“Do not accumulate for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But accumulate for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. If then your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is diseased, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! No one can serve two masters, for 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 God and money. Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Isn’t there more to life than food and more to the body than clothing? Look at the birds in the sky: They do not sow, or reap, or gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you more valuable than they are? And which of you by worrying can add even one hour to his life? Why do you worry about clothing? Think about how the flowers of the field grow; they do not work or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his glory was clothed like one of these! And if this is how God clothes the wild grass, which is here today and tomorrow is tossed into the fire to heat the oven, won’t he clothe you even more, you people of little faith? So then, don’t worry saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For the unconverted pursue these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But above all pursue his kingdom and righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. So then, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Today has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:19-34)
It’s too easy to read this out of context. This is part of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount passage. Jesus teaches the Law from the original Hebrew mystical intellectual assumptions, pointedly contrary to the contemporary Hellenized thinking of His opponents. To a Westerner, this sounds like promoting a listless “the world owes me a living” with God thrown in as the supplier. They miss the part about the eye as the lamp for the soul. What you see is determined by how you see.
Already men are planning how they will take everything you own. Here in the US, the government reserves the right to confiscate all worldly possessions on the whim of any armed agent of the state. More, these agents can confiscate your entire future on this earth via the absolute right to arrest and confine on the same empty whims. They can kill you simply for arguing, though most of the time torturing you is more fun. With each passing day, we see mounting evidence of declining accountability for these acts. You can frame it verbally any way you like, but these are the conditions under which we live. Consider this: Imagine the US government deciding there is a crisis because the world loses confidence in the dollar. So they reinstate a gold standard. Naturally it will match the newly inflated dollar value in price and you’ll face a “windfall tax” amounting to — oh, let me guess — 75% of the value of your gold in the new dollars. Payable in gold, of course. The reality will likely be worse. No matter what direction you take it, people at the top are determined to rip you off.
Such conditions are hardly much different from the oppression in Jesus’ day. Notice how He never counseled resistance. He pointedly said your middle class apprehensions about guarding your children’s future is tantamount to arguing with Him. Obey God and let Him worry about your children’s future. Because of the Fall, human liberty is not the default condition of mankind. Oppression is the norm. However much liberty and rights you could possibly have after the Fall are limited to a particular form of government and a social regime all Westerners reject without conscious consideration. So all this talk of liberty and rights is evil, a blasphemous rejection of what Jesus Himself said you should expect in this life.
If it belongs to this world, it stays here when you leave. Leaving is the whole objective, working through the calling God has placed on your life. You go home when He’s satisfied, or when He can no longer make use of you because you have fought His plans tooth and nail. That’s just for those He redeems; the rest of the world follows His plans as slaves do, knowing nothing at all of the Master’s plans. For them, it seems totally random, so they fight and scratch to get what little they believe is for their own comfort. We who are Spirit-born cannot act like that, cannot think like that.
Our treasures are in Heaven. We use everything and anything in this world to build up the Kingdom as a family trust. We participate in the greater bounty of God’s blessings. Whatever earthly blessings we receive here merely symbolize what we already have in Heaven. Yet American Christianity has damned itself by refusing to think and operate on that level. The worship of Mammon comes in all flavors in the American churches, showing up in the very willingness to accept the state’s strictures for tax exempt status. They have some silly notion those strictures are somehow under their control because they get to vote on which filthy psychopath we shall have over us making the rules.
I can take you to a very large evangelical church right now in my area where you can quickly discover God is a Republican. There’s a richer but smaller church just a few miles away that proves He’s a Democrat. That day Jesus first manifested His prophetic message by cleansing the Court of Gentiles of the Bazaars of the Sons of Annas, because they blocked the Gentiles from worshiping His Father, the crowd had seen His miracles and were ready to make Him their earthly king. They thought His actions heralded the new Messianic Kingdom everyone was expecting any day.
Now while Jesus was in Jerusalem at the feast of the Passover, many people believed in his name because they saw the miraculous signs he was doing. But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people. He did not need anyone to testify about man, for he knew what was in man. (John 2:23-25)
Go ahead and squander your time chasing political winds of fortune; save up your guns and gold and long-shelf-life food. Pretend it makes any difference at all. Meanwhile, you know nothing of God’s plans because you prove by your actions you cannot understand His Word. Go ahead; cling to your fake Western Christianity, which is precisely what the Pharisees and Judaizers were hoping it would turn out to be. This should be entertaining.
