Read Along
Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used with permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
You’d expect the next line to be about money. Instead, Jesus says, “The eye is the lamp of the body.”
Treasure, then eyes, and two verses later, a servant with two masters. It’s easy to read them as three separate sayings. But they belong together. What you treasure and how you see shape each other, and together they decide whom you serve.
This is episode nine of twelve on the Sermon on the Mount. Last time, Jesus taught His followers to pray, and to ask the Father for “our daily bread.” This time, Matthew six, verses nineteen to twenty-four. Only six verses, and one question running through them: what is your treasure doing to your eyes and to your heart?
Start with the treasure.
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.
Think about where people kept their wealth. A lot of it was cloth. When Elisha’s servant Gehazi went after a gift from Naaman, he asked for silver and “two sets of clothing.” Fine clothes were savings, and a moth in the chest could eat them. Some Bibles say “rust” here and others “vermin,” and the word itself simply means eating: whatever eats away at what you’ve stored. And “break in” is literally “dig through.” Walls were often mud brick, and a thief could dig his way into a house.
So Jesus names three ways a stored treasure disappears.
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