“Ye have laid up your treasure in the last days.” These wicked rich have heaped up treasure like a thesaurus and in the end of the day have seen it turn to dust and ashes, crumbling between their fingers. There is no vault on earth secure against moth, rust, and thieves (Matt. 6:19). Those who set their hearts upon the wealth of earth are bound to come to grief. Pitiful is the state of the man “that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:21). The only wealth that lasts is riches toward God, and this is open to us all. The only wise use of money is in making friends who will welcome us (Luke 16:9) into the eternal tabernacles. The mammon of unrighteousness may be so employed. If it is not, one will find that he has simply treasured up wrath against the day of wrath, to be paid at last with compound interest (Rom. 2:5).
Wronged Workers (5:4)
The God of all the earth will do right. He is not deaf to the cries of those oppressed millions in the ages whose piteous appeals for elemental justice come to him. This is a terrible indictment of Jewish capitalists who withheld the meager wages of the men who gathered the harvests. “Behold, the hire of the laborers who mowed your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth out.” The hire of the laborers reminds one of the proverb, “The laborer is worthy of his hire” (Luke 10:7; 1 Tim. 5:18). The word for “hire” occurs sometimes in the sense of reward (e.g., 1 Cor. 3:8, 14), but the original idea is that of pay for work done (e.g., Matt. 20:8), and so here.
The word for laborer means any kind of workman, but it is common in the New Testament for agricultural workers. “The harvest indeed is plenteous, but the laborers are few” (Matt. 9:37). When the work is done, it is only simple justice for the workman to receive his pay, for the hungry mouths at home have to be filled.
In the Old Testament the cause of the workman was guarded with special care: “Thou shalt not oppress a hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy sojourners that are in thy land within thy gates: in his day thou shalt give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it ... lest he cry against thee unto Jehovah, and it be sin unto thee” (Deut. 24:14 f.). See also Malachi 3:5: “I will be a swift witness against ... those that oppress the hireling in his wages.” Tobit charges his son Tobias, “Let not the wages of any man, which hath wrought for thee, tarry with thee, but give him it out of hand” (Tobit 4:14). Sirach (34:21 f.) says, “The bread of the needy is the life of the poor: he that defraudeth him thereof is a man of blood. He that taketh away his neighbor’s living slayeth him; and he that defraudeth a laborer of his hire is a blood-shedder.” Certainly, therefore, the Jews were not without explicit teaching on this vital point of elemental social justice.
And yet these men “who mowed” (literally, “heap together”)[90] their fields had the sad experience of not receiving the wages, “of you kept back by fraud, comes too late from you” (Mayor). The word means to “fall short,” “be too late.”[91]
The honest laborers who form the foundation of our industrial system are not to be treated as beggars or hobos. They are not subjects for charity. They are the human element in the industrial problem. Blood is thicker than water and is more valuable than gold. The horror of war is that it treats men as fodder for cannon, regardless of the result to the man or those dependent on him.
This stolen pay “cries out” and ought to cry out, whether the hire is kept back after the work is done or whether the employer purposely squeezes the laborer down to starvation wages in order to make more money for himself. There is a just balance to be struck by which both capital and labor may receive fair remuneration. “The cries of them that reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.”
“The cries of the harvesters” (Moffatt) are musical when they sing together as they work, content with their wages and joyous in their work. But the cries here heard are of a very different sort. They are the angry, resentful outcries of men who have been wronged in their very souls by those who should have been their protectors and friends, those for whom the harvesters have worked. These men cry to heaven, and they ought to do so. Mayor notes four sins that cry to heaven: a brother’s blood (Gen. 4:10), the sin of Sodom (Gen. 18:20), the oppressed hireling (Deut. 24:15), and the cry of Job for justice (Job 16:18 f.). But men ought to hear the cry of the laborers before they become too clamorous. It is only right that social injustice should be rectified here and now and the transgressors punished.
The social test of modern Christianity is to do justice to the laboring men without doing injustice to the capitalists. The conditions of life must be made easier. If corporations have no souls, the men who toil at the forge have. Men are entitled to a bit of heaven here and now at their own hearth and home. Somehow, many of the laborers have come to feel that the churches do not sympathize with the struggles of the laboring classes to better their hard lot but fawn upon the very rich who sometimes grind the toilers to the earth. It is easy to be extreme and unjust to one side or the other. The main thing is to be faithful to God and man, to man as man. The poorest of men is worth more than a sheep, yes, than gold and silver. The soul is without price, and the soul dwells in the body. We must shake the shackles free from men and women who cry out to God. The Lord God of Sabaoth has heard their cries and will punish the offenders in due time, but that fact does not absolve us from our present duty in the midst of conditions that call for action. Wronged workers have a right to a hearing at the bar of public opinion. They will cry on until they are heard.