Proverbs 1

In this, the first chapter of Proverbs, we find one of what must be hundreds of statements about greed in the Bible: “If a bird sees a trap being set, it knows to stay away. But these people set an ambush for themselves; they are trying to get themselves killed. Such is the fate of all who are greedy for money; it robs them of life.” (vs 17-19)

God hates greed, and I’m convinced that He hates it primarily because of what it does to us, not because of what it causes us to do to others. We usually think that greed causes people to mistreat others, robbing them of life. But in this proverb, God reveals that it is the lives of the greedy that greed destroys.

Many people have commented on this phenomenon:

“Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.” —Erich Fromm
“He who is not contented with what he has would not be contented with what he would like to have.” —Socrates
“I think one of the most pervasive evils in this world is greed and acquiring money for money’s sake. Once you have six houses and a plane, it’s just about a number. It’s never been anything I understood.” —Kevin Bacon

Several years ago, I read an interview done with Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, where he described a story he’d once written about greed: “That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife’s slain body in his arms.”

This is the devastation of greed. It quickly becomes a monster that takes over your life, leaving you unsatisfied and discontent at every turn. I think this is why God hates it so much—it is sort of the antithesis of trust. Instead of depending on God for what we need, we undertake to get it ourselves. And often, the moment we begin to covet what we don’t have—even if we believe we need it or we’re entitled to it—we’re headed down the wrong path. In fact, the proverb says, we’re headed down a path of destruction.

Greed is inherent in the sinful human heart, and it seems we shouldn’t be eager to encourage it, even when it is cherished for a “good” reason. To covet what someone else has—even if that person acquired it in the wrong way—is a dangerous road to travel. Stephen King once wrote, “It didn’t occur to me until later that there’s another truth, very simple: greed in a good cause is still greed.”

Greed is an all-consuming denial of the fact that God cares about your needs and has your best interests at heart. Giving into it will probably destroy your relationships with those around you, but more importantly, it will destroy you. And that’s why God hates it.