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A narrated teaching walk through James 5:1–6 — about 38 minutes. Press Begin the lesson and the slides advance with the narration; or explore silently with the arrow buttons.
James 5:1–6 · A Teaching Walk Through the Passage
Come Now, You Rich
The Lord of hosts hears the defrauded laborer’s cry and has already sentenced the oppressing rich, whose hoarded wealth testifies against them.
Opening Prayer
Lord of hosts, who hears the cry of the laborer
Lord of hosts, who hears the cry of the laborer and keeps the tears of the poor in your book, we come before you with open Bibles and open hearts. This passage is a hard word, and we are tempted either to shrink from it or to aim it at others. Send your Holy Spirit to do neither. Search us. Show us where we have loved comfort more than justice, and where our possessions have become our security. Above all, reveal Christ to us here: the Righteous One who did not resist, and who now reigns as the Judge standing at the door. Through Jesus Christ our Lord we pray. Amen.
Where we are
James, Jerusalem, and the Dispersion
- Author and setting: James the Lord’s brother, leader of the Jerusalem church, writing c. AD 44–49 to Jewish believers scattered in the Dispersion — most of them poor.
- The city: Jerusalem, where James led the church until AD 62, when the high priest Ananus had him put to death; the city of the temple of the Lord of hosts.
- The letter’s shape: wisdom exhortation in the line of Proverbs and the Sermon on the Mount; 4:13–5:20 is its closing movement, governed by the nearness of the Lord’s coming.
- This pericope: the second and sharper of two “Come now” oracles — a prophetic woe spoken at the absent oppressor and written for the oppressed church.
Where we are
Jerusalem and the Dispersion
Where we are
The city of the Lord of hosts
The passage · ESV
James 5:1–3
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.
The passage · ESV
James 5:4–6
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.
The shape of the passage
The shape of the oracle
The shape of the passage
Five movements
- The Summons to Weep and Howl — James 5:1
- Rotted Riches and Corroded Gold — James 5:2–3
- The Wages That Cry Out — James 5:4
- Fattened for the Day of Slaughter — James 5:5
- The Righteous Person Who Does Not Resist — James 5:6
Section 1 — Key Insight · James 5:1
The Summons to Weep and Howl
- “Come now” (age nyn) repeats the summons of 4:13: the presumptuous merchant and the oppressing landowner are two faces of one worldliness.
- “You rich” are not the brothers but the oppressors of 2:6–7 — the class that drags the poor into court and blasphemes the name.
- “Weep and howl” (ololyzō) is the wail of the day of the Lord in the prophets (Isaiah 13:6); the miseries are already “coming upon” them.
- Calvin: James pronounces their doom rather than calling them to repent, so that the faithful may bear oppression with a quiet mind.
- The Judge whose coming makes them howl is Christ, who said, “Woe to you who are rich” (Luke 6:24).
Section 1 — Application · James 5:1
The Summons to Weep and Howl
- Let God’s verdict stand where ours would waver: the untouchable landowner is already summoned to his funeral.
- The wronged have a court no money can buy; the Judge at the door produces patience, not vengeance (Romans 12:19).
- Use the summons as a mirror: what is your wealth doing, where did it come from, and whom has it cost?
- A warning: wealth is not sin, nor every rich person cursed; the target is wealth gained by fraud, hoarded, and enjoyed in indifference to judgment.
Ask yourself: When you look at the wealthy and powerful in your world, do you instinctively regard them as secure, or do you see them as James sees them, already under a sentence that has been passed?
Section 2 — Key Insight · James 5:2–3
Rotted Riches and Corroded Gold
- Three prophetic perfects — rotted, moth-eaten, corroded — speak of the judgment as already done: “Fallen, fallen is Babylon” (Isaiah 21:9).
- Grain, garments, and coin are the three forms of ancient wealth, each matched to its own destroyer; Jesus named the moth and the rust (Matthew 6:19–20).
- Gold does not rust: the irony teaches that no treasure is beyond decay when God decrees it, and hoarded wealth is as good as spoiled.
- The corrosion (ios, also “poison”) will be evidence in God’s court, and then fire that eats the flesh (Zephaniah 1:18).
- Treasure laid up “in the last days” is the wrong treasure, in the wrong place, at the wrong time; the alternative is treasure where Christ is (Matthew 6:20).
Section 2 — Evidence · James 5:2–4
The witnesses
Section 2 — Application · James 5:2–3
Rotted Riches and Corroded Gold
- Lay up treasure in heaven: giving, hospitality, generosity to the poor, and support of gospel work (1 Timothy 6:19).
- Hoarding is a sin, not a missed opportunity: full barns beside hungry neighbors testify against us (Luke 12:18–20).
- “In the last days” reorders time: accumulation without purpose is unbelief in the shortness of the age (1 Peter 4:7).
- A warning: James does not condemn saving or provision for one’s household (1 Timothy 5:8); the target is treasure hoarded in defiance of need.
Ask yourself: Where in your life have you confused hoarding with stewardship, and what unused resource of yours would “testify against you”?
Section 3 — Key Insight · James 5:4
The Wages That Cry Out
- “Behold”: the laborers who mowed your fields work on estates, hired at dawn and dependent on the evening’s pay (Matthew 20:1–8).
- Withholding the wage is a covenant crime God promised to prosecute: Leviticus 19:13, Deuteronomy 24:15, Malachi 3:5.
- The unpaid wage cries out like Abel’s blood and Israel’s groaning in Egypt; the cry lodges a case in the court of heaven.
- Lord of hosts (kyrios Sabaōth) and “into the ears” come from Isaiah 5:9: Isaiah’s land-grabbers and James’s landowners stand under one oath.
- The Lord who hears has a face: Christ, who had nowhere to lay his head, counts what is done to the least of his brothers as done to himself (Matthew 25:40).
Section 3 — Application · James 5:4
The Wages That Cry Out
- Pay promptly, fully, and justly; never let a contract become a device for withholding what in equity belongs to the worker (Colossians 4:1).
- Train the ear: notice the migrant laborer, the underpaid caregiver, the worker whose overtime quietly vanishes.
- If you have been cheated and cannot obtain justice, your cry is a real prayer, and it is heard (Psalm 10:17); leave vengeance to God.
- A warning: this does not license laborers to defraud employers or work carelessly (2 Thessalonians 3:10), nor the church to take the role of the state.
Ask yourself: Whom do you pay, directly or indirectly, and are you certain they receive what justice, and not merely the contract, requires?
Section 4 — Key Insight · James 5:5
Fattened for the Day of Slaughter
- Luxury (tryphaō) is soft living; self-indulgence (spatalaō) is Paul’s word for the widow “dead even while she lives” and Ezekiel’s for Sodom (Ezekiel 16:49).
- “On the earth” marks a life whose whole horizon is earthly — the economic form of the earthly wisdom James has already condemned (James 3:15).
- To fatten the heart is to gorge like livestock; the beasts feed contentedly in the very day of slaughter, not merely before it.
- The phrase is Jeremiah’s (Jeremiah 12:3): the prosperity of the wicked is the fattening before judgment, not the reward of their ways.
- Christ stands opposite at every point: he came to serve, and was himself led like a lamb to the slaughter so that those who trust him are spared it (Isaiah 53:7).
Section 4 — Application · James 5:5
Fattened for the Day of Slaughter
- Examine appetite: luxury is a posture, not a dollar figure — a life organized around comfort, in which the poor are invisible.
- A fattened heart cannot hear (Isaiah 6:10); fasting, simplicity, and deliberate generosity keep it lean enough to hear the cry.
- Enjoy God’s gifts with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:4) — as pilgrims at a table, not cattle at a trough, with room for the poor.
- A warning: the passage does not condemn enjoyment or feasting; the sin was eating well in the day of slaughter, indifferent to the poor and to God.
Ask yourself: What does your pattern of spending and leisure reveal about whether your heart is being fattened or kept lean enough to hear the needy?
Section 5 — Key Insight · James 5:6
The Righteous Person Who Does Not Resist
- Three verbs without connectives — condemned, murdered, “does not resist” — fall like verdicts at the close of the oracle.
- The rich kill legally, through courts they control (James 2:6), as Naboth was murdered by a rigged trial (1 Kings 21).
- Jewish teaching counted withholding a poor man’s livelihood as murder; James has already bound the whole law together (James 2:10–11).
- The righteous person is the poor believer of Wisdom 2:10–20 — and the title belongs first to Christ, “the Righteous One” (Acts 3:14).
- “He does not resist“: the non-retaliation of the faithful; the same verb in 4:6 hints that the one they do not resist will be resisted by God.
Section 5 — Application · James 5:6
The Righteous Person Who Does Not Resist
- Suffer injustice as the righteous person does: refuse the oppressor’s weapons, use lawful means, entrust the outcome to God.
- Legal harm is still harm: profit through structures that crush the weak is murder in God’s sight, even when courts approve.
- Honor the poor in the assembly as heirs of the kingdom (James 2:5); their cause is Christ’s own.
- A warning: “he does not resist” is not passivity, nor a bar to seeking justice (Proverbs 31:8–9); never counsel the abused to stay in harm’s way.
Ask yourself: When you are treated unjustly, do you respond as “the righteous person” who entrusts himself to God, or do you reach for the weapons of the oppressor?
The throughline · James 5:1–6
Two courts, one Judge
For discussion
Questions for the group
- When you look at the wealthy and powerful in your world, do you instinctively regard them as secure, or do you see them as James sees them, already under a sentence that has been passed?
- If someone read James’s summons, “weep and howl,” over your own possessions, what would you have to weep about?
- Where in your life have you confused hoarding with stewardship, and what unused resource of yours would “testify against you”?
- How does knowing that we live “in the last days” change what you are saving for and why?
For discussion
Questions for the group
- Whom do you pay, directly or indirectly, and are you certain they receive what justice, and not merely the contract, requires?
- When you have been wronged and cannot obtain justice, do you bring your cry to the Lord of hosts, or do you take matters into your own hands?
- What does your pattern of spending and leisure reveal about whether your heart is being fattened or kept lean enough to hear the needy?
For discussion
Questions for the group
- How can you enjoy God’s good gifts with thanksgiving while living as one who knows this is “a day of slaughter”?
- When you are treated unjustly, do you respond as “the righteous person” who entrusts himself to God, or do you reach for the weapons of the oppressor?
- Are there ways you benefit from arrangements that harm the weak while remaining entirely legal, and what would James call them?
Closing Prayer
Righteous Father, no cry of the oppressed is lost in your ears
Righteous Father, we thank you for the truth revealed in these verses, and for the assurance that no cry of the oppressed is lost in your ears. We confess the sins this passage has exposed: our trust in what rots and corrodes, our indulgence in a world under sentence, our deafness to those whose labor we enjoy. Forgive us for the sake of Jesus Christ, the Righteous One who did not resist. Grant us grace to pay what we owe, to loosen our grip on what we have hoarded, and to bear injustice with the patience of those who know the Lord is at hand. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
James 5:1–6
The ears of the Lord of hosts
The Lord of hosts who heard the cry of the harvesters is the Righteous One who was condemned and murdered without resisting, and the Judge at the door is the Redeemer who bore the day of slaughter for all who trust him.
The full study, the summary handout, and more passages are at thebereantable.com — examine the Scriptures daily (Acts 17:11).
Keyboard: ← → slides · space play/pause · T transcript. Scripture quotations are from the ESV®.