What Money Can't Buy

Article 1 of 26 from the Ponder This - 2005 series

January 2005 - WHAT MONEY CAN’T BUY by Ray Pritchard “A feast is made for laughter, and wine makes life merry, but money is the answer for everything”� (Ecclesiastes 10:19). Commentators differ on the meaning of the last phras”“money is the answer for everything.”� Is this an ironic jab at those who think money can solve every problem or is this Solomon’s sober evaluation of life as it stands? I suggest the latter as more appropriate because in one sense money is indeed the answer for everything. The Bible never condemns money per se. A quarter is a morally neutral object””capable of being spent in a million different ways””some good, some not so good, and some positively evil. That quarter can be combined with others to provide food for a homeless man; it can also purchase pornography or make a phone call to a lonely grandmother. It could end up traveling to Thailand to buy hymnbooks or it could help pay college tuition. It might even buy a blouse or it could buy bullets for a street gang. Who knows? In each case the moral value of money is determined by the ends to which it is put. Jesus made the same point in Luke 16:9, “I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.”� Notice the reason he gives””“So that when it is gone.”� What is the “it”� he is talking about? Money and everything money can buy. Money fails in the end. Five minutes after you are dead someone else will have your money. Five minutes after death your checkbook will be useless to you. Think of it. All you live for, the accumulated wealth of a lifetime, everything you dreamed about, every cent you ever saved, every investment, all of it gone forever. As I write these words, the death toll from the earthquake and the tsunamis in Asia has surpassed 52,000. That equals more than 16 times the number of people who died on 9/11. For tens of thousands of people, all their worldly posses- sions vanished under a raging torrent of water. Then life itself was taken away. How quickly we pass from the earthly stage. We are here today and gone tomorrow. After a rich man dies, people often say, “How much did he leave?”� The answer is always the same: He left it all. The question is not, How much did you make? The question is, How did you spend what you had while you had it? Did you buy houses, land, stocks, furniture, new cars, new clothes? Is that all you did with your money? Was that the goal of your life? Or did you use your money to invest in things that will last forever? Those are your only two choices.