Driving with our family on a picnic we listened a bit to Stephen Fry talk about oddities of the English language. At one point he talked about how quotations get modified so that the exact words of the original are sometimes forgotten. That has happened with verse 10 of our text this week, I Timothy 6:6-10.
“Money is the root of all evil,” is how popular culture has transformed the actual words Paul wrote, which are in fact “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” There was even a pop song in the 1940s which repeated over and over that misquotation.
Like many things in human life, money itself is neither good nor bad. It’s our attitudes toward it which have moral character and can be good or evil. So the root of all kinds of evil is not money itself, but the overvaluing of money to the point of loving it.
“Love of money” is all one word in Greek and is basically equivalent to the old-fashioned word “avarice,” or as we would more usually say, “greed.” We are looking this week at greed as the second of the seven deadly sins. Like pride and the other “deadlies,” greed is a condition of character, of the heart, which is not an action in itself, but which leads to many other sinful actions.
The answer to greed is laid out by Paul in the first verse of the text, verse 6, when he says, “there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment.” That thought reflects Jesus own call not to be anxious about food and drink and clothing (all the things money buys), but to seek God and His kingdom and be content with what we have. Such an attitude is not resignation or stoicism, it’s a living trust in God’s provision. That trusting faith is the antidote to greed.