James 4 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.
Time Period
Roughly AD 45 to 62, decades of relative prosperity and mobile trade across the Roman provinces
Location
Jewish Christian communities across the eastern Roman Empire, including merchants travelling between provincial cities
Audience
Jewish believers in Jesus, among them traders and property owners as well as the poor
Situation
James traces the fights inside the community back to cravings that go unsatisfied, calls friendship with the world hostility toward God, and demands a thorough change of behavior. He then forbids slandering fellow believers and mocks merchants who plan a year of profitable trade without reference to God.
Key Background
The adulterous people charge draws on the long prophetic habit of describing loyalty to God as a marriage, so choosing the world's values reads as unfaithfulness rather than mere weakness. The mourning and wailing James calls for match the formal Jewish gestures of repentance, which included weeping, changing posture, and setting aside celebration, so he is prescribing a recognized public ritual rather than a mood. The travelling merchant sketch reflects a real feature of the first-century economy, where Roman roads and safe sea lanes let traders plan a year in a chosen city, and Jewish traders commonly attached a phrase meaning if God wills to such plans, which is exactly the habit James says they have dropped.
Where do all the and among you come from? Don't they come from the that are at war inside you?
You want things and don't get them, so you You're to have what have but can't get it, so you fight and argue. You don't have because you don't ask God.
And when you do ask, you don't receive because you're asking with the — you just want to spend it on your own
You Don't you realize that friendship with the of means hostility toward God? Whoever chooses to be a friend of the system makes themselves an enemy of God.
Or do you think the Scripture says this for no reason? The spirit he placed in us for us with
But he gives even greater That's why it says: "God stands against the but gives to the
So yourselves to God. the and he will run from you.
Come close to God, and he will come close to you. you who do and make hearts you who are
over this. Mourn and weep. Let your laughter turn to mourning and your joy to
before the Lord, and he will you up.
Don't each other down, and Anyone who tears down a fellow believer or judges them is tearing down the and judging the And if you judge the you're not following it — you've put yourself above it.
There is only one and judge — the one who has the power to and to destroy. So who do you think you are to judge your
Now you who say, "Today or tomorrow we'll head to this city, spend a year there, do and make money."
You don't even know what your life will look like tomorrow! You're a that shows up for a little while and then vanishes.
Instead, you should say, "If the it, we'll live and do this or that."
But instead, you about your All boasting like that is
So if you know to do and you don't do it — that's