“Friends by the Mammon of Unrighteousness”
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to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against ... those that
oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless, and
that turn aside the stranger from his right.” “Will a man rob God? Yet
ye have robbed Me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed Thee? In
tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse; for ye have robbed Me,
even this whole nation.”
Malachi 3:5, 8, 9
. “Go to now, ye rich men,
... your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your
gold and silver is cankered, and the rust of them shall be a witness
against you.... Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.” “Ye
have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton.” “Behold, the
hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you
kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped
are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.”
James 5:1-3, 5, 4
.
Everyone will be required to render up his entrusted gifts. In the
day of final judgment men’s hoarded wealth will be worthless to them.
They have nothing they can call their own.
Those who spend their lives in laying up worldly treasure show less
wisdom, less thought and care for their eternal well-being, than did the
unjust steward for his earthly support. Less wise than the children of
this world in their generation are these professed children of the light.
These are they of whom the prophet declared, in his vision of the great
judgment day, “A man shall cast the idols of his silver, and the idols of
his gold [margin]; which they made each one for himself to worship,
to the moles and to the bats; to go into the clefts of the rocks, and into
the tops of the ragged rocks, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of
His majesty, when He ariseth to shake terribly the earth.”
Isaiah 2:20,
21
.
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“Make to yourselves friends by means of the mammon of unrigh-
teousness,” Christ says, “that when it shall fail, they may receive you
into the eternal tabernacles.” R.V. God and Christ and angels are all
ministering to the afflicted, the suffering, and the sinful. Give yourself
to God for this work, use His gifts for this purpose, and you enter into
partnership with heavenly beings. Your heart will throb in sympathy
with theirs. You will be assimilated to them in character. To you these
dwellers in the eternal tabernacles will not be strangers. When earthly
things shall have passed away, the watchers at heaven’s gates will bid
you welcome.