Chapter 3
For over a hundred years, a large part of the American people has imagined that the virtual meaning of life lies in the acquisition of ever-increasing status, income, and authority. ROBERT BELLAH
The lust for affluence in contemporary society has become psychotic; it has completely lost touch with reality. RICHARD FOSTER
Where riches hold the dominion of the heart, God has lost His authority. JOHN CALVIN
The comic strip “Cathy” depicted a young man and woman discussing various items they’d acquired:
“Safari clothes that will never be near a jungle.”
“Aerobic footwear that will never set foot in an aerobics class.”
“Deep-sea dive watch that will never get damp.”
“Keys to a four-wheel-drive vehicle that will never experience a hill.”
“Architectural magazines we don’t read filled with pictures of furniture we don’t like.”
“Financial strategy software keyed to a checkbook that’s lost somewhere under a computer no one knows how to work.”
“Art poster from an exhibit we never went to of an artist we never heard of.”
Finally, as both characters stand with blank stares, one says to the other: “Abstract materialism has arrived.” To which the other replies: “We’ve moved past the things we want and need and are buying those things that have nothing to do with our lives.”
Shopping has become our most popular weekday out-of-home entertainment. In the United States there are sixteen-and-a-half square feet of mall space for every man, woman, and child. More people visit Minnesota’s Mall of America each year than Disneyland, the Grand Canyon, and the Grand Ole Opry combined.18 But it’s no longer even necessary to fight through the crowds at the mall—or even to pick up a catalog. Today all that’s needed to “shop till you drop” is a credit card, a telephone, and access to the Home Shopping Network or one of its spin-offs. Or you can bid day and night on eBay. Many of us act as if we believe the words of the old bumper sticker: “He who dies with the most toys wins.”
In 1955, Fortune magazine interviewed a large number of twenty-five-year-olds who were starting to build their careers. The study portrayed the group as dedicated to family and community service. In 1980, Fortune repeated the same exercise with a new crop of twenty-five-year-olds. This time, however, the results were strikingly different. Over the span of twenty-five years, materialism had made remarkable inroads. Writer Gwen Kinkead summarized the attitudes of those she interviewed:
They believe that business offers the fastest means of gratifying their frankly materialistic requirements. Deferred success, the traditional basis of the work ethic, holds little appeal. They expect to enjoy immediately a relatively high level of material comfort. Terry Michel, a management trainee at Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, echoes the consensus: “I like to spend money. I don’t feel like giving up any luxuries. I grew up with lots of land, private schools, horses, dogs, a car at sixteen.”
To a stranger from another generation, they sometimes seem a grabby bunch.
It seems that, almost unprincipled, this class flaunts its ambitions. Why bother with goals, they ask, if you don’t shoot for the top?
Worries about marketability have turned this group into congenital scale-watchers who tote up their chances of promotion, weigh their salaries against the going market rate, and never, never do anything that won’t enhance their records. . . .
Dwight Billingsly, a utilities consultant in a Washington, D.C., firm, strikes a common chord: “I plan to set up my own business, be independent, report to no one,” he says. “Though I have more money now than I ever thought possible, I’d like all the money in the world, and to own a major-league baseball or football team.” . . .
They are unabashed materialists who crave the latest labor-saving and electronic hardware, along with frequent entertainment and travel. Scarcely any twenty-fives have children at present. Most of those who doubt they will ever be parents say they can’t spare the time. Explains Edward Beam, a planning officer at Chicago Northern Trust Company, “I love kids, but I don’t want any. I’m too selfish to give what’s necessary to raise them properly. Eventually, I’d resent their taking me away from my interests, just as I’d be upset that I wasn’t devoting enough attention to them.”
Some already view owning a home (and having two incomes to cover the mortgage) as more desirable than having children. Later the choice may be between having children and an even higher standard of living—or greater job mobility.
One woman in the group stated, “With our lifestyle, we can’t afford good child care and all the things we like.”
Few devote time to public service or volunteer work or express concerns about social problems. Organized religion, favored by the 1955 group as a social and family adhesive, appears too proscriptive or irrelevant to today’s secular twenty-fives. The majority call themselves agnostic or privately spiritual.19
In the more than two decades since the 1980 Fortune interviews, America has continued to drink deeply of materialism. However, in recent years we’ve begun to see a backlash, as typified by the PBS television special “Affluenza,” which addressed what it called the “modern-day plague of materialism.” The program highlighted several symptoms of this new “plague,” including the following statistics:
• The average American shops six hours a week but spends only forty minutes playing with his or her children.
• By the age of twenty, the average television viewer has seen one million commercials.
• Recently, more Americans declared bankruptcy than graduated from college.
• In 90 percent of divorce cases, arguments about money play a prominent role.20
The remarkable thing about this public television program is that it doesn’t argue against materialism on a moral basis but a pragmatic one. The producers’ main objection to materialism is simply that material wealth doesn’t make us happy.
One look at the treasures of King Tut should convince us that materialism didn’t first arise in the latter twentieth century, or even with the industrial revolution or the establishment of Western capitalism. Materialism was rampant in the time of Christ, but it didn’t begin there either. The genesis of materialism was in the Garden of Eden, when the first man and woman chose to follow their appetites rather than God, seeking fulfillment in the one thing he had told them was forbidden. A. W. Tozer describes the ongoing results of their sin and ours:
Before the Lord God made man upon the earth, He first prepared for him a world of useful and pleasant things for his sustenance and delight. . . . They were made for man’s use, but they were meant always to be external to the man and subservient to him. In the deep heart of the man was a shrine where none but God was worthy to come. Within him was God; without, a thousand gifts which God had showered upon him.
But sin has introduced complications and has made those very gifts of God a potential source of ruin to the soul.
Our woes began when God was forced out of His central shrine and things were allowed to enter. Within the human heart things have taken over. Men have now by nature no peace within their hearts, for God is crowned there no longer, but there in the moral dusk stubborn and aggressive usurpers fight among themselves for the first place on the throne. This is not a mere metaphor, but an accurate analysis of our real spiritual trouble. There is within the human heart a tough, fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets things with a deep and fierce passion. The pronouns my and mine look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease. The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended. God’s gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution.21
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines materialism as “a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter.” Two other definitions flow from the first: “A doctrine that the only or the highest value or objectives lie in material well-being and in the furtherance of material progress,” and “a preoccupation with or stress upon material rather than intellectual or spiritual things.”22 In short, a materialist attaches the wrong price tags to the things of this world and the things of God.
Materialism begins with our beliefs. Not merely what we say we believe—not our doctrinal statement—but the philosophy of life by which we actually live. So even though true Christians would deny belief in the philosophical underpinnings of materialism (they couldn’t be Christians if they didn’t), they may nonetheless be preoccupied with material things. Materialism is first and foremost a matter of the heart.
God created us to love people and use things, but materialists love things and use people. Take for example our society’s tendency to treat people as objects. In the marketplace we refer to consumers—economic units that are of value to a company only insofar as they contribute to its profits. Products are marketed to “consumers” without regard to the fact that they may become addicted, depressed, obese, or diseased—taking years off their lives—as a result of consuming those products.
We have every reason to be alarmed about our country’s materialism but no reason to be surprised by it. We cannot reject the Creator and his truth without rejecting the respect for human dignity that naturally flows from it. We cannot teach and believe that human beings are merely the product of time, chance, and natural forces without ultimately treating each other that way. When young people are taught that they’re no different in kind than animals, it shouldn’t surprise us when they act like the animals we’ve told them they are.
Materialism drives not just the “bad apples” of society, not just the abandoned street kids or reform schoolers. It drives “the best and the brightest,” those from the finest homes and schools, those who become government and business leaders, physicians, and attorneys. Materialists are simply living out what they’ve learned at home, at school, from the media, from their friends—and sometimes, sadly, even from our churches. Every person values something. What other values than materialistic ones would we expect from a generation of materialists? As a society, we are reaping exactly what we have sown.
Materialism can never be corrected by high-sounding courses in ethics or the campaign speeches of politicians calling on us to restore the moral fiber of our nation. Moral fiber must come from somewhere. It cannot simply be grabbed out of the sky in the midst of a moral vacuum. Materialism can only be corrected by changing our view of God. This change, in turn, can only come from a belief in and study of the Scriptures, which tell us about God, and which alone give us the context to understand ourselves and the proper place of money and possessions.
Materialism results from a failure to realize that we were made for only one person (Jesus) and one place (heaven). Those of us who know Christ will one day be with him in heaven. Until then, nothing else can satisfy us. Materialism is a lie that Satan whispers in our ears: “If you had this thing or this person, you’d finally be happy.” As long as we live by the lie, regardless of what we say we believe, we will be practicing materialists.
Warnings from the Word
Materialism fills the pages of Scripture. Achan’s lust for money and possessions brought death to himself, his family, and dozens of men in battle (Joshua 7). The prophet Balaam cursed God’s people in return for Balak’s payment (Numbers 22:4-35). Delilah betrayed Samson to the Philistines for a fee (Judges 16). Solomon’s lust for more and more wealth led him to disobey flagrantly God’s prohibitions against accumulating large quantities of horses, gold, silver, and wives (Deuteronomy 17:16-17). To gain wealth, Gehazi lied to Naaman and then to Elisha, for which he was afflicted with leprosy (2 Kings 5:20-27). In the ultimate act of treachery, Judas asked the chief priests, “What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?” Judas then betrayed the Son of God for thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26:14-16, 47-50; 27:3-10).
In the midst of God’s powerful work right after the Church was born, Ananias and Sapphira withheld money they said was given to the Lord and were struck dead for it (Acts 5:1-11). It’s no accident that this happened so early in Church history and that God acted in such a powerful and memorable way. It was as if he was saying, “The Church will not be immune to materialism, greed, and deceit, but I will bring strong judgment on those who poison my Church with them.” The subsequent story of Simon Magus sends the same message (Acts 8:18-21).
Jesus Christ sounded a sober warning against materialism in any form and in any age: “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Luke 12:15).
Greed surfaces in possessiveness and covetousness. Possessiveness relates to what we have, covetousness to what we want. Possessiveness is being selfish with what we own, not quick to share. To covet is to long for and to be preoccupied with having what God hasn’t given us. It’s the passion to possess what is not ours.
Greed isn’t a harmless pastime but a serious offense against God. As one who lusts is an adulterer (Matthew 5:28) and one who hates is a murderer (1 John 3:15), so one who is greedy is an idolater (Colossians 3:5). Greed is money worship, a violation of the first and most fundamental commandment: “I am the Lord your God. . . . You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:2-3). The eighth commandment is a prohibition against stealing (Exodus 20:15), another product of greed, and the tenth commandment is a warning against covetousness (Exodus 20:17). Remarkably, the ten great laws of God, written in stone, contain three prohibitions against materialism
Greed is considered the source of almost every destructive force imaginable, including war (James 4:1-3). The lust for money and possessions is considered the root of a thousand social evils, the most basic of which is apostasy, running away from the true God (1 Timothy 6:10).
Materialists come from every walk of life. There are communist materialists just as there are capitalist materialists; Republican materialists and Democrat materialists; materialists in management and in labor; secular and religious materialists. Greed transcends all economic philosophies, social systems, political parties, religions, and financial situations. It’s part of our basic sinful nature.
What will happen to the affluent person or society that does not rectify its materialism? The basic laws of physics give us the answer. The greater the mass, the greater the hold that mass exerts. This explains why the largest planets are capable of holding so many satellites in orbit. Similarly, the more things we own—the greater their total mass—the more they grip us, hold us, set us in orbit around them. Finally, like a black hole, a gargantuan cosmic vacuum cleaner, they mercilessly suck us into themselves, until we become indistinguishable from our things, surrendering ourselves to the inhuman gods we have idolized. This is the final end of materialism.
In the face of this grim prognosis, Jesus Christ brings us good news. He calls us to adopt a mind-set of generous giving, a habit of life that changes the equation of our lives. Generous giving frees us from the hold of our possessions, breaking us out of their orbit. Through generous giving we can escape the gravity of things on earth by establishing a new orbit around treasures we store up in heaven.
The Stupidity of Materialism
We must understand that materialism is not simply wrong. It is stupid. As Jesus once asked his profit-conscious audience, “What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26).
The parable of the rich fool portrays a man who thought of himself as a successful businessman (Luke 12:16-21). The essence of foolishness is that we either don’t recognize the truth or we choose to ignore it. The rich fool of the parable thought he was captain of his fate. He made his plans without taking into account God’s plans. He failed to come to grips with three fundamental facts—the mortality of his present life, the eternality of his future life, and the reality that today’s choices were forging his future life.
The rich fool was a materialist. He acted irrationally, as if he could escape death or delay it indefinitely. He neglected to number his days and therefore failed to gain a heart of wisdom (Psalm 90:12).
Scripture describes our lives as “like grass” and our achievements as “the flowers of the field.” The grass withers and the flowers fall—in the eyes of eternity this earthly life comes and goes in the blink of an eye (Isaiah 40:6-8). “But man, despite his riches, does not endure; he is like the beasts that perish” (Psalm 49:12). “Man is a mere phantom as he goes to and fro: He bustles about, but only in vain; he heaps up wealth, not knowing who will get it” (Psalm 39:6).
A Greek philosopher said, “All men think it is only the other man who is mortal.” The way we scurry about accumulating things is testimony to our unspoken doctrine that we are exceptions to the law of death. The events of September 11, 2001, were a shocking reminder to millions of Americans of something we should have already understood—our mortality.
The rich fool was “not rich toward God” (Luke 12:21); that is, he did not handle money in a God-centered way. He was self-centered, hoarding and stockpiling money and possessions rather than releasing them to serve God and meet the needs of others. He was too self-sufficient and independent to ask God’s counsel on how much to keep and how much to give, too preoccupied with the business of “success” to open his heart in love to meet the needs of those around him.
The Talmud says, “Man is born with his fist clenched but dies with his hands wide open.” The Scriptures say, “Naked a man comes from his mother’s womb, and as he comes, so he departs. He takes nothing from his labor that he can carry in his hand” (Ecclesiastes 5:15). But the rich fool was too busy being “successful” to care.
When one of the wealthiest men in history, John D. Rockefeller, died, his accountant was asked, “How much did John D. leave?”
The accountant’s reply was classic: “He left all of it.”
You can’t take it with you. Or as someone put it, “You’ll never see a hearse pulling a U-Haul.”
Perhaps we need to read the obituaries to remind ourselves how short our time on earth is. Perhaps we need to visit a junkyard to remind ourselves where all the things we work for and chase after will one day end up. The wise man thinks ahead. The foolish man acts as if there is no eternal tomorrow.
Luke 16:19-31 tells us the story of another rich man and a poor man named Lazarus. The rich man dressed well, lived in luxury, and was apparently healthy. Lazarus was a beggar, diseased, dirty, and “longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table” (Luke 16:21). If I asked, “Who would you rather be, the rich man or Lazarus?” you would presumably reply, “The rich man, of course.”
We aren’t told that this rich man was dishonest or irreligious or that he was worse than your average person. We don’t know that he despised poor Lazarus; we only know that he ignored him. He lived his life as if the poor man didn’t exist. He didn’t use his God-provided wealth to care for another man in need.
Both men die. Lazarus goes to heaven and the rich man goes to hell. When the rich man begs Abraham from across the gulf to send Lazarus to relieve his suffering, Abraham replies, “Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony” (Luke 16:25).
Now that you’ve heard the rest of the story, who would you rather be, the rich man or Lazarus? You’d probably like to switch places, wouldn’t you? But that’s Abraham’s point: After death, it’s too late to switch.
This parable represents a strong and often overlooked New Testament teaching, which we might call “the reversal doctrine.” It teaches that in eternity many of us will find ourselves in opposite conditions from our current situation on earth.
In this life, the rich man “lived in luxury every day,” while Lazarus begged at his gate, living in misery. At the moment of death, their situations reversed—the rich man was in hell’s torment and the poor man in heaven’s comfort.
It would be both simplistic and theologically inaccurate to conclude that heaven is earned by poverty and hell is earned by wealth. But this parable is not isolated—it corroborates a host of other teachings by Jesus, as well as those of the apostles.
In the song she composed in anticipation of Christ’s birth, Mary said, “He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:53).
“Blessed are you who are poor,” Jesus said, and “Woe to you who are rich,” precisely because their status will one day be reversed (Luke 6:20, 25). The poor in spirit, those who mourn, those who are meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness and are persecuted will be relieved and fulfilled and have a great reward in heaven (Matthew 5:3-12). Those praised in this world will not be highly regarded in the next, and vice versa (Matthew 6:1-4, 16-18). Those who are exalted in this life will often be humbled in the next; those who are humbled here on earth will be exalted in heaven (Matthew 23:12).
Those who are poor in this world will often be rich in the next, and those who are rich in this world will often be poor in the next (James 1:9-12). The poor are reassured that the hoarding and oppressing rich will one day be punished and the honest poor will be relieved (James 5:1-6). In Revelation 18:7, a voice from heaven says of materialistic Babylon, “Give her as much torture and grief as the glory and luxury she gave herself.”
Some of these passages may present us with theological difficulties, but all of them remind us that temporal sacrifices will pay off in eternity and temporal indulgences will cost us in eternity. These are the verses that encouraged Christian slaves and should have served warning to the plantation owners who were profiting from slavery. The reversal doctrine is comforting to the poor and weak, and threatening to the rich and powerful. But it’s a consistent teaching of the New Testament—one that confirms the premise that materialism is not only wrong but stupid. Conversely, trusting God, giving and caring and sharing are not only right but smart.
Someday this upside-down world will be turned right side up. Nothing in all eternity will turn it back again. If we are wise, we will spend our brief lives on earth positioning ourselves for the turn.
Wherever true Christianity spreads, it must cause diligence and frugality, which, in the natural course of things, must beget riches! And riches naturally beget pride, love of the world, and every temper that is destructive of Christianity. Now, if there be no way to prevent this, Christianity is inconsistent with itself and, of consequence, cannot stand, cannot continue long among any people; since, wherever it generally prevails, it saps its own foundation.23
After one of our church’s missionaries had been home for a month, he said, “I’ve been overwhelmed with the materialism here.” When another missionary was returning to the field after a year’s furlough, we asked him, “What struck you the most in the time you were home with us?” His matter-of-fact reply was sobering: “What struck me the most was how people use their houses to make statements to each other; their houses aren’t just places to keep warm and dry, but showcases to display their wealth and impress each other.”
Both these men were from other cultures. The sad thing is that if either had stayed in the United States for another year or two, he might no longer have noticed. Like the frog that boiled to death by degrees, we tend to gradually acclimate to our materialism, becoming desensitized to it. Finally, we regard it as normal rather than an aberration.
The hardest part of dealing with our materialism is that it has become so much a part of us. Like people who have lived in darkness for years, we have been removed from the light so long that we don’t know how dark it really is. Many of us have never known what it is not to be materialistic. This is why we need so desperately to read the Scriptures, to grapple with these issues, bring them to God in prayer, discuss them with our brothers and sisters, and look for and learn from those rare models of nonmaterialistic living in our Christian communities.
If we were to gain God’s perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall.
For years, the argument against materialism, among Christians, has been that materialism is wrong. Materialism is wrong, but since this line of argument has proven itself ineffective, perhaps it’s time for a new approach: “Materialism is stupid; in fact, materialism is insane.”
Seeking fulfillment in money, land, houses, cars, clothes, boats, campers, hot tubs, world travel, and cruises has left us bound and gagged by materialism—and like drug addicts, we pathetically think that our only hope lies in getting more of the same. Meanwhile, the voice of God—unheard amid the clamor of our possessions—is telling us that even if materialism did bring happiness in this life, which it clearly does not, it would leave us woefully unprepared for the next life.