My husband and I recently met with our financial advisor to go over our retirement situation. Neither of us will have a pension, so we will be primarily dependent on what we have put away in his 401K, my similar account, and elsewhere. At the same time, both of our sons’ families are undergoing transition times that are impacting their incomes. As a result, I’ve been thinking about money.

Many believe the Bible says that money is the root of all evil, but it actually doesn’t. Rather, 1 Timothy 6:10 says, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs” (ESV). As usual, God is concerned with our hearts and minds rather than our circumstances.

God is certainly concerned about how we get our money. A perusal of Proverbs turns up warnings about oppressing the poor and several statements about how much better it is to be poor than to be a liar or “crooked.” When Jesus drove the money-changers and pigeon sellers out of the temple in Matthew 21, it wasn’t only because they were conducting business in the temple. He says they have made it a “den of robbers.” God really doesn’t like it when people who claim to be his are cheating the poor.

We are told to do more than simply avoid oppressing the poor. In Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, in addition to the warnings about treating the poor fairly, we see calls to be generous to the poor.

It’s easy to take all of this and take from it a legalistic view of money and how to act with it, but that’s not what we see in the New Testament. Instead, we are called to treat money well because our hearts are right. We know that God loves a cheerful giver, and so we try to force ourselves to give cheerfully, but that’s not the point of the passage:

Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work. (2 Corinthians 6:8-9 ESV)

Instead, we are able to give cheerfully because of the grace of God and our trust in him. I recently came across a verse I had somehow missed for many years. It happened to be in a collection of verses I picked to memorize. It’s another place where we hear about the love of money: “Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’” (Hebrews 13:5 ESV)

God isn’t asking us to browbeat ourselves into handling money correctly. Instead, he seeks to assure us that we can handle it correctly and be content because he will be with us and care for us. That’s the point in the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus talks about seeking God first and laying up treasures in heaven. God’s in charge and he actually cares about us. What happens here on earth may or may not look the way we think it should, but if we trust him, it’s all going to come out right in the end. And if we believe that, really believe it, we can save ourselves a world of anxiety and suffering.

 

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash