First Pure, Then Peaceable

Manu won it. He wants that established before anything else, because it is true and because the rest of this makes no sense without it.

It was at the long table on the sand at his cousin's fiftieth, about eleven at night, with the fire down and most of the little ones asleep in the trucks.

His uncle raised it, the way he does. Manu had the better of it and everybody at that end of the table knew it, and he did not raise his voice, and he did not go for the personal thing that was available and that he had thought about using.

He won cleanly. By any measure it was a good night's work.

And he woke up at about four in the morning and could not get back to sleep, and he has been trying to name what happened for about five months.

Here is the closest he has got.

There were eleven people at that end of the table. Two of them were his nieces, who are nineteen and twenty and who came home for that weekend and are not often home.

They did not say anything after about half past ten. Neither of them.

He has gone back over it many times and he is fairly sure of the timing. They were talking before it started. And once it started they went quiet and stayed quiet, and at some point one of them got up and went and sat with the aunties by the fire, and Manu did not notice at the time because he was busy being right.

He said to his brother, months later: "I won an argument and I did not talk to my nieces."

His brother said, "You were not wrong, though."

And Manu said, "No. That is what I am telling you."

You may have had a night like that. You were right, and you were fair, and you did not do the cheap thing, and something in the room got smaller anyway and you cannot work out what rule you broke, because you did not break one. And nobody has ever shown you the list in James, or pointed out what order it is in.

The List Is In An Order And The Order Is The Point

There is a description in James of what wisdom from above actually looks like, and it is written as a sequence rather than as a set.

"But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy."James 3:17

First pure. Then peaceable.

Pure comes first and that is not an accident. Being right matters. James is not writing a case for softness over truth and anybody who uses this verse that way has read it badly. If it is not pure it does not qualify, and no amount of peaceableness rescues something that is not true.

But look at the word then.

Then is a sequence word. It means there is a second thing, and that the first one on its own is the beginning of the list rather than the whole of it.

You have been holding the first word of a list and calling it the list. James 3 puts pure first and then keeps going for six more terms, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and sets it down at a long table on the sand at eleven at night.

And read the ones that follow, because they are all about what happens to the people in the room. Gentle. Easy to be entreated, which means approachable, which means somebody could still bring you something afterwards. Full of mercy. Without partiality.

You were given a whole sequence and you completed the first term of it. That is what the written word says wisdom from above looks like, and it is the Spirit of God who makes an order of words land in a man awake at four in the morning.

This Page Does Not Say You Were Wrong

Now be exact, because this is the article where it would be easy to do the thing this site exists not to do.

You were right. This page is not taking that off you, and it is not quietly suggesting that the peaceable thing would have been to concede.

And this site does not rule on the argument your uncle raised. It has no view on it, it is not leaning, and it is not implying that the whole disagreement is beneath notice.

What is in front of you is not a correction of your position. It is a longer list that your position is the first item on.

You can be entirely right and still have more of the list available. It is written that the wisdom from above is first pure and then peaceable, and the word then is not a softening of the word first, and His Spirit is the one who has been awake with you at four in the morning for five months.

And say the guard. Nothing here asks you for anything. No figure, no proportion, no percentage, no practice, no side, no concession, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all. You are as fully His having won that argument, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from being a rebuke in a kind voice.