*Ye* also have patience stablish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is drawn nigh.
Rich men have cheated and bullied the believers James writes to. His answer is not protest but patience. Two questions follow. What does it mean to steady, or "establish," a heart? And how can a coming that is still future be "at hand"?
One writer notes that the instruction rules out both hitting back and pressing our own demands for justice:
If the believer is oppressed, he is not to fight or make what he considers righteous demands. He is to be patient. For how long? Until the coming of the Lord! This is the only real hope of the child of God. It is useless to hope that men will choose to stop oppressing others unless God truly brings them to Himself.
That silence has a reason, and it has an end:
God is not indifferent to the wrongs of His poor people, nor to the rejection of Christ by the world. For now God does not usually show His care for His people by stepping in publicly. When He does intervene, it will be in judgment on the world. At present He is acting in grace, not willing that any should perish. For His public intervention we must wait for the coming of the Lord. When the Lord comes, it will be clear that God has not been indifferent to the sufferings and wrongs of His people. Trouble will overtake those who troubled them, and those who were troubled will be brought into "rest" (2 Thessalonians 1:6-10).
"Establish your hearts" is aimed at a particular feeling — the sense that nothing underfoot is solid. One writer sets each phrase of the passage against the trouble it answers:
Are we tested, our hearts weighed down with wrongs that no one has put right? "You also, be patient," is the word for us. Do we feel unsettled, as if everything around us and inside us were shaking and unsafe? The message comes to us, "Establish your hearts." Does it seem as if we sow and sow with no result? Do we plough and wait, and plough and wait, until we are tempted to think we are only ploughing sand?
Commentators here reject two common readings: that James means the fall of Jerusalem, or that he means death releasing the sufferer:
But to those who love Him, His presence means more than all the rest. No truth has a stronger effect than this one, after faith in His person, His love, and His death. It pulls us away from the world and its traps. It holds us up under the world's hatred and persecution. … It is not God's providential dealing with Jerusalem and the Jews. Nor is it death, which rids sufferers of the troubles of this life. Those are the misreadings of a fallen Christendom. The truth is the hope of His own coming. It will act first on all the saints, dead or living, to give them complete blessedness, and then on the land and people of Israel, as well as on all the earth.
If the coming was at hand then, the centuries since raise an obvious objection. One answer is that the delay is grace at work:
But God is full of longsuffering. He is "not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). So He has slowed down the working of evil. It is a very long time coming to a head — as we count time. When the Apostles wrote, it was quite true that the next decisive move in the drama would be God's public intervention at the coming of the Lord. We are still waiting for that coming today. We shall not wait for it in vain!
The farmer of verse 7 shows the shape of that waiting, and one writer presses the comparison:
The farmer waits for the good crop of the earth, until it gets the rain it needs from above, both early and later. Our hope is far better than his. How much more, then, should we establish our hearts in patience, until the last believer is called! For the coming of the Lord is at hand. Can we not trust Him Who gave us His Son, and with Him all things?
For these believers the Lord's return was not filed-away teaching but daily expectation:
But this exhortation shows plainly that the hope was a present thing, woven through the whole thread of Christian life. It was not a theory in the head, a point of acquired knowledge, or a dogma of belief only. They expected the Lord in person. … Nothing produces separation from the world like waiting for the Lord — I do not say the doctrine of His coming, but true waiting for Him.
- Wrong — the oppression is real. The answer is not to fight back or press our own claim. It is to wait for the only One who can put it right.
- Waiting — God's silence is grace, not indifference. He holds back judgment so that people may still repent.
- Steadying — "establish your hearts" is for the person who feels everything shaking, inside and out.
- Which coming — commentators read it as Christ's own return, not the fall of Jerusalem and not death. It brings His people into rest.
- Near — the farmer waits for rain he cannot hurry. The believer waits with a better hope, and that waiting loosens the world's grip.
Complain not one against another, brethren, that ye be not judged. Behold, the judge stands before the door.
Under pressure, complaint looks for a target close to home. James stops it with one reminder: the Judge who will settle every account is already at the door.
The verse does not deny that believers give each other real cause for complaint. It refuses to let those causes harden into something nursed and kept.
What is more common than grudges and complaints of believers against one another? And what does more damage to the spiritual health of all the saints? Are we suggesting there are no causes of complaint, nothing that might lead someone to nurse a grudge? There are probably more causes than we have any notion of, but let them not be turned into grudges. The One who will sit in judgment, and weigh everything — even matters between believers — in perfect righteousness, is standing with His hand on the door handle, ready to enter the court. And the one who is quickest to take up and nurse a grudge will probably be the first to be condemned himself.
Much of this grumbling is comparison. Someone else appears to have the easier life. Traced to its root, that complaint aims past the brother and at God's ordering of our lives.
Knowing that the Lord at His coming will put everything right, we are urged to go on in quietness of spirit, content with what we have. We are not to complain about our own lot, nor to condemn others who appear to be in easier circumstances than ourselves, for "the Judge is standing at the door." It is not for us to judge what is best for ourselves in our present circumstances. To complain is to condemn ourselves by calling His ways with us into question. We must allow that the Lord is the Judge and knows what is best for each one.
James attaches a reason to the command: that you may not be judged. The one who grumbles steps onto a bench that is not his.
We are apt to murmur, or groan, one against another. How unwise, ungracious, and unbelieving! The measure we use will be measured back to us. To judge is to be judged. How much better to wait in patience, overcoming evil with good! Why should we judge?
That raises the question of which judgment James means here.
But this is taking the place of judge. The only true Judge stands ready to judge all that is wrong, and we may find that our own judging exposes us to judgment. This is not eternal judgment, of course, but that here and now.
The nearness is not only a warning about others. It turns the question back on us.
Notice the urgency, the nearness of the case. The Judge is ready; are we? He stands before the door! Do we have our hand on the latch to open to Him? Do we have everything ready for Him to give His own verdict on it?
What restrains the grumbling is not simply believing that the Lord will come one day. It is living as though the door might open now.
It is not only that the Lord would come; it is the present expectation of His coming. They were not to grumble against one another, for "behold, the Judge is standing at the door."
The same fact that warns also comforts. A Judge who already knows the whole story does not need our help.
It is not for us to seek our revenge, but to endure patiently. When we try to defend ourselves, we too often act in the flesh. That takes us out of the hands of the Judge and brings us under condemnation. It is well for us to endure silently, knowing that the Judge stands before the door. He is not indifferent to the wrongs of His people. He has perfect knowledge of all that takes place, and He is just and impartial in His judgment.
- Pressure. Wrong from outside looks for an outlet inside. The grudge between believers is where it escapes, and it damages the spiritual health of everyone.
- Grudge. Real causes for complaint exist, and more than we know. The command is not to deny them but to refuse to keep them.
- Judge. Complaining puts you on the bench, and the measure you use comes back on you. That judgment is the Lord's dealing with you now, not eternal condemnation.
- Door. He is not distant but ready to step in. What checks our temper is expecting Him now, not just knowing He will come one day.
- Silence. A Judge with perfect knowledge is that close. Defending ourselves pulls us out of His hands; staying quiet leaves the case where it belongs.