James’ letter shows that he was a true Hebrew steeped in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. His letter reads like a commentary on the book of Proverbs. According to the book of Proverbs, wisdom comes from knowing God: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7). ‘The fear of God’ is the intimate experience of God’s transcendent greatness. We often think of wisdom as knowing about things. The Greek Philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, whose influence pervaded James’ culture, thought that true wisdom was grasping the essence of reality; they saw truth as a body of ideas. But James reminds his readers that true wisdom means knowing the person of God and being conformed to his image. You don’t come to know the truth by thinking very hard about things. You come to know the truth by being reconciled with God through Christ and walking with him. The reason why I am bothering you with this philosophical distinction is because our culture happens to be obsessed with knowing about things too. We Christians, being children of our time, tend, therefore, to feel that if God wanted us to know truth, he must have given us all the information. This leads us to fill in all the gaps (i.e. the things that God doesn’t tell us) and make the grey areas black and white. We must not treat the Bible like it is a theoretical textbook or an encyclopedia of theology. It is far more relational than this. What we all need is more intimacy with God, not just more information.
Ask God to teach you and lead you into a deeper knowledge of himself.
Read James 3:13-18
