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2Ti 2:17

Verse 3. Your gold and silver is cankered] Instead of helping the poor, and thus honouring God with your substance, ye have, through the principle of covetousness, kept all to yourselves.

The rust of them shall be a witness against you] Your putrefied stores, your moth-eaten garments, and your tarnished coin, are so many proofs that it was not for want of property that you assisted not the poor, but through a principle of avarice; loving money, not for the sake of what it could procure, but for its own sake, which is the genuine principle of the miser. This was the very character given to this people by our Lord himself; he called them filarguroi, lovers of money. Against this despicable and abominable disposition, the whole of the 12th chapter of St. Luke is levelled; but it was their easily besetting sin, and is so to the present day.

Shall eat your flesh as it were fire.] This is a very bold and sublime figure.

He represents the rust of their coin as becoming a canker that should produce gangrenes and phagedenous ulcers in their flesh, till it should be eaten away from their bones.

Ye have heaped treasure together] This verse is variously pointed. The word wv, like as, in the preceding clause, is left out by the Syriac, and some others; and pur, fire, is added here from that clause; so that the whole verse reads thus: "Your gold and your silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall consume your flesh.

Ye have treasured up FIRE against the last days." This is a bold and fine image: instead of the treasures of corn, wine, and oil, rich stuffs, with silver and gold, which ye have been laying up, ye shall find a treasure, a magazine of fire, that shall burn up your city, and consume even your temple. This was literally true; and these solemn denunciations of Divine wrath were most completely fulfilled. See the notes on Matt. 24, where all the circumstances of this tremendous and final destruction are particularly noted.

By the last days we are not to understand the day of judgment, but the last days of the Jewish commonwealth, which were not long distant from the date of this epistle, whether we follow the earlier or later computation, of which enough has been spoken in the preface.

Ver. 3. Your gold and silver is cankered , etc.] Or grown rusty like iron, by lying long without use; this is not easily and quickly done, but in length of time gold and silver will change, and contract a rustiness; and so this conveys the same idea of hoarding up riches and laying up money, without making use of it in trade, for the support of the poor, and without distributing it to their necessities: and the rust of them shall be a witness against you : at the day of judgment; which will be a proof that they have not been employed to such services, and for such usefulness, for which they were designed and given. And shall eat your flesh as it were fire ; that is, a remembrance of this, a sense of it impressed upon them, shall be like fire in their bones; shall distress their minds, gnaw their consciences, and be in them the worm that never dies, and the fire that shall never be quenched: ye have heaped treasure together for the last days ; either for many years, as the fool in the Gospel, for the times of old age, the last days of men, for fear they should then want; or for the last days of the world, or of time, as if they thought they should live for ever: the Vulgate Latin version reads, �ye have treasured up wrath for yourselves in the last days�; instead of riches, as they imagined; and that by their covetousness and wickedness, by a wicked disuse of their riches, and an unrighteous detention of them; but this supplement seems to be taken from ( Romans 2:5) though the sense is confirmed by some copies which connect the phrase, �as it were fire�, in the preceding clause, with this, �ye have treasured up as it were fire�; and the Syriac version renders it, �ye have treasured up fire�; the fire of divine wrath; this is the fruit of treasuring up riches in an ill way, and without making a proper use of them.

Flesh (tav sarkav). The noun is plural: the fleshy parts of the body. So Sept. (2 Kings ix. 36): "the flesh (tav sarkav) of Jezebel. So Revelation xix. 18.