Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. (2) Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. (3) Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. (4) Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. (5) Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. (6) Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.
When the Reader hath duly pondered the many solemn things, which are here said of the ungodly and unregenerate, if the Lord be his teacher, I venture to think that it will strike him, as it doth me, that there can hardly be a passage more tremendously alarming, to shew the folly, as well as sin, of the rich worldling, than what is here said. Nothing can be more clear than the Lord's design in it. The Holy Ghost is all along writing to the Church. His sole object is the instruction and comfort of the Church. In doing which, the Lord seems in these few verses, but still wholly in the Church's hearing, and for the Church's good; to turn to the unregenerate, and in this rousing apostrophe, to expostulate with them on their extreme folly. The images are finely chosen, being taken from the things which worldly men make their idol. Their contemptible nature is strongly expressed. The cobweb covering, and the canker even of gold, not only testify their folly, but become witnesses against them in the end, in that they could not use them themselves, neither would let others who needed them. But let not the Reader mistake, as if this address was delivered in a way of persuasion to them, but wholly for the benefit of the Lord's people. Every part and portion in the word of God, is done with an eye to the Church, And whenever the Lord the Spirit steppeth aside to represent the final end of the ungodly, ordained of old to this condemnation, it is with the express design, to impress upon the minds of the Lord's redeemed ones, by such awful repesentations, the nature of that distinguishing mercy vouchsafed them.