Making Friends With Unrighteous Money Series

We laugh as comedians ridicule authority with biting, sarcastic humour and then we are surprised that the members of our society no longer respect either lawmakers or the law. We teach our youth that all things arose through natural processes as result of time and chance and then we wonder why they will not worship God. We assure ourselves that all mankind has descended from animals and wonder why people act like beasts. We insist that faith is a private matter, insisting that it be confined to a few moments on a Sunday morning and then we marvel at the degeneration of moral and ethical behaviour. We adopt values clarification as an instructional method and wonder why our youth are so influenced by their peers to act wickedly. Jesus was assuredly correct! “The sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light.”

Joseph Epstein tells a story that illustrates some of the changes that have taken place in a very short time. He writes of having lunch with a lawyer in his late seventies. A number of his partners had retired and he planned to close his office. He had arranged to move in with a large firm where he would provide counsel. I pick up Epstein’s story at this point. “The deal was set, but before the actual move, he took 12 of what were to be his new firm’s associates to lunch, to explain to them how he worked with his clients. The day after the lunch, he was called by a senior partner of the firm and informed that the move couldn’t be made after all. When he inquired why, he was told that, at the lunch, he apparently made a joke about a fat man and more than once referred to women who had worked for him as ‘my girls.’ The associates, as a body, found this unacceptable and wanted no part of him. ‘When I was in college, there were certain words you couldn’t say in front of a girl,’ Tom Lehrer remarked. ‘Now you can say them, but you can’t say “girl.”’

Epstein continued his story. “I happen to know that the lawyer in fact paid these women well, treated them respectfully, and as a result they were as loyal to him as he to them over the decades they worked together. None of which, though, signified, since the associates made their judgment of him on grounds of political correctness, and from the kangaroo courts of political correctness there is no reprieve, no time off for good behaviour, and no parole.” [4]

Jesus continued by admonishing those individuals who seek to honour Him to “make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.” Jesus did not say that we were to make “unrighteous wealth” our friend—we are not to be “lovers of money.” There is a wide difference between “of” and “by means of.” What Jesus did clearly say is that each Christian bears responsibility to use “unrighteous wealth” to make friends. In short, it matters to God what you do with your wealth!