‘As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy’ (1 Timothy 6:17).
Living near Morrisons has many advantages, but it’s been depressing recently to watch fuel prices creep up on an almost daily basis. And that’s even before you go into the supermarket and see the price of food! As we head into the summer, people are cancelling or rearranging holidays, or else heading off as planned, but with the thought that this might be the last one for a while.
What makes it all feel like a sucker punch is that after two years of restrictions, we thought things were finally getting back to normal. We’ve gone from having money, but not freedom, to having freedom, but not money.
The Bible talks about ‘the uncertainty of riches’, and times like this really bring that phrase home to us. Maybe we think that talk of ‘the rich’ and ‘riches’ doesn’t apply to us, but on a global or historical scale, we have far more than most people who’ve ever lived.
Yet even if there wasn’t a cost-of-living crisis, money is a very insecure thing to set our hope on. Even if we had unlimited wealth, one day we’d have to let it go. The Bible reminds us that ‘we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of the world’ (1 Timothy 6:7). In the face of that, the Christian message is that we must put our hope in something that will outlast this world – God himself. A crisis like this, when there’s huge financial uncertainty, challenges us to ask what our happiness is rooted in. Doubtless we’ve all repeated the old adage that ‘money doesn’t bring happiness’, but do our lives show that we don’t really believe it?
Nor is materialism a recent problem, that we could be cured of if we could only go back to some mythical simpler time. I was recently asked to write an introduction to a Spanish translation of a seventeenth century tract which you could once have been killed for owning, entitled The Causes of the Lord’s Wrath against Scotland. This ‘seditious, treasonable and poisonous’ tract enraged Charles II, was burned by the public hangman at Edinburgh in 1660, and its author was executed the following year. In many ways, the tract and the circumstances in which it was written seem light years away from 2022, but much of it is startlingly up to date. For example, one of the sins that it highlights is that ‘the majority of the people spend their time in seeking after the things of a present world; and as they prosper, or are frustrated in these things, accordingly do they think themselves happy or miserable’. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.
If a seventeenth century tract seems too obscure, take it from someone who’s achieved everything in the world’s eyes. The actor Jim Carrey has said ‘I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer’. But if riches and fame aren’t the answer, what is? Not to set our hope in God’s gifts, but in the Giver.
Our big problem as human beings however is that by nature we’re alienated from our Creator. One of the evidences of that is that we ‘worship and serve created things’ (Romans 1:25). We might wonder how we’re going to be able to pay skyrocketing utility bills over the winter, but that’s nothing compared to the debt we owe to God. Christians pray in the Lord’s Prayer ‘forgive us our debts’ – and that is no small thing to ask, since ‘the wages of sin is death’ (Romans 6:23). Come winter, we will be a lot slower to put the heating on than before because we know that it will cost us – but have we ever considered what living in God’s world without acknowledging him will cost? If we’re now living in a financial day of reckoning, what will a spiritual day of reckoning look like?
And yet if only we will face up to our need, we can then hear the news that someone has come to solve our spiritual cost-of-living crisis – by offering to pay the price for us to live forever. The cost? ‘Not perishable things as silver and gold, but the precious blood of Christ’.
Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 30th June 2022