<p>4:1 <em>What causes the wars and fights among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasures that war within you?</em>- The way this is phrased implies that the unspiritual brethren were blaming the evident infighting within the ecclesia on others- perhaps the group of poor brethren who they spiritually cursed in 3:9,10. Note how the fightings came out of their lusts- warring in the members suggests an allusion to Rom. 7:23 &quot;I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members&quot;. The allusions to Romans may be because this letter too was in circulation amongst the dispersed Jewish believers. The &quot;members&quot; of James 4:1 are therefore the parts of the evil human heart. The double mindedness in the hearts of the individual brethren was inevitably reflected in the members of the ecclesial body (cp. 1 Cor. 12:12; Eph. 4:25). Another link with 1 Peter clarifies that the warfare within the body was also within their own minds: &quot;Abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul&quot; (1 Pet. 2:11). The Greek for &quot;lusts&quot; here in James 4 is not the normal word so translated. The only other times it occurs are in 2 Pet. 2:13 translated &quot;pleasure&quot;, where it is associated with the Judaist false teachers; Tit. 3:3, where Paul says these lusts were part of his former Judaist life; and in Lk. 8:14 regarding that which chokes the growth of the word.</p><p>Their lusts or pleasures may have warred against each other in the sense that they desired different things which conflicted within their heart, but the idea of war and fighting seems more usually used with reference to the spiritual warfare within the human heart (cp. 1 Pet. 2:11), whereby the spiritual reservoir is under violent attack from the united desires for the various pleasures to be possessed. The Greek for &quot;fightings&quot; occurs in Titus 3:9 and 2 Tim. 2:23,24 concerning arguments within the ecclesia over the interpretation of the Law. It would therefore seem that the justification for gratifying their materialistic desires was based on misapplication of the word. Again we are seeing the classic characteristic of apostasy- a mixture of truth with error until a position of self-justification has been reached. These reasonings over certain passages began as a debate within their own heart (&quot;members&quot;), and then spread to the whole ecclesia. We have pointed out that the break between chapters 3 and 4 is unfortunate. The mention of &quot;wars&quot; in 4:1 and &quot;confusion&quot; in 3:16 only 3 verses earlier suggests a connection with the &quot;wars and commotions&quot; heralding the destruction of Jerusalem (Lk. 21:9), seeing that &quot;confusion&quot; and &quot;commotions&quot; are the same Greek word. Is James implying that the crazy political situation in the world that heralded Jerusalem's downfall was going to be reflected in ecclesial life in the last days, resulting in a similar downfall of the scattered Jerusalem ecclesia? The situation within the body in these last days may provide an unfortunate parallel.</p>