Chapter Fifteen: The Love of What

1 Timothy 6:10 — The Root of All Evil

"For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people in reaching for it have strayed from the faith and stabbed themselves with many pains." — 1 Timothy 6:10 (NET)

Everyone knows the saying: money is the root of all evil. It is quoted by people who have never opened a Bible, and by people who have, as though it were the plain teaching of Scripture. It is not. The verse says the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Two words have been lost in popular transmission: love and kinds. The loss of those two words produces a different verse with a different theology.

The subject is the craving, the love, the disordered attachment. Not the thing itself. Money is morally neutral. It is a tool. The question is what the tool is attached to — what it means to the person who holds it, what they are willing to do to get it and keep it, what they lose when they lose it.

The removal of the word love produces an anthropology in which the material object itself is corrupting — in which having money is spiritually dangerous. That is the anthropology of asceticism, not of the New Testament. The New Testament is full of people of means who follow Jesus faithfully: Joseph of Arimathea, Lydia, Philemon, the patron network that supported Paul's missionary work. The issue is not their wealth. The issue is the ordering of their loves.

The removal of the word kinds narrows the claim. The verse says the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil — meaning that this particular disordered attachment has branches that reach into every category of wrong behavior. Greed produces dishonesty. It produces the exploitation of the vulnerable. It produces the abandonment of integrity under financial pressure. It produces the prioritization of security over faithfulness. The love of money is not the only root, but its branches are diverse.

The person who has absorbed the phrase money is the root of all evil has been handed a framework that makes honest engagement with wealth and generosity more difficult. If the thing itself is the problem, the only solution is to not have it, which produces either guilt in those who have it or a suspicious withdrawal from economic life. The actual verse produces a different discipline: not the avoidance of money but the examination of your love. What does this mean to you? What would you be willing to do to keep it? What do you become when you lose it?

The Recovery

Read 1 Timothy 6:6–10 as a unit about contentment and the disordered love of wealth. The teaching is about what money means to you, not about money itself. The recovery is an examination of your loves rather than a verdict on your bank account. Godliness with contentment is great gain. The craving is the problem. The craving can operate in the person who has very little as well as in the person who has a great deal. The verse is about an interior condition, and interior conditions require interior examination.