Kingdom Commerce (6)
Then He taught, saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it a ‘den of thieves.’” Mark 11.17
A cancerous corruption
Once corruption has found its way into an economy, it grows and spreads. Wherever greed supplants grace as the base currency, the dark horse is untethered and deceit, self-interest, pride, oppression, competition, corruption, and idolatry spread throughout, until no sector of society is safe from infection.
Even the Church has taken up practices deriving from a worldly economy and its corruption, and has become so accustomed to their use that we fail to see the threats and dangers inherent in them.
This is what happened in the temple in Jesus’ day. The religious leaders of the day had turned “spiritual” leadership into a means of personal aggrandizement, even depriving their needy parents of support to bankroll a system that ultimately enriched them more and more (Mark 7.9-13). So comfortable had these religious leaders become in their position of prestige, power, and prosperity, that their great fear concerning Jesus was that the Romans would do away with their privileges (Jn. 11.45-48).
Sanctioned and licensed by the religious leaders, the temple merchants brought buying and selling, as well as money-changing, into the sacred precincts of the Lord’s house, making a profit on people’s desire to be pleasing to the Lord and enriching the purses of those who approved their corrupt economic practices. They were all just keeping in step with the times on the dark horse of economic corruption.
But Jesus would have none of it.
Worldly practices?
I often wonder what the Lord thinks about some of the practices we have taken up in His Name. Christian websites often feature advertising, much of which has nothing to do with the Gospel. Before they mostly went belly-up, Christian bookstores, so called, featured books as a secondary item. Clothing, jewelry, knick-knacks, posters, candy, chewing gum, and more, all of which had been “spiritualized” by some Jesus imprint or Gospel tagline, confronted buyers at every turn. Look at the way fund-raising in the Christian community seeks to manipulate donors through sentimentality, marketing techniques bordering on harrassment, premiums, and vague promises of personal blessing and enrichment. Consider how churches assess their health and growth by counting heads and tallying-up bottom lines. Look at the lengths to which churches go to “market” or “position” themselves in the eyes of their communities.
All these practices have the odor of secularism about them, of getting-and-spending, greed rather than grace, the dark horse rather than the white. As long as we continue to man these tables in the courts of the Lord, letting programs take the place of prayer and preferring numbers to spiritual nurture, we give in to economic self-interest in the name of the Gospel. We cannot expect the Lord to bless such endeavors.
In our day corrupting economic principles and practices have pervaded much of the life of the Church; it is no coincidence that the Body of Christ in America is both richer and, up to just recently, more populous and, at the same time, more marginal and irrelevant than at any time in our history. In many ways, we have fit ourselves into the economy of greed and getting-and-spending, rather than working by grace through faith to bring the Kingdom economy of God to reality.
The evidence of sin’s corrupting presence is easily marshalled. If individual Christians worked as hard at their sanctification and Personal Mission Field as they do at their jobs and diversions, we might bear more fruit of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. If we tithed as freely and lavishly as we spend on our own greed and self-interest, no good work undertaken for the Kingdom economy would go without the resources it needs. If we invested as much time in Scripture and prayer as we do in the various diversions that gobble up God’s gift of time, we might be more inclined to seek the Kingdom and righteousness of God rather than our own comfort and convenience above all else.
If churches and ministries spent as much time praying as we do pleading for funds; if we studied and obeyed the Word of God as assiduously and faithfully as we embrace the latest techniques for organizing or marketing ourselves; and if we insisted on holiness as earnestly as we promote spurious notions of “growth,” the Church in America today would be a far different place.
It would be a nexus of grace and truth, a flourishing economy of divine blessing for itself and its communities.
The wrong horse
It is ironic that, for much of the past generation, Christian thinkers and preachers have been flailing away at the corruption of the world with all our might, beating the dark horse and decrying its woeful effects, even as we have sought to stable it within our precincts. If we paid more attention as the Lord pats and spurs His white horse onward, encouraging us to go forward in grace, we might see more of that commodity transforming our time and spreading throughout our communities.
If we continue to falter and to fall in line with the world, allowing the Kingdom economy to stall, we can only expect that the Lord will bring out the whip to get us back in our proper place under His leadership, rather than that of corrupt worldly institutions and ways.
Corrupt economies infiltrate all the institutions of society, and the Church today harbors its own money-changers and power brokers, all the while thinking itself immune to the dissolving power of greed.
For reflection
1. Do you agree that the Church today has become ensnared in the corruption of our greed-based economy? Explain.
2. What is Jesus looking for from His followers? From His Church? How can we know when we are fulfilling His expectations?
3. What does it mean to overcome a corrupt commerce and economy with an economy of Kingdom good? How does that happen? What is your daily role in this?
Next steps—Preparation: Wherever you see the corruption of a greed-based economy of our age leaching grace and truth out of your life, confess your waywardness and pray daily that Jesus will exert His grace-based rule into your midst with renewed vigor.
T. M. Moore
Glorifying God in how we use our money might seem like a small thing. But our life is made of small stuff, and God expects us to work for His glory in all things. Our book, Small Stuff, can help you develop a mindset for glorifying the Lord in whatever you do. Order your copy in book form or as a free PDF.
If you have found this meditation helpful, take a moment and give thanks to God. Then share what you learned with a friend. This is how the grace of God spreads (2 Cor. 4.15).
Other columns of interest this week: In our Read Moore column, we continue readings from the book, Such a Great Salvation. Our Crosfigell series on Brendan of Clonfert finds him pressing on in his journey to the Promised Land of the Saints. You can subscribe to Read Moore and Crosfigell and receive them in your email regularly. Use the Subscriptions box at the bottom of this page to update your subscriptions. All subscriptions are free. Click the Articles tab on the home page to see all the selections available to you.
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Except as indicated, all Scriptures are taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. For sources of all quotations, see the weekly PDF of this study. All psalms for singing are from The Ailbe Psalter.
