Santiago 1:11

(11) For the sun is no sooner risen . . .—Translate, the sun arose with the burning heat, and dried up the grass; and the flower thereof fell away, and the grace of its fashion perished. The grace, the loveliness, the delicacy of its form and feature—literally, of its face—withered and died away. Often must the Apostle have seen such an effect of the fiery-Eastern sun, scorching with its pitiless glare the rich verdure of the wilderness; and in his ear, perchance, was the cry of Isaiah (Isaiah 40:6-8):—

“All flesh is grass:

And all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.

The grass withereth;The flower fadeth;

Because the Spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it:

—Surely the people is grass.The grass withereth;The flower fadeth;

But the Word of our God shall stand for ever.”

So also (or, thus) shall the rich man fade away (or, wither) in his ways.—Not the rich brother, observe, is to fade thus, though his wealth will so pass away. The warning is rather (as in Mark 10:24) “for them that trust in riches.” Even “the mammon of unrighteousness,” well used, will make for us “friends that may receive us into everlasting habitations” (Luke 16:9). And he who, out of the possessions wherewith God has blessed him, “deviseth liberal things, by liberal things shall stand” (Isaiah 32:8). There seems, moreover, looking closely at the text, a special fitness in its exact words: for they mean that the rich shall perish in their journeyings for the sake of gain; and to no people could the rebuke apply more sharply than to the Jews, the lenders unto “many nations” (Deuteronomy 15:6), the merchants and bankers of the world. Nor can “the sword of the Spirit,” unsheathed from this Word of God (Ephesians 6:17), be without an edge for those of us in these latter times who err in the former ways.