timewerx
the village i--o--t--
At this point, it's important to clarify that the issue is what is faith and what is not faith.
It's a binary, you cannot have a grey area.
You are either depending on mammon for earthly (temporal) gains or God for permanent (eternal) gains.
Where it IS nuanced is the fact that most believers (99 out of every 100) cannot give everything they have to the poor and follow Christ. However, they can ask for terms of peace.
Acts 5:4
4Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied just to human beings but to God.”
Interesting, yes, it's fundamental beginning of making profit....
At the every beginning, nobody owned anything. Everything belongs to God and God gave them away freely to all humankind.
"Ownership" was one of the consequences of man's sin, eventually, this degraded to actual theft. One of the wholesale means of "ownership" back in the ancient days is by forced conquest of lands which clearly qualifies as theft and sometimes even genocide / mass murder. The weak are always the victims.
From that came the appraisal of land or other things being sold for profit and from that money was born. Even today, the flow of money is from the weak and less fortunate towards the strong and rich. Although we use a different system, the direction of flow is still in most cases, the same ("The rich getting richer and poor getting poorer.....") Money originally came from theft and in this case, stealing from God and from the weak.
This why Jesus called the 'simple' merchants at the temple thieves or robbers. He didn't just accuse them of descrating the temple but also accused them of thievery.
This fundamental truth is why Jesus called the rich to sell their luxuries and give the proceeds to the poor. Because the concept of making profit would always exploit or take advantage of the weak and poor. To God's eyes, it is qualified theft. This is just returning back what society took from the weak and poor.
This is also the reason why Jesus said, that anyone who loves money will hate God. You cannot even just 'like' money as I have explained already, money originally came from unrighteousness, the only way to make it right is by using it for actual work for God, using it to help the weak and less fortunate, and not to use it for your own advantage or comfort.
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