had a hard time with James’ book. He thought it utterly bereft of God’s grace, a throwback to the law and order days of the Old Covenant. He could see no indication that James understood Paul’s great themes of justification and sanctification by faith that had so powerfully influenced his conversion. And so he gave the book scant attention, calling it, “an epistle of straw.” “James,” he wrote, “is a very dangerous and bad book…I feel like throwing Jimmy into the stove.”

Later, I’m happy to say, Luther, whose great mind was always growing, revised his opinion of James’ book, perhaps as a result of discussions with his colleague Philip Melanchthon and after reading John Calvin’s commentary on James, and surely as a result of the prompting of the Holy Spirit. “I think highly of James (now),” he wrote, “and regard it as valuable….”

I too have a hard time with James’ book, but for a different reason. I too think highly of it and regard it as valuable, but it’s a hard read, not because it’s hard to understand—indeed, I understand it too well—but because it is full of what Jesus’ early disciples would have called “hard sayings,” precepts that are hard to hear. Indeed, James steps all over my toes; I can’t read his book without flinching.

He looks into my heart and sees bottomless evil—pride, prejudice, self–righteousness, hypocrisy and deceit. He targets my cold, deliberate sins of the spirit and delivers his message with lethal accuracy.  As Professor Howard Hendricks used to say, “James doesn’t strafe the deck; he drops the bomb down the funnel.” 

James segues rapidly from one searching concept to another in what we would call today “a stream of consciousness,” touching on a subject, illuminating it, expanding it, applying it and then moving to another thought, triggered by an idea that associates itself in his mind. His arguments are not always easy to follow since he gives us few grammatical markers to show us how his mind is working. 

Despite James somewhat distracting tendency to shuttle readily from one topic to another, however, there is one clear theme that warps its way through the woof of his writing. It is that good, old­–fashioned word, holiness. James would have us “holy as God is holy.”

Holiness is a dull word these days, conjuring up images of fusty, finger–wagging prigs, who are good in the worst sense of the word, men and women with sullen, morose faces, full of rectitude and rigid duty, “on hold for the next life,” as a Washington Post writer once put it. 

True holiness, however, is anything but dull. It is startling and arresting. It is more than being decent, good, ethical and upright. It has that aspect the Bible calls “the beauty of holiness.” It is what Paul has in mind when he calls on us to “adorn the gospel” (Titus 2:10). 

Likewise Peter, writes, “Live such good lives among unbelievers that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1 Peter 2:12). The word, here twice–translated “good,” means “something beautiful to see.” 

This is the picture of holiness James draws for us, a portrayal that fascinates us, and awakens us to the hope that we can be more than we ever hoped to be; that we too can live lives of uncommon beauty and grace. It can happen as we humbly receive it. “The Lord…will beautify the humble,” Israel’s poet assures us (Psalms 149:4). 

David Roper

10.9.21