Psalm 119:127 – Better than Gold

Thus I love your commandments
more than gold, than fine gold.

I once told a group that if they wanted to find out if this is how people feel, leave some gold on the pew beside a Bible, and see which goes first.

Of course, that misses the point in many ways. Just to start, I own a very large number of Bibles. They are in a variety of languages, including some I can’t read, and in various editions. I have study Bibles from different perspectives. I never have a problem laying hands on a Bible.

But this doesn’t mean anything about my Bible knowledge or my commitment to my faith. Those Bibles sitting on my shelves may have a monetary value, but it’s not in comparing the book to some measure of currency that you can discover what is of value to me. The vast majority of these Bibles, in fact, represent something I accepted for some currency, a modern version of having some gold.

And yet my paying for these books doesn’t tell you what value I place on God’s word. You may find God’s word in any of those volumes, but the question is whether, having access to it, and knowing what it is, you value it.

For example, what amount of money would it take to persuade you, or persuade me, to violate one of the principles we would learn from one of those Bibles? Or, for that matter, one of the principles we might learn from God’s word manifested in the physical world around us.

The question is rarely going to come in the form of some bars of gold, or a stack of printed currency with an instant choice. Rather, it’s going to come in day to day actions.

What do you do, for example, if you have a choice of service versus wealth? Would it not be likely that you, or I, would choose the higher paying option and tell ourselves that we will contact the right people in that higher paying job? But supposing instead that the choice is between a higher paying and higher profile job that would let you serve, and because you, or I, don’t like the limelight we choose something a bit less?

In each case the question is just what is driving us. Too often we take the simple path and assume that someone who is rich has sold out and someone who is not rich must be a true servant of God and others. Or we can take the simple path of assuming the rich person is the blessed person, and the one with less has missed God’s law.

It is never that simple. The question we need to ask is where God’s commands will lead us. That might be to wealth, and it might be to poverty. On the other hand, wealth might be leading us to perdition, or on the other hand it might be leading us to a place of value in God’s kingdom.

What values are driving you today?

(Featured image generated by Jetpack AI and edited with Photoshop.)