Charles Ellicott Commentary James 5

Go to now, you rich.—As in James 4:3, it was “Woe to you, worldly,” so now “Woe to you rich: weep, wailing”—literally, howling for your miseries coming upon you. Compare Isaiah 13:6, Isaiah 14:31, and Isaiah 15:3, where (in the Septuagint) the same term is used—a picture word, imitating the cry of anguish, peculiar to this place in the New Testament.

Observe the immediate future of the misery; it is already coming. This doubtless primarily meant the pillage and destruction of Jerusalem, but under that first intention, many others secondary and similar are included, for all riches certainly make themselves wings and fly away (Proverbs 23:5).

Calvin and others of his school fail to see in this passage an exhortation of the rich to penitence, but only a denunciation of woe upon them. However, since all prophecy, whether evil or good, is conditional, there is sufficient room to believe that no irrevocable doom was pronounced by “a Christian Jeremiah.”

Your riches are corrupted . . .—As expanded in the eloquent gloss of Bishop Wordsworth, “Your wealth is mouldering in corruption, and your garments, stored up in vain superfluity, have become moth-eaten: although they may still glitter brightly in your eyes, and may dazzle people by their brilliance, yet they are in fact already cankered; they are loathsome in God’s sight; the Divine anger has breathed upon them and blighted them; they are already withered and blasted.” .

Your gold and silver . . .—In like manner, the gold and silver are said to be “corroded,” or eaten up with rust. The precious metals themselves do not corrode, but the base alloy does, which has been mixed with them for worldly purposes. The rust of them shall be a witness to you: not merely against you, but convincing yourselves in the day of judgment; and, moreover, a sign of the fire which shall consume you. So will the wages of the traitor and the harlot, the spoil of the thief and oppressor, burn the hands which have clutched them; the memories of the wrong will shiver through each guilty soul, like the liquid fires which Muslims say torture the veins of the damned in the halls of Eblis.

You have heaped . . .—The text reads: You heaped up treasures in the last days:—the days of grace, given to you for repentance, like the years when the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah (Genesis 6:3; 1 Peter 3:20), or the time during which God bore with Canaan, until the iniquity of the Amorite was full (Genesis 15:16).

Some commentators have seen in this verse an instance of James’s belief that he was “living in the last days of the world’s history,” and compared his delusion with that of Paul and John (1 Thessalonians 4:15, and 1 John 2:18). But there was no mistake on the part of the inspired writers; freedom from error in their Sacred office must be vindicated, or who shall sever the false gospel from the true?

The simple explanation is an old one—the potential nearness of Christ, as it is called. In many ways He has ever been near each individual, as by affliction, or death, or judgment; but His actual return was probably nearer in the first ages of faith than in the brutality of the tenth century, or the splendid atheism of the fifteenth, or the intellectual pride of the nineteenth.

His advent is helped or hindered by the state of Christendom itself: one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day (2 Peter 3:8). There is neither past nor future in His sight, only the presence of His own determination.

And nothing delays Christ’s Second Coming so much as the false and feeble Christianity which prays Thy kingdom come in frequent words, but does not wait as the handmaid of her Lord, with loins girded about and lights burning (Luke 12:35), until the day dawn, and the day star arise (2 Peter 1:19).

Behold, the hire of the labourers.—Not merely the wrong of the poor, but the wages kept back from him by the miserly master, contrary to the merciful Jewish law (Leviticus 19:13), which permitted no delay in payment whatever (Malachi 3:5). And the indignant protest of the text is a swift witness also against the like-minded of this generation—whose God is self, whose religion political economy, and whose one great object in life is to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest: as if for these ignoble purposes the Lord God had given them a brain and a soul.

The hire of the labourers . . . kept back by fraud, cries (out).—A question has arisen concerning the right position of the word translated “of,” or from you, in this clause; whether the withheld dues appeal “from the wronger to God,” or as the Authorized Version has it above, “the hire of the labourers of you kept back by fraud.” The balance of opinion seems to be with the latter.

Are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.—“A sublime and awe-inspiring picture” is in the mind of the Apostle. The Lord of Hosts, the name by which He is called, especially by the last of the prophets, Malachi, is seated as a judge on His throne, to hear the right; the charge is laid, the guilty called, the witnesses are heard: the cries of the wronged have entered into His ears:—

“The Lord of the Vineyard beholds afar;
The arm of His fury is bared to the war:
The day of His terrible wrath is at hand.”

It is the reflection of our own Bede that St. James thus speaks of the Lord of Sabaoth, or armies, to terrify those who suppose that the poor have no helpers . God’s majestic title is proclaimed, we may believe, by a Hebrew to Hebrews, for a warning against their darling sin of covetousness, and in hope that the vision of Isaiah (Isaiah 6:1–4) would move them to consider who and what the Lord of Hosts, of angels, of cherubim, of seraphim, might be when He makes inquisition for blood, forgetting not the complaint of the poor (Psalms 9:12).

You have lived in pleasure. And what an indictment this is, brought against them by the Apostle: You revelled upon earth, and wantoned; you nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter. The pleasure and wantonness in which the rich had lived, the selfishness with which they had cared for their own hearts, in a time of death for others—indeed, preparation of the same for themselves: this is the aggravated wrong, and the inexpiable shame. In the Received Text for the scripture quoted above, they are accused of having “nourished their hearts as in a day of slaughter,” the cries of the victims thus seeming an addition to their own delights; but the charge against them is heavy enough without this insertion.

As they had dealt with others, so the vengeance of God dealt with them. The Passover called together the richest Jews from all parts of the earth, and they themselves were the victims in their last sacrifice. No words can overdraw the fury of the Roman onset, under Titus, when the Temple floors ran with blood, and the roofs raged in fire until all was utter desolation.