You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. (James 4:4)

There is a lot of resistance to the message of James. This is because he is so right, and he exposes our unbelief and our hypocrisy. Among Christians this resistance usually subtle, since Christians are not supposed to go up against the word of God, and this letter from James is most definitely the word of God.

So even though some of them pay lip service to James, they attempt to go around him by appealing to the goodness of creation. In some traditions, an entire doctrine has been constructed that allows people practically unlimited indulgence in personal hobbies, sports, amusements, and political and financial ambitions. But the truth is that Scripture is not flexible enough to accommodate all of this.

Indeed, the Bible teaches that God “who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment” (1 Timothy 6:17). It never condemns riches and material goods as such, but all these are tempered with the principle that even if everything is permissible, not everything is beneficial. The person deceives himself who fully devotes all his energies to gathering the world’s riches and sampling its pleasures, and still presents himself as if he is doing God a favor, as if worldliness is a mandate from God.

There are those who attack James more directly. Like the others, these people are hearers of the word but not doers of the word, and they deceive themselves. The truth is that the message of James pervades the entire Bible – other writers may use different words to say the same thing – and there is no way to isolate James for exclusion without throwing out the whole Christian faith, and along with it, one’s own soul. Perhaps even more than his original readers, who needed to hear this message, those who hear this message and then attack it are in even greater darkness and delusion, and will certainly come under a greater condemnation.

James says that a person can claim to have faith, but he might be a liar so that he in fact has no faith. Why would a person rise up against such a message? Because even as he denies it, he realizes that James is talking about him. The proper response consists in confession and repentance, and in asking God for grace to improve.

A person can claim to be a friend of God, but if he is clearly a friend of the world, then this shows that he is a liar, and that he is in fact an enemy of God. The passage describes something that is more than a thankful enjoyment of God’s gifts; rather, the person covets and quarrels. He tries to gain an advantage over others to obtain the things that he wants, and even as he asks God for them, it is a pretense and does not proceed from a genuine faith, since he only wishes to satisfy his own sinful desires. Among some who claim to be Christians, who wish to give an appearance of religion, friendship with the world may take a subtler form, but it will be clear in that he shares the world’s values, desires, and priorities. Can this “faith” save him?

People resist the message of James because they are the kind of people that James is talking about, so that they wish to hide and excuse their sins, and to further deceive themselves so that they would not have to face the truth. James speaks so explicitly and forcefully about his subject, and this puts people in an embarrassing position. It strikes fear in the religious impostors. On the other hand, if we will receive the word of God that he sends through James, it will deliver us from delusion and hypocrisy, and from those things that distract and hinder us from offering true service to God, and from a life that demonstrates full commitment toward thinking and living according to the teachings of Jesus Christ.