Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to James · About this commentary
Humble Yourselves
James 4:9-10
9 Lament, mourn, and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. · WEB
The letter asks for grief in a way that sits uncomfortably beside its opening command, and the discomfort is the point.
Verse 9 is hard to read and harder to preach. Lament, mourn, and weep. Let laughter turn to mourning and joy to gloom. Three verbs of grief, then two reversals.
It appears to contradict the letter's own opening instruction to count trials as joy James 1:2, and the difference is in the object. The joy of chapter 1 is a judgment about what a trial is producing. The grief here is a response to what the reader has just been shown about himself — wars, killing, prayer conscripted by appetite, friendship with the world.
The letter is not prescribing a temperament. It is saying that a person who has understood the previous five verses and feels nothing has not understood them. Sorrow over one's own condition is treated as the appropriate first evidence of having heard, which is consistent with a letter whose complaint throughout is hearing without consequence James 1:22.
Verse 10 gathers it into one command with one promise, and the promise is the release the paragraph has been withholding. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
The lifting is God's act and is stated without condition or timing. And it completes the quotation from three verses earlier: grace is given to the humble James 4:6, the reader is told to become humble, and what follows is not merely grace but exaltation. The mourning of verse 9 is a doorway rather than a destination.
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