Henry Krabbendam - James - World Evangelical Alliance

(Burdick, 199, with reference to Is. 10:10; 13:6; 14:31; 15:2-3; 16:7; 23:1, 6,
14; 24:11; 52:3, 65:14; Jer. 2:23; 31:20, 31; Ezek. 21:17; Hos.7:14; Am. 8:3
and Zech. 12:3 13-21; Moo, 1985, 159; Brosend, 132). “The howls of rage
and the pain of the damned” appears to be their irrevocable lot (Martin, 173).
God has given up on them both as a group and as individuals. Their supposed
economic success is in the final analysis a total failure. Hence the howling
that accompanies their torment will be incessant (Zodhiates, III, 36, 38). Supposedly
the only reason that the wicked rich are introduced at this juncture is
to warn the oppressed faithful not to envy them or follow in their footsteps,
and to urge them by all means to respond to their own lot in life with calm
resignation and to anticipate God’s vengeance upon their oppressors (Calvin,
342). Christian reader, take courage about the demise of your oppressors and
be on your guard against duplicating their lifestyle (Tasker, 109)! A further
look at the identity of those condemned in this context seems to support this
exegesis.
Incidentally, in today’s modern economic setting they could stack up as
tycoons of business and industry who treat their laborers as serfs in their impersonal
companies, let them live in squalor in their housing projects, saddle
them with open sewers in their streets, require endless working hours in their
places of labor, and dump toxic wastes in their environment. From the perspective
of the proposed exegesis it could be tempting to surmise that James
would have thrown in his lot with the “messianic fervor” of revolutionary and
evolutionary socialism that insists on the transfer of all capital to the state
(communism) or most capital to the poor (socialism) to remedy these ills of,
if not blights on, society. However, this would overlook that the “siren call of
these “new messiahs” usually produces a society in which the gap between
the elite and the downtrodden widens, and at best a setting in which the rich
would still be rich and the poor still poor (So Phillips, 163).
Nevertheless, in spite of all this the thrust of James’ message is not quite
caught in terms of irreversible condemnation and judgment. That the tone of
James’ denunciation is stern can hardly be denied. It also can be conceded
that it may well be the “eleventh hour,” sufficiently late to make “howling” a
credible, possibly even pending, reality. But the notion that repentance is no
longer possible ought to be rejected. Unless it is specifically excluded, any
denunciation, however severe, must always and by definition be regarded as
an implicit summons to repentance (Is. 13:6; Am. 8:3, 9) (contra Manton,
400; with Keddie, 156, 182). This context is no exception (Nystrom, 268). In
fact, there is every reason to believe that the conclusion of the third section in
James (Jam. 4:7-10), which culminates in the withering universal summons to
repentance, specifically in the last five of James’ “ten commands” (Jam. 4:7-
10), sets at the same time the tone for the total range of practical godliness
729