Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Chapter 5, verse 1.

Oh, this is going to offend some people, but hey, it's St. James.

What are you going to do?

Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you.

I've said before that you get a lot of folks who want to say we take everything in the

Bible literally and you get to that place where Christ says go sell everything you have

and give it to the poor and become my disciple and all of a sudden people are

like well you well uh there's all the reasons why that doesn't that doesn't apply to me

well here we go again um so this is not this is not class envy right this is not this is not this is the way sometimes

this gets built any any any criticism of the wealthy in our modern society often gets

billed as oh this is jealousy, this is envy, right?

But chapter five here comes after chapter four that we just read.

So St. James is not now contradicting himself and teaching envy, right? So how did you get rich at that time in history? Were there a lot of people

getting rich by not participating in the world system that existed at that time? Right. Yeah,

you didn't go and work hard as a fisherman in Galilee and become incredibly wealthy that did not happen right field work was not going right working with your hands was not going to get you rich there you're right there's no nothing like that in this uh in the the the is pre-futal even economic system right

that is not how one became wealthy so if someone became wealthy you became wealthy

by the means described above by wedding yourself to the world by doing things the way the world

does things,

right, by collaborating with evil, essentially. And I'm not saying that to say, well, so now it's

fine for people to be obscenely rich, right? Because it is not fine as we're going to see as we go forward, right? This is,

...