Laying Up Treasures on Earth or in Heaven?
Our Lord declared to His disciples in Matthew 6:19, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.” In this passage the Lord taught His disciples not to make it their goal to amass wealth for themselves. Again He declared in Luke 12:15, “And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.” Here the Lord taught emphatically that our lives do not consist of those things which we possess.
But many people spend most of their mental powers and exert a lot of their physical energies in the hot pursuit of stockpiling the treasures of this world. The Bible shows us the foolishness of doing so. Ecclesiastes 5:16 says, “And this also is a sore evil, that in all points as he came, so shall he go: and what profit hath he that hath laboured for the wind?” Imagine seeing a man running across a field with a burlap bag and you say to him, “What are you doing?” And the man replies, “I am gathering wind. You know you can’t be too sure about the air currents in the future.” You then ask, “How long have you been doing this?” He answers, “I have spent my entire life gathering wind.” You would stand there in shock and say to yourself, “How foolish!” But it is no more foolish than a man gathering wealth for himself. We read in Proverbs 23:4, 5, “Labour not to be rich: cease from thine own wisdom. Wilt thou set thine eyes upon that which is not? for riches certainly make themselves wings; they fly away as an eagle toward heaven.”
Money is not the measurement of wealth! Oh, there are things money can buy. Money can buy things, but not happiness; luxuries, but not contentment; pleasures, but not peace. We have been deceived in believing that our source of security and protection is financial success. The Word of God warns us in 1 Timothy 6:9, “But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.” Proverbs 28:22 says, “He that hasteth to be rich hath an evil eye, and considereth not that poverty shall come upon him.” First Timothy 6:10 tells us that “the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Here the Word of God shows us the brevity, poverty and sorrows of riches.
As the Lord warned His disciples about the dangers of laying up treasures on this earth, we also should carefully consider how easily wealth could do the same harm to us. Riches, wealth, and possessions have a way of getting a hold on us. I have often said that people possess possessions and then possessions possess them. These things can easily dominate us! However, the Lord also instructed His disciples about the direction of our riches. We read in Matthew 6:20, “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.” Here the Lord teaches that the safest place for our investments, with the highest percentage of interest and greatest dividends in stock, is in Heaven. The Lord said in Matthew 6:21, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” What a person treasures is what he watches. The Lord said that a person will either focus on that which is physical—that is, temporal—or else he will focus on that which is spiritual— that is, the eternal. God contrasts these in Matthew 6:23: “But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness.” The word “evil” in this verse speaks of a person whose focus on this life is so intense that his life is characterized by selfishness, covetousness, and greed. All he sees is money and more things that he must have—and yet he is never satisfied.
Someone asked John D. Rockefeller, one of the wealthiest men of the twentieth century, “How much money does it take to satisfy?” He replied, “Just a little bit more.” Someone has said, “Money is like salt water; the more you drink, the thirstier you get.” So the person whose focus is on the physical has a life full of things, yet he ends up full of darkness and emptiness because this world has dominated his life. The Scriptures describe the outcome of a person who lives only for the temporal in Proverbs 13:7: “There is that maketh himself rich, yet hath nothing.” Ecclesiastes 5:12, 13 warns that “the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep. There is a sore evil which I have seen under the sun, namely, riches kept for the owners thereof to their hurt.”
As the Lord warned His disciples of not living for the temporal, we also should take heed. First Timothy 6:7 says, “For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” The Lord wants us to focus on the spiritual, that is, the eternal. We will look at what the Lord taught about this in our next article.
Evangelist Jerry Sivnksty may be contacted at PO Box 141, Starr, SC 29684 or via e-mail at .
(Originally published in FrontLine • July/August 2014. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.)
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