A Root of All Evil

Yesterday was day 51 in my 1 Timothy study. Due to how busy life has been my study has been limited to the days I'm in the office, so it's taking a little longer than I had initially thought. But yesterday the section was 1 Timothy 6.3-10. While I was reading William Hendriksen's thoughts I noticed something for the first time.

I've heard a quote many times, I've said it several times, and yesterday I found out that I've heard and said the wrong thing. The quote is actually a misquotation of 1 Timothy 6.10. "The love of money is the root of all evil." If you're using the King James Bible or the New Living Translation, that would be the correct quotation. But if we look at the New American Standard Bible, the New International Version, the English Standard Version, several other translations, and most importantly, the original text we see the correct translation, "For a root of all evils is the love of money" (directly from the Greek text). "For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil," (NASB).

I have been wanting to blog about this verse for a while now, but every time God wouldn't give me peace about it, so I held off. I now see why, I hadn't noticed "a root" in the text. Honestly, I think it's because I was so used to hearing "the root" that my mind put a "the" in there instead of the "a". I don't know how many times I have read this passage, but I never caught it until I went to the commentary.

So what do we do with this? We now see that loving money is not the only source of evil, but simply one of them. However it is crucial to note that money in itself is not evil, the love of money is. C.S. Lewis talks about this in Mere Christianity.

"But in real life people are cruel for one of two reasons - either because they are sadists, that is because they have a sexual perversion which makes cruelty a cause of sensual pleasure to them, or else for the sake of something they are going to get out of it - money, or power, or safety. But pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things. The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much... I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way." (Book Two, What Christians Believe; Chapter 2, The Invasion

Money in itself is not evil, it is the love of money, the drive to have more, the yearning that is never satisfied, which is evil. We must learn to be content in what God has given us. We must learn generosity with what we have been given. By serving we stay humble, by giving we stay generous. Generosity will keep us from the love of money, which will keep us, in that aspect, away from evil.

In the words of John Wesley, "Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can."

Peace be with you