We must guard against sin of idolising money
One modern writer claims that many Christians listen to Jesus say “You cannot be the slave both of God and of money”, and then respond: “Oh yes we can!” Could it be that we have forgotten God’s warnings against greed?
Jesus called money the “mammon of unrighteousness”. Mammon means riches of any kind. In the same breath, Jesus also said we should use it: “And so I say to you: Use money, tainted as it is, to win you friends, and thus make sure that when it fails, they will welcome you into eternal dwellings.”
Jesus asks us to use money to help others. If you have little, there’s always a way you can help others. Whether rich or poor, we all tend towards a kind of idolatry. We tend to assume that money is the solution to all our problems. Since we have many problems, we tend to assume that we need lots of money. This attitude becomes the same as idolatry when we place our trust not in God but in our bank account.
Those who have a bulging bank accounts tend to assume that their life is secure. To warn us against falling into this defect, Jesus told the parable about a rich man building enormous barns.
The man already had barns but he wanted bigger ones to store his abundance of goods. Once he had stored everything away safely, he said to himself: “My soul, you have plenty of good things laid by for many years to come; take things easy, eat, drink, have a good time.” At the end of the parable, God calls the rich man a “fool”.
“The Pharisees, who loved money, jeered at him.” Love for money can lead a holy person far from God. “So it is when someone stores up treasure for himself instead of becoming rich in the sight of God.”
We become like Pharisees if we pile up more and more cash in our bank accounts and do nothing to help others. Cash in the bank is really the same as many barns full of an abundance of goods. We fall into idolatry because we measure the good or evil of our lives by calculating how much cash we have. Money becomes the god we worship.
The only thing that we don’t have to pay for these days is the air we breathe. Because of the way society is structured, it is all too easy for money to become a permanent obsession.
When that happens, it does a great deal of good to recall Christ’s words: “Don’t worry about what you are to eat and drink”. If we are not supposed to worry about even such a necessary item as “our daily bread”, how much more should we trust God to take care of all the rest!
