The True Riches by EPSILON

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Nov 8, 1883

The True Riches.

By EPSILON

WHAT a grasping after the wealth of this present earth! Alas! how men all around us are worrying and fretting to obtain it. Their one idea of life is money, money, money! What wrongs are committed on every hand! What countless millions mourn on account of the oppression and robbery of the money-graspers! If we may judge by the lives they lead, how many put their trust in riches! And it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for those who trust in riches to enter the kingdom of Heaven; but, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.”

It is right that we be industrious, and provide things honest in the sight of all men, and that we obtain money only for the good we may do with it. But we should never join in the mad rush of the world after wealth and earthly glory. If we but do our duty toward God, toward our fellow-man, and toward ourselves, we need not fear for food and clothing. “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” [life]. He parts with it at death, and it remains behind him, to be a curse, perhaps, to his children.

But oh, the inestimable value of the true riches, the gift of God, the eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord; and with it the saints’ inheritance—the renewed earth, and the mansions which Christ our Lord prepares! When the glory of this present earth shall have passed away forever, and with it the rich oppressor; when the wicked shall be as ashes under the feet of the glorified, and “be as though they had not been,” swallowed up in eternal silence by the second death; when the former things are passed away, and all things are made new, and “Christ who is our life” shall be with us, and be our God, then will we rejoice that we have gained the true riches, the “inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away.” EPSILON.