Money Isn't Evil, But Your Relationship With It Might Be.
How much money you have is not evil, but how badly you crave it might be.
The Most Misquoted Financial Verse in Scripture
Drop the phrase “money is the root of all evil” into any conversation, and watch how quickly everyone nods.
They are confident it’s in the Bible. They are equally sure they know what it means.
They are wrong on both accounts; that error has done enormous theological damage.
What Paul Actually Wrote
1 Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.”
A few words dropped — and everything changes.
The first: “the love of.” Paul is not indicting money itself. He is accusing the heart oriented toward the pursuit and possession of money as an end in itself.
The second: “kinds of.” This is not a declaration that money is the singular taproot of every evil in the universe. It is a warning that the love of money opens a door to a wide range of destructive consequences.
Abraham Was Rich. So Was Job.
Money is morally neutral.
Abraham was extraordinarily wealthy, “very rich in livestock, in silver, and in gold” (Genesis 13:2). It was God who gave him that wealth.
Job was the wealthiest man in his region.
God allowed Satan to strip it all: his livestock, his servants, his children, even his health. Every visible sign of blessing gone. But when Job’s faith held, God restored him two times over: more sons and daughters, twice the livestock, a greater legacy than before (Job 42:10–17).
God gave wealth. God took it. God restored it, He even multiplied it.
The Bible does not condemn wealth. It confronts the worship of it.
The Real Target
Charles Spurgeon wrote in John Ploughman’s Talk: Plain Advice for Plain People:
“Many save their silver, but lose their souls. Many a man’s soul has been ruined by his great love of money, although he had but little money to love.”
Spurgeon put it plainly: a man can save his silver and lose his soul. He can have almost nothing and still be ruined by his love of it.
The issue was never the amount. It was always the grip.
The man whose thoughts are consumed with accumulation, whose identity is tied to his net worth, whose generosity is calculated and minimal, that man is in the crosshairs of this verse.
Matthew 6:24: “You cannot serve God and money.”
Note the verb: serve. The question is not what you have.
It’s what has you.
The Takeaway
This distortion has produced guilt in the generous and theological cover for the covetous.
The God of the Bible has no quarrel with your bank account. He has everything to say about what your bank account has on you.
What does your relationship with money reveal about what you actually trust?
To His Glory,
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