![]() True wisdom is choosing to believe that God is good despite any circumstances. It’s when we realize our humble and frail place before God that we’re forced to choose between anxiety or trust. God will generously give wisdom to people who ask for it in faith without doubting God’s character. This journey begins with gaining wisdom, the ability to see hardships through a new perspective (Jas. ![]() All of us are more compromised than we’d like to admit, but God is on a mission to restore fractured people and make them whole. Jacob knows that most of us live as fractured people with large inconsistencies in our character. In this context, it means living a completely integrated life in which your actions are consistent with the values and beliefs you learned from Jesus. In biblical Hebrew, the word is tamim, while the Greek is teleios. Now, this word “perfect” is important for Jacob, and he repeats it seven times throughout the book (Jas. God can work on us in the midst of suffering to help us become “perfect and complete” (Jas. But he believes that life’s trials and hardships are paradoxical gifts that can produce endurance and shape our character. After all, he was martyred not long after writing this letter. Jacob knows from personal experience that life is hard. Chapter 1 is a flowing stream of wise teachings and one-liners that introduce us to all of the key words and themes that we’ll see in chapters 2-5. The introductory chapter is designed to sum up the main ideas to the entire book. In essence, Jacob is calling the messianic community to become truly wise by living according to Jesus’ summary of the Torah-love God and love your neighbor as yourself. This book is made up of short challenging wisdom speeches, which are full of metaphors and easy to memorize one-liners. Jacob literally grew up with Jesus and the book of Proverbs, so his own teaching sounds a lot like them both and is stamped with their language and imagery. ![]() The second key influence is the biblical wisdom book of Proverbs, especially the poems in Proverbs 1-9. Jacob’s wisdom has been heavily influenced by two sources, the first of which is Jesus’ teaching about life in the Kingdom of God, especially the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. His goal isn’t to teach us new theological information rather, he wants to get in our business and challenge how we live. Instead, this book is a summary of Jacob’s sage wisdom for any and every community of Jesus’ followers. While it begins like a letter, with Jacob greeting all the messianic Jews living outside the land of Israel, the rest of the work doesn’t read like a letter at all because it doesn’t address the specific problems of one local church like Paul’s letters. In this book, we have the legacy of Jacob’s teaching and wisdom condensed into a short but powerful work. Sometime around 62 C.E., he was murdered by the priestly establishment in Jerusalem for following Jesus. Jacob, however, was known as a pillar of this Jerusalem church, acting as a peacemaker who led with wisdom and courage until his untimely death. There was a famine that led to great poverty in their region, and these messianic Jews were also being persecuted by the traditional Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. This church was the first Christian community ever, and we know the people experienced difficult times during the twenty years that Jacob was their leader. After Peter moved on from Jerusalem to start new churches, Jesus’ half-brother Jacob rose to prominence as a leader of the mother church in Jerusalem, made up of messianic Jews. We learn about Jacob's story from the book of Acts and Paul’s letters (Acts 12, 15 Gal.
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