As for the rich
in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on
the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything
to enjoy.
1
Timothy 6:17
We begin this second week of Advent
by looking further at the nature of money, in order to prepare to consider what
Jesus of Nazareth said in his Sermon on the Mount about using it. We need to probe the deeper reason why we cannot serve both God and money, why it is so very
hard for a rich person to enter the spiritual life and why the love of money is
the root of all evil.
Although money has great objective
power in the world, it is a system of trust. When communities first created money,
the trust operated locally: the things they used as money, like coloured beads,
feathers and seashells had little intrinsic value. So long as everyone
respected the system, valuable agricultural and diary produce like food and
clothes could be worth an agreed number of relatively worthless beads or
feathers. But as people began to travel greater differences, money needed to
have worth of its own in order to travel with them.
The most common form of ‘valuable’ money
to emerge in the ancient world was silver rings. The first coins were made at
Lydia in Asia Minor in around BC 678 but coins, even ones made of gold and
silver, rarely have a face value the same as the value of the metal. Paper
money has significantly less value. During the 20th Century, plastic
money became common: first charge cards, then credit, debit and prepaid cards,
all of which are used like cash. Today, money need have no more substance than
flickering figures on a touch screen.
It is estimated that about 97% of the
money in circulation today has no physical existence and no material worth. In a
debt economy, the only way that most money can exist is as minus figures in
sophisticated banking systems. When money is transferred electronically, it may
seem to disappear entirely for a while or appear to be in two places at once.
The presence of money in the real
world (primarily the coins, notes and plastic cards) is the same sort of
reality as a novel: it is ‘real’ only in that it gives expression to the idea.
Although we try to make fiction real in many ways, it is never really real and
the extent to which it affects our lives depends on how we relate to it.
That is the evil: not using money as
a tool but serving and loving the system that encompasses it. Trusting in
nothing but Mankind’s ultimate system of trust, the system that people rely on
to meet their needs and fulfil their dreams.
I’ll conclude this thought tomorrow.
But in the meantime, take some time to think what might happen if all the
financial databases in the world were wiped clean overnight. How much would you
have left?
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Copyright © All Souls Clubhouse Community Centre &
Church and Philip Evans 2012.
Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English
Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry
of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
These Advent Reflections do not teach personal finance
skills and where these skills are mentioned the issues have been simplified. Handling
money and dealing with money problems and debt can be complicated and neither
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