So men have to be holy in order to have a relationship with God. They are not holy. For the most part, they don’t even recognize that they are not holy and if they do recognize that they sin, they will usually blame someone else’s and that someone in a very vague sense is the God who put them in the circumstances they are in and gave them the impulses he gave them and they want to shirk the responsibility.
So James says in 1:13 to 18, you cannot blame anyone but yourself for your sin. In verse 13 he says, the nature of evil demonstrates that. No man can say, when he is tempted, I am tempted by God, for God can’t be tempted with evil, neither tempts he any man.
You can’t blame God for evil because God and evil are mutually exclusive. And then in verse 14, the nature of man. He says, man has his own problem. Man is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust and enticed. The problem is in man, it is in his sinfulness, his fallenness.
It says this, of his own will, speaking of the father, God the father mentioned in verse 17, "Of his own will begot he us, with the word of truth that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures. A simple verse, but on in which is bound up all the richness of the new birth.
The Old Testament said, be holy for I the Lord am holy. Peter says in his epistle, be holy, for I the Lord am holy. In order to enter into the presence of God, man must be holy. Set apart from sin unto righteousness. Now men are not holy. That’s obvious.
They are not righteous, that is, they are sinful.
They do not think right, speak right, act right, do right. They to not rightly perceive God.
They do not rightly perceive themselves.
They do not rightly perceive God’s truth, God’s revelation or God’s law or God’s will.
