God and the Love of Money

For centuries many have said that the root of all evil is the love of money, and although this concept is directly derived from the New Testament (see 1 Timothy 6:10), most people only come to understand such an adage through a superficial observation without any in depth contemplation. Could a understanding of the love of money, for example, be used to explain the origin of all sin in creation? On the other hand what exactly is evil about money, or what is evil about loving money? Overall, my purpose is to explain a unique way of dealing with the question of evil and the love of money that will explain the real dangers involved with how people relate to money.

In a previous paper I discuss the question of Radical Evil, and I thus define the nature of evil as the darkness or nothingness that the light entered and thus God created all of reality into. The point thus of evil existing in creation is that some creation inevitably is directed to evil as like a icon to the nothingness, and thus lies for example are distortions of creation that point away from God and are directed into the nothingness of nonexistence. Money for example could either act as a symbol that points and connects to the nothingness, or money could act as a symbol that has its corresponding reality in God's creation and thus ultimately has its reality in God's creative expression that demonstrates God's own will and desires to the world.

Today in many nations money is a form of paper that the government issues, and often the money issued has no corresponding physical good or service associated with it other than perhaps a promise to repay. In the United States the dollar is issued through the treasury offering banks overnight loans at low interest whenever the economy needs more money, and the dollar can be brought back into the treasury through selling long term treasury bills at high interest in exchange for money. Overall, the value of the dollar and the value of the treasury bill are almost completely controlled by the Federal Reserve Board controlling interest rates, and what secures the power of the government to be in power over the economy through trust is by keeping the economy productive and by providing reciprocity.

The three elements of every government that are necessary for having a government are taxation, the legal administration of justice, and a standing army. A standing army is necessary for defining the jurisdiction of one nation from another, the legal administration of justice is necessary for eliminating threats that would end the rain of the government from within its own ranks, and taxation is necessary for paying for everything that the government has to offer in order that the government may appease the people in order to have continuous support from the citizens. When a nation thus makes paper that is traded for things, the security of that money is ultimately backed by the trust that people have in the government that issued the paper.

In the United States every dollar says, "In God We Truest." Our nation has thus recognized that even the symbols that we trade (the paper) must ultimately point back and connect to God in order to have any reality associated with it. Otherwise paper produced by the government would point only to things at best that could be traded, and neither the symbol nor the things traded could have all of its origin in God's creativity because those things would be alienated from God or broken from communion with God. The term sanctification for example means to be set aside for a purpose, and things that are sanctified for God for example would be things that have their reality ultimately in God because those things become instruments of God.

The problem with the love of money is that to desire money for the sake of money is to desire a symbol for the sake of a symbol without any corresponding reality associated with it. Some would say that the reality that is realized by the symbols of money are only ever realized in the physical things that money can buy, and the problem with this belief is that this view either denies the existence of God to be the creative force of all things real or it makes money and those things that money can buy into objects that are alienated from God through being set aside for ultimately pointing to and connecting to the nothingness known as evil. Evil thus emerges with money when it no longer becomes part of the great chain of creation that comes forth from God's own speech (the Word of God).

Loving money thus for the sake of money means that money acts as a symbol that does not have its reality in Gods creativeness that brings forth all of reality through his speech. Instead money would in this case become a false God. When money becomes a false God or in anyway points to the nothingness of evil, then it becomes a instrument of evil.

Decades have passed and have brought about sharp dispute among citizens of the United States as some have argued that a separation of church and state should mean that any belief, understanding, or acknowledgment of God, anything divine, or any exhortation of ultimate reality should be removed from the public with the exception of public expression in public forum that is separated from people having to experience any feeling of offense if they disagree with what is said. In other words the belief that God exists has become so offensive to some people that they do not want to feel trapped into listening to a spokesman introducing the notion of God, and those people would then use the concept of the separation of church and state in order to try to protect their environment from a belief in God intruding into it. Overall, the point is that for Christians removing reference to God from creation what emerges is evil because created things no longer have their origin in Gods speech.

Money and the love of money has thus become the front that atheists and Christians come into conflict with. Since everyone is considered to need money and since the government is in control of money thus the question of judging between atheists and Christians in terms of their expression and belief in ultimate reality eventually enters into the government's jurisdiction as people work for money with contrasting views and then come into conflict with their world views at the workplace. Overall, since government uses money as its instrument of control thus government may find itself siding with its primary tools (namely money) instead of siding with any view that explains ultimate reality, and this happens because government often drifts more and more away from purposely fulfilling a ultimate purpose and thus becomes more and more absorbed into short run survival that demonstrates a value for self love over service to the divine.

Individuals and governments that have a love of money would in the end use money to bring the love of self (otherwise known as pride) into fulfillment. Money would thus become like a idol that a person would worship in order to secure welfare and prosperity for one's own self, and this desire to worship such a idol would emerge from self love seeking fulfillment through gaining the blessings that a idol would give in exchange for worship. After all if people and government fail to recognize the divine in ultimate reality, then they are faced with the prospect of only showing their reverence to created things such as in the case of idol worship (although it is not always called this by all people). My point in all of this is that instead of loving money that ultimately would break our communion with God and bring about idol worship, thus instead we should love God and bring money into relation to the creative force that God's speech (God's Word) brings.