By David ReayWednesday 30 Oct 2019LifeWords DevotionalsFaithReading Time: 2 minutes
Don’t be surprised if you see a poor person being oppressed by the powerful and if justice is being miscarried throughout the land. For every official is under orders from higher up, and matters of justice get lost in red tape and bureaucracy. Even the king milks the land for his own profit.
Those who love money will never have enough. How meaningless to think that wealth brings true happiness! The more you have, the more people come to help you spend it. So what good is wealth—except perhaps to watch it slip through your fingers! (NLT)
It has been reported that those who have windfall wins in lotteries or the like often end up wasting that wealth. It doesn’t give them the happiness and security they figured it might. Little wonder the Bible is full of warnings about accumulating material wealth. It does not live up to its promises.
Not that there is any glory in material deprivation. Not that wealth in itself is morally wrong. We can do a lot of good with a lot of money. But the greedy desire to be rich ends up making us selfish and neglecting those in need. Aspiring to get more in order to be more generous is a good thing, but so many want to get more simply to please themselves.
The love of money corrupts. It leads to injustice as our text reminds us. It never satisfies because those who are so greedy can never say ‘enough’. Greedily acquiring wealth reveals a deep insecurity within us, and a carelessness towards the needs of others.
Ultimately, as the old saying goes, you can’t take it with you. So we neither despise wealth out of some glorified and erroneous concept of poverty, nor embrace it as a way of satisfying our deepest ego needs. We ask God to help us be generous and assume he will give us the means to do so.
Blessings
David