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The greed road – the “love of money” – has many pitfalls. Greedy financiers, bad housing policies that let people over-borrow and speculations by corporate investors have resulted in many financial crises in many parts of the world. Greedy Christians have tortured their own souls with sorrows from wanting riches. Like King Saul in the Bible. He was lured by the spoils of war against the Amalekites and kept “the best sheep and cattle” to supposedly offer them as sacrifices. But that contradicted God’s instructions to reject the spoils of war and God rejected him as the King of Israel.

However, there are also examples of who those who are wealthy but earned God’s praise. Abraham was “very wealthy in livestock and in silver and gold” (Gen. 13:2). Yet, when God tested him to sacrifice his son Isaac, he never used his wealth to buy, say, hundreds of sheep for a sacrifice. Job was super wealthy but he was not a fair-weather believer, thanking God only when he was the wealthiest man in the neighbourhood. He blessed the Lord even when he lost everything, including his children.

God does not frown on riches per se. Psalm 112:3 says “wealth and riches” are blessings for believers who fear Him. But Christians cannot, as Matthew Henry writes in his commentary on 1 Tim 6:5, “make religion truckle to their secular interest” – that is, make teachings conform to our material practices. A clear New Testament example is how merchants turned the Temple in Jerusalem into a market place, faking themselves to think that their doves for sale and money-changing services are helping people to worship. “To obey is better than sacrifice” (1 Sam. 15: 22). For God, the giving is vain when the heart is empty.

So, the Bible teaching is not that believers cannot get rich. It is that we cannot let the riches get to us. 1 Tim. 6:8 (and Matt. 6: 33) mentions only two tangible essentials – food and clothing, not property. It reminds us that the security of our life rests not in possessions. Knowing this should liberate us to free up our wealth to help the needy among us. Indeed, we are not to go after quantities. We are to go after qualities like righteousness and faith (1 Tim. 6: 11). And in whatever we have, when we love the Lord God, with all our heart and soul and strength, that is the greatest gain.