James 4:2

Ye lust and have not The genesisof evil is traced somewhat in the same way as in ch. James 1:15. The germ is found in desire for what we have not, as e. g. in the sins of David (2 Samuel 11:1) and Ahab (1 Kings 21:2-4). That desire becomes the master-passion of a man's soul, and hurries him on to crimes from which he would, at first, have shrunk.

ye kill, and desire to have The order strikes us as inverted, putting the last and deadliest sin at the beginning. The marginal alternative of "envy" would doubtless give an easier sense, but this cannot possibly be the meaning of the Greek word as it stands, and comes from a conjectural reading, suggested, without any MS. authority, by Erasmus and Beza. If we remember, however, the state of Jewish society, the bands of robber-outlaws of whom Barabbas was a type (Mark 15:7; John 18:39), the "four thousand men that were murderers" of Acts 21:38, the bands of Zealots and Sicarii who were prominent in the tumults that preceded the final war with Rome, it will not seem so startling that St James should emphasise his warning by beginningwith the words "Ye murder." In such a state of society, murder is often the first thing that a man thinks of as a means to gratify his desires, not, as with us, a last resource when other means have failed. Comp. the picture of a like social condition in which "men make haste to shed blood" in Proverbs 1:16. There was, perhaps, a grim truth in the picture which St James draws. It was after the deed was done that the murderers began to quarrel over the division of the spoil, and found themselves as unsatisfied as before, still not able to obtain that on which they had set their hearts, and so plunging into fresh quarrels, ending as they began, in bloodshed. There seems, at first, something almost incredible in the thought, that the believers to whom St James wrote could be guilty of such crimes, but Jewish society was at that time rife with atrocities of like nature, and men, nominally disciples of Christ, might then, as in later times, sink to its level. See note on next verse.

ye have not, because ye ask not This then was the secret of the restless cravings and the ever-returning disappointments. They had never once made their wants the subject of a true and earnest prayer. Here again we note the fundamental unity of teaching in St James and St Paul. Comp. Philippians 4:6. Prayer is with each of them the condition of content or joy.