“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.