James 4:2

‘You desire, and have not. You kill, and envy, and cannot obtain. You fight and war; you have not, because you ask not.'

He then builds up a picture which reveals how they go about obtaining what they want, for it is clear that they will do anything rather than ask God for it and fulfil His conditions. And yet in the end they desire in vain because they do not get what they want. They will even ‘kill', with the mind even if not in reality, because they are green with envy, with their covetous eyes on what others have, or on other people's positions, but they still do not really find what they are looking for, for they are never satisfied. So then they fight and ‘go to war' in order to obtain what they think their enemies have. But all the time what they are looking for is elusive. They do not find it because they do not ask God for it. Notice the parallels, ‘you are at war -- and you desire, you kill and you covet'. The picture is of a continual activity. The need for pleasure leads on to squabbling, leads on to desire, leads on to murder, leads on to further coveting, leads on to further war, and so on in an endless sequence.

It should be clear by now that James is depicting this in deliberately strong language (note the fact that there is war in their members, hardly something intended literally). Most do not literally ‘go to war' for what they want, they simply ‘battle' with one another, or with those on another strata of their group. Most do not literally kill, although in the volatile world of the Middle East at that time some probably did. Rather they are murderers at heart. They hate and they threaten and they plot and they purpose harm (see Matthew 5:22; 1 John 3:15). After Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount most Christians would see hating and revealing contempt as being the equivalent of murder. (Recognising this takes away the difficulty of coveting following murder, even for those who find it a difficulty. For hatred and coveting go hand in hand).

Some find it difficult to have the envying following the killing and therefore punctuate differently (there is no punctuation in the Greek).

You desire and do not have, you kill.

And you envy and cannot obtain, so you wage war,

You have not because you ask not.'

This is not so obvious a translation in view of where the conjunctions lie (although it is a possibility), but whichever way we take it the end result is the same, the endless cycle of pleasure, ‘war', desire, ‘killing', envying, ‘war'. And this goes on from the top downwards, whether it be by a would be ‘Caesar' desirous of great position, or by a slave desirous of a more favoured position or a sinecure.

‘You have not, because you ask not.' And all the time they fail to obtain their hearts desire because they do not go to the One Who alone can satisfy the heart. They do not ask God for it (contrast James 1:5), or if they do it is with the wrong aims and the wrong motives. All their thoughts are on pleasure and desire and warring among themselves, and not on pleasing God. Here in practical terms is the working out of James 1:13. Those who fall, having failed to be spiritually strengthened by the testings and trials that they have faced, are tempted by their own desires, are enticed and allured, and this gives birth to sin which finally results in death.