James 5:1-6
Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. 2 Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. 3 Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. 4 Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. 5 You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you.
Sermon Quotes & References
The verb wail … conveys the sounds of weeping accompanied by recurring shouts of pain, bringing to mind the experience of excruciating grief or anguish. The rich will lose everything they have devoted themselves to and everything they have relied upon. Theirs will be the despair of people who discover their dreams have betrayed them and their treasures have been destroyed forever.
IVP NT Commentary Series, James 5.1-3
For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek. They are not in trouble as others are; they are not stricken like the rest of mankind. Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes swell out through fatness; their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff & speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth.
But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end. Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin. How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors! – Psalm 73. 3-9, 16-19
It is in fact surely impossible to read the words “… murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you” without the lone & wonderful figure of the Lord Jesus coming before the eyes of the mind. He is preeminently the Righteous One—his response of non-resistance is at one & the same time the most demanding example and the sweetest consolation in time of oppression & temptation. – Alec Motyer, The Message of James