James 4:11-12

¹¹ Speak not evil one of another, brethren. He that speaketh evil of his brother, and judgeth his brother, speaketh evil of the law, and judgeth the law: but if thou judge the law, thou art not a doer of the law, but a judge. ¹² There is one lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy: who art thou that judgest another?

Having called those in the Church guilty of worldly wisdom to repentance in James 4:4-10, under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, James proceeds to correct other specific issues the scattered Christian community had. We have already been introduced to the issue of the misuse of the tongue in James 3:1-12. It is to that issue that James returns to in 4:11-12. We have before us in these two verses his instruction and correction regarding a specific sin of the tongue, the sin of slander. Slander, specifically, is lying about someone else. In this context, the word is used in a broader sense to cover any malicious or evil intentioned talk about another person.  Slander is such a serious sin because it reveals three things about a person’s heart. It reveals that they think incorrectly about other people, they think poorly of God, and they think too highly of themselves.

The first thing that the sin of slander reveals about a person is that they have a harmfully incorrect view of other people. James uses the term “brethren” once and the term “brother” twice in verse 11 to remind us that if we slander someone in the body of Christ we are doing harm to someone in the family of God. The verb translated as “speak…evil” here is katalaleo which literally means “evil speak” or “to speak against.” It is most commonly used to describe slander, even though it can have a wider understanding of any kind of malicious speech about another person. It can be face to face or behind someone’s back. In fact, the noun form of the word is translated in some translations as “backbiters” in Romans 1:30. It encompasses any kind of harmful, hateful, untrue, unkind, or malicious speech about or toward someone else. Kent Hughes explains, “Related to this, some reject running down another behind his or her back, but believe it is OK if done face to face. These persons are driven by a ‘moral’ compulsion to make others aware of their own faults. Fault-finding is, to them, a spiritual gift…” The sin is directly connected to the sin of partiality in 2:1-13 because the rich man was spoken to one way and the poor another, the misuse of the tongue in 3:1-12 because it involves the use of our tongues, and the fighting addressed in 4:1-3 because the fighting was the result of malicious action and speech. It is linked to all of these because slander flows out of hatred for another person. We cannot say that we love someone else and lie about them or maliciously tear them down. There is nothing wrong with honest criticism, evaluation, or fruit inspection, but there is no place for malicious gossip and slander about someone else to bring them harm or exalt ourselves.

The second thing that slander reveals about a person’s heart is that they have a very poor view of God. When a person exalts themselves and diminishes others through such actions, they essentially attempt to set themselves up above God’s throne and standards. There are definitely plenty of passages in Scripture that call for us to confront sin and warn about false teaching. However, these actions must never be carried out from vindictiveness or selfish ambition to get even with or harm someone. It should always be done to help and protect someone and honor God. Speaking about sin or confronting sin in someone else’s life must never be motivated by selfish ambition or pride (3:14-16). It must never come from the place of self-advancement or seeing someone else fail (4:1-3). Instead, it must always be driven by the desire to see God honored in someone else’s life and to see straying brother’s and sisters reconciled and repentant. The Bible does not condemn all judgment of other people. Instead, it condemns hypocritical judgment (Matthew 7:1-5). When we judge using God’s standards and godly motives, then our judgment is according to His standards. When we judge according to our personal preferences, selfish motives, individual agendas, jealousy, rivalry, etc., then we are judging with worldly, sinful wisdom. James speaks of misusing and judging God’s law in verses 11-12. What he is speaking about is someone using God’s law for purposes He never intended or twisting God’s law and applying it, not for righteousness’ sake, but for one’s own gratification. This demonstrates a very low view of Scripture even if one claims to use the Bible as God’s Word. True judgment should always come from a place of meekness and humility, never maliciousness, deceit, or hypocrisy. It never fails to be true that the people who are hardest on other people in the body of Christ prove themselves to be the most in need of grace from others. Pride will blind us to that if we are not careful. We can never put ourselves in the place of God and attempt to use our speech about someone else to advance ourselves or our agendas. Instead, we must speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15) and let God be God.

The last thing that slander reveals about the heart of a person is that they have too high a view of themselves. The simple question that James asks in the last part of verse 12 calls us to take inventory of ourselves and remember that we are not fit nor capable of being the moral arbiters of the universe or in the life of another person. Only God is. We must heed Paul’s instruction in Romans 12:3 where he wrote, “³ For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.” One of the chief indicators and symptoms of a heart filled with pride and selfish ambition is the constant need to criticize someone else. Again, we must correct error and prevent others from being led astray in sin and error, but we cannot play God in someone else’s life nor be hypocritical. We must begin by examining ourselves and removing the logs from our own eyes before we can help others remove specks from their eyes (Matthew 7:1-5).

With a wrong view of others, of God, and ourselves, the sin of slander reveals a perspective that is out of alignment with God’s. Those that walk with Christ have a view of love toward others, a posture of submission to God, and a perspective of humility and sobriety about themselves. What is the answer for slander? First, it is repentance. Second, it is to adopt the attitude of humility that James has stressed to us. Robert Leighton, the Archbishop of Glasgow in the 1600’s once wrote some words that should be the rallying cries of our hearts, “O Jesus, my Saviour, thy blessed humility! Impress it on my heart, make me most sensible of thy infinite dignity, and of my own vileness, that I may hate myself as a thing of naught, and be willing to be despised, and trodden upon by all, as the vilest mire of the streets, that I may still retain these words, ‘I am nothing, I have nothing, I can do nothing, and I desire nothing but one.”