• Title Page
• Pentateuch
• History
• Poetry
• Prophets
• Post Captivity Prophets
• Gospels, Acts
• Pauline Epistles
• General Epistles
  • Lesson 56: Hebrews
  • Lesson 57: James
  • Lesson 58: I Peter
  • Lesson 59: II Peter
  • Lesson 60: I John
  • Lesson 61: II and III John
  • Lesson 62: Jude
  • Lesson 63: The Revelation

“Ye have laid up your treasure in the last days,” is the way James 5:3, last sentence, should be rendered. How vividly it applies today! Are we not nearing the last days, and are not treasures heaping up in the coffers of the rich as never before? What three charges are laid against the rich here (James 5:4, 6)? Fraud, voluptuousness, injustice! How awful to think of these things under the cloak of Christianity! Or shall we say that James is here referring to the rich outside the Christian church altogether? It is difficult to say. Different readers will have different opinions as their experience leads them to think. Notice carefully, however, the judgments coming upon these rich people. What miseries indeed!

6. The epistle closes, however, as it began, with comfort for the tried and oppressed (James 5:7-20). What hope is set before the oppressed laboring men of that day (James 5:7-8)? How different, is it not, from the principle of the strike and the boycott? If the rich of our day be at fault, are not the poor equally so, the Word of God being the standard? What examples of long-suffering patience are set before them in James 5:10-11?

What closing recommendations and exhortations are now set before all concerning oaths (James 5:12)? Concerning heavenly-mindedness in the opposite experiences of life (James 5:13)? What specific directions are given concerning the sick (James 5:14-16)? What testimony to the efficacy of prayer is given in this last-named verse? How is it illustrated (James 5:17-18)? With what statement of the believer’s privilege does the epistle close (James 5:19-20)?

I Peter

We need not devote any time to the history of Peter who writes the epistle following that of James. He is readily identified as, in some sense, the leader among the twelve disciples, the story of whose life is given with such detail in the Gospels and Wilts of the Apostles. The last we read of him in the Acts he was laboring in Jerusalem and its neighborhood (Acts 10-12), but subsequently he seems to have migrated further to the east and south where we now find him, at Babylon, writing this epistle (I Peter 5:13).

He is addressing it to the “strangers” scattered throughout the different provinces of Asia Minor, an introductory form of address suggesting that of James’ epistle, and leading to the opinion that he wrote practically to the same class of persons, only perhaps a little later in time.