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Did Jesus Really Say You Won’t Get Into Heaven If You’re Rich?
Welcome back!
by Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D.Â
The world is divided into at least three types of people.
- Â People who either don’t know or care what Jesus said about money.
- Â People who care profoundly about what Jesus said about money and do their best to be obedient to those words.
- The people who know what Jesus said about money-or at least they think they know-and wish they didn’t.
Here is an example of the third type of person. I was at a seminar about creating a millionaire mindset. After a break, I was returning to my seat when I saw one of the students talking with the speaker. As I got closer, I heard the student ask: “How can you say it is good to be rich? Jesus said that a rich man can’t get into Heaven.”
I knew what the man was talking about. He was referring to a statement about a rich man who asked Jesus a question about eternal life. The story ends with words of Jesus about a “rich man,” “a camel,” “the eye of a needle,” and “the Kingdom of God” or “Kingdom of Heaven.”Â
This one comment about a rich man and the Kingdom of Heaven is probably the single most misunderstood verse about money among all of the words of Jesus. And it is my candidate for the Bible verse most likely to produce people who are afraid of becoming rich out of fear for their own salvation.
The distressed questioner had misquoted the verse itself. Jesus did not say that a rich man can’t get into Heaven. In the three biblical versions of the story, Jesus made a statement about a rich man entering the Kingdom of God or Kingdom of Heaven. By identifying the “Kingdom of Heaven” with “Heaven,” the questioner had significantly missed an important point.Â
The point is that the Kingdom of Heaven is not the same as Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven is about changing the economic reality of people living on planet earth.
The only liberating remedy for people who know-or think they know what Jesus said about money-is to put the words of Jesus into the context of the story, and to put the story in the context of the economic society in which Jesus lived.
The alternative is to live your life feeling guilty about wanting money and guilty about having it. This is what happened to the man at the seminar. He misunderstood the point of the story. As a result, he was stuck in the Eye of the Needle about money, without realizing that he had completely missed the point of the story.
Jesus was not saying that the rich cannot get into Heaven. Jesus was condemning an economic system that produced so much poverty, not glorifying lives of poverty.
© 2007 Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D.
