One Lawgiver and Judge

James has been calling for humility before God. He turns now to how the humble treat one another, and he comes back to the tongue, this time aimed at a brother. He forbids slander outright, speaking against each other, and then he does something unexpected with the command. He says that judging your brother turns out to be judging the law.

Anyone who speaks against his brother or judges him speaks against the law and judges it.

The reasoning takes a moment to see. The law tells us to love our neighbor. When a person sets himself over a brother, weighing him and finding him wanting, he is stepping past that command as though it did not apply to him. And a person who does that is no longer under the law and keeping it. He has quietly climbed above it, treating himself as its judge rather than its subject. James says as much plainly: if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge of it. The slander he began with was never a small sin about words. It is a person taking a seat that is not his.

Then he asks the question that puts the whole thing back in its place.

There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the One who is able to save and destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?

There is one Lawgiver and one Judge, and it is not us. The God who gave the law is the only one who stands over it, and he is the only one who holds what the seat of judgment actually requires, the power to save and to destroy. We can wound a person with our verdict, but we cannot save him, and we cannot see the whole of him the way the real Judge does. When we pass sentence on a brother, we are reaching for a chair with one occupant, and we do not have what it takes to sit in it. So the cure for a slandering, judging tongue is not mainly better manners. It is remembering who God is, and, just as much, who we are not.