Recently I posted insights from Taleb's book "Black Swan" on the arrogance associated with "know what" knowledge that gives us an illusion we can link cause and effect and predict the future. While I admitted I do not know Taleb's view of God, he simply restated what James told the early Christians. In Chapter 4 James says "come now, you who say, 'today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell and make a profit,' whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow.... now you boast in your arrogance and all such boasting is evil."
Now these verses are placed within the context of James' expose on faith and how it works. Immediately after these verses James says, "therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin." Often Christian peeps take this last verse as a stand alone marching order to "doing good." For many this verse gets a behavioral focus of sin and a prescription for legalism. But for anyone to apply this verse to the "goodness" of what we do implies we have a circumstantial "know what" of the actions that produce "good". This "know what" knowledge is the target of James preceding notion of our arrogance in thinking we know what God is up to.
My small group was studying this Scripture yesterday and it caused great discussion and pondering. How was this last verse related to the immediately preceding ones? So, word nerd that I am, I did my word study last night and found some interesting insights I would like to share with you.
I was particularly interested in the Greek word for "know" - it is not episteme (cognitive awareness) or gnosis (intimate relationship), but eido (perceive or understand).
I then went to word for "good", there are 3 Greek words in this family of the word used here, first there is elegant or polite, then there is beauty but not at highest form and then there is the highest form of "beauty" translated as "harmonious completeness" and that's the word translated "good" here.
Then there is the word "to do". In most of James the word used simply means action taken or deed. The word used here means the result or accomplishment of our actions.
The word for sin is the bigger notion of missing the mark, not the more micro notion of behavioral transgression. "Missing the mark" refers to dominance of the carnal mind and living beneath the privileges and provisions of the Heavenlies.
So we might see just from the literal meaning of the Greek words this verse may best be translated as
"to him that understands what it is to be in complete harmony (Kingdom minded), and does not, misses the mark."
If we put all of this together, we see that James is telling followers of Christ that being right with God is living in the faith that God is doing something in and around us that we do not know. Thus, its a form of arrogance to believe we can be in harmony with the Heavenlies (righteous) by living an illusion that we are in control of our righteousness by what we do (legalism).
So, instead of obsessing over moral codes of conduct (nothing wrong with these except its carnal minded - missing the mark), we should seek a sense-making not based in our own knowledge and understanding of the circumstances, but a Kingdom mind that claims a deep trust that God is in control, accomplishing His purposes, and loves us beyond our imagination. As David Platt says about Radical, "work then becomes the fruit of faith."
One application might be that we are in harmony with the Heavenlies (Kingdom minded) AS we trust God with the outcomes of the Presidential election or our personal finances, not when we are trying to "do good things" today. In other words, trying to be "a good person" while worrying profusely about the future or getting our feelings hurt is arrogant and sinful. That's when Kingdom mindedness is radical!!
just something to ponder ......
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