Matthew 6:22-24. This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on March 17, 2024.
Our passage continues looking at how the things of this world can become a pitfall for hypocrisy. Last week, we saw that wealth that is amassed can get ahold of our heart. It can become the thing we love.
In this passage, Jesus moves to the eye and points out how it can be captured by things as well.
Let’s look at the passage.
How do people who start out wanting to serve God become hypocrites? How do popes, pastors, general superintendents, and the religious, become hypocrites? One of those ways is through their love for things more than God. It shouldn’t be lost on us that Jesus spends more time talking about how things pull our heart away from God, then he does talking about our bad relationships with people.
If wealth can take hold of our heart and become the love of our life, then it can also affect our eye. What does that look like?
Jesus first starts out with the natural affect of having a good eye or a bad eye. He pictures the eye as the “lamp of the body.” The eye channels light into our brain so that it can be turned into a mental picture of the reality around us.
Notice that the eye is not the source of that light, but only a conduit, or a sensor. That is exactly how a lamp works. It is designed to hold oil (the fuel) and generally has a wick, which is lit. The burning of the oil around the wick is then able to send light throughout the room.
This is important because the man standing in front of them is the “Light of the world.” He has come to give them the light, the truth, about God’s purpose of salvation and man’s true condition. Jesus knows that they will need some good spiritual eyes to see him as the light and to receive his teachings, ultimately, to be saved from their sins. When you have good spiritual eyes, you can make an informed decision and hopefully a wise choice.
Yet, just as wealth can have a grip on people’s hearts so too, it can affect people’s spiritual eyes. We can be surrounded by the light of God and not see it because we are spiritually blind. This is why the Scriptures warn us over and over to guard our hearts. We could add that we need to guard our eyes. This is the challenge that Jesus speaks to us here.
Yet, there is something more specific than just seeing the truth in Jesus. An evil eye is always connected to a greedy, miserly, and even covetous person, in the Scriptures. On the other hand, a good eye is generally connected to generosity and charitable giving.
It is seen as an evil, or bad, eye because you cannot see your brother’s true need. You can only see that the money you love will be depleted if you use it to help others. Your eye is good if you can see that the things in your life were most likely given to you so that you could help your brother. We will come back to this, but it does beg the question. Why does God allow some to amass wealth and not others?
Jesus uses this concept of an evil eye in Matthew 20 when he tells the parable of the workers in the vineyard. In the story, the owner of a vineyard goes to the place where day-laborers gather in the morning and hires them to work for the day. He will pay them a denarius, which was defined as a day’s wage. He goes back to the hiring place several more times: at the third hour, the sixth hour, the ninth hour, and the eleventh. For sake of the story, we will assume they were working a twelve hour day.
When evening came, they began to pay the workers starting with the men who started at the eleventh hour. Interestingly enough, they were paid a denarius. The story jumps to the men who worked all day long, but imagine if you had worked all day and were in line to get paid when you saw the men who worked one hour receive a whole denarius (a whole day’s wage). Most people would immediately have their hopes up that they would get even more than a denarius, perhaps even 12 of them (for scale, imagine going from thinking you would receive $240 for the day to thinking you might receive 12 times that, $2,880). Yet, when the men came to get their pay, they only received a denarius. They began to complain, but the owner challenges them. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? They couldn’t say no. They were not being ripped off. Yet, it didn’t seem fair in some way.
Jesus get’s to the heart of the manner with the statement, “Why is your eye evil because I am good?” It was good of the landowner to pay everyone a denarius. Yet, somehow that because a situation for those who worked all day to become greedy. This is an important acknowledgment that we need to make. Our hearts can be overcome by greed, but here Jesus ties it to our eyes.
These men had their hearts on things, on money. Thus, they couldn’t see the goodness of the landowner. They could only see that they had been jilted somehow. This is hypocrisy in the life of a person who claims to serve God.
Thus, wealth not only gets our hearts, but it affects our ability to properly see people (even God) in our life. Everything becomes twisted and perverted into our lust and desire for more wealth. Yet, this can even affect your ability to see the Truth of God when He is standing right in front of you. People would miss Messiah because their eyes were captures (as well as their hearts) with wealth.
When we are generous, it fills our hearts and minds with the light of Jesus. However, when we are greedy and stingy it fills us with darkness (every evil thing).
The point is not about having wealth. It is about how it affects your heart and eyes. Jesus is not saying, “If your bank account is above a certain amount, then you are full of darkness.” Rather, it is similar to the statement that it is impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus follows it up with another truth, “but all things are possible with God.” Similarly, on our own, wealth will conquer our heart and eyes. We will become hypocritical slaves to it. But, with Jesus, we can make wealth our slave for His purposes.
Jesus drills home just how bad this problem is. In the natural, a bad eye simply keeps you from seeing. However, a greedy, covetous eye is a spiritual problem. It doesn’t just block light (truth), but also sends darkness into the soul (the whole body). You become “full of darkness.” The darkness here is not just the absence of light. It is something more substantial. It represents a soul that is lusting with all manner of vice.
Think of it this way. It is bad not to see when the lights are not turned on. Israel had received some light in the Law, but the prophets had spoke of a coming Messiah who would give the full light of God. We can’t blame them for not fully seeing the truth of God. However, when the lights are turned on (Messiah comes) and we still can’t see, then you find out that something is wrong with your eyes. The Pharisees and Sadducees were revealing that their eyes and hearts were generally bad all along.
So the problem of heaping up earthly wealth starts by becoming the love of your heart. It then also affects your ability to benefit from the light of God that you have received. How can you fix such a problem? In the natural, there is little that can be done for a blind person, but we are speaking of spiritual matters. The only solution to spiritual blindness is repentance. It is casting down the idol that has your heart and going after God. The sad truth is that we have played a large part in our own blindness because our hearts lusted after things over the top of people and especially God.
A man whose heart is captured by earthly wealth, and whose eye is gripped by greed and stinginess, is a man whose life is filled with darkness. This leads Jesus to challenge us on who our master truly is. Is He, who is the Master of the universe, the master of me? This is easier said than done.
To the religious leaders, wealth was a sign of God’s blessing upon them. Yet, they didn’t rightly answer the question, “Why has He blessed me with wealth?” Most likely, they felt that it was proof that they were such a righteous person and so pleasing to God. Yet, the truth is that God tests us with wealth in order to see if we will care for our poor brother or not.
The relationship with wealth and things is that wealth enables you to get anything that you want. This is how it becomes our master. We will do anything to keep it and amass more of it. In the end, it rules us and we become its slaves.
Jesus brings up the classical problem of conflicting allegiances. You cannot be serving your desire for wealth and God at the same time. You will be drawn one way or the other. Even selling all of your possessions in order to follow Jesus cannot guarantee that wealth will cease to be an idol in your life. Idolatry is loving and desiring anything above God.
When we make wealth (or anything else for that matter) an idol in our life, it becomes a worthless and impotent thing. Nothing in this world can be God to you, but God Himself. We actually destroy the things in our life by making them into idols.
It is not that God doesn’t want us to have thing. The things we have in our life are His goodness and grace. We should be filled with thanksgiving and fully enjoy them. But, at the end of the day, if I have to choose between the things and Jesus, I need to choose Jesus. Otherwise, they have become an idol to me.
It is interesting that Jesus uses the word “mammon.” Most versions translate this as money or wealth. This is fine. However, it seems obvious that Jesus is giving a play on words. He has been using phrases that keep pointing back to the Exodus. Jesus is the New Moses come to lead them in a New Exodus. In the Lord’s prayer, he talks about our daily bread, which is reminiscent of Israel in the wilderness with the manna. I believe he uses the word mammon because they would have been thinking about the manna in the wilderness just moments before (Daily bread is in verse 11 and this is verse 24).
Just as they didn’t need to worry about their daily bread (manna), so they don’t need to worry about having enough money (mammon). “Man doesn’t live by bread alone.” We tend to take this as natural bread, but in the context, it begs to be seen as the manna. Man doesn’t live by the manna alone, but by the fact that the God of heaven decreed that you were to be given it. We must learn to rest in God’s care for us, rather than amassing wealth so that we can stop being anxious. Spoiler alert: the more money you amass the more fearful you will become about losing it. If money is your idol, you will never be more anxious than when you have a lot of it.
Life has a way of testing us and trying us. Do we want God or do we want wealth? If you are serving wealth, then there is going to be a conflict some day. Do you really love God? You will find out on the day choosing God will lose you all your wealth.
Yet, Jesus brings up something more than love. “He will be loyal to the one and despise the other.” Loyalty and despising have to do with how much you value something. Would you rather have God than all the gold in the world? It is easy to say so when no one is offering us all the gold in the world. In countless many ways, we make choices that declare God’s true value to us. This is a good place to start looking.
Jesus, please show me all the ways in which I am saying that something else is more valuable to me than you. And then, Lord help me to choose You over them.
This reminds me of Isaiah 53:3-4. Speaking of Messiah Jesus, it says, “He is despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.”
It is a scary thing to live your whole life saying that you love God, but when He reveals Himself, you value Him little. This is the big reveal of the Old Testament prophets. Of course, the nations would be in trouble when God came down to judge. However, Isaiah shows us that even the people of God who claim to love Him and value Him greatly, would despise Him and walk on by. Imagine not choosing God and esteeming created things over the top of the Creator. We should value God above the things that He can give us. We should be thankful to the Giver for the gifts that He gives, but we should never let them have our heart, damage our spiritual eyes, and make us a hypocritical slave to things.