Slave for God or for Mammon? (Matthew 6:19–24)
“19 Stop storing up for yourselves treasures upon the earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break in and steal. 20 Rather, store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes, and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
22 “The lamp of the body is the eye. If, then, your eye is simple, your whole body will be bright; 23 but if your eye is wicked, your whole body will be dark. If in reality the light that is in you is darkness, how great that darkness is!
24 “No one can slave for two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will stick to the one and despise the other. You cannot slave for God and for Riches” (Matthew 6:19–24).
It is clear that the Bible does not condemn wealth, just as it does not encourage poverty. Jesus Christ warns against our relationship to wealth, put in perspective with our main purpose of serving God. Jesus Christ, like the Bible as a whole, condemns the love of money: “However, those who are determined to be rich fall into temptation and a snare and many senseless and hurtful desires, which plunge men into destruction and ruin. For the love of money is a root of all sorts of injurious things, and by reaching out for this love some have been led astray from the faith and have stabbed themselves all over with many pains” (1 Timothy 6:9,10). By the expression “simple eye”, it means sincere, all one way, in focus, generous, which is in conformity with the service for God. And a “wicked eye” is bad, envious, and has goals based on lust, greed, which is consistent with service to the god Riches.
Jesus Christ encourages being rich toward God: “With that he spoke an illustration to them, saying: “The land of a certain rich man produced well. Consequently he began reasoning within himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, now that I have nowhere to gather my crops?’ So he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my storehouses and build bigger ones, and there I will gather all my grain and all my good things; and I will say to my soul: “Soul, you have many good things laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, enjoy yourself.”’ But God said to him, ‘Unreasonable one, this night they are demanding your soul from you. Who, then, is to have the things you stored up?’ So it goes with the man that lays up treasure for himself but is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:16–21).
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