Verses 15-17: If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, And one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,” and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that? Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself.
James continues in these three verses with an illustration of what constitutes faith without works.
He begins with a hypothetical1 scenario: a brother or sister who is without clothes (i.e. poorly dressed or insufficiently clothed) and are lacking daily food. This is a picture of those who are at the very bottom of the social ladder or those having unfavorable conditions which transpired in their lives. Their status may be either an on-going problem or one which occurs repeatedly in their lives. It is as if James is saying: “Suppose you discover someone who is in these dire conditions.”
He goes on and asks if you see someone lacking sufficient clothing and obviously wasting away from the lack of food and all you do is say “Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,” what good is that? Have you demonstrated compassion? Have you produced divine good? And if this individual were a fellow believer, it would be just as unthinkable for us not to help one of our own.
Now we could advance the issue and change the phraseology. Let’s presume that this individual is an unbeliever, what if instead of saying, “Go in peace,” we share with that person the gospel and then say, “Be warmed and be filled”? Would that be compassionate or even pertinent to the situation? Would this be an effective witness of the gospel? No.
This is not to minimize the presentation of the gospel, but the correct order as James indicates, would be to “give them what is necessary for their body”—to clothe and feed the individual. And then maybe while they are eating it would be a more appropriate time to present the gospel.
The main emphasis is this: if a person has believed in Christ as his Savior, it should be a distinct characteristic of that person to respond by means of a pure demonstration of love, a work of compassion to help someone in need, just like the Good Samaritan did (Luke 10:25-37).
Verse 17 as correctly translated in the English Standard Version from the original Greek: “So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” Note that James is not disparaging “faith by itself” as such; for faith—belief in Jesus Christ as Savior—is God’s ultimate aspiration for mankind (2 Peter 3:9). God’s divine intention is that the believers’ faith should include not just the moment of belief in Christ, but the comprehension of the Biblical principles of His Word and the execution of His plan for their lives. This was the Apostle Paul’s directive:
Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude. (Colossians 2:6–7; cf. Jude 20)
However, for the believer in Jesus Christ, if their faith is without any outward manifestations to substantiate its reality, that faith is deemed ‘dead.’ The word dead in the Greek is a descriptive adjective used to characterize the type of faith that ‘has no works’—an inactive or an inoperative faith, one which produces no divine good works.
This is an often misunderstood verse. Many have wrongfully interpreted this verse in reverse: If a believer has no works, he has no faith and therefore he is not a believer. It is not what James intends. The individual who initially believes in Jesus Christ as Savior will obtain the irrevocable free gift of eternal life, period. This is the unfettered gospel of salvation as the early church understood. For example, when Peter stated simply: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). The free gift of salvation is in no way contingent upon whether or not the individual produces good works in the future.
The reality is that believers who do not produce divine good (works) may have made a decision at the point of salvation or even during their Christian lives not to undertake a personal relationship with Christ as is God’s objective which Paul described:
For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10)
The phrase to ‘walk in them’ means precisely that we are to perform the good works which God has designated for us to execute. The apostles and Paul did not advocate an idle, inactive relationship, but one which is vibrantly evident with fruitful good works (Acts 9:36; Galatians 5:22-23; Colossians 1:10; 1 Timothy 6:18).
However, there is a major difference in James’ argument between verse 14 and these verses under consideration. In verse 14 he discussed a particular belief system: that faith which indeed provides salvation but where the individual refuses God’s life of fellowship and service to the Creator as was His divine objective from the beginning of creation. It was established in that verse, that salvation was not in view, but instead deliverance from the divine discipline as detailed in verse 13.
But in these verses, James exhibits hypothetically why that particular faith—the belief system that embraces a relationship with God lacking evidential proof—is in practice a stark contrast to God’s divine objective of salvation. That without the production of divine good it is merely an inactive faith—it is idle, inoperative.
