Last 5 Days
A Serving on the Dining Table
1 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.
James 5 is the continuation of the concluding part of James 4 that mentioned how some people were planning to get rich on earth without a view of eternity. In short, James 5 is not condemning all the rich men but the rich men who do not think of eternity. They relied entirely on their wealth, thinking it would provide them with everything. They are ruthless towards their servants. These people will be greatly disappointed. Verse 5 tries to compare them to the household animals raised for food. You feed your pigs till they are fat enough so that you may slaughter them. So are these rich men who live to enjoy. They are only meant to be slaughtered. So do not think that you alone can enjoy your lives the way you want – the pigs also are enjoying their lives. They enjoy now so that they may become an enjoyment of others. So also, the pleasure of the rich now will end up as eternal suffering.
You may say, I am not rich, so this passage is not talking to me. Wealth is a matter of relative. I used to think that I was poor because I lived in HDB housing, did not have a servant, and was jobless. Until I went to China as a missionary, I realised I had been living a much better life than many others. So the above passage is also not talking about people of great wealth but people who live only for wealth on earth.
Sometimes, we work so hard to earn the first pot of gold so that we may serve God better after that. That seems to be a common excuse for many of us. We have both short term and long term goals. We will first achieve the short term goal before working on the long term goal. That sounds very fair. We did not realise that the two goals were in opposite directions. When we seek our first goal, we move away from our second. After we achieve the first goal, the second becomes immaterial to us. By then, we are as good as a serving on other’s dining tables.