What Money Always Does

We are talking about the grace of God resulting in the growth of community. But we are not disembodied souls. God created the human soul to function in the body—the body is not simply a carrying case. We are soul and body together. This means that as community grows up around us, characterized by things like faith, hope, and love, something else is growing also. That something else is an economy. And that means money.

This is an exhortation I have given before, but given the nature of the problem, and given how good God has been to us, and given the warnings about mammon throughout Scripture, it bears repeating over and over. In the aggregate, you cannot keep money from doing what money always does. Wanting to experience this blessing without learning to resist this temptation is like wanting to go through adolescence without experiencing sexual temptation. It doesn’t work that way.

The twin temptations, when money comes, are self-sufficiency in those who have it, and carping envy from those who don’t, or more likely, who think they don’t have enough. The warning of Deuteronomy addresses the first aspect. “And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth. But thou shalt remember the Lord thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day.” (Deut. 8:17–18). The Lord’s parable about the workers in the vineyard caution us about the other temptation. “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?” (Matt. 20:15).

As I said, we cannot keep money from doing what money does. But we can keep it from doing what it wants to do to us. Jesus commands us to defend ourselves successfully. Right after His famous words about the camel and the eye of the needle (Matt. 19: 24-26), the disciples are astonished, and say, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus responds by saying, “Oh, God can do that.”

And as He does, remember His statement in Deuteronomy about what He is doing. He gives the power to get wealth, why? To ruin us? To stumble us beyond recovery? To torment us? No—He does it, Moses says, in order to establish His covenant. Self-sufficiency and envy are therefore profoundly anti-covenantal.