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The Meaninglessness of Wealth
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Introduction
You can tell a great deal about a civilisation and culture from its buildings.
From the size and scale of the buildings it is possible to see what people regard as important in their lives.
For example, many medieval cathedrals are large towering buildings with massive doors and windows.
They were built to reflect the importance and impressiveness of God in the life of medieval man and also to demonstrate the relative insignificance of man in comparison.
Even to enter through the massive doors added to that sense of insignificance.
Today we don't build our cathedrals on that scale.
For one thing we are not prepared to pay what it costs to build them.
For another, we don't see God as either important or impressive.
But we do still build some buildings of massive size and scale.
A glance round our large cities will show you that the buildings which are the grandest and largest in our day and age are banks, insurance head offices, and financial institutions.
And that tells us a great deal about our society; it is driven by and motivated by money.
St. Paul's Cathedral no longer dominates the skyline of the City of London; it is the 32-storey Nat-West Building.
The temples of the early twentieth-first century are the great temples of Mammon.
And it is no longer the voice of prayer which is never silent; it is the non-stop electronic chatter of financial traders in stock markets around the world.
The shrines of Mammon are everywhere - London, New York, Frankfurt, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo.
The important barometers of the world's well-being today are the Dow-Jones, the FTSE 100, the Hang Seng, the Nikkei indexes.
For modern man, it is money, not God that makes the world go round.
But does it?
How does it even begin to give purpose to our lives?
There is an assumption around today that satisfaction may be found in wealth and that wanting more money is a good thing.
Certainly, no one would deny that an increase in personal income will relieve financial pressure.
But there is, it seems, a law that expenditure always rises to match (or overtake) income.
Neither will anyone deny that material prosperity is a legitimate reason for work.
The Bible sees such success as a blessing from God; but it also sees wealth as a stewardship under God, given so that it may be used to further God's work in the world.
However, the general attitude to money and moneymaking in our society takes no account of the biblical model of stewardship and blessing of personal prosperity.
Instead, instant wealth seems to promise instant happiness.
It is not the simple desire to escape poverty that makes gambling - including the National Lottery - a multi-billion pound industry in this country of relative affluence.
It is not a burning passion to be enabled to support God's work at home and abroad that causes people's hearts to beat faster when the winning numbers of the National Lottery are announced on television.
It is the thought of getting something for nothing.
It is a heady and intoxicating solution to life's problems, but its fruit is like its root.
"Easy come" becomes "easy go".
Even the idea of working for yourself, succeeding, and living what is so deceptively called "the good life", is equally exciting.
Now, this is legitimate, to a point, because God does call us to work and He does bless work with success.
But human sin can turn blessings into curses.
Material prosperity, which starts out as a blessing, can become a tyrant that casts a dark shadow over people's lives.
What is good can so easily become a god.
And when that happens, our desire to maintain and enjoy our daily life through money and wealth can become meaningless.
Now, Qoheleth is not opposed to wealth, but he warns against materialism in all its forms.
It is as empty and pointless as every other aspect of under-the-sun humanism.
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Dissatisfaction Guaranteed
In the parable of the sower in Matthew 13, Jesus says that the seed sown among thorns /"is the man who hears the word … and the deceitfulness of wealth chokes it, making it unfruitful."/
Why does the Lord say this?
It is because wealth promises more than it can deliver.
Children, when approaching Christmas or a birthday, will loudly insist that such-and-such a toy is exactly what they need.
They will assure us that it will really satisfy them.
But we all know how passing that satisfaction is.
Two days after the opening of the presents, they are back to their old tried and tested toys.
We adults are perhaps more sophisticated in our tastes.
After all, we are such experts in the quest for personal satisfaction, that we are able to express our most selfish wants as needs.
This is where the deceitfulness attaches itself to the wealth.
The deceit is in the human heart, of course, and it consists in the notion that a certain level of wealth, or a particular purchase, will give us lasting satisfaction.
But, as we all know, there is never a complete stamp collection, nor a perfect house, nor the best holiday ever, nor a large enough multinational corporation.
Today's goal becomes tomorrow's baseline.
The carrot is always ahead of the donkey.
Satisfaction is an illusion.
And the person who is chasing it through increased wealth is, as W.G.T. Shedd once said, "trying to jump off his own shadow The further he leaps, the further ahead his shadow falls."
If we believe that throwing money at the problems of life will actually give it meaning, forget it!
Remember what Jesus said about it!
Wealth is deceitful.
Dissatisfaction is guaranteed!
That dissatisfaction takes many forms, but Qoheleth observes a general principle that "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."
The motivation that drives people on to a consuming passion for money and self-advancement, inevitably multiplies misery for others who must pay for our so-called advancement.
Is there any real prospect of materialism producing lasting happiness in this world?
Qoheleth says, in effect, "Don’t hold your breath!"
And that is only his introductory hint!
He goes on to add some very explicit negative examples.
Whoever loves money will never be satisfied with money.
It's the getting, not just the having, that is exciting.
What we have is never enough.
The satisfaction is in the acquiring of what our heart desires.
As in the days of the prophet Amos, we have to drink out of bigger and better cups and go to sleep on more expensive beds.
That modern barometer of economic success, the standard of living, is not a fixed point, but a moving gravy train, which, for those who are on it, must keep on rolling.
Otherwise, success is an anticlimax.
When you finally acquire the things you want, they so often become a bore.
You may own a valuable painting or sculpture or ornament or car, but you can only feast your eyes on them - enjoyable, no doubt, but hardly the essence of a meaningful life.
And wealth does not provide true security.
Sir William Burrell was a Glasgow shipowner, early last century, who devoted most of his long life to amassing a truly marvellous collection of art objects of all types and from all periods.
A visit to the Burrell Collection in Pollok Park, Glasgow, is a most memorable excursion through world cultural history.
Sir William gave his collection to his native city, but never lived to see it on permanent public view.
In fact, he lived out his later years as a virtual recluse in his home, Hutton Castle, in mortal fear of fire and theft consuming his life's work.
The burden of his great work - which has preserved so much of our cultural heritage - was the torment of its obvious vulnerability.
As Qoheleth observed, the full stomachs that rich people have will not allow them to sleep.
Jesus' taught His disciples to look at things - and He meant things that are good in themselves - from God's perspective.
Don't store up treasures on earth, He said.
After all, they are subject to decay and to theft.
Rather, He said in Matthew 6:19-21, /"Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."/
For an under-the-sun, material humanist, there is no heaven in which to store up the spiritual treasures that Jesus was referring to in the Sermon on the Mount.
For the materialist decay and theft nibble daily at the fragile meaning of life.
But it is all you really have until and unless you receive the Saviour who is Christ the Lord.
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Danger - Money!
And money is dangerous!
Materialism, you see, is not merely a theory or a lifestyle, which, like a brand of coffee or a make of washing machine, is morally neutral and physically harmless.
Materialism maims and kills.
It has consequences that Qoheleth describes as a painful tragedy.
On October 19th 1987, the so-called "Black Monday", the New York stock market lost 23% of its value.
A few days later, Arthur Kane walked into an office in Miami, pulled a revolver from his briefcase, killed the manager, maimed a broker, and then committed suicide.
The crash had all but wiped out a multi-million dollar shares portfolio, which Kane had built up with clever speculation, but largely with borrowed money.
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