Matthew 6:24: You Cannot Serve Both God and Mammon?

Mammon (NIV "money") is a term that Jesus sometimes used to denote wealth. He was not the only teacher in Israel to use it, and whenever it is used it seems to indicate some unworthy aspect of wealth--not so much, perhaps, the unworthiness of wealth itself as the unworthiness of many people's attitudes to it. The derivation of the word is uncertain. Some think that it originally meant that in which men and women put their trust; others, that it originally meant "accumulation," "piling up." But the derivation is not very important; it is the use of a word, not its derivation, that determines its meaning.

Since the service of mammon is presented in this saying as an alternative to the service of God, mammon seems to be a rival to God. Service of mammon and service of God are mutually exclusive. The servant of mammon, in other words, is an idol worshiper: mammon, wealth, money has become an idol, the object of worship.

The man who depended on finding enough work today to buy the next day's food for his family could pray with feeling, "Give us today our daily bread" (Mt 6:11) or, as Moffat rendered it, "give us to-day our bread for the morrow." But the man who knew he had enough laid by to maintain his family and himself, whether he worked or not, whether he kept well or fell ill, would not put the same urgency into the prayer. The more material resources he had, the less wholehearted his reliance on God would tend to become. The children of the kingdom, in Jesus' teaching, are marked by their instant and constant trust in God; that trust will be weakened if they have something else to trust in.

In the Western world today we are cushioned, by social security and the like, against the uncertainties and hardships of life in a way that was not contemplated in New Testament times. It was in a society that did not provide widows' pensions that the words of 1 Timothy 5:5 were written: "She who is a real widow, and is left all alone, has set her hope on God and continues in supplications and prayers night and day" (RSV). This is not a criticism of social security (for which God be thanked); it is a reminder of the difficulty we find in applying the sayings of Jesus and his apostles to our own condition. But when we hear of victims of famine or refugees fleeing war, we can try to imagine what it must be like to be in their situation and consider what claim they have on our resources. This will not get us into the kingdom of God, but at least it may teach us to use material property more worthily than by treating it as something to lay our hearts on or rest our confidence in.

A covetous person, says Paul, is an idolater (Eph 5:5), and in saying so he expressed the same idea as Jesus did when he spoke about mammon. "Watch out!" said Jesus on another occasion. "Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions" (Lk 12:15). That should teach us not to say "How much is So-and-so worth?" when we really mean "How much does he possess?" Luke follows this last saying with the parable of the rich fool, the man who had so much property that he reckoned he could take life easy for a long time to come. He went to bed with this comforting thought, but by morning he was a pauper--he was dead, and had to leave his property behind. He had treated it as mammon, the object of his ultimate concern, and in his hour of greatest need it proved useless to him. If he had put his trust in God and accumulated the true and lasting riches, he would not have found himself destitute after death.

See also comment on JAMES 4:4; 5:1.