The Letter of James can easily be seen as a tool by which shock therapy is performed just to make sure we are paying attention to what God is saying to us. We read in 4.11-12: Brothers, do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against his brother or judges him speaks against the law and judges it. To slander carries the sense of speaking wrongly against another in order to bring them to destruction.

To stand in judgment is to attempt to exercise an authority over something by virtue of a superior position in that circumstance: When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it. It is as if one bypasses the need to obey the Law in order to declare it not worthy of such obedience. What this means is that our opinion of the Law carries more weight than God who determined the Law worthy.

Thus, there can only be one chair at the table of judgment, and either I am sitting on that seat or the one God who gave the Law is allowed to sit there: There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who is able to save and destroy. My determination of what is worthy and righteous about the Law carries little if any weight in any arena other than my own mind. The Lord God gave the Law, and only he can be right.

If I seek to sit in judgment of the Law as given by God, the only reason for so doing is to gain an upper hand over the Lord, my neighbor, and everyone else in the world: But you—who are you to judge your neighbor? And where did I get that authority? One cannot remove the influence of the enemy of God from that equation, but the chief perpetrator of that sin is my own heart! Be ready for God’s shaking to begin!