Charles Ellicott Commentary James 5:3

"Your gold and your silver are rusted; and their rust shall be for a testimony against you, and shall eat your flesh as fire. Ye have laid up your treasure in the last days." — James 5:3 (ASV)

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).