If I Were a Rich Man (part 2)

If we fix our eyes on mammon [material wealth], it will darken our hearts, cloud our judgment, and leave us morally confused and uncertain. It will lead us into bad decisions—choices that defy logic and cause us to deny our highest values. We will fudge, cheat, embezzle, misappropriate, pad, and pilfer.

We will, in the end, do anything to make a buck. The light in our hearts will go out and, as Jesus said, “How great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:23).

But worse, the love of money will turn our hearts from God. “No one can serve two masters,” Jesus said. “Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money” (Matthew 6:24). If we think about money all the time, we will, in time, take no thought of God. Wanting money—what wise men call greed—is a state of mind in which it’s easier to forget God than any other.

John Bunyan, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, described the ruin of some travelers: “Now on the far side of that plain was a little hill called Lucre and in that hill [there was] a silver mine, which some of them, because of the rarity of it, had turned aside to see. But going too near the brim of the pit the ground being deceitful under them broke and they were slain. Some also had been maimed there, and could not to their dying day be their own men again.”

If we love money, that devotion will inexorably supplant our passion for God, and we will be maimed and slain by it. We will be “devoted to the one” and will “despise the other.” We may dabble with God for a time, but in the end we will deny Him. “One master-passion in the breast. . . swallows up the rest,” said Alexander Pope.

So God in His mercy will do one of two things for us: He will give us money and leave us with heart-breaking disappointment in it, or He will take it all away. Either way, God is at work, humbling us, ridding us of our preoccupation with mammon, loosening our grip on “earth’s toys and lesser joys,” as my wife Carolyn says, setting our affection on things above. This is the ruin that enriches us, the “low position” that leaves us better than ever before.

What God leaves behind is pure gold: We have God and all that He gives. We need nothing more. Israel’s poet wrote out of his poverty:

I am always with you;

you hold me by my right hand.

You guide me with your counsel,

and afterward you will take me into  glory.

Whom have I in heaven but you?

And earth has nothing I desire besides you . . .

As for me, it is good to be near God (Psalm 73:23–25, 28).

This is the good life. This is the richest man on earth!

Taken from Seeing God, © 2006 by David Roper. Used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566, Grand Rapids MI 49501. All rights reserved.