Luk. 16:13 ... "No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other, or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon."
The language spoken by the Jews in the days when Jesus was among them was Aramaic. Some of the words of that language, which was also spoken by Jesus, have been left untranslated in the English Bible. Jesus' cry on the cross, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani," (Mat. 27:46), is one such example. It means, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" The word "mammon" is another example; it meant "wealth." In this statement Jesus personified wealth as a master named Mammon, who is opposed to God. There are those who choose God as their Master and subject their lives in service to Him. But there are others who select mammon to be their master and yield their lives to its dominion. Jesus wants us to understand very clearly that no one can choose both God and mammon as co-masters and serve each, thus claiming the best of two worlds.
A similar statement is made by Paul, "Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness?" (Rom. 6:16). The opponents in this statement are "sin" and "righteousness." It is clear that one cannot serve both, for the apostle states further that "having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness," (v.18). That is, one must first be liberated from sin as master before he can become the servant of righteousness. We might notice that this discussion in Rom. 6 is not afield from Jesus' thought in Luk. 16:13, since only two verses earlier he mentioned the "unrighteous mammon." Mammon is one of the major venues of unrighteousness in human experience, and those who yield themselves to its dominion enter a sphere of service antagonistic to God.
More precisely, mammon is the lust, or craving, for wealth and the pleasures it can afford. Notice that I said the "lust" or "craving" for wealth, not the wealth itself. There are those who have great wealth but are not controlled by it. The essential factor is one's attitude. We are assured that "the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil," (I Tim. 6:10). So, it is the "love of money" rather than the possession of it that constitutes the root from which evil grows. Understanding this should lead us to an important conclusion: A person who is poor may be as much enslaved to mammon as the person who is very rich. The penniless person may be as much convinced that power and privilege lie in wealth as the man who has great treasures and trusts in them. Though he may never have much, he may struggle and grasp for the little he gets, and feel badly that it isn't a lot more. He may consider life cruel to him for his poverty and live in perpetual envy of the rich, not realizing he is needlessly compounding his misery thereby. The unrighteous mammon is as much his master as it is of the man who holds great wealth.
Christians must learn that wealth is unworthy to be the master of human life, especially the life which has been purchased by the blood of Jesus. We must realize that money is a means of life and not an end. If we use it to cope with life and serve God, it is a blessing. If we place our trust in it and think it to be the decisive factor in life, we have let it become our master. We are counseled that "those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a snare and many foolish and hurtful desires which plunge men into ruin and destruction," (I Tim. 6:9). Wealth can possibly pamper a person with pleasure and power up to the point of death, but then its horrible end is "ruin and destruction." Only God will reward His servants beyond the grave, where material goods no longer exist. So, in this life we should be the master of mammon and never let it gain the rule over us.
