[Week 31] The Joke We've Been Reading as a Fight (James 2:18-19)

This week, we are memorizing James 2:18-19.

• Check out my latest Scripture Memorization song here: James 2:18-19
• If you're new here, see my introduction to this series here.

"But someone will say, 'You have faith, and I have works.' Show me your faith without works, and I will show you faith by my works. You believe that God is one. Good! Even the demons believe, and they shudder."
— James 2:18-19 (CSB)

The Fight We Think We're Watching

We read this like a title bout. Faith in one corner, works in the other, and James in the middle counting somebody out.

I'll be honest with you, that's how I read it for years. Two heavyweights, one ring, and my job was to figure out which one I was supposed to be rooting for and what that really means for how I live my life.

And that reading isn't wrong, exactly. James really is confronting people whose religion had gone all the way inward and stopped showing up in the day-to-day.

But there's just one problem: James isn't staging a fight here. He's staging a pun, and he's being funny on purpose. And it only lands if you know what first-century Jews heard when he said the word "faith."

The Word That Isn't Really a Word

Here's something worth sitting with: Hebrew doesn't really have a word for "faith."

Not the way we mean it. Our English "faith" is a thing you hold in your head. A position. A conviction. Something true about your interior that nobody else can inspect or know or prove.

But that is an abstract idea, whereas in Hebrew, words tend to start concrete and stay concrete, and the abstract ideas get built from the concrete ones.¹ Ask an English speaker to define a pencil and you'll get something like: it's yellow, it's wooden, it's sharp. Ask in the world Hebrew came from and you get something very different: it makes marks, and it can take them back.

So the word sitting underneath every "faith" in your Old Testament is a word that describes an action, something you can see. It is the Hebrew word emunah (אֱמוּנָה), pronounced "eh-moo-nah." It comes from the root aman (אָמַן), which carries the sense of firmness, steadiness, something solid enough to lean your weight against.² It's the same root that gives us the word you say at the end of every prayer. Amen.

And emunah doesn't mean faith. It means faithfulness.

Look what happens when it shows up in the Old Testament. In Exodus, Israel is fighting the Amalekites, and Moses is up on the hilltop with his arms raised. His arms give out. Aaron and Hur sit him down on a rock and hold his hands up on either side, and Exodus says his hands were steady until the sun went down.

That word "steady" is emunah.³

The Hebrew word we translate "faith" is used to describe a tired old man's arms being physically unable to fall because they are held in the air by two other men. His arms were faithful that day, and that is not an abstract idea in the least.

Now Read It Again

James was a Jewish man from Nazareth writing to Jewish believers scattered across the empire, and the Greek word he reaches for, pistis (πίστις), is the same word the translators of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament that Jesus and the apostles read) had been using to carry emunah across for three hundred years.⁴ The word arrives in his letter already full of meaning.

So let's read it again. This time, with the meaning it was already carrying.

"But someone will say, 'You have faithfulness, and I have works.' Show me your faithfulness without works, and I will show you faithfulness by my works."

Hah! Do you see it?

Show me your faithfulness without works.

It's absurd. It's a punchline. You cannot show anyone your faithfulness apart from doing something, because faithfulness does not exist apart from doing something. James is asking the man to hand him a color with no crayon, a song with no sound.

And then he closes the argument. You believe God is one? Good. Excellent theology. The demons have that one down cold, but does it make them faithful? No.

Belief can be had alone in a room without any action. Faithfulness is an action.

Go Be Faithful

This is what I love about this book, and about our God, honestly. We come to a hard verse braced for a fight, and what we actually find is James grinning at us.

The pressure is off in a way we didn't expect. He isn't asking you to generate more internal certainty. He isn't asking you to feel it harder or believe it better.

And then it hit me where this lands. We have been memorizing James since the end of June. Count it all joy in your trials. Ask God for wisdom. Be doers of the word and not hearers only. Don't treat the man with the gold ring better than the man without one.

Five weeks of James, bouncing around in our heads, renewing our minds.

Memorization is how the word gets into you. It was never meant to stop there.

So here is this week. Go back through the James verses we have been learning since June and pick one. Just one. Decide what it would look like as an action, and then go do that. Not because someone is watching, but because faithfulness to Jesus is a verb, and He has already handed you five verses, all worthy of a place to start.

"I will show you faithfulness by my works."

Pick one. Go be faithful.

References

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