²²You see that faith was working with his works, and as a result of the works, faith was perfected; ²³and the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” and he was called the friend of God.

The phrase “You see” is critical to understanding James’ mindset. He may be using this phrase simply as a means of drawing attention to his following comments and as a natural inference of what he has already said. But we cannot ignore the possible play on the word, as a way of indicating that he is writing about that which is observable. This is critical to his use of the words “justified” and “righteousness.” (Note: those words are so closely related in meaning that they need to be consistently interpreted similarly in the same context.)

So now James says that faith and works, work together (the pun is clearly intended as a play on the word “working” and “works”). We could rephrase this as, “Genuine faith does the work of working.” Works without faith, then, cannot work itself out. That would be like trying to pick yourself up by pulling up on your ears! No, works cannot do the work of working for righteousness. Not only is faith without works useless (James 2:20), so works without faith are useless.

Yes, faith needs perfecting, but not in the sense that our salvation needs perfecting. James now quotes Genesis 15:16, where God declares Abraham righteous for believing His promise for a multitude of descendants. This came at a single point in time and was Abraham’s complete justification before God. Nowhere do we read of his faith needing to be perfected to make his justification more firm. He was justified, period. And this is the understanding given to the event in the other three quotations of it in the NT (Rom. 4:3, 22; Gal. 3:6). We take it as James’ understanding here as well—that Abraham was justified before God because of his faith, before he was shown to be justified when he offered up Isaac. In the first case, Abraham was “reckoned” to be righteous; his faith was seen (or proven) to be genuine. Some object, who would have seen this event? The answer is quite evident. Although God didn’t need to see it, Abraham needed his faith tested for his own sake, to validate to himself that he really did believe. Further, his son Isaac would have seen his actions as evidence of Abraham’s faith, as well as the men who accompanied him to the mountain. But Abraham’s faith is justified to us today, also. What God saw as proof of his faith (Gen. 15), we see outwardly as proof by his actions (Gen. 22).

Lord, I want my light to shine before others that they might see Your glory.