The Industrial Conflict in the Light of Revelation.
By George W. Rine
MAMMONISM IN THE LAST DAYS.
THE exact root-meaning of the word mammon has never been positively determined. But many scholars maintain that it was the name of a Syrian god which the people worshiped when they were desirous of riches. Whatever its original meaning may have been, Christ, during His ministry on earth, used the term as the name of a real idol, namely, the apotheosis of money. With an emphasis and iteration born of deep anxiety, our Lord warned men against the dangers of mammon-worship. He characterized such worship as absolutely opposed to the worship of God. Observe the stern directness with which He declares that "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye can not serve God and mammon." Matt. 6:24. On another occasion, in His teaching, Jesus called devotion to money not simply mammon, but unrighteous mammon. Luke 16:11. The use of money is involved in so much unrighteousness, so much money is obtained by iniquitous methods, that, in a sense, the very metal is tainted. Christ would have every soul realize that all the aspirations and labors of men have, consciously or unconsciously, one of two objects: devotion to God or devotion to mammon—the worship of the Creator or the worship of the creature. In the case of most men the attempt is made to devote themselves to both the service of God and to the amassing of wealth. Jesus most emphatically declares this to be impossible. The one is diametrically opposed to the other. The worship of mammon—material things—is our unrighteousness; the worship of God is our righteousness. Hence, in the very nature of things, one can not devote himself to money-getting and to the service of God at the same time. One can not be a Christian and idolize riches. A human life consumed in the laying up of material treasures is branded by our Lord as wholly sinful. In truth, the Master goes so far as to actually command men not to lay up material wealth. Let us hear Him: "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break through and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth consume, and where thieves do not break through nor steal; for where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also." How rigorously our Lord here interdicts the laying up of wealth as an aim or purpose in life! His mandate is absolutely unqualified. It is startlingly stern and direct. He knew how preternaturally prone the human heart is to entwine its affections about the treasures of sense and time. To secure houses and lands, to become merchant princes and captains of industry, was the aim and ambition of most men nineteen centuries ago as it is to-day. Such as succeeded were honored and applauded; such as failed were ignored and socially ostracized. See Luke 14:12. This worldly spirit pervaded the synagog as it does the modern church. To Jesus all this was abhorrent. He set His face against it. His followers must not live that way. He gives us to understand that he who lives for riches must, simply must, perish spiritually. "Where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also." Having one's treasures on earth, one's heart will inevitably be there also, and grow carnal and earthly. Having one's treasures in heaven, one's interests, affections, and hopes are there likewise. Having our hearts set on the imperishable treasures of heaven, we grow in grace and in the knowledge of Christ. Jesus did not ignore the fact that food, raiment, houses, and other creature comforts are indispensable. To provide for them is not only right and proper, but a moral duty. It is when we are not content with enough, and become greedy for superfluous wealth, that our efforts to accumulate become sinful. Since in most communities men are honored according to the measure of their wealth, the temptation to make money-getting the supreme aim in life is almost irresistible. To do this is to effectually bar the soul against spiritual influences. That this is true is shown by the following statement in the parable of the sower: "The deceitfulness of riches chokes the word, and it becometh unfruitful." Matt. 13:22. Note further: "Verily I say unto you, It is hard for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven." The same awful truth is illustrated by the parable of the rich man who tore down his barns and built larger ones, and stored them with his goods. The man is then represented as saying: "I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said unto him, Thou foolish one, this night is thy soul required of thee; and the things which thou hast prepared, whose shall they be?" And, having told the story, Jesus solemnly adds: "So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God." This poor fool lost his soul, lost eternal life, lost the measureless and imperishable riches of God, because of his devotion to his goods, his lands, and his building enterprises. Is there any wonder that the Master added this ringing caution: "Take heed, and keep yourselves from all covetousness." And then, through His servant Paul, He positively affirms that all covetousness "is idolatry." This being true, can we wonder at the absolute impossibility of serving God AND mammon? There is no other sin that Jesus so sharply and insistently places in direct and utter opposition to the worship of God. And does not both past and current history justify Him in the enforcement of this truth with such relentless emphasis? Have there not always been, and are there not now, a thousand times as many devotees at the shrine of mammon as at the altar of God? Do we not find our own hearts drawn out to the treasures of this world, with well-nigh irresistible spontaneity? Only the boundless power of God can save any of us from this almost universal species of idolatry. Mammonism in the Time of the First Advent.
Notwithstanding all the advantages of soil, climate, location, and commerce, which Palestine enjoyed at the time of our Lord's earthly ministry, the masses of the people were wretchedly poor. We read of debtors going to prison, of creditors discounting bills, and of a woman whose whole living was only two mites. In one of the Master's parables, every one except the king is bankrupt; the steward is in debt to the king, the servant to the steward. The question of what to eat and to wear created much anxiety. This was true not only of those who dwelt amid the desolate crags of southern Judea or among the wind-swept hills of Perea, but also of those in prosperous Galilee. Judging from the Gospel narratives, the rich were cold, selfish, proud, hard, pitiless. They dressed in purple, and fared sumptuously every day, refusing to give even the crumbs from their groaning tables to the beggars that lay at the gate. By the roadside and at the door of the temple sat blind and lame people, begging for alms. Philo, a writer of that day, complains bitterly of the indifference of the wealthy to the poor. He indignantly declares that the rich were appropriating the "whole of nature's liberality themselves and giving no share of their wealth to any one." In courts of law a poor man's case was given no attention. We remember that Jesus himself tells us of a widow whom the judge shamefully neglected, obviously because she had no bribe to offer, until her importunity won where the righteousness of her cause was impotent. The very fact that a man was poor branded him in the eyes of the money-changers as a sinner. To these brutal devotees of the money tables, poverty was the visible evidence of the frown of God. To the magnates of our day, indigence is the outward mark of incapacity. Poverty spells impotence. "Rabbi," asked one of the disciples, "who sinned, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind?" Poverty, blindness, disease, or accidents, it was thought, were all the fruits of sin. The wealthy Pharisees had failed to learn the lesson of Job's suffering. Eliphaz asks Job the contemptuous question: "Whoever perisheth, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off? According as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow trouble, reap the same." His friends Bildad and Zophar said virtually the same; but God declared that their reasonings were wrong. But the wealthy of Jesus' day had not grasped this truth, and so the poor had to bear in addition to the distress occasioned by their oppression and want, the imputation and suspicion of guilt. Wealth, then, as it is to-day, was congested, and controlled by a few. There was abundance, but it was not accessible to the common people. The pauperized masses dwelt in the shadow of the millionaire classes. On the one hand was luxury and revelry; on the other, destitution and wretchedness. Pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness contrasted strangely with despair, hunger, and corroding anxiousness. The rich despised and neglected the poor; the poor feared and hated the rich. It has already been shown that the same conditions, only in a manifoldly greater degree, obtain in our day. As it was in the days of the first advent of the Redeemer, so it is to-day, when His second advent is so imminent. I need not repeat that this is essentially a money-loving age. The greatest peril of our day, as it was in the days of Jesus, is the insatiable lust for gold. On the authority of our common Lord, I repeat, that there is nothing6more perilous than to become absorbed with the idea of getting rich. You recall the fact that there were only a very few rich men whom Jesus could reach, whom He could save, while here on earth. We can count them on our fingers. There were Nicodemus, Zacchæus, and Joseph of Arimathæa. But the common people, the poor, heard Him gladly. The rich were infatuated with their possessions. Covetousness "is idolatry." They would serve mammon, and hence could not serve God. Trusting in their gold, their birth, their authority as the evidence of their acceptance with God, they rejected their Messiah, their Saviour. Of course there was no other name that could save them. Their "house was left unto them desolate," and they perished miserably by the Roman sword. O, it is not safe to surrender one's self to the bewitching power of gold! "They that are minded to be rich fall into a temptation and a snare, and many foolish and hurtful lusts. . . . For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil; which some reaching after have been led astray from the faith, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows. But thou, O man of God, flee these things." Trusting in Money Rather Than in God.
Once, when the Son of God walked among men, there came running to Him a rich young man, who knelt down and eagerly asked, "Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" Our Lord first told him that it was necessary to keep the commandments, and named some of them. The young man protested that he had kept them from his youth up, and then inquired, "What lack I yet?" Jesus answered, "One thing thou lackest; go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, take up the cross, and follow Me." The young man, however, proved to be an unwitting idolator. He was wedded to his money. His heart was with his treasures. He was self-deceived in maintaining that he had kept the commandments. He was systematically trampling underfoot the very first commandment. Before God and above God he placed wealth. His actions attested his supreme devotion to gold; for it is written, he "went away grieved; for he had great possessions." The Lord then spoke to His disciples of how hard it was for rich men to enter the kingdom of heaven. The disciples being astonished at this, their Master explained by saying: "Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter the kingdom of God!" Mark 10: 17-24. That small word "trust" is the cue, the very principle involved. It is not the having of riches that makes one an idolator, but the trusting in them. We can not trust in gold and in God at the same time; for either we will love the one, and hate the other; or we will hold to the one, and despise the other. Whatever is supreme in our affections is, in spite of ourselves, our god. O, how many of us feel that we should be safe if we were only rich! How many of us would make riches our defense, our refuge, if we could! To most of us, lands and houses and bank deposits are, in times of stress and trouble, more than the changeless promises of God. Such feeling, such convictions, show unmistakably that we are not willing to commit our keeping, our destiny, to God. They show that we feel safer surrounded by stocks and bonds than by the exceeding great and precious promises of God. How often we hear it repeated that this is an age of unrest, of misgivings, of fear and anxious forebodings. It is because we are afraid to trust in the keeping and saving power of God. Either our love of money or our mad passion for acquiring it separates us from Him who pleads that we should come unto Him that He may give us rest, even rest unto our souls. We are afraid to seek first the kingdom of God, and to trust Him to supply all temporal needs. "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee; because he trusteth in Thee." Isa. 26: 3. We read a verse like this and say, "How beautiful! how precious is this promise!" But by our actions we declare, "I don't believe it; it isn't true." A Corroding Sin of To-day.
"In the last days . . . men shall be lovers of pleasure," "lovers of money." 2 Tim. 3: 1-4. This is the cardinal sin of to-day, the chief menace to the soul. It is the sin that lies nearest the root of the universal unrest and social disorder of our time. It is destroying faith in man, and when that is lost, faith in God is impossible. Is there any wonder that Jesus asked the sorrowful question, "Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?" It was the strongest possible way of declaring that there would be but little faith among men at His second coming. The prevalence of mammonism effectually precludes faith in God. This is the fatal mistake that so many of the rich are making in these last days. They make gold their defense, their refuge. Divine Wisdom foresaw that they would do so. In the second chapter of Isaiah, the prophet deals with events that are to take place at the time when the Lord is about to arise to "shake terribly the earth." See verses 5 to 22. In verse 7 the prophet exclaims, "And their land is full of silver and gold, neither is there any end of their treasure." However, the supremely sad fact regarding those who possess these "treasures" is that the final destruction of so many of them will be compassed by their devotion to their money. This awful fact is distinctly affirmed in verses 20 and 21. Thus: "In that day men shall cast away their idols of silver, and their idols of gold, which have been made for them to worship, to the moles and to the bats; to go into the caverns of the rocks, and into the clefts of the rugged rocks, from before the terror of Jehovah, and from the glory of His majesty, when He ariseth to shake mightily the earth." 'Drown Men in Destruction and Perdition.'
In Ezekiel 7, verse 19, the Holy Spirit repeats essentially the same awful incident: "They shall cast their silver in the streets, and their gold shall be as an unclean thing; their silver and their gold shall not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of Jehovah; they shall not satisfy their souls, neither fill their bowels; because it [money] hath been the stumbling-block of their iniquity." Is it not clear from the foregoing that these possessors of silver and gold trusted that their treasures would "be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of Jehovah"? But on the contrary their very riches wrought their irretrievable destruction. Hence, like Judas, when they see how covetousness, how the love of money, has barred them from the attainment of eternal life, they hurl their gold and silver from them in utter agony of despair. Again: in Zephaniah 1: 14, the prophet says: "The great day of Jehovah is near, it is near and hasteth greatly; . . . the mighty man crieth there bitterly. That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wastiness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess." And then, in the 18th verse, he declares respecting these "mighty men:" "Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of Jehovah's wrath; but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of His jealousy; for He will make an end, yea, a terrible end, of all them that dwell in the land." The citation given above, from Ezekiel, shows that it was devotion to silver and gold that proved the undoing of the souls there referred to. For it (gold) was "the stumbling-block of their iniquity." It obtruded itself between them and God, as was the case with the rich young man who came running to Jesus. They served mammon, and so could not serve God. In the supreme crisis their idol failed them; yea, not only failed them, but was itself the "stumbling-block," the instrument of their everlasting undoing. Doubtless it is hard for a rich man to surrender himself, with his riches, to God. But it is not impossible. Rich men have surrendered, and believed unto eternal life. There is nothing impossible with God. He is no respecter of persons. He loves all men equally. Of Zacchæus it was said that he was very rich. Yet so completely did Jesus save him that he declared his purpose of devoting one-half of his wealth to the relief of the poor. As a publican, Zacchæus had been a grasping, conscienceless tax-gatherer. He had defrauded many. Yet so thoroughly was covetousness banished from his heart, that he determined to make fourfold restitution to all whom he had defrauded. Our Lord died for rich and poor alike. He has saved not a few men of wealth, and doubtless He will save many more. I have a conviction that rich people deserve more sympathy, more Christian kindness, than they commonly receive. They have more to forsake, more to give up, than we poorer ones. But to them, as well as to us, the promise is, "My grace is sufficient for you."