Biblion Bible Commentary
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Treasures in Heaven
Matthew 6:19-24
19 “Don’t lay up treasures for yourselves on the earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break through and steal; · WEB
Three sayings about money that are really about the heart, the eye, and who owns you.
"Don't lay up treasures for yourselves on the earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break through and steal" Matthew 6:19.
The three forms of earthly wealth in that world are each named with what destroys them: cloth eaten by moths, metal corroded, and anything else dug through a mud-brick wall and carried off. The argument is not that wealth is wicked but that it is perishable, and the investment advice follows from the fact.
"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" Matthew 6:21.
The order in the sentence is the surprise. We assume the heart chooses the treasure; this says the treasure draws the heart after it. That makes the placing of one's resources a way of aiming one's affections rather than merely expressing them — a person who wants to care about something should put something into it.
"The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light" Matthew 6:22.
The middle saying looks like an interruption about optics and is not. The word rendered sound means single or undivided, and in that idiom a good eye meant a generous person while an evil eye meant a stingy one Proverbs 22:9 Deuteronomy 15:9. So this is still about money: the way a person looks at their possessions lets light into the whole of them or shuts it out.
And the warning at the end is the darkest line in the sermon — if therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! Matthew 6:23. A faculty meant to admit light can be the very thing keeping it out, and the person will not know, because the instrument they would check with is the one that is broken.
"No one can serve two masters... You can't serve both God and Mammon" Matthew 6:24.
The third saying settles it with the language of slavery rather than employment. A servant with two owners is not overworked; he is in an impossible position, since every claim of one denies the other. Mammon is simply the Aramaic word for wealth, and treating it as a rival master rather than a neutral tool is the paragraph's claim: money is never merely held, it makes a bid for the person holding it. The choice is not whether to serve but which.
settled What this mark means