Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters. Again, I ask your continued prayers as God keeps working on this vessel to make him what he ought to be. It is a process and one that is not pleasant as I look at myself and see things that ought not to be there and realize I need to work on developing Christlikeness more. I also ask for prayers regarding a particular situation. I don’t need to tell you the need. God knows it. For now, let us continue our Trinitarian commentary. Tonight, we’re going to start the book of Jams and we’re going to start with the very first verse of the epistle. Let’s go to the text:
1James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,
To the twelve tribes scattered among the nations:
Greetings.
James was the brother of Jesus. This is important for our considerations since we know from texts in the gospels that the brothers of Jesus did not believe him and thought he was literally out of his mind. Now we might think that odd, but consider the claims Jesus made. James was one who grew up with him. What would you be thinking if your brother was going around claiming to forgive sins and telling everyone that he was the Messiah and that your eternal destiny depended on what you thought about who he was.
Now we can say James was wrong, which he was of course, but let us not overlook that chances are, most of us would not have been much better. That does not justify James at all, but it does put things in perspective and we will see later on makes this even more remarkable.
James went on to become the leader of the Jerusalem church. This letter I believe was written to Christians of a heavily Jewish background and is the only book of the NT that is Proverbial in nature. It is wisdom literature, such as James 1:5, telling us how we are to live on a practical basis.
However, look at how James identifies himself. First, he is a servant of God. All well and good. Nothing controversial there. Next, he is a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. Okay. Now it’s time to step back. This is the James who thought Jesus was out of his mind. Now he’s using the title that we’ve seen involves his humanity, deity, and being messiah.
What would it take for you to believe that your brother was the Messiah, God, and yet fully human at the same time? Today, we believe this is because of the evidence of the resurrection. James came to see that his brother had been risen from the dead.
James also identifies himself as a servant. This is the leader of the Jerusalem church. This is the brother of the Lord. If anyone had any step they could take to lift themselves up, it was surely James. James does no such thing. He considers himself to be just a servant.
This tells us much about James and how he viewed his brother. James came to realize Jesus was not out of his mind. He really was the one he claimed to be. James submitted himself to the Lordship of Christ then and became what we know him to be in the NT, one of the heroes of the early church and a writer of sacred Scripture.
What would it take to convince you that your brother was God? Undeniable evidence that he was. That is what James was given. We should see the resurrection of Christ and the claims of who he was as such evidence today.
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