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How universal is it among those who are in pursuit of wealth to make gold their hope; and, among those who are in possession of wealth, to make fine gold their confidence! Yet we are here told that this is virtually as complete a renunciation of God as to practise some of the worst charms of idolatry. We recoil from an idolater as from one who labours under a great moral derangement, in suffering his regards to be carried away from the true God to an idol. But is it not just the same derangement, on the part of man, that he should love any created good, and in the enjoyment of it lose sight of the Creator — that, thoroughly absorbed with the present and the sensible gratification, there should be no room left for the movements of duty, or regard to the Being who furnished him with the materials, and endowed him with the organs of every gratification? There is an important distinction between the love of money, and the love of what money purchases. Either of these affections may equally displace God from the heart. But there is a malignity and an inveteracy of atheism in the former which does not belong to the latter, and in virtue of which it may be seen that the love of money is, indeed, the root of all evil. A man differs from an animal in being something more than a sensitive being. He is also a reflective being. He has the power of thought, and inference, and anticipation. And yet it will be found, in the case of every natural man, that the exercise of those powers, so far from having carried him nearer, has only widened his departure from God, and given a more deliberate and wilful character to his atheism than if he had been without them altogether. In virtue of the powers of mind which belong to him, he can carry his thoughts beyond the present desires and the present gratification. He can calculate on the visitations of future desire, and on the means of its gratification. But the reason of man, and the retrospective power of man, still fail to carry him, by an ascending process, to the first cause. He stops at the instrumental cause, which, by his own wisdom and his own power, he has put into operation. In a word, the man's understanding is overrun with atheism, as well as his desires. To look no further than to fortune as the dispenser of all the enjoyments which money can purchase, is to make that fortune stand in the place of God. It is to make sense shut out faith. We have the authority of that Word which has been pronounced a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart, that it cannot have two masters, or that there is not in it room for two great and ascendant affections. Covetousness offers a more daring and positive aggression on the right and territory of the Godhead, than even infidelity. The latter would only desolate the sanctuary of heaven; the former would set up an abomination in the midst of it. When the liking and the confidence of men are toward money, there is no direct intercourse, either by the one or the other of these affections towards God; and in proportion as he sends forth his desires, and rests his security on the former, in that very proportion does he renounce God as his hope, and God as his dependence.

(T. Chalmers, D. D.)

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KJV: If I have made gold my hope, or have said to the fine gold, Thou art my confidence;

WEB: "If I have made gold my hope, and have said to the fine gold, 'You are my confidence;'