You become
what you worship.
This is the
warning Jesus so profoundly offers when He pronounces, “No servant can serve two masters; either he will hate the one and love
the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot
serve God and mammon.”
God’s Word
consistently and constantly warns us against having a divided heart – and the
reason is because once the heart is divided, it really goes all the way to the
other side. Thinking it is merely divided in a proportionate way is self-deception.
It is not possible.
The acquisition
of wealth from God is what the Pharisees are about. Jesus strongly lets them
know God knows this, and that God knows their hearts are polluted. It does not
matter at all that the people see them as representing God. Jesus tells them
God knows they do not.
Think of how
serious it must be in God’s eyes to know He knows everything you do in His name
is pretense.
Wealth is
not the issue. It is the pursuit of wealth in God’s name which is leading them
to condemnation. It is not too late, but it is too terrible unless they
immediately and forcefully turn away. The god they serve is money, they have
become wealthy, and the entire focus of their ministry life is not service to
the True and Living God, but service to themselves and the monetary accounts
they steward, “in God’s name.”
The
Pharisees worship wealth and its preservation, and so they are constantly in
peril unless they can collect money in the name of God. (This is what happens
when money becomes the focus of your life.) They have no means of acquiring
personal wealth on their own. (They cannot dig, they are ashamed to beg.) For
them it is about using their religious position to build up an earthly
religious kingdom, and then to live off those proceeds.
They
represent the True God as a hard master to the people because of their own need
for fortune. And strangely, this ultimately this leads to a softening of God’s
Word to preserve the resource (the people,) the wealth appears to come from.
-Pastor Bill
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