Today, I am reading and commenting on  James 1-5.

I love the Book of James, but there is so much in it that I always struggle deciding what I want to write about.  I want to write about all of it, but I don’t have the time to do that.  I am going to start writing about what James says about temptation at the beginning of this letter and quarrels later because I think he intends them to be two parts of the same message.  First, he tells us that temptation occurs when our evil desires drag us away and entice us.  I like that imagery of our evil desires dragging us to someplace we don’t want to go, but I also like the implication he makes that we often don’t resist being dragged there as much as we like to pretend.  Then we come to what James says about the cause of fights and quarrels.  He tells us that they also come from our desires.  We desire and covet things, but are unable to get them, so we behave with hostility.  Further, James tells us that we do not have the things we desire because we do not ask God for them.  Or, if we do ask for them, we ask for them in order to satisfy our sinful desires (see what he says earlier about temptation).  Unspoken is that God does not give us those things we only ask for in order to satisfy our earthly desires is because it would be bad for us to receive them).  Or, perhaps not so unspoken, since James goes on to write that being friendly with the world means being hostile to God.  So, let us flee from evil, let us resist being dragged into temptation, then evil will flee from us and we will become ever closer to God.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.