No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and will love the other, or he will cleave to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
The Lord ends a long section about a steward, his master's goods, and money that was never the steward's own. It presses one question: who owns you?
The word the Lord uses is not a general word for a worker. Reference works note its narrower sense:
oiketēs, "household servant." Luke 16:13; Acts 10:7; Romans 14:4; 1 Peter 2:18.
So the picture is of someone who belongs to a house, not someone who takes shifts. That is why serving two masters is not just hard, but impossible.
Older translations keep the word "mammon" where the ESV says "money." It is not a demon's name but an ordinary word raised to the rank of a rival master:
An Aramaic word meaning "riches." Matthew 6:24 and Luke 16:13 present it as a "master": "You cannot serve God and mammon." Luke 16:9 calls it "unrighteous mammon," because it belongs to this world, where people have refused God's rights over everything. It stands in contrast to true riches, which belong to the world to come.
Money itself is not the problem. The problem is the throne it climbs onto. One commentator states the order: possessions "are given to be of service to us, not that we should serve them."
The verse does not ask what you say you serve. It asks what directs you:
Besides, this object really becomes our master; in truth Satan governs by it. What governs our heart, our object, is our master, and so the love of money rules… This will show itself in loving one and hating the other, or at least holding to one and despising the other.
There is no neutral third option where a person serves no one. The moment self takes charge, you have already chosen a master:
If I do not have Christ as my Master, I will make myself my master. The moment we set up our own will, we find ourselves in Satan's service. The fallen will is Satan's slave.
The Lord describes two cases here. Commentators read them as two kinds of people, not two stages:
One person may have strong feelings of love toward one master and hatred toward the other. In another, the feeling may not be so strong. Even then, the fact of holding to one and belittling the other will be evident.
The fiery person swings to extremes; the mild person simply drifts. Either way the attempt collapses. Of the milder case, one writer says such divided service "can only be a form on one side." It leaves "a halting inconsistency of life in which the Christian side is bound to be the one that fades."
The verse uses a hard word — "despise" — and it is aimed at people who would never say they hate God. Eli, who feared God but favoured his sons, is offered as the example:
We find the same truth in Luke 16:13… To covet the things the world can offer is to despise God. In general our souls are very little aware of this, but this is how God looks at things.
Wealth wraps itself around a person and changes where he stands:
Possessions here wrap themselves around the heart. They give a man a false place among the people around him, feeding his pride and shutting God out. So it is impossible to make both God and mammon the object of the heart. You cannot make the best of both worlds. It is either one or the other, but not both.
The answer is not poverty. It is to hold what you own as belonging to Someone else:
A Christian should treat his time, his money, his abilities and his property as the goods of his Master. His business is to serve his Master and carry out His will faithfully. This matters enormously, because covetousness means trying to make earthly things your own when God has not given them to you.
- One house. The word for "servant" is a household servant — someone who belongs, not someone who clocks in. Belonging to two houses is impossible by definition.
- One master. Mammon is riches personified as a master. Whatever governs your heart is already your master, and if it is not Christ, it is self — and Satan governs through it.
- One test. Two temperaments, one result. The strong heart loves one and hates the other. The weak heart just holds to one and belittles the other. Both fail.
- One verdict. Coveting what the world offers counts as despising God — even in people who fear Him, like Eli.
- One cure. Not giving up possessions, but holding them as your Master's goods. Covetousness is calling your own what God never handed over.
And the Pharisees also, who were covetous, heard all these things, and mocked him.
Jesus had been teaching His disciples about money, and others were listening. Their answer was not an argument but a laugh, and Luke tells us where it came from: they loved money.
The Lord had been speaking to His followers about handling money. The listeners who reacted were the Pharisees, and one commentator notes exactly which nerve had been struck.
Now the Pharisees, not the disciples, come before us. The passage describes them as lovers of money. The Lord's teaching to the disciples did not touch their forms or their legalism; it touched their love of money. After they had "heard all these things," they "ridiculed him." The evil He had warned the disciples about was at work in the Pharisees with nothing to check it.
The term Luke uses is not a general grasping after more. It is a specific word, and it is striking where else it turns up.
The Greek word philargyria means, literally, "love of money." It is the miser's sin, and a person can indulge it while professing religion. So Luke 16:14 applies it to the Pharisees, and 2 Tim. 3:2 applies it to those who had a form of godliness but denied its power. This love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, 1 Tim. 6:10, and those who go after it are liable to wander away from the faith, and to pierce themselves with many sorrows.
Their scorn had a logic behind it.
But that cuts deep, for the Pharisees are in His audience. They are the eager defenders of the law, and at the same time they are lovers of money. So they mock Him. Had the law not promised every earthly good to the man who kept it? From there the step was easy. A man who had never felt how hopeless his condition was on that basis could treat the profits of his own greed as the sign that God accepted him.
Their greed also shut a door.
The greed of the Pharisees (v. 14) kept them from going after the things that belong to faith. Those things were unseen, and in their judgment too far-fetched to trust. They went after the good things of this present life, as though they could use the things of God however they pleased.
Jesus had said no servant can serve two masters. The Pharisees' response demonstrated it in front of everyone.
By rejecting the Lord's teaching, the Pharisees proved it was true. They clung to money and despised the Lord; they could not serve both. So the Lord announces God's judgment on them. Judgment is needed where influence is great, and that influence is unholy.
He did not defend Himself. He shifted the case from the opinion of onlookers to the knowledge of God.
They cared only for the outside, for what people can see and what people admire. They ignored the God who cares about the state of men's hearts, and whose thoughts are completely opposed to men's. In the end God's thoughts will stand and men's thoughts will fall.
Commentators press this verse home rather than leaving it with the Pharisees. One gives a working definition of the sin, and refuses to let the discovery of it drive anyone away from Christ.
What He taught was a heavenly principle, and they loved money. Greed is living for this world, and we are greedy just so far as we are laying our plans for this world. Now, when you find such corruption in yourself, what do you do? Do not let it lead you to give up Christ. Let it lead you to put on your armour.
This sin is also good at hiding from the conscience it lives in.
The Pharisees loved money, and they could only turn Christ's teaching into a joke (see Luke 16:14). The same will be true of everyone who catches the same infection from them. They will not see how the truth rightly applies, whether about greed or anything else. They will try to define it in a way that suits them. They will interpret it, adjust it, trim it down and bend it, until they have succeeded completely in getting their conscience out from under the edge of God's truth.
- Heard. Jesus aimed His words about money at the disciples. The Pharisees overheard, and the teaching touched their love of money, not their legalism.
- Money. The word means "love of money" — the miser's sin. A person can carry it while still professing religion.
- Mocked. They laughed because the law had promised good things to whoever kept it. Their own wealth looked to them like God's approval.
- Weighed. They clung to money and despised the Lord at once, and no one can serve both. God weighs the heart, not the outside, and His verdict stands.
- Warned. The same greed hides easily in any conscience. When you find it in yourself, do not give up Christ — put on your armour.