There is no power greater than the Lord. Nothing can transpire either in the material creation or the spiritual creation without His will, His agreement. On the “sermon from the mount”, Jesus informs us that there are two masters: God and Mammon…….that we are in the service of one or the other, and that we cannot be in the service of both.
Just as the ability to be in the service of God, with all of our heart, is actually a gift bestowed upon us by God, in response to our ardent desire……similarly when we are in forgetfulness of God, and thinking that the things of this world can fulfill the desires of our heart…..this misdirection of the heart is also due to God’s influence.
It is not that God wants us to be misdirected. He sends Jesus as His messenger to give us a proper sense of direction. But the choice is ours. If we take shelter of God’s messenger, his influence will bless our heart with higher intelligence, spiritual intelligence. Taking shelter means more than saying “I am saved”. Taking shelter means praying to Jesus with heart and soul, begging him to protect us from the attractions of mammon. And the moment that heartfelt request for spiritual protection stops, at that moment we fall victim to the allurements of mammon. It is not that mammon is so strong. The only problem is that our spiritual desire for God’s protection is not strong. Mammon will not appear where the Lord is present. But the moment the Lord is absent from our heart, Mammon moves in to allure us, taking up the slack. That is his job.
We have to understand that we are in therapy within the material world. We have been expelled, excommunicated, so to speak, from the “Garden of Eden”, not by chance, but because of our own misuse of our free will. And now our job, as prodigal sons and daughters is to convince God that we want to come home again.
The consciousness of attachment to the allurements of Mammon, is the “prison cell” that keeps us apart from God. Jesus is our spiritual “parole officer”. As long as we maintain our communion with him, we are free. And the moment we break parole, we are back in the prison of Mammon’s grip.
Although it may appear that Mammon is working against God…….the fact is that Mammon is the superintendent of God’s prison house. If we don’t want to be in communion with God, we are placed under Mammon’s jurisdiction. The choice is ours from moment to moment. Mammon is insurmountable. No one can escape his control by willful determination. The only way to escape from the control of Mammon, is to convince God that we want to be in His company more than anything in this world. And the way to do this is take shelter of God’s son who has come to save us.
Even the best of so-called “good” people can be under the direction of the dictates of Mammon. When Jesus told the pious wealthy man to give away all he had to the poor and follow him, the man could not do it. At that time Jesus said that the person who is attached to his wealth, more than he is attached to God……such a person cannot enter the kingdom any more than one can pass a camel through the eye of a needle.
Therefore to be in the grip of Mammon can be very subtle. One is not saved by being a “good” person. We have to be attached to God and His empowered messenger with all of our heart and soul. It is that attachment only that can break the bond of all of our mundane attachments. It is only that heartfelt attachment to God that can free us from our attachment to Mammon.
For those of us who are not ready to give our hearts to God 100%, God employs His servant, Mammon, to take charge of us. And the payment we receive for such service is death. And the payment we receive by becoming servants of God is…….eternal life.