Today, I’m starting a new study in James, a short Epistle in the new testament. The author, James, starts this letter with a greeting, very common for all letters.

James, a bond-servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes who are dispersed abroad: Greetings.

James 1:1

When looking at a passage, I always want to look at it, as if it was the first time I read it, and ask those basic questions to get my mind into the mind of the author.

Who wrote this? James

Who is James? He tells us he’s a bond-servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ

What is a bond-servant? so I google this phrase “bond-servant” and it pulls back a reference from oxford English dictionary, “a person bound in service without wages.” we’ve got a bit more to move on here…

Why does he use “Bond Servant” to describe himself? this is tough, let’s skip this for now, and come back to this. We know he a a servant of some kind, but

Who is he a servant of? “of God and the Lord Jesus Christ”

Now we can see James making a simile, saying his relationship with God and the Lord Jesus Christ is like being a Bond Servant. He is defining who he is, as this relationship.

Isn’t that true of us, I’m Stephen, Son of Chuck and Lorraine, Brother to Jon, Ben, Tom and Christina. Father of Samuel, Rachel, Noah and Micah. Our family relationships help define who we are. But our occupational relationships help too, I am Stephen the programmer, marketer, project manager, and data janitor. You see, you know me better by my relationships.

But a bond-servant isn’t a regular servant, the word “Bond” is referring to a debt. When a business or organization needs to do something critical, but they don’t have the resources on hand, they can create a bond, which is a promise to repay a debt in exchange for money. Bond-servants were not the same as chattel-slaves who were always slaves, a Bond-servant had a debt, and someone paid it, and now they are working in service to repay the debt.

Put it simply, can we figure out the debt that James is talking about here? No, but there are clues, we know his debt is to God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who are They? We can now use other parts of the Bible to help us here, let’s look at the rest of the chapter. We can see James refers to God and Jesus, but in this chapter we don’t see any clues to define who they are.

In Chapter 2 he talks about the “Faith in our Lord Jesus Christ”, but we would have to realize now, the people he is writing to already know who this is, they understand his content. This book was written to a specific target audience, they were followers of God and Jesus Christ, they were Christians.

Christians would understand why he calls himself a Bond-Servant, and that is because they know the debt. You see, the debt that James is speaking about is the debt of sin.

So we now know James, a bond servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ. So what’s he doing?

Bringing Greetings!

Who is the audience of the greetings? To the twelve tribes that are dispersed abroad, who are the twelve tribes? We have to move outside the book of James, outside the other Epistles, even outside the New Testament of the Bible to the Old Testament where we need to go to the first book, or the book of beginnings, Genesis.

The term Twelve Tribes begins in Gen 49:48

All these are the twelve tribes of Israel, and this is what their father said to them when he blessed them. He blessed them, every one with the blessing appropriate to him.

Genesis 49:28

This is the first time that phrase was used, but it doesn’t tell us much, we have to go back in the chapter. To summarize this chapter, this is a prophecy given to Israel about his 12 sons. You see, each of these sons has children… and generations go by, and we have the nation of Israel. James is speaking to descendants of Israel.

From this one verse we can see the target audience of the book, and much more about who this author is.