Charles Ellicott Commentary James 5:1

"Come now, ye rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you." — James 5:1 (ASV)

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.”