Key Words

Here is my final post on what the Bible has to say about money. In my first two posts I wrote about what the Bible says about the poor, now I will write what the Bible says about the wealthy. A lot of people say that money is evil by misquoting 1 Timothy “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” Two key words here “love” and “a”. The common phrase is “money is the root of all evil” but that simply is not true. It is the love of money that is wrong, as is the love of anything. The clearest example is the encounter between Jesus and the rich man where Jesus tells him to go sell all he has to enter the kingdom of Heaven. I wrote about this a while ago but a summary is that Jesus didn’t really mean that we all must sell all we have to be with Him, he was asking the man if he trusted Him. The rich man found security in his wealth (as we all do at one time or another) and Jesus was asking him if he trusted God enough to take care of him. If I put all my security in how much money I have I am bound to become disappointed, the financial crisis that is still going shows that. People are still without jobs, people that five years ago were probably doing fine are now out of work that is how quickly money fades. But the strength and grace that God gives us never fades, it never depreciates or loses value, you can’t spend it all or lose it in the stock market, we’ll always have it. In the end the love of money seems almost foolish, to endlessly chase something that can be taken away so easily instead of chasing God who never leaves. The last point is the word “a”, it’s not just the love of money that can lead to evil and distance from God, the love of anything can. If I love my job, baseball, the Red Sox, or anything more than God then it also separates us from God and becomes an idol. There are a lot of things in the world that I like, but we can’t find ourselves loving them.