Charles Ellicott Commentary James 3:14

"But if ye have bitter jealousy and faction in your heart, glory not and lie not against the truth." — James 3:14 (ASV)

But if you have bitter envying and strife in your hearts.—Rather, it should be, bitter zeal and party-spirit. “Above all no zeal” was the worldly caution of an astute French prelate. But that which the Apostle denounced had caused Jerusalem to run with blood, and afterwards helped in her last hour to add horror to shame. The Zealots were really assassins, pledged to any iniquity; such were the forty men who bound themselves under a curse, saying they would neither eat nor drink till they had killed Paul (Acts 23:12; see Note there).

Some of these desperadoes unluckily escaped the swords of the Romans and fled to the strongholds of Mount Lebanon. They were probably the nucleus of a still more infamous society, known in the Middle Ages as that of the Old Man of the Mountain; in fact, our word “assassin” comes from “Hassan,” their first sheik. Happily for humanity, they were finally exterminated by the Turks.

Glory not.—Boast not yourselves as partakers of this accursed zeal; consider now what ruin it is bringing on us as a nation and a Church. And it would be well to take care, even in these milder days of religious factions, that the strife of creeds is wholly different in kind from the old zealot feuds, and not merely in degree. Able only to rend and overthrow, party-spirit will, if it is gloried in and exulted in, lay down the walls of Zion even to the ground. But if any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy (1 Corinthians 3:17), and the words must be translated much more sternly: If any man destroy...

Lie not against the truth.—This is not tautology, nor a Hebraism, but of far deeper significance. What is truth? said jesting Pilate (John 18:38), and, as Bacon remarks in his Essay on Truth, he would not stay for an answer. Probably he put a question familiar to himself, learned in a certain school of knowledge whose wise conclusion was that mankind could not tell; and the inquirer turned away, unaware that before him stood the incarnate Truth itself. The world of unbelief repeats the careless utterance of the Roman Governor and sides with him in its new Agnosticism; and to its self-assurance and pride of life He, Who can only be learned in the doing of His will (John 7:17), is alike unknowable and unknown.

But the words of the Apostle have a mournful significance for those ignorant of God, and a terrible one for the Christian who knows and sins against the Light. Falsehood is not an injury to some abstract virtue, or bare rule of right and wrong, but a direct blow at the living Truth (John 14:6), Who suffered and still endures such contradiction of sinners against Himself (Hebrews 12:3). As the fault of Judas was double—personal treachery against his Friend and Master, and a wider attack on Christ, the Truth manifest in the flesh—so in a similar two-fold manner, when we speak or act a lie, we smite both God and our brother. All faintest shades of falsehood tend to the dark one of a fresh betrayal of the Son of Man if they are conceived against others; while if they are wrought only to shield ourselves, we are, as Montaigne observed, “brave before God, and cowards before men,” who are as the dust of His feet.