Wealth: A Self-made Prison
What will one sacrifice when he is “in love”? The price is very high when it comes to riches. What would one give in exchange for his soul? Whatever one gives himself to habitually and compulsively is the object of his love. The deception of riches ensnares the one who has a love for it. By what a man is ensnared, by this is he overcome. What has trapped him is his own internal decadence and fallen sense of self-importance.
Most who attain to great wealth live in their own man-made confines of loneliness and isolation. Private, gated entrances to exclusive properties portray the deeper, underlying reality of what possesses the souls of the rich. Like a top-security prison, the guards of self-centeredness and pride work together as a blockade to those outside its walls. The rich alienate and are alienated by their own insatiable lust for wealth. Their castles turn out to be self-made prisons in which they are beset with many sicknesses from constant financial troubles and anxiety.
Those who place their confidence in their riches end up spending enormous amounts of time worrying about the potential of losing what they have. They will seek greater investments to secure their wealth. Oh, security! Riches! It is like the wealthy farmer in Luke 12:16-21 who wanted greater and greater wealth in order to guarantee his future prosperity and comfort. In order to secure what he owned, he tore down one barn to build two. “Well done,” the man said to his soul, “Now I have much wealth stored up for many years to come; I can take my ease and eat, drink, and be merry.” What a fool! That night, his soul was demanded of him, and who would enjoy all that he had hoarded for himself?
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
5/18/2005
The Righteousness of Man and the Righteousness of God
The people of the nations must struggle to live according to the voice of their conscience. Yahshua spoke about them in Matthew 6:31-32 saying,
He was not condemning the Gentiles for their anxiety. Isn’t it normal that people would be concerned about how to get those necessary things for themselves and their families? They have no choice but to consume themselves with getting what they need. The issue for them is how they go about it, not the fact that they do.
However, Yahshua was speaking to those who wanted to follow Him. They were those who heard the “voice of the Son of God.” To them He said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.” They were called to a higher dimension of righteousness than those locked in the struggle of working for what they need to live. They were called to His righteousness, to partake of it by trusting and obeying Him. It was a new dimension of righteousness that would cause those who followed Him to escape the chains of self-life and actually attain to
bearing the fruit of His kingdom.
Such was the life recorded in the early chapters of Acts. The life of serving one another to meet each other’s needs rather than one’s own expresses His righteousness. This love between them was the sign that they belonged to Him. After all isn’t that why He died?
For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that One has died for all, therefore all have died; and He died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for Him who for their sake died and was raised… For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:14-15,21)
Those who have become His righteousness are His holy people, who will rule together with Messiah eternally over those who did not abandon the natural righteousness of their conscience. For all eternity, God will dwell in His holy ones, who are His temple, and through them He will dwell with men - the restored men and women who were raised from the first death to stand in the Last Judgment and were not found worthy of the second death. Redeemed Man (having the righteousness of God) will rule over Restored Man (having the righteousness of man), and those who hated all righteousness will have their part in the lake of fire, which is the second death. These are the Three Eternal Destinies of Man.
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
5/7/2005
Seeing the Worth of Messiah
To understand that man is born with the possibility to do good is to begin to understand the value of what Yahshua did by paying for our sins. Rather than being helpless puppets doomed to a life of depravity, we sin because of choices we willingly make. To sin is to do what you know you should not do, therefore it requires suppressing the voice that gives you that knowing - your conscience. It is a matter of choice. The “cowardly and unbelieving” became that way because of choices they made, just as “the abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars.”
If sin were not a matter of our own choices, but merely our lot from being born incapable of doing good, then God sending His Son to die for our sins could hardly be called mercy. Even good people have gone to great lengths to save the life of a helpless victim like a baby. But the love of God far surpasses such human responses. It enters into a dimension of righteousness that is far above that which human beings can understand in their own experience: His mercy extended to our deliberate disobedience.
The Son of God partook of man’s struggle on this earth and overcame every obstacle that man faces. No man is without those moments when he has made choices he knew were bad. No man except Yahshua. He chose always to do the will of His Father, triumphantly conquering every obstacle. This qualified Him to be the spotless Lamb needed to pay for our sins. In death, He paid the full wages of our sins. We were truly worthy of the torment of death because of the choices we made. He
definitely did not deserve it, yet He chose to receive the full wrath of God that was due for the sins of the whole world.
If a man cannot see the worth or value of what He did, how could he possibly make the right response? What you pay to gain something always reveals its worth to you.
For more on this topic, please visit http://www.twelvetribes.org/3ED/
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.