"Do not toil to acquire wealth; be wise enough to desist. When your eyes light upon it, it is gone; for suddenly it takes to itself wings, flying like an eagle toward heaven." (Prov.23.4-5 RSV)

Timely advice today, when fortunes are won and lost by unexpected financial crises. A noticeable factor in contemporary society is the intensive and oft-times frantic endeavour to make money and still more money.

Whether it be the manual worker, demanding higher and ever higher wages in proportion to the success of earlier demands, or the business executive working the stock markets, or the housewife filling in her football pools coupon, the dominant motive is the acquiring of wealth. And who can blame them when every aspect of modern industry takes measures under the pretext of "efficiency" and "stream-lining" to increase its profits, and every national government devises ways and means to extract progressively heavier taxes from its citizens? The acquirement of wealth has become the major pre-occupation and few are wise enough to know when to desist.

The Wise Man knew better. He knew how transitory a thing is worldly wealth, even apart from the fact that "you cannot take it with you". And this is the important thing. The life we know is but the beginning of life, a caterpillar stage, as it were. Beyond the traditional three score years and ten lies an infinity of expanding life and increasing achievement, and nothing of this world's wealth is of any value in that world, or those worlds, and the life we shall then experience. Good it is for one to acquire wealth in this world if it is used to do good, and so to enrich character, that one is better fitted for entry into the next stage of life, but that involves knowing "when to desist"; No good at all, said Jesus, to lay up treasure if one is not rich toward God. To be of any use in the next world, treasure must be laid up in heaven.

AOH (1989)