Come Near to God

James has just said God gives grace to the humble. Now he shows what humbling yourself actually looks like, and it turns out to be less a feeling than a series of things to do.

Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

He begins with two moves that belong together. Submission to God comes first, and the resisting follows from it, and James attaches a promise to the second: the devil flees. He does not say the fight will be easy, only that a person already under God's authority is not resisting the enemy alone or on his own strength, and that the enemy does not hold that ground. At the center of the passage stands an invitation.

Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

Draw near, and God draws near in return. It is a two-way promise, and it is not held back until a person is already clean. But James does name the cleaning: hands and hearts, the outward action of the hands and the inward loyalty of the heart together. He calls his readers sinners and double-minded, the same divided mind he named at the start of the letter, and the remedy he presses is to stop being divided and turn fully toward God.

Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you.

Between the drawing near and the humbling, James calls for grief. Grieve, mourn, and weep, he says, and turn your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. It reads harshly to ears trained to keep everything light, but it is not gloom for its own sake. It is the honest sorrow of people who have seen their sin for what it is and are not pretending otherwise before God. The last line gathers the whole passage: humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you. Every command in these verses runs the same way, downward, and the promise attached to them runs the other way. The way up, in James, is down.