Loving Two

Meditation June 8, 2020

Matthew 6

24“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

Jesus continues with the dichotomy he is drawing between believers and unbelievers and their behavior. In the beatitudes he gives us the characteristics, the personality traits of the believer and he is following that showing how that affects behavior. First he looks at the law. For the unbeliever it deals only with the outward, but Jesus says for the believer, those who to whom the Spirit has given understanding of spiritual things (1 Cor. 2:14) he is shows the law to apply to the heart and intentions and following on that same way teaching them the path they should follow. Having directed them in the manner they should live in their relationship with fellow men he teaches them how their new person should relate to God in their duties and relationship toward Him. He then turns our attention toward things, worldly things, treasures on earth and treasures in heaven and the way in which we should relate to them. Now, having drawn those distinctions He teaches us that we can’t have it both ways, we can’t have double vision and successfully go through life with one eye on heaven and the other eye on earth. Why not? It seems that a lot of people manage to do that. But that I just the thing; i.e. it seems so but in reality it is all appearance without substance. It is impossible for that to be true. That is the point Jesus is now at in His teaching.

“No one can serve two masters….” He does not say that it is difficult but that it is impossible. Jesus leaves no doubt regarding this. “No one” translates oudeis which according to Strong mean not one, none at all, no valid example exits of anyone able to do that which follows. Jesus makes it as emphatic as language allows. “Not one example is to be found of someone who can serve (literally be the slave of) two masters. We can easily miss the force of that and read it as no one can serve two people. Why not? What is to prevent serving two or a half dozen people? Nothing prevents one serving several people but that is not what Jesus said. He said, “No one can be a slave to two ‘masters….” The word translated masters here is translated lord elsewhere in reference to Jesus. Master, lord refers to a person who has absolute ownership. To serve, *douleuein), to be a slave to has to be understood as it would have been understood by Jesus’ hearers. When they heard slave, they heard someone who according to the law that governed them who was practically not a person but a thing over which the owner had absolute rights even of life or death. The slave was a walking, talking tractor, a farm implement that could be bought, sold, beaten, thrown away or all of them. A slave had no time to serve another master simply because no time was his. All his time belonged to his owner and should his owner grant him permission to serve another temporarily, he was still under the rule of his master who could at any moment for any reason or no reason at all retract that temporary leave. A slave, quite simply, for every living moment of his life was at the disposal of his master to do as he master pleased. (We do well to remember that in to relation to our being servants, slaves of Christ.)

Now that Jesus has made it clear to them in terms they could easily understand, i.e. that one cannot have two masters, He directs them to the two masters vying for their complete servitude. Those to masters are God and mammon, God and, to be precise, things. Usually understood as money or riches, mammon, according to linguists, is a Syriac word that means worldly goods or any thing that come under the name of worldly good; e.g., money, riches, toys (remember the bumper sticker about the one with the most toys. I hate that sticker.) John Gill says that mammon, “according to the Jewish way of speaking, which the Samaritans used, is one that is greedy…who cannot refrain himself from gluttony.”

Note that Jesus does not say wealth is sinful but that having it be your master means that you cannot also be serving God. There is no mistaking His teaching regarding this. “Not one is able to serve…both God and Mammon.” We have in the OT examples of those to whom God gave much wealth. Abraham, Job, Solomon and numerous others were given much wealth. Deuteronomy 28:11 God promises prosperity, in Malachi 3 God says bring me your tithes and see if I do not open the windows of heaven and pour our on you more than you can receive; there will be so much you will have nowhere to store it. But here is the point, wealth, things, worldly goods, though they had them in abundance, was not their master and one need not read far in the OT to learn that when things became the master, God took them away. You cannot love two masters and God will not share your affections with another.

Many are the subtle ways in which we let our affections stray. Martin Lloyd Jones tells the story of a man whose heifer became pregnant and delivered two calves, a black calf and a black calf. The farmer told his wife the Lord had been very good to them in giving them two calves, that he was giving one of the calves to the Lord and when they were grown and he sold them he would give to the church the money he received for the Lord’s calf. Which calf is the Lord’s she asked? The farmer replied he hadn’t yet decided but soon do so. Some months later he came into the house with a sad face and announced to his wife that the Lord’s calf had died. We don’t have calves but few, if any, of us are there who cannot remember a time when we had to give a little less because we had to spend part of the Lord’s money for food, or gas, or some other unexpected expense.

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

This we know all too well. May God grant us that we keep our affections on those things that we may store up in heaven.