James 5:1-6 Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you! Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be a witness against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have heaped up treasure in the last days. Indeed the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. You have lived on the earth in pleasure and luxury; you have fattened your hearts as in a day of slaughter. You have condemned, you have murdered the just; he does not resist you.

Here are two statements about money that are both true, but sound contradictory. The Bible teaches both of these statements. Here they are. One, wealth is good. Two, wealth is dangerous. Wealth is a good thing. Wealth is a dangerous thing. How could something be both good and dangerous? Well, there are plenty of things in life that are good and dangerous at the same time. Fire is good – for heat, for energy, for combustion, but fire is also dangerous – it burns, destroys, and ruins. Water is good and dangerous. Water vivifies, cleans, refreshes, cools, enlivens, but water is also dangerous – it floods, overflows, ruins. We could think of many things that are good and dangerous – the sun, human government, a doctor’s scalpel, a car.

So the Bible teaches that wealth is both good and dangerous. Wealth meets needs, protects, blesses others, enables ministry, assists the poor. But wealth is also dangerous. It ensnares people in a whirlpool of covetousness, it quickly becomes a master, it blinds you to ultimate things, it lures you away from faith, making the entrance into Heaven smaller and smaller for you, until it is like the eye of a needle.

It’s both good and dangerous. We can only know the good without being burnt by the dangers, if we allow God, the giver of wealth to teach us how to spend it. It is funny that most Christians will agree with the statement, it’s all God’s money – he owns it all. But then they have difficulty with the follow-up statement. If He gave it to you, then He gets to tell you how to spend it. If it is His, and is still His, then the practical way you acknowledge that is by saying, so Lord, how should I spend your money?

Proud people don’t ask that question. Unbelieving people don’t ask that question, because they don’t believe it is from Him, they don’t believe it is both good and dangerous. Humble people, genuine believers accept it is from Him, it is good and dangerous, so they want to submit their spending to God.

James has been talking about pride and humility. Pride characterises unbelievers; humility should characterise Christians. We’ve already seen James show us the difference between proud judging and humble judging. We’ve seen the difference between proud planning and humble planning. And now James is going to deal with the difference between proud spending and humble spending. His focus here is on those who are in a position to spend. The hand-to-mouth labourer is not really his focus. He is speaking to people here who have some disposable income, some extra money to spend on something besides today’s food and clothing.

In particular, he is focusing on the wicked wealthy. He is announcing an ancient biblical judgement on the unbelieving rich, on how God is going to eventually bring justice and pay back the proud, defiant, arrogant unbeliever whose wealth is his weapon and high tower.

This has been a question asked by believers since Job, since David wrote Psalm 37, since Asaph wrote Psalm 73, since Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes. Why are there these proud, God-defying people, who seem to get only wealthier? Why does God allow these people to not only defy Him, but to use their wealth and power to harm the defenceless, or the poor, or God’s people?

The universal answer of God’s Word to God’s people has been: wait. You will see the justice of it when God judges in the end. This is one of those passages which warns the unbelieving wealthy, comforts God’s people.

But I think there is a third implicit application. This passage describes the spending and behaviour of the unbelieving rich. But it is possible for Christians to act like unbelievers. Living in an unbelieving culture, we can become accustomed to the way the world tells us to spend our money, or to make a profit, or even to enjoy our wealth. And when we see that God is going to judge and punish the wicked wealthy for these things, we should flee from them in our own lives, repent of them if they are present, and replace them with biblical approaches to spending our wealth.

True believers submit their spending of God’s money to God’s Word. So as we seek humility, we want to gain instruction as to how not to spend this wealth that is both good and dangerous.

Let’s look into this passage for the three indictments against the wicked wealthy, which warns, comforts and instructs each of us.

I. The Unrighteous Rich Will Be Judged for Investing in the Temporary

James 5:1-3 Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you! Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be a witness against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have heaped up treasure in the last days.

James announces to the ones partying and sipping champagne on their yachts, begin crying, begin wailing, for the pain that will replace your pleasure. This bubble of luxury is going to pop and what will be left will be affliction, torment and pain. These are all words referring to judgement. God is going to do this, with such certainty that James uses the perfect tense of the verbs which means completed action. This judgement is signed and sealed, done and dusted.

What is the judgement? First, there is total loss. Verses 2 and 3 describe this loss. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten.

Your wealth has rotted away to nothing. For an agricultural economy, this would be every animal has died, every crop has decayed. For a monetary economy, it would be, you have lost every asset, every cent from every account you owned. The balance in all of those accounts is zero, and you have nothing to sell, to mortgage, to trade.

Your garments are moth-eaten. In a culture where several changes of clothes denoted wealth, to have them all decayed, eaten up with holes means you now have the appearance of the beggar on the street.

Verse 3 – your gold and silver are corroded. Gold and silver were signs of wealth in the ANE, but even these can be tarnished, and decay sets in. Loss. God says to the proud rich man, there is coming a day when you will have nothing, and the more you have, the more you will have lost, which will be a greater judgement against you.

But there is a second aspect to this judgement which suggests the personal punishment of the unrighteous rich. Verse 1 speaks of the miseries coming upon them. Look at verse 3. Your gold and silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be a witness against you and will eat your flesh like fire.

The corrosive effects of time on your hoard will judge you, and it will then be your turn to rust and corrode. The image is clearly that of Hell.

Luke 16:19-26 “There was a certain rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously every day. But there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, full of sores, who was laid at his gate, desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table. Moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. So it was that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried. And being in torments in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. Then he cried and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.’ But Abraham said, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted and you are tormented. And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that those who want to pass from here to you cannot, nor can those from there pass to us.’

Jesus was confronting a false idea present in Jewish thinking at the time – that wealthy people had been blessed by God, and their blessing now was a sign of what they would enjoy in the life to come. Jesus said, no it is sometimes reversed. Sometimes it is the unbeliever who is rich, has his comforts now, but then has eternal misery, while the believer may endure some misery now, but then has eternal rest in Heaven.

Now what have the Unrighteous Rich done that merits such a judgement? In these verses, we see why God is so displeased with them. All the wealth they had, all that God providentially allowed them to gather up, they spent on what was temporal. Look at all the temporal adjectives. Verse 2 – corrupted, moth-eaten. Verse 3, corroded, corrosion. Verse 3- you heaped up, you hoarded goods for yourself in the last day – you were busy looting the tuck shop on the Titanic, when it was already going down.

God’s displeasure at the unrighteous rich is that all the money He gave them was spent on the here and now, this life, the body, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life. And that spending habit shaped their beliefs and their loves, because Jesus taught, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. A person who only loves what time will consume is abominable to God, because that person does not love the things God loves most.

Matthew 6:19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.

This is how Randy Alcorn put it in his excellent little book, “The Treasure Principle” – “My heart always goes where I put God’s money. Watch what happens when you reallocate your money from temporal things to eternal things.”

The Unrighteous Rich care only for the here and now. God may bring out what remains of their houses, cars, clothes and gadgets – cracked, ruined, melted by God’s judging fire, and say to them – this is what you spent all the money I gave you on.

But believers are different. This world system is not our home. We don’t believe the lie that we can take any of this with us. We don’t live for the tiny dot. We live for the line that extends from the dot. So Christians are the very best investors in the world. We invest in that which brings the greatest, ultimate returns – eternal reward, eternal glory to God.

Let me give us an exercise. In your mind’s eye, imagine a table with two columns. The one column, label “permanent”; the other, label “temporal”. Now I’m going to give you a list of things you could spend your money on, and you put them either in a permanent or temporal column. Now I didn’t say good and evil, I said permanent and temporal. I didn’t say important and unimportant, I said permanent and temporal. Here are some things your money can be invested in, you put them in the appropriate column: supporting a missionary taking the Gospel to the unreached, a holiday by the sea, Botox shots for your face, funding Bible translation and distribution, a Harley Davidson, a renovated house, supporting a church planter, or new church plant, helping a man through seminary, a new lounge suite, a weekly pedicure, supporting your local church’s ministry, buying Christian books for other believers, a second holiday home, the latest tablet or smartphone, supporting the persecuted church, giving to Christian crisis-pregnancy or adoption ministry, a 5-carat Tanzanite ring, funding an evangelism resource, aiding destitute Christian widows, a teeth-whitening treatment.

I am not saying choose one over the other. I am asking, of those you identified as permanent investments – are you giving to any of those? And as a proportion of what you spend, how much is spent on the eternal. Like you, over half of my money has to go to meeting temporal needs. But my family and I have chosen to set a proportion of money that we invest in what is permanent.

What I don’t want to have happen on Judgement Day is that the Lord tallies up the amount of money that he sent my way, and I see it is actually an astronomical figure – given all the years combined. And then He shows me how much of that money I spent on the here and now, some essential, some not essential but important, some not important but justifiable, some frivolous, and some pure waste. And then He shows me what percentage I spent on what is permanent and I see it is a tiny fraction of what he sent through my hands. I won’t be able to argue with those figures. They will speak in their numbers of what I loved, what I believed in, what I valued. I don’t want that, and neither do you. So before God, as someone that He has given more money than just your daily needs – are you spending on what is permanent? Are you distancing yourself from the unrighteous rich by spending on what will survive the coming judgement?

II. The Unrighteous Rich Will Be Judged For Profiting By Other’s Loss

James 5:4,6 Indeed the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. You have condemned, you have murdered the just; he does not resist you.

God is not only displeased with the unrighteous rich for their temporal, earthly focus, He is displeased with them for how they exploited and oppressed the poor and the righteous. Verse 4 describes a practice that was going on in ancient times and still is today. God warned Israel:

Leviticus 19:13 “You shall not cheat your neighbor, nor rob him. The wages of him who is hired shall not remain with you all night until morning.”

Deuteronomy 24:15 “Each day you shall give him his wages, and not let the sun go down on it, for he is poor and has set his heart on it; lest he cry out against you to the LORD, and it be sin to you.”

The poor man was counting on being paid at the end of the day – it was his only chance to buy his one meal for the day. But the wicked wealthy wants to earn more interest on his hoard, or sometimes just wants to get work for free. And just as it happened then, it happens now. The millionaire constructionist hires some guys on a Friday to do brick-laying. They haven’t eaten, and he agrees to give them R150 each. At the end of the day, he is too lazy to have gotten to the bank to draw money, and says to them – come back Monday, and I’ll pay you. He hopes they won’t come back, so he could profit off their backs. Sometimes, he has no intention of paying them, and knows that with his superior wealth, there is nothing they can do about it.

You see the powerful business that promises to buy a huge order from a little company. So the little guy goes and places a massive order by taking out a loan. Then the big business comes to him, and says, “You know we don’t really want this, anymore.” The man is bankrupt, and has to sell his stock at any price to cover his financial ruin. The big business comes back and buys the stock at bottomed out prices, knowing all along what they were doing.

The wealthy man asks for a special product – some software, or a special renovation, or custom-designed gadget. The one making it says it will take 4 months of work. The rich man gives him a little deposit, and he scrapes through. And after four months, he takes the product and pays nothing, and the worker is ruined.

Verse 6 – He condemns, he murders, and the small man cannot resist him. And can the day-laborer, or the small business, or the individual contractor, afford the lawyers, and the time it would take to get his money? He can’t, and the unrighteous rich know it. In fact, they use their crooked lawyers to threaten and punish the honest merchant.

Does God see any of this? Verse 4 says that the unpaid money cries out, the cries of the unpaid labourers have reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth – that is the Lord of Hosts, the Lord of armies, the great and powerful One, the avenging One. God is very displeased with those who use the money He gave them to manipulate and exploit the weak and the helpless.

III. The Unrighteous Rich Will Be Judged For Living in Self-Indulgence

James 5:5 You have lived on the earth in pleasure and luxury; you have fattened your hearts as in a day of slaughter.

This is the lifestyle of the unrighteous rich and famous. They spend their given days on Earth, with their given wealth in self-indulgent, sumptuous living. You have pleasured yourself in every conceivable way, you have refined your pleasures and your indulgences into an art form. You have lived a life of obscenely extravagant selfishness, you have lived in riotous revellings.

The image is like a calf being fattened up for a feast. It is being fed, and while it is being so overfed, we can imagine the calf is feeling pretty happy and quite content. But it doesn’t know that it’s being fattened up for slaughter to become meat for others to enjoy. So the unrighteous rich thinks that his intensely selfish pursuit of his own pleasure is feeling good, but James says, it is really just making you all the more combustible for the fires of Hell.

God does not condemn enjoying creation. God does not condemn eating and drinking and rejoicing in your labour – Ecclesiastes commends that. God does not condemn pleasure – he is the author of it.

What God condemns is taking His gifts, when they are far too much for you to modestly consume on your own, and then finding a way to consume it on your own. Finding new and more expensive ways to pamper yourself and amuse yourself. There comes a point when we cross the line from moderation into excess, from temperance into dissipation, from being full to being gluttonous, from enjoying pleasure to gorging ourselves on it.

Proverbs 25:16 Have you found honey? Eat only as much as you need, Lest you be filled with it and vomit.

We must resist the worldliness that keeps trying to make us scratch where there is no itch, and create an itch, trying to get us to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to impress people we don’t know.

What we then do with the overflow, is we refresh others. We meet needs in the body of Christ. We read in 3 John this morning:

3 John 1:5-8 Beloved, you do faithfully whatever you do for the brethren and for strangers, who have borne witness of your love before the church. If you send them forward on their journey in a manner worthy of God, you will do well, because they went forth for His name’s sake, taking nothing from the Gentiles. We therefore ought to receive such, that we may become fellow workers for the truth.

That’s exactly why believers love moderation. We know when we live moderately, we will have more left over to refresh the Body of Christ.

Take John Wesley for example – one of the great evangelists of the 18th century. In 1731, he decided to limit his expenses so he could give more to the poor. In 1731, his income was 30 pounds a year, which is around 6000 pounds today, adjusted for inflation, or R138 000. That was certainly enough to live on then and he found he could live on 28. In his long life, due to his royalties through his books and songs, he sometimes earned as much as 1400 pounds in a year, which would be around 281 000 pounds or around R6.5 million. But, he rarely, if ever, allowed his expenses to rise above 30 pounds. His lifestyle did not have to expand to match his income. It so baffled the English Tax Commissioners, that they investigated him in 1776. Of course, they could find no wrong. When he died in 1791, the only money he mentioned in his will was the coins in his pockets and dresser. He had given away most of the 30 000 pounds that he had earned in his life.

You don’t have to copy Wesley exactly, but you can copy the principle. We don’t have to all live at the same standard, drive the same cars, wear the same clothes. But as Christians, we want to distance ourselves from the Unrighteous Rich, who live on the Earth in luxury and pleasure, and indulge themselves without conscience. Enjoy how God has prospered you, eat enough honey to be full, reinvest your profits, but at some point, say with Paul, Indeed I have all and abound. I am full, (Philippians 4:18). Now, how can I use this blessing, to be a blessing?

You don’t want to be near the Unrighteous Rich on the day of Judgement.

Luke 6:24 “But woe to you who are rich, For you have received your consolation.”

The unrighteous rich will be judged for their temporal investments, their exploitation of others, and their self-indulgent excess.

This should not be named amongst the saints. In fact, if you are believer, you will not be judged at the Great White Throne Judgement for sinners. You will be judged at the Judgement Seat of Christ, the Bema seat, which is the judgement not of our sins, but of our life and service and work and stewardship. On that day, every one of us who has been born from above will be judged, and we will stand there not in clothes we have bought, but clothed in garments of white that He has provided. None of us will have more money than another as we await Christ’s judgement. But after the judgement, some believers will walk away richer than others. Some believers will receive more rewards, and some less. And that will then be your permanent wealth for an eternity.