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Description

What the Bible Tells Us about Wealth and Possessions
WILLIAM BARCLAY
Foreword by Sally Magnusson

One of the great themes of the Bible is the conflict between worldly possessions and spiritual values. Insights: Money gathers together in one place many of the New Testament writings on wealth.
Readers may find the lessons in this book unsettling and shocking. But William Barclay gives us the courage to be had from understanding the truth. Money cannot buy your character, or your relationships, or your values. This book certainly reveals some uncomfortable truths, but it also helps you to see life from a different perspective.

EXTRACT

Jesus goes on to say: ‘You cannot serve God and mamon.’ The correct spelling is with one m. Mamon was a Hebrew word for material possessions. Originally, it was not a bad word at all. The Rabbis, for instance, had a saying: ‘Let the mamon of thy neighbour be as dear to thee as thine own.’ That is to say, people should regard their neighbours’ material possessions as being as sacrosanct as their own. But the word mamon had a most curious and a most revealing history. It comes from a root which means to entrust; and mamon was that which was entrusted to a banker or to a safe deposit of some kind. Mamon was the wealth which was entrusted to another person for safe-keeping. But as the years went on, mamon came to mean not that which is entrusted, but that in which people put their trust. The end of the process was that mamon came to be spelled with a capital M and came to be regarded as nothing less than a god.
The history of that word shows vividly how material possessions can usurp a place in life which they were never meant to have. Originally, another person’s material possessions were the things which people entrusted to others for safe-keeping; in the end, they came to be the things in which they put their trust. Surely there is no better description of a person’s god than to say that it is the power in whom he or she trusts; and when people put their trust in material things then material things have become not their support but their god.