Wages

Wages are the payment owed to a worker for labor, and in Scripture they are treated as a matter of justice, livelihood, and spiritual consequence. Linguistically, the English word in these texts denotes ordinary hire or pay owed for work, not a gift. The legal material says, “The wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night until the morning” (Leviticus 19:13), and Deuteronomy 24:15 says, “In his day you shall give him his wages, neither shall the sun go down on it, for he is poor and sets his heart on it.” The prophets treat failure here as oppression: Jeremiah 22:13 pronounces woe on the man “who uses his neighbor’s service without wages, and doesn’t give him his hire,” and Malachi 3:5 lists “those who oppress the hireling in his wages” among those God will judge. James 5:4 says withheld wages “cry out” and have “entered into the ears of the Lord of Armies.”

Scripture also treats wages as the worker’s livelihood. Luke 3:14 tells soldiers, “Be content with your wages,” and Matthew 10:10 and Luke 10:7 state that “the laborer is worthy of his food” and “the laborer is worthy of his wages.” Haggai 1:6 describes a frustrated economy in which “he who earns wages earns wages to put them into a bag with holes in it,” so that earned pay does not secure life. In these texts wages are presented not as charity but as what sustains the poor and the worker.

A key figurative use appears in Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The text sets wage and gift in contrast: death is what sin pays or earns, while eternal life is not a wage but a gift. One way to read the verse is that Paul borrows the ordinary labor relation to say sin is a slave-master that pays in death; the passage itself does not call eternal life a wage.

Christian traditions differ in how they press these texts. In Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed practice, “the laborer is worthy of his wages” (Luke 10:7) has been used to support materially supporting ordained ministers, while some free-church, Anabaptist, and Brethren traditions have emphasized unpaid or bivocational leadership and have read the same verse more loosely. On Romans 6:23, some traditions emphasize death as a legal penalty owed to sin, others as the natural fruit of slavery to sin, and others chiefly the free-gift contrast; the verse itself states both the wage and the gift without resolving every later formulation.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.