The Dangerous Trap of Wealth

There's a story of a man who was a regular at a very nice restaurant. The owner of the restaurant always did his best to please him. But one day, the man started complaining that he only received one piece of bread with his meal. So the waiter promptly brought in four slices. The man said, that's good, but it's not really good enough.

So the next night, he was given six slices with his supper. He said, that's good, but I still feel like you're being a little stingy. Even a basket full of slices the next day didn't stop the complaints. Finally, the owner decided to end this for good. That day, he had a colossal loaf of bread baked.

It took the manager and two waiters all their strength to carry this bread loaf to the table. And then when they laid it on that table, it took up five place settings. That's how large it was. They stood there and smiled, waiting for the man's reaction. The man took one look at the gigantic loaf of bread and said, so we're back to one piece of bread again.

When is enough enough? It's a very important question for us to think about regularly. When is enough enough? This morning, we're going to be dealing particularly with the question: how much wealth is enough? When are you comfortable enough?

What does it look like when you are? This topic, as I'm sure you understand, is one that makes most of us shift uneasily in our seats every time a preacher talks about money. But like it or not, the Bible, and especially Jesus, had a lot to say about money and its use. But today, we're not turning to Jesus to talk about those things.

We heard Him talk about in Luke 9 this morning already: what good is it to gain the whole world and forfeit or lose our soul? This morning, we actually hear not from Jesus, but from the brother of Jesus, James, who once wrote a letter to the Christian church and gave a lot of godly wisdom and advice on Christian living. We hear today what he has to say about wealth and the dangers of it. Let's have a look at James chapter 5, verses 1 to 6.

James chapter 5, verse 1: come now, you rich. Weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted, and your garments are moth eaten. 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. Behold, the wages of the labourers 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. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous person.

He does not resist you. So far, our reading. This is the word of the Lord. Strong words. First question we have to ask is: who is James writing to? Because this is obviously a group of pretty wicked sort of people that we're talking about, murder at one point here.

Who is James writing to? Well, obviously, this is found in an epistle, a letter that James, the brother of Jesus, writes. We're told at the beginning of the letter to the 12 tribes in the dispersion. Now, the 12 tribes is obviously a reference to the nation of Israel, the historical nation of Israel divided amongst 12 tribes. But James is not writing to the Jews.

He's writing to Christians. Secondly, the dispersion was traditionally the Jews who had been assimilated into all the surrounding countries in the Middle East. But again, this is not to the Jews sitting in those countries. This is to God's people, the church that are scattered all over. So James, on the one hand, is writing to the church.

But specifically, he is talking to and writing to people who are ungodly, people who are not followers of Christ, people who don't know God. And so you can say that James is writing to them through the church, through the witness, through the preaching, through the encouragement, perhaps, of the Christian church. And he's calling them to repent of their sin, of greed, and selfish ambition, and so on, and to turn to Christ. But while James is directing these words to people who don't walk with God, it is still important to remember that he is writing to the church. And he's writing it in such a way that Christians overhear his warning to those who walk far from God.

He writes for us to hear these words and to test our own hearts by them. And he gives us a series of examples and tests which boil down to this one overarching warning: wealth can be a dangerous trap leading to eternal destruction. Wealth can be a dangerous trap leading to eternal destruction. If you were to take a systematic approach to studying it, you discover that the Bible doesn't teach that money itself is an evil.

But rather, when it falls into the hands of those who don't have God as their king, it becomes extremely dangerous for them. Wealth isn't inherently evil, but if you don't live with God as king, it becomes a trap more often than not. Money is like fire. Used properly and under control, fire is a helpful tool. Used carelessly or with evil intent, it becomes a force that destroys life.

When combined with the fallen heart, money quickly corrupts, we're told by the Bible. That's why Jesus famously said in Matthew 19: after that rich young ruler said he went away sad because he couldn't obey Christ in the challenge of selling everything, giving to the poor, and then following Him. Jesus said, truly I say to you, it is difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. The disciples hearing this said, then who can be saved?

And Jesus replied: with people, this is impossible. But with God, all things are possible. We love that verse, don't we? But it's used specifically in relation to how impossible it is for rich people to accept Christ. In other words, Jesus says it takes nothing less than the power of God Himself to save us, to rescue us from the danger bound up in wealth.

And so James, like an Old Testament prophet of doom, begins his preaching against the evil of ungodly wealth. And this is how he opens his case. Come now, you rich. Weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted, and your garments are moth eaten.

Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. That's provocative language. And James makes the point of how foolish it is to pursue wealth that is temporary when judgement is eternal. It's often the case that people aren't rich because of their occupations and the added benefits of generating great wealth from those occupations. People are rich because they want to be rich.

And it's to those people who have money as their masters who soften the drive of their greed by saying that they simply do it to be comfortable. James warns that doing so is simply delaying eternal misery and hardship. In fact, the very thing they pursue for comfort here in life will be the thing that gives them eternal distress. James writes in a very different way to most of the other letters because he writes in a way or style that's called wisdom literature. You can read James as a Christian, and there's a hundred thousand different bullet points of things to do.

He writes in a very practical way. But you can absolutely see that the main aim here is to live a wise life, a godly life, and to avoid foolishness. The point is money won't buy you God's favour. Now the great danger about this wealth is that it easily becomes a trap that causes you to think that you don't need God. That's what great wealth does.

The money becomes a god in itself, and it is in this pursuit of wealth where you are willing to commit all sorts of atrocities, he will say later, that leads people to eternal destruction. It seals them in eternal destruction as they reject God. And so, with those opening words, in order to build his case about the foolishness of a heart that is gripped by a love for wealth, James identifies four ungodly uses of wealth. Have a quick look if you have your Bibles with you. Verses 2 and 3, the first ungodly use is hoarding.

The second one is cheating people out of money in verse 4. The third one is to live in luxury while disregarding the needs of others. Verse 5. And then in verse 6, the fourth one: harming innocent people for the sake of personal gain. Let's have a look at those four warnings briefly.

Don't hoard wealth, verses 2 and 3. When we talk about money in the Bible, it's important to point out that the Bible does command us positively to provide for our needs and the needs of our family. Paul himself writes in 1 Timothy 5:8, for example, very clearly: if anyone does not provide for his relatives and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. There's nothing wrong with providing for your family.

In fact, it's a divine command. But the danger of money is that it can so quickly move from being a tool to being the goal itself. How do you know whether it's controlling you? Well, one good question to ask is, can I be happy without it? So on the one hand, we should be wise about having enough money to look after our daily needs and the needs of our family, to pay the bills, to look out for emergencies, and so on.

But the Bible then has this overriding message that your money needs to be used for things like looking after the poor and the needy, looking after your immediate household, supporting the work of the gospel. Money is not supposed to be treasured above all else. Money is the tool to which you direct the things that you treasure. Hoarding wealth for its own sake is foolishness. When James says this, he has in mind rich people who have so much stuff.

He says that it is rotting in storage. What good are silos full of grain when you go to get a bag and it's full of mould? What good is a closet stuffed with clothes, he says, when you go to get something out of the closet, it's moth eaten? What good is the gold and the silver that you've buried in the backyard when you go to dig it up, it's corroded to dust? One of the deceptions we live under sometimes is that our money is safe.

That it's safe in the bank. But talk to an economist today about inflation. Go and talk to Werner about this. He works in finance. And he'll tell you that every country in the world is experiencing inflation just about, and that your money in the bank is losing value every day.

It's foolishness to think that your wealth is forever. It's foolish to think that you have control over it. Now, where exactly the balance is between wise financial buffers and the issue of hoarding, I can't tell you. And I've got savings. I think that's a good thing to have.

But I will say this: that often behind our desire for accumulation is either the sin of greed of just wanting more and more and more, or a faithlessness towards God in His role to provide for you your daily needs. And we're told this morning, don't corrupt your soul collecting junk that you will never use or need. Hoarding wealth and possessions is foolishness, says James in verses 2 and 3. Use the possessions that God has given you if He's legitimately given it to you. If you don't use them, you might just lose them.

Then we're given a second warning in verse 4, and it makes a lot of sense for us. Don't cheat people out of money. Now this verse might give us a bit of an idea of who James has in mind when he's writing on wealth. It seems that he's addressing wealthy landowners, farmers, agriculturalists. And here he addresses their cheating of workers out of wages.

So captivated are these landowners that they don't pay their moral obligation. They abuse their power in order to keep back wealth for themselves. What's worse is that there may be a thin veil of Christian faith over these farmers. James says that instead of their worship going up to God, it is the cry of the oppressed workers that reaches the ears of the Lord of hosts. God doesn't hear the farmers.

God hears the workers, and they're groaning under the oppression. Now, I'm guessing most of us here don't have employees. Most of us aren't wealthy landowners and farmers, but perhaps you are a boss. Perhaps you are a business owner. And so if you are, as a Christian, you should consciously wrestle with that idea: how much is a fair wage to pay?

Am I unfairly holding back something that does belong to my employees? I know that many of us in this church are immigrants, and we have all sorts of opinions on wages in this country compared to the wages of our home countries. In this church, I know we also have all sorts of views on economic theory about how good the free market economy might be and so on. But I hope we can also see the goodness of God where we live in a stable, law bound country where the scrutiny between a fair day's work and a fair day's wage is high. The scrutiny is high, not low, and that is a good thing.

Perhaps you might think that the tension between what is a good day's work and what is a good day's salary or wage, well, that might be a bit skewed, but at least we have protections. Why do I say this? Because when I think of the helplessness that is described here by James, of a landowner who can unilaterally decide, I'm not giving you what you deserve and keep it, that is a helplessness that I don't think any of us really understand. For them, there is no legal recourse. There is no fair work ombudsman.

You take what you're given and you keep your mouth shut or you go home hungry. And it is their groaning, says James, that reaches the ear of God. As you abuse your power, says James, you raise the arm of God against you who is about to strike you down in judgement. If your God hates that vile oppression, Christian, James tells us as we overhear it, if your God hates that vile oppression, so should you if you call on His name. Again, many of us aren't in positions that might tempt us to cheat people in this direct way, but I wonder if we think carefully about even the things we buy.

The cheap products we might get because somehow they've come to us very, very cheaply. We might have to think carefully about our Christian obligation towards the employees from which we buy, from the companies from which we buy our products. Something to think about. The third warning is in verse 5: don't get fat on luxury. Verse 5 reads: you have lived on the earth in luxury and in self indulgence.

You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. James says that the heart bent on accumulating wealth, even oppressing others, cheating others to get it, eventually gets fat on gluttony. It's interesting that James doesn't say your hearts have been hardened. It literally says you have fattened your hearts. Now that might have all sorts of interesting medical implications if you talk about calcification of the arteries and so on.

You have fattened your hearts. The NIV translates this as meaning you have fattened yourselves up for the day of slaughter. But I think the image more literally translated by the ESV is more powerful in that original phrasing. Their hearts have become fat off their self indulgence so that it's almost as if they've got a layer around their heart isolating them from a love towards God. Now this has come about, James says, from living in luxury.

The Greek word here is only used here once in the whole New Testament. This is the one time that it takes place, and it carries with it this idea of an opulent pleasure that has to do with sensuality. That luxury is all about good taste, good sights, good touches. Again, the Bible speaks positively about the pleasures of things like good food, even good wine. But there comes a point when it kicks over into something that is sinful and damaging.

We know so many times from scripture that drinking can become drunkenness. Eating becomes gluttony. And so here again, it's a classic case of good things, even luxurious pleasurable things that have become disordered and misdirected. You see, the problem with pursuing pleasure as an end in itself is that you always fail to reach it. Pleasure as an end in itself.

You always fail to reach it because pleasure is only ever really the byproduct of certain good activities. There's a problem in the human nature, however, that when you try to separate the pleasure from the act, to go after the act for its own sake, the pleasure inevitably becomes unsatisfying. And yet, for eighty years of your life, you can hop from one pleasure to the next believing that this time, I'm gonna get it. You buy one car. You think, no, I need a bigger car.

You buy one house, you think, I need a bigger house. You can so quickly jump from toy to toy to toy and we see that, I think, in Australia so often. The problem is that it is never found. The cycle in itself is addictive and hopeless, and it eventually almost always harms you. Indulge in too much food and you get diabetes.

Drink too much and you get liver cirrhosis. James says, don't fatten your hearts towards God. If you do, you lose sight of Him. You lose sensitivity towards Him even while you know that you have enjoyed His good gifts. So cut back, be disciplined, be self controlled, and let those pleasurable byproducts of the good gifts be the things that drive you back to God.

Don't get fat on luxury. And then lastly, verse 6, is probably the most intense example here: don't harm innocent people to protect your sin. James says, you have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you. Now some scholars will say that James is speaking here literally of murder, that these people that are being condemned by James have committed murder.

Others say that he is speaking figuratively, but the idea here is the same. A harmful outcome to an innocent person has come from a wealthy, godless person trying to maintain control over their wealth. Evil wealth, in other words, seeks to resist righteousness from correcting their evil, so they are willing to murder the righteous person who is standing in their way. We know of examples of this sort of dynamic happening in the Bible. Who doesn't know the story of David and Bathsheba?

In order to cover up his adultery, David orders Bathsheba's righteous husband to a suicide mission to get him out of the picture. That covering up of sin happens all the time. A baby is aborted to hide an infidelity. Numbers are fudged on the books to hide an earlier embezzlement. And in the case of verse 6 here, an innocent person is murdered who could offer no resistance to the power of this wealthy person simply because they wouldn't put up with the wickedness of this person bent on attaining that wealth.

Again, you read that verse, and it just seems so incredibly vile in broad daylight to think that someone could do this to protect their affluence. But I'm sure if we really thought hard enough about it, we can identify people that have done that. But we don't have to think too hard to remember also that the most righteous man, Jesus Christ Himself, was a victim of this similar violent violence. In order to protect their way of life, their wealth and power, the religious rulers of the time had Jesus crucified. Commentators say that there is some allusion to this in these verses.

In fact, amazingly, James himself, the brother of Jesus, was martyred in 62 AD by the Pharisees as well. The tradition goes that they threw him off the temple peak, and when he didn't die instantly, they hit him with stones and sticks till he died. The title that James was known by in the early church was James the righteous or James the just. And so, again, people are saying, maybe there's some prophetic allusions here to the life of James. He is an example of the righteous one murdered to protect sinful ways.

There obviously is a difference between James and Jesus, however, because James dies a righteous death for God and it shows the guilt of his enemies while Jesus dies a righteous death for us and removes our guilt. For examples: hoarding wealth, cheating people, getting fat on luxury, and harming others to cover up or protect our own sinfulness. These are all sins which seals the fate of your eternal destruction, James says. Apart from the intervening grace of God found in Jesus Christ, however, this is what your pursuit of wealth amounts to. But God in His grace, through James, through the church, even to these wicked people, has given us this wonderful perspective to live joyfully within the privileges and the responsibilities we've been given.

We're reminded this morning that if we have failed to treat wealth rightly, that we can know that Jesus is the truly righteous one, who did not resist us, did not resist the will of the Father even when He was sent to die for our failures. He died for our greed. He died for our inordinate pleasure and He died for our selfishness and vanity. He died for my love of wealth so that my riches may be found in heaven. Christians, our wealth needs to be carefully used as a tool, thoughtfully integrated with our faith, and then sometimes we need to ask questions that make us think.

So in closing, maybe just four questions for us to think about on our way home today. How do you know when you cross the line from prudent savings to greedy hoarding? Do you measure the value of money based on the world's standards or God's? Where can your wealth be used most effectively? And lastly, how well are you holding the tension between enjoying the pleasurable byproduct of God's good gifts versus chasing after the pleasure in and of itself.

Wealth can be a dangerous trap that leads to eternal destruction. So Christians, let's not fall into it. Let's pray. Lord, this is where the rubber hits the road for, I dare say, all of us. We are the wealthy ones.

We're the top of the top in percentage. And yet, Lord, it is so easy to hear these things and look over our shoulder and to think that it's directed to the guy next to us. Help us to act with wisdom, which is essentially what James is simply asking us to do, to be mindful and thoughtful and intentional about how we understand the good things You've given us. Help us to err on the side of generosity. Help us to love the kingdom and to seek to use all the tools at our disposal to build it, including our wealth.

And, Lord, help us to shy away from these things that may cause our lives to be shipwrecked, to lose our very selves if we're not willing to die to ourselves in order to follow You. And then finally, Lord, for some of us, perhaps, realising that we are very far from You and have never held You as the God of our lives, by the terror of Your coming judgement, move us to repent of our sin, to repent of our idolatry, to recognise that we are serving ourself or other gods, but not the living God. Help us to cast our trust and our hope on Jesus Christ, the righteous one, who did not resist, who was murdered, but did so in order for us to be forgiven and saved. Thank You, Lord Jesus, for that. And we pray that those who hear this might put their faith in You as well.

In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.