Wednesday, October 26, 2011

What Jesus Said about Your Money, Part 29 of 31

TEXT: "Therefore if you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches?" (Luke 16:11).

IDEA: Jesus calls money "unrighteous" because when we live for it, it makes us evil.

PURPOSE: To warn ourselves and our listeners about the danger of money.

If you were to think of the most dangerous spiritual force at work in the world, what would it be?

Jesus says that it is money: "If you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches?"
(What are the questions we ask? What do the words mean?)

I. What does Jesus mean by "mammon"?

Bible scholars have made some guesses about this:

Leon Morris: Mammon is our transliteration of an Aramaic expression of uncertain derivation, used to denote money or wealth generally.

Frederick Godet: The word mammon is not, as has often been said, the name of an oriental divinity, the god of money. It denotes, in Syriac and Phoenician, money itself

Joseph Fitzmyer: The noun mamonas is a grecized form of either Hebrew mamon or Aramaic mamona. Though unknown in OT Hebrew, it is found in Qumran literature both in Hebrew and in Aramaic. Augustine knows of it as a Punic word, even though it is so far unattested in Phoenician or Punic. Many etymological explanations of the word have been suggested, but they are all improbable, involving alleged assimilations that never occur. The best explanation of the word remains that it is a maqtal noun type of the root 'mn, "be firm" (the Hebrew causative of which is he'emin, "believe, trust in"); It would mean "that in which one puts trust," from which a semantic shift to "money, possessions" would not be difficult.

We don't know precisely what mammon means:

We do have a general, if not exact, idea. It's probably something like "filthy lucre."

II. Why does Jesus call this "unrighteous" mammon? What does "unrighteous" mean in connection with money?

In contrast to "the true." it would mean "the false."

It is similar to speaking of "the true God" in contrast to idols which are false.

They appear to be something they are not, and because of that people worship them.

They are assigned a reality they don't have.

In connection with verse 10, it means that what is a little thing becomes the big thing in life and leads to all kinds of unrighteousness:

Look at the Ten Commandments of God: Money leads people to break each one of them.

If money were not involved, we could solve most of the major problems we face in society today.

III. Money stands as a substitute for God and is therefore the most dangerous force we have to deal with in society.