5 Come on now you rich people, get weeping and howling for the miseries that await you! ² Your wealth has rotted and your garments have become moth-eaten. ³ Your gold and your silver have corroded, and their corrosion will serve as a testimony against you and will consume your flesh like fire. It is in the last days that you have stored up your treasure! ⁴ Behold, the pay of the labourers who mowed your fields, and which has been withheld by you, cries out against you; and the outcry of those who did the harvesting has reached the ears of the Lord of armies. ⁵ You have lived for pleasure on the earth and lived luxuriously; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. ⁶ You have condemned and put to death the righteous person; he offers you no resistance. ⁷ Therefore be patient, brothers, until the coming of the Lord (James5:1-7).

Unlike the previous related warning from James (ch4) regarding loving the world resulting in being at enmity with God, this yet more ominous tirade almost certainly concerned people outside the church, members of which may have suffered at their hands. That is suggested by verse 7: “Therefore be patient, brothers, until the coming of the Lord”. Note incidentally that this is typical of apostolic appeals regarding what the believer should be looking forward to: not so much “going to heaven when you die” but the return of the Lord Jesus, or particularly in Paul’s case, the resurrection of the body (note especially Rom8:23). As that verse explicitly states, it is not until that point that the Christian becomes a fully adopted member of God’s family.

What about Job?

Returning to James’ tirade, one might wonder whether God  intrinsically has a problem with people who are materially wealthy? Not so, the prime example being (in today’s terms) a millionaire named Job. God delighted in him, to the point of challenging the devil to find any fault in him. And after Job’s well chronicled ordeals God rewarded him by making him wealthier still! But then man has been made in the image of the Lord of the universe, and as we have just seen, God’s elect who are a kind of first fruits of humanity (Jam1:18) and the “firstborn” (leader/representative) of the human family (Heb12:23 ) are currently being conformed into the image of their Firstborn (Rom8:29) so as to be adopted into the bosom of God’s family, where untold wealth and privilege both spiritual and material must surely abound.

The current world order

No, the problem with earthly riches is who currently possesses them and how they are utilized. It’s back to the previous chapter/post concerning the “κόσμος”,  i.e. the current world order and its way of thinking and acting. That’s why James was insisting Christians should not be taken up with it – to do so opposes God’s plans for His people in the current age. Whilst, as just considered, it is possible to be both wealthy and virtuous, James well knew that that was not generally the case, certainly in his day. Hence verses 4-6, asserting that most of the super-rich were dishonest, stingy, unjust tyrants, either in the way they had obtained their wealth or in their defrauding of those who had laboured for them. They weren’t just accumulating riches, they were heaping up trouble for themselves come Judgement Day, starting at the point of their death (cf. the rich man and Lazarus).

The mystery of providence

As was the case with “Dives”, many of the people James was slating will have enjoyed a lavish, relatively untroubled life. That, as Jesus had warned, could be a problem in itself . This pertains to a separate but related issue, and is a key component of the providential mystery I have been unravelling in my book. I won’t expand on it here other than to say that it pertains to God’s supremely equitable nature on the one hand and humanity’s ultimate destiny on the other. Jesus’ esoteric comments in Lk6:24-25 taken alongside Lk16:25, Mk9:49 and Heb2:10 provide a clue to this mystery, which is considered in a little more detail in this earlier post.

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