We're going to read James chapter five, verses one to six. So just a few verses once again today. James chapter five, reading from verse one, this is the word of the Lord. Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.

Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. 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. Behold, the hire of the labourers 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. You have lived in pleasure on the earth and been wanton. You have nourished your hearts as in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and killed the just and he doth not resist you. Amen. May the Lord bless to us this reading from his word. How stark, forceful, and fearsome are Scripture's warnings of everlasting judgment. I testify to you today upon the authority of God's word. If you are outside of Christ, you are going to hell. If you are without a saviour, you cannot inherit eternal life.

If you are rich in your own self-righteous estimation, you will, as James tells us here, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. If I believed in creature power, I would plead with you to flee the wrath to come. I would implore you to seek forgiveness with God. I would beg you with tears if necessary, not to push God's patience a moment longer when the cost of your refusal is an eternity of separation and suffering. I say again, if I believed it would make any difference at all, I would beg you to come to Christ.

But you will not, you cannot, except the Lord change your heart and quicken your spirit. If the terrors of law and of God, if the horrors of hell and the testimony of God's own words do not shake your proud self-worth, what hope have I of altering your opinion?

You're convinced, you're sure, that you have no need of a saviour. You're content to take your chances with the great mass of careless men and women who live in denial of their personal accountability before the holy God. And what can I possibly say to change your mind?

Nothing. But I tell you this, the Bible is clear. When you die, as you will, in your sin, you will enter God's presence without a friend. And God the Lord, God the Lord of Sabaoth, God the Lord of hosts, will say to you, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. I never knew you. Depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

This judgment, this sentence, this condemnation, It is set out in God's Word so starkly, so forcefully, so fearfully, as to be impossible to miss. And I have no doubt that it is coming, and it is coming fast. And here James adds this testimony to the rest of the Word of God. Go now, he says, go to now, ye rich men.

Weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered and rust, the rust of them shall be a witness against you and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. This is the certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation which Hebrews chapter 10 talks about.

And let me speak to you, child of God. These words from James are mocked by the worldly wise. They're considered a foolish tale something to scare the children with, a joke for the carnal man to laugh at. But to you who have faith, to you who are saved, they are evidence of God's holiness and evidence of the wrath from which you've been saved. They describe what your Savior endured for your redemption, what he gave of himself for your spiritual life. And they are a testament to sovereign, distinguishing grace. James has set this awful prospect of hell and judgment before the church, not to frighten us, not to shake our assurance, not to cause us anxiety, but to confirm to us what we have been delivered from.

I am sure that with me you sometimes wonder, what heaven and hell will be like. My, there are so many that we hear of every day who through death enter into heaven or hell. How can it be that we cannot wonder about these things? Heaven will be wonderful life with Christ.

Hell makes me shudder. But while you and I as believers recoil from hell's horrors, And I've said this before and I'll say it again. It is only you and I as believers who truly understand hell's horrors. There will be no understanding of the horrors of hell until the unbeliever is experiencing it for himself.

But while we recoil from what scripture teaches us about what is in store for the unbeliever, let every mention of hell provoke us to thank the Lord for bearing our hell in his own body and in his own soul. Every view As Mr. Watts was directing us there in thinking about our worship, every view of heaven's blessing and every glimpse of hell's curse ought to be a double promoter of worship, praise, and gratitude from Christ's redeemed people for God's electing grace.

We're going to be thinking today of what James has to say about this Lord of Sabaoth and why he would use that term and what he would mean by it. And that's what I'm going to think about now. But let us, let us take these solemn words that the apostles and our Lord And the Old Testament as well we're aware of and let us take them and understand the seriousness of what they speak about and how blessed we have been to have been delivered from them.

So the Lord of Sabaoth. Let me just say, and then it's said, this word sabiath is nothing to do with Sabbath. So the Lord of Sabiath is nothing to do with Sabbath. It's a title of God, nothing to do with the Sabbath day. The Lord of Sabaoth is a title. This is who James is speaking about, who he introduces us to in these verses today. The Lord of Sabaoth is simply the Lord of hosts. So when we read that, the Lord of Sabaoth, we are to think the Lord of hosts, the Lord of the armies.

And James uses this phrase to draw the church's attention to the absolute power and authority of her holy, sovereign, covenant God. This is a wonderful title that James is bringing to our attention here. He is drawing our attention to the absolute power and authority of our holy, sovereign, covenant God. It's a grand name, a glorious title by which the Lord has revealed himself to his people for our encouragement and for our faith, to strengthen and reassure our faith. And specifically, James is telling us that our God will deliver judgment and justice for his put upon people. Now, I think a little earlier I mentioned accountability, but there is a day coming. There is a day coming. Let all of us be aware of it. A day of reckoning.

The old preachers used to call it the great assize. And assize was a time when a judge would come into the town and the assizes would take place. And those that had been convicted or those that had to be judged would be judged and convicted. People would have disputes resolved. That was called the assize. But the great assize is what the old preachers used to call the day of judgment, the great judgment day that is coming.

And Christ's redeemed people on that day will be saved upon the merits of Christ's substitutionary atonement. And the lost upon that day will be separated and condemned to hell and a lost eternity. On that day, the last day of this world, the Lord of Sabaoth will go forth in righteous judgment for his persecuted people whose cries for deliverance and for help have come up before him. and entered into his ears. Now I mentioned there Christ's redeemed will be saved upon the merits of Christ's substitutionary atonement. And I'm going to spend a couple of minutes on that little phrase right now and I'm going to explain it so that no one can accuse me of using words that are not clearly understood by the youngest and the simplest amongst us. Christ's redeemed people on that day will be saved and delivered upon the merits of Christ's substitutionary atonement. To redeem means to buy back.

And on the cross, our Lord Jesus Christ bought back the lives of all for whom He died. All those that had been given to Him by His Father to save. The Lord Jesus Christ came into this world to do the work of His Father. And that work was to save the people God had chosen from their sins.

And a transaction took place at the cross. A price was paid. Yes, the Lord Jesus Christ died on the cross, but it wasn't just that He was put to death. by the Jews and the Romans, the people that were present there, the authorities in the land, there was something much more significant, something much more dramatic taking place when the Lord Jesus Christ died. A transaction of eternal significance. A price was paid and a people were purchased. Or, to use the word that we used before, they were redeemed. Christ didn't buy these people back with money. He bought them back with his own life. He bought them with his life's blood. He shed his own precious blood to redeem God's chosen people from their sins.

And substitutionary atonement is just another way of saying the same thing. In dying, the Lord Jesus gave his life for the lives of others. He took the sin of God's chosen people and he carried it on his own shoulders and he suffered for it in his own body. He took our place as our substitute and he died to make atonement for our souls before the Lord. When he died, our sins were atoned for.

Christ took God's judgment against our sin and he reconciled us to his Father. That's what atonement means. We are reconciled to the Father. We are made at one with the Father. Everything that separated, everything that formed a barrier that made a gulf, that put a division between those for whom Christ died and the holiness of God was taken away by the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that's what substitutionary atonement means.

Christ took God's judgment against our sin and reconciled us to his Father. And now all the sins of God's elect are forgiven and taken away. They're taken away in Christ, and all for whom Christ died have peace with God. That is what it means when we say Christ redeemed his people and that we are saved upon the merits of his substitutionary atonement. In dying, the Lord gave his life for us.

And when that great assize comes, when that day of judgment arrives, The Lord's people will have no sins to answer for because all their sins were taken away and placed on the shoulders of their Saviour, and He made substitutionary atonement for them. They will be taken into the presence of the Lord, but those who are still in their sins, the wicked, There will be a division and a separation will be made between those whose sins are forgiven and those whose sins are not forgiven. The redeemed of the Lord will be taken into the presence of God, and those whose sins remain will be separated from ever from God, and they will be judged in hell. And it is these ones that James is addressing in this opening verse when he says, It is possible that James has in mind some false professors in the congregations of the Lord's people whom he knows personally to have exploited the brethren and misused their influence to enrich themselves to the heart of poor believers. And it is certainly true that rich church members can exert more influence than they should in a local congregation and thereby govern the lives of others inappropriately.

The example that James provides in these verses of withholding proper wages from the harvest reapers is emblematic. It's a picture. It's not designed for someone to say, oh, well, that doesn't include me then because I've never withheld wages from harvest reapers. It's an emblem. It is symbolic of any kind of financial injustice or imposition. It's a picture of any kind of sin. But remember, it is a picture, an example that is to be spiritually applied. It isn't just rich people who sin, poor people sin too. And Christ has spoken of those and to those who were rich, not in monetary terms, but in their own esteem and in their own self-worth.

Remember the pride of the rich young ruler? It may well be that he was a rich man, certainly. That was a way of conveying these truths that the Lord used. But the rich young ruler is showing to us why these riches were seen to be an important vehicle for describing this situation. Riches were seen as a blessing. If a man was rich, it was because God had blessed him. It was because he must be better than everyone else.

God is looking upon him favorably. God is looking upon him and blessing him with much of this world's goods. That's the reason why when the rich young ruler turned away sorrowful that the disciples thought it must be impossible. If this man can't be saved, who then can be saved? The Lord Jesus Christ had to tell them that with a man it was impossible, but with God all things were possible. Again, speaking of that free sovereign grace which he gives to sinners. The Lord is telling us it isn't earthly riches, but spiritual riches in Christ that are a mark of God's blessing.

Those who are rich in their own eyes, will never enter heaven. Those who are rich in their own eyes will never enter heaven. They trust in their uncertain riches instead of trusting in the Lord. In Matthew 19 verse 23, Jesus is speaking to his disciples and we read, Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. A rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.

The natural man says, happy are the rich. They have all the privileges of this world. The Lord says, happy are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the next world. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. This is the great division that there is between the men and women of this world. Those who are rich in their own estimation, rich in their own self-righteousness, rich in their own ability, trusting in themselves, and those who are poor in spirit because they have been made to see their own inadequacies before a holy God and made to rest on the richness which is spiritual and that only Christ can give.

As I say, it may be that James had a particular individual or group of individuals in mind. But I think it seems more likely that it's not only members of local congregations, but generally the rich and powerful men of the world who are being reprimanded in these verses for their abuses against the poor. They're being called out for offences against their fellow men and especially believers who are less inclined to fight back or go to court or cause trouble. Let there be no doubt, the people of this world will be held to account for how they have treated Christ's church. I don't think that is much grasped either in the church or certainly not by those outside of the church.

But don't be mistaken. The people of this world will be held to account for how they have treated you and me who are believers. Christ said, It is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were cast into the sea. It will be better on that day of judgment. It will be better at the greatest size. It will be better when the Lord of Sabaoth goes out in judgment. For one who has offended one of the Lord's little ones, a believer in Christ, if a millstone was hanged around his neck and it was dropped into the ocean.

A cup of water given for Christ's sake shall not be forgotten. Remember that from the beginning of this epistle, James has been encouraging the Lord's people to be humble. He has been encouraging humility and meekness in the Lord's people. He is going to add to that in the coming verses. We're not there yet, but a little bit further down in James chapter 5, he is going to be advocating for patience. So he wants to add to the church's humility and to its meekness, patience under affliction for the testimony of Christ. These are qualities, characteristics that ought to adorn the Lord's people. But woe betide those who take advantage of a believer's humility, of a believer's meekness, and of a believer's patience.

The crimes charged against these rich oppressors, the men and women of the world, of amassing and hoarding their riches. Again, these are examples. But it shows how that there is just a cumulative effect of the sins of men and women. They exploit the poor. and then they aggravate their wrongdoing by storing up their wealth for their own future use while others are in need. And the picture of rusting and corroding gold and silver and moth-eaten garments suggest that these goods are spoiled by the selfish hoarding.

Such men certainly were known to James in his own day. And to the other apostles, Paul tells us about the love of money being the root of all evil. And he says of some in the church, which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith. So there were those who coveted money in the church whose real desire was after wealth and who aggravated their accumulation of that wealth by denying it to their brothers and sisters in need. Paul says, they have pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

The Lord does not forget. The Lord takes note of these things. And James's point, I'm sure, is to convey that God keeps account and no offence against his people goes unseen. Every offence against the church is indeed an offence against Christ himself.

He is the head. That's where the feeling is. We get bruised in our hand or we get bruised in our foot, but where that pain is felt is in our head. And Christ is the head of the church, feels the pain of his body. He feels it with us. He is touched with the feeling of our infirmities.

Christ's church, the humble meek, are an easy target for greedy abusers. And throughout church history, Christ's true people have been mistreated and oppressed by Satan's followers who are in the thrall of mammon. And yet James tells us, the Lord of Sabaoth hears the cry of the just, the cry of the defrauded reapers. with every abuse and every victimised saint reaches God's throne and he will avenge his children. He will repay those who have harmed and hurt his little ones.

And he can. He is the Lord of Sabaoth. He is the Lord of hosts. It's a descriptive name for the covenant God who knows and cherishes and protects and saves his own dear people. For his great love we're with, he loved us. Our Lord shall deploy every host that is at his disposal for our good. I mentioned yesterday in the little note that the phrase the Lord of Sabaoth is used twice in the New Testament, once by Paul in Romans 9, 29, and here in James chapter 5. It's a transliteration.

And that just means it's a straightforward transfer of the Hebrew word for hosts into English. and it speaks of God's power and authority over all that is created and ordained. Christ is Lord of the angelic host of heaven. He doeth according to his will in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth. The Lord of hosts is Lord of the nations of the world. We're told in Revelation that he is king of kings and lord of lords. We're told in Proverbs the king's heart is in the hand of the Lord as the rivers of water.

He turneth it whithersoever he will. and even the demonic hordes serve at his pleasure, pleading with the Lord Jesus Christ to be allowed to go into the swine and then they ran off the cliff's edge. Our Lord Christ rules and overrules the affairs of men and he orders the providences of life so no crime can go unnoticed and no person will pass unjudged. The Lord sabaoth will do this. Paul tells the church at Rome, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath, for it is written, vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord. The Lord of Sabaoth will repay."

And here James accuses these wicked men of murder. That is the extent of their crimes, even the murder of the Lord's elect. James accuses them of murder and he speaks of some who cannot resist their crimes because they're already dead. Ye have condemned and killed the just, says James, and he doth not resist you.

Just blood has been unjustly spilled, and like Abel's blood, it cries to God for justice and retribution. Not retribution because the Lord's elect want to get their own back, but retribution because the Lord's elect want the holiness and the righteousness of God to be vindicated. They want justice to be done so that the holiness of God might be revealed. Justice is what their spilled blood shall have. For God is jealous of his church. He is jealous for his dear, beloved children. He has our interests at his heart.

Do you remember how frequently the Lord went forth and brought judgment on the enemies of Israel in the Old Testament? Anyone who harms the Lord's anointed touches the apple of his eye. And James's language predicts imminent destruction of the wicked who are ordained of old to this condemnation. Isaiah chapter 30 verse 33 tells us that. The Lord of Sabaoth will do it.

By writing to the church of this impending judgment of the wicked, the apostle, as I've said before, is not writing to frighten us. He is writing to remind Christ's people of who God is and of the mercy that he has shown towards us, of the grace that has distinguished between us and our neighbours, the grace that causes us to differ. Brothers and sisters, those of you who are listening today who have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, do not be discouraged. It is true that believers are often brought to tears by the hurt and injustice that fills this evil world. the inhumanity of man, flagrant abuse of power, self-interest, exploitation and domination of the poor by the wealthy, and perhaps of the church in particular, the destruction of the weak by the strong.

It has always been thus and it shall continue to be so until the day of the great assize. But there will be accountability. There will be justice. There will be righteousness and retribution. The Lord of hosts is holy and true and he is on our side. Just in closing, I'm reminded of the vision given to John in Revelation chapter 6. And I'm going to leave you with this thought.

John writes, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice. John not only saw them, he heard them. They cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? And we read this, And white robes were given unto every one of them.

And it was said unto them that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellow servants also, and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled. James says, Go to now, ye rich men. Weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.

What is the delay? When shall judgment come? Soon. When shall righteousness be accomplished? Soon. When will God's truth be vindicated and Christ's people avenged? Soon. Just a little season more until all things are fulfilled. then the Lord of hosts shall come in glory and time shall be no more. May the Lord bless these thoughts to us today. Amen.