What About Today—and Tomorrow?
An Appeal for Priorities
An Editorial By Dr. Shelton Smith

“Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain:

“Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.”—Jas. 4:13,14.

Sometimes we quote these verses as a reminder of just how fragile and brief life is. It is entirely appropriate to look at them in terms of life’s brevity and its fragile nature. But the larger picture and the more precise meaning must be viewed in connection to the beginning of chapter 5. It is very much related.

“Go to now [the same beginning as 4:13], ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.

“Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.

“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.

“Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter.

“Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.”—5:1–6.

There are people in every generation and society who build their whole lives around the accumulating of assets. They’ll step on you or do whatever they need to do in order to achieve the goals they have set for themselves. They don’t mind putting somebody else down in order to make themselves a little wealthier. That kind of wicked greed is at the heart of what we’ve just read.

James pointedly tells the rich, “The time is coming when all you’ve put together is not going to solve for you whatever is going on in your life.” The fact is, you can “weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you, [but] your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.”

Everybody enjoys having money to spend, clothes to wear, homes in which to live and other such things. Whenever the Bible deals with such things in a negative context, it is not preaching against having those things—that’s not the issue. But it says they are wrong when those things become such an issue with us that we will do anything to possess them. When we build our whole lives with our eyes bugged out in anticipation of what we will get next, we are off track. “We’ll be on the top of the heap if we can just gain this and get that!” You probably know some people who, although they are not billionaires, nevertheless live as if they were. In fact, we all know people who go around acting that way who probably don’t have any more, maybe even less, than you have. And they say, “Oh, you can’t believe what I have now and where I’m going next!”

The Bible is here teaching that the miseries of life cannot be handled by your trinkets, your gadgets, your holdings or your bank account. When the major miseries come, you can weep and howl all you wish, but you’re going to feel the pain just as others do.

I’ve often said that a man can have a big bank account in every bank in town, but if he ends up in the emergency room, the chances are quite good that he is not going to say to the doctor, “You won’t believe the big deal I struck last week and how much money it made me!” That will not be his concern; he’ll be weeping and howling for his miseries, but his riches won’t bail him out. It will be all the more so when he comes to face death and eternity. It won’t pay the tab.

Think ahead to the day when all at once your gold and silver are cankered; they are discolored and not nearly as pretty as you thought they were. They no longer look bright and shiny.

It says the “rust of them shall be a witness against you.” Have you ever thought about rust or canker on something as a witness? It’s an interesting expression; it’s like saying, “You worked your whole life, but look what’s happened to it.” Your accumulated wealth may seem big, but it cannot buy you health or happiness, and certainly not Heaven.

When Betty and I go to Kentucky where our folks live, we’ll sometimes drive back around where we used to be when we were growing up. Some of the houses in which people were living in those days that we thought were pretty nice places are not even there. Others are just broken down all to pieces, and we wonder, “Where did those people go?” Go to the local cemetery, and you’ll find a monument that says they’re buried there.

When we were in New Jersey the other day, Dr. and Mrs. Riddell went with us to Princeton, New Jersey. There are some interesting things there. We drove through the Princeton University campus, so, yes, I went to Princeton—in fact, I’ve been to Princeton three different times in my life! But we were looking at the historic things, one of which was the Princeton cemetery which is just two blocks from the university campus.

That cemetery has a number of historic personages buried in it. Jonathan Edwards and his wife, as well as Grover Cleveland and his wife are interred alongside a line of the presidents of Princeton, including John Witherspoon, who was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. It is an interesting visit.

We took pictures, and I looked at that line of dignitaries. A number of them had been president of Princeton, but it was in a different time frame. If you’ve got any heart and mind at all, you stop and think and realize that these men were prominent around there at one time.

Woodrow Wilson was at one time president of Princeton. He is not buried in that cemetery, but he had two houses close by. You drive by and look at them and say, “Wow! Wilson lived in those houses.” Yes, but somebody else lives in them now.

Sometimes “stuff” becomes a witness, and it reminds us that the houses, the gold and silver, the position and the prominence are not what it is about.

Look at the expression in verse 3: “Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.”

We have squirrels in our neighborhood who have been working like crazy for several weeks storing acorns and other things for the coming winter. Some say that because they are working so hard, we will have bad weather. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that they have sense enough to prepare for the days ahead. You don’t see squirrels lying around in January who have starved to death. So there is a positive side to saving and having things in store, but James is saying to us, “You lived in pleasure on earth and thought you had it made just because you had a big pile of things.”

The reminder here is to get your perspective right, to get your focus right, to get your priorities in place. Live by the principles of God’s Word and not by the pile of things that you can amass.

This passage exposes the negative side, but there’s another side in the verses that follow that heads us in the right direction.

“Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.

“Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.”—Jas. 5:7,8.

In view of the pending reality of Christ’s second coming—someday, maybe even someday soon—it is wise for you and for me to get our lives set on God’s principles, not our prosperity. The principles then become the foundation for our own philosophy and practice of life. Those Bible precepts should become the priorities upon which we build our lives.

Only one life, ’twill soon be past.

Only what’s done for Christ will last.

Your “stuff” is not the substance of life and eternity; the Saviour is! So don’t put your trust where the canker and the rust can get to it. Put your trust in Him who is imperishable and eternal.

“Blessed is that man that maketh the Lord his trust.”—Ps. 40:4.