The Danger of Misplaced Trust

James 5:1 – 6

 

Trust falls have always been a scary concept for me. The idea of falling back and someone catching me always made my heart rate tick up a bit. That might have been directly influenced by the fact that for much of my life I’ve been a rather heavy person.

 

However, when I was at my lightest weight, probably since I was a teenager, I placed my trust in the hands of three of my good friends on Father’s Day in 2023. I had to trust that they wouldn’t drop me, especially Mark there holding my upper third.

 

They didn’t drop me, and Julie got a couple of pictures and a video of the momentous event. I was in good hands, but it does make one reflect on where, who, or what we place our trust in. As Christians, believers are called to place their trust in God, to trust in the saving work of Jesus Christ.

 

Reality, however, can often be a bit different. All too often people, even Christians, find themselves placing their trust and hope in anything but God. Too often believers place undue trust and hope in the government to deliver them from their struggles, instead of God.

 

Believers will often place their hope for a good marriage in their spouse, rather than both putting their trust in Christ. Many will place their trust in themselves, believing themselves to be masters of their own domain. And many will place their trust in their wealth, their money and their possessions.

 

The Bible has much to say about trusting in wealth and possessions and misusing them as well. Both testaments speak to this, a lot. Throughout history, the people of God are consistently oppressed and mistreated by the wealthy, and just as often the wealthy committing oppression and mistreatment are also people of God.

 

True to his character, James doesn’t shy away from calling out the wealthy among the body of believers. He’s already taken a few shots at them in his letter.

 

In 1:10 – 11, James said the rich should boast in their humiliation because they would pass away and wither like a flower in the scorching sun, and in 2:3 – 6 he called out the church for showing partiality to the rich, who are the ones who oppress the poor believers and drag them to court. So, let’s take a look what James has to say in our passage today. Let’s read God’s Word together: James 5:1 – 6.

 

 Of all the New Testament passages about the sins of the rich, James 5:1 – 6 stands out. You would have to go back to the Old Testament prophets’ condemnations to find comparable declarations against the rich among the people of God. Think of Hosea, Amos, Micah, and Joel to name a few.

 

How could professing believers in Jesus Christ have fallen into such a spiritual condition? James has drawn the distinction that believers who give in to the temptation of bitter envy and selfish ambition end up giving into the temptation of friendship with the world.

 

Envy creates its own worldview that is contradictory to the Bible, to the biblical worldview. Envy leads a person to justify any action to gain more wealth. One of the richest men in history, at one point the richest man in America, and America’s first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller was once asked how much money it takes to make a man happy. He answered, “Just a little bit more.” (https://breakpoint.org/just-little-bit/).

 

The worldview created by envy will rationalize the evil consequences and outcomes of anything done in the name of selfish interest. The picture here in James is awful, and even though most Bibles give this section a header that says, “Warning to the Rich,” this is not just a warning.

 

James doesn’t explicitly make a declaration of about the unjust rich having no hope of redemption, but he also doesn’t offer any words of hope to them either. Those wealthy believers who were living in the world and for the world were committed to their wicked ways, and as James put in 4:4, “You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.”

 

• Watch out for self-deception because it leads to sin and judgement.

Like he did in the last section about those who boasted about their self-fulfilled futures, James sets a sharp confrontational tone here too by starting with “Come now, you rich.” From the get-go, James is being crystal clear here, he’s calling out the rich who profess to be Christians but live like the rest of the pagan world.

 

Only certain passages in the Gospels come close to anticipating the kind of declarations made here by James. “Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’” (Matthew 19:23 – 24).

 

Also, Luke 6:24, “But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.” What James says here is much harsher than Jesus’ warnings and harsher than the classic warning from Paul in 1 Timothy 6:10 about the love of money. “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”

 

Paul also warned Timothy in 2 Timothy 3:1 – 5, “But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.”

 

That warning from Paul to Timothy comes close to what James is saying to the church here. James sees his day as the “last days.” James addresses them as “you rich” instead of brothers. Whatever appearance these people had that suggested Christian faith, their actions were so worldly and destructive that the truth about them could only produce the righteous indignation you see here from James. Their actions contradicted their own faith.

 

The harsh rebuke is real. But James still does believe them to be believers even though they’ve compromised their beliefs. Were they in danger of missing salvation? No, if they really believed. Real believers don’t go on acting in the ways James goes on to list in our passage today.

James calls on them to weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon them. The language of weeping and howling, or wailing, was also used in 4:9 in talking about how believers should grieve over their sin when they repent. There’s the little nugget of hidden hope in James’ rebuke.

 

When believers who are living in sin are confronted with it, they ought to repent and grieve their sin. In the case of our passage today, the rich believers who have been awful towards their poor brothers and sisters in Christ out to grieve over their sin and repent. If there is genuine faith, and they’re still breathing, there is still time to repent and do the works of true faith. Otherwise they will be grieving over their final judgement.

 

• Don’t place your trust in an illusion of security that consumes people in the end.

 

James points out the truth about greed and selfish hoarding of wealth here. Riches rot; moths eat clothes. Gold and silver corrode. These are the things that wealthy believers placed their confidence in rather than God.

 

The things of this world that carry any real value are the things that last. Land, buildings, fields of crops and trees, homes, and gold and silver, these are things that carry with them intrinsic value in this world because they last for some time.

 

            Gold and silver, when refined and purified, shouldn’t corrode on this side of eternity. But James is declaring that in the final judgement, that gold and silver that rich believers trusted in because it doesn’t corrode, will indeed corrode and rust.

 

And more than that it will stand as witness against the rich. James personifies the corrosion. It will be the evidence of their folly in trusting worldly wealth over God. When standing before God they’ll look to their gold and silver, and it’ll be “Exhibit A” of where their faith was truly founded.

 

And more still, the rust corrosion won’t stop with consuming a person’s gold and silver. After the personified corrosion has completely ruined all the hoarded gold and silver, it turns on the wealthy themselves in the final judgement.

The rust is transformed in the judgement from a witness of guilt to an instrument of God’s wrath. It went from having a voice to testify to having a mouth that consumes the unjust rich. In the same way fire can be said to eat what it burns up; the corrosion will eat their flesh. That’s quite the picture.

 

It’s been a little over 15 years since my dad sold his herd and shut down his dairy. It’s been almost 8 years since he passed away, and almost seven since the farm was sold. Every year that goes by I see with my own eyes how foolish it was of me to even try to place my trust in worldly wealth.

 

I used to argue with my dad quite a bit, and it usually had to do with how he ran his business. He was a hard worker, the hardest worker I’ve ever encountered to this day. But he held on to his business and his property with white knuckles.

 

When we would fight over control, remember James 4:1 – 2, I would often point out to him that he wasn’t going to be able to take his farm with him when he died. Now, I wasn’t a born again Christian in those days but looking back I realized that I needed to take my own words to heart.

 

The business was sold, my dad died, and the farm got sold before I finally humbled myself and came broken before Christ and gave my life to Him. But over time God has shown me how trusting in something as truly fleeting as worldly success was quite foolish of me.

 

Almost every time I drive down Lander, I can’t help but glance at what’s left of the place that I called home for so many years. It’s not pretty. It’s bittersweet really.

 

I know had I fought harder for that and held on to it, trusting in that instead of trusting in God, it would have consumed me, like it consumed my dad. I probably wouldn’t be standing here before you today, fulfilling God’s plan for my life.

 

The person who has known God and experienced the eternal realities of the Christian life can look past the extravagant treasures of this world and see the underlying corruption behind them. Trusting in wealth because it supposedly keeps its value is trusting in an illusion.

The end of every life and the final judgement show that people and possessions are not durable, they don’t truly last. All wealth is perishable; none of it will survive the final judgement, so believers shouldn’t try to hoard it and hold on to it as if they could take it with them.

 

Instead, they should take Jesus’ teaching from His Sermon on the Mount, “But lay for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:20 – 21).

 

The deceptiveness of riches is dangerous for the soul of the believer because it will end up endangering many other people. When wealth is the result of selfishness and deceit, like the second half of our passage describes, its inability to last through the last days is a warning to those who store up treasure on earth of the destruction waiting for them.

 

• Don’t trust that unchristian actions will go unnoticed.

 

Here self-deception is clearly visible. Many wealthy people, believers included, who amass their wealth by improper, unscrupulous, dishonest, and unrighteous ways deceive themselves into thinking no one notices, or no one cares. Clearly, according to our Scripture, God cares.

 

James drives home his outcry against wealthy believers who mistreat their fellow believers who work for them. He tells them to look at what they’ve done, “behold!” Where the corrosion of gold and silver was personified earlier, now it’s the wages that should have been paid by that gold and silver that has a voice.

 

Leviticus 19:13 specifically addresses this issue, “Do not defraud or rob your neighbor. Do not hold back the wages of a hired worker overnight.” The wages that the rich believers held back from the workers who labored in their fields cries out against them. The wages were due, and these wealthy Christians were holding them back, making excuses, committing fraud against fellow Christians.

 

When Christians do business with unbelievers, they often keep in mind the possibility of being cheated. But when Christians do business with Christians, they often expect the other to behave like a Christian. Clearly, these believers James was addressing were not conducting business with Christian principles.

James escalates the cry of those suffering injustice. From the wages crying out, James then says the cries of the harvesters themselves had reached the Lord of hosts, God Almighty Himself. Understand that the Lord of hosts is an OT name for God, He is the Lord of the Armies.

 

The Lord of hosts heard his people’s cry, like He heard Abel’s blood cry out from the ground when his brother Cain murdered him. The Lord of the Armies heard His people’s cry, like He heard the cry of the Israelites enslaved in Egypt before He delivered them from there.

 

And the Lord of hosts will deliver his people from injustice, even injustice committed by those who profess to be Christians. Injustice of His children did not, does not, and will not go unnoticed by God the Father.

 

The indictments from James keeping coming though. First the wages cried out, then the harvesters’ cries reached the Lords ears. On top of that, the lifestyle of the rich indicts them. Their heartlessness is seen in how they have continued to live a life of extravagant luxury, while they neglect to even pay their fellow believers their earned wage.

 

James calls them out for living in luxury and self-indulgence. Isn’t that normal life in America? Hasn’t the worldly culture today fundamentally oriented itself towards leisurely living? So many claim to work hard so they can play hard, but is that what God wants for His children?

 

James says they’ve fattened their hearts for the day of slaughter. Now there’s an illustration I can understand. It takes a lot of high energy feed to fatten a steer for slaughter. They get a steady diet of the good stuff, coupled with comfortable living, by bovine standards, to put on as much muscle and marbling as possible for slaughter.

 

They get to live high on the hog, as the wealthy James is talking about here. And he lands one last knockout punch here. He says they have condemned and murdered the righteous person by their actions.  

 

The vicious connection between idolatry, mercilessness, and murder becomes part of the guiding logic of James here as he sternly warned his hearers and readers. God, who opposes the proud (4:6), here does so by slaying them because, as seen earlier, “Judgement without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful” (2:13).

Not to have done what they knew they should have done was sin (4:17), and God would treat the oppressive rich as He treated all His enemies: destroying the destroyers of His people.

 

James ends this section here with three Greek words, five in English, “He does not resist you.” On the surface this is a statement of fact about the situation, but the poor, which made up the majority of the believers, should hear this promise so that they can develop a wiser response to the unjust rich and the injustice they’re experiencing.

 

Rather than envy them and covet the same perishable wealth that belonged to the rich, they should trust in God because what was theirs was God’s judgement.

 

The workers were right not to oppose or resist the injustice they experienced, “But I tell you, do not resist an evil person” (Matt 5:39). Their innocence became the final indisputable piece of evidence against the rich who had caused so many to suffer and even die by an unsatiable lust for more wealth.

 

Twice in the past week I found myself in conversation talking about Jesus’ Parable of the Talents. Christians are called to steward what God has gifted them with, not bury in the ground, or envy what another received, or worse abuse and trust the gift more than the Gift Giver.

 

Rightly place your trust in God, the Everlasting One, the Righteous Judge, the Forgiver of sins through faith in Jesus Christ.

 

No matter what your circumstance is in life, your trust is supposed to be in God the Father, in the saving work of Jesus Christ on the cross, and in the power of the Holy Spirit to enable you to live a righteous life characterized by Christian principles and obedience. Not in the things of this world.

 

And if you haven’t placed your trust in God, if you haven’t taken hold of eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ, talk to me after church, or talk anyone of the believers in this building or in your life. They can show you how to place your trust in the only One who you can entrust your life to.

 

Let’s pray.