In prayer this morning, I was reading James 4. It seems that there is a theme that can underlie verses 1, 2, and 11 that is not always obvious or within the standard interpretation. Those verses state as follows.
James 4:1-2 NIV. What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. …
James 4:11 NIV. Brothers and sisters, do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against a brother or sister or judges them speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it.
Verses 1 and 2 condemn coveting that which someone else possesses. Of course, this is a sin, coveting being specifically mentioned more than once in the Ten Commandments. For comparison, verses 11 and 12 speak in terms of Judging People. How can these two thoughts be related?
In The Sermon on the Mount, found at Matthew 5 through 7, specifically in chapter 7 verses 1 and 2, Jesus condemns casting judgement on others.
Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
There are many ways to judge others: being disdainful of another; thinking oneself better than another; seeking to “lord it over” another for one’s own self-aggrandizement, and the list could go on at length.
May I submit that another way to judge others is what we see in James 4. This involves the taking advantage of someone else for one’s own personal gratification. That can be the desire to possess something tangible that the other person has and the consummation of the evil thought, the taking of it from such a person. We would call this “stealing.” It could even be murder, taking someone’s life, if one has a serious enough issue with the other. These are some obvious examples.
Some other equally as grievous examples are not so obvious. I submit that when one “objectifies” or otherwise “uses” someone else for one’s own gratification, even anonymously, in order to possess what the other person has, one is in effect, judging the other person. One has “judged” the other person to be non-human. In the mind of the actor, the other person has been made an object, not a person. This is a very serious sin. Here’s why.
God made the other person in His own image, thus the other person bears the image of God. By objectifying and judging such a person as a non-human, one is saying that the image of God is not sufficient to be human. That is not only a sin against the person but blasphemy against God. This sin should be taken very seriously by anyone who would denigrate the humanity of another person by taking what that person has even if it is an intangible, such as that person’s humanity in judgment, and even if it is without the other person’s knowledge.
Do you want to be guilty of blasphemy? I don’t.
So let it be written, so let it be done.
johnthebaptist15 