You Cannot Serve Two Masters

Some Musings on  Matthew 6:24

The idea of someone having a master is really politically incorrect and repugnant to our modern sensibilities.  Yet, the reality is that we cannot escape having one.  We all have a master or a lord.  The question is who or what is your master?   If the word master is unacceptable to us the word slave is even more so.  Yet we all are slaves to some particular master in that we are either in bondage or beholding to some ruling power or influence. 

Bondage is the condition of being under some kind authority that is abusive and of course oppressive and destructive.  Yet, we must not confuse the bondage of abusive or tyrannical authority with being under obligation to inherently righteous and infinitely good authority. 

Jesus teaches here that as his followers we must be sure that our wills come under the influence and shaping authority of the kingdom of God.  He makes it very clear that God is the ultimate and rightful authority.   This means that we are not to see God’s authority as abusive, harsh, unpleasant or oppressive.  Yet this is exactly how we tend to see it through the lens of our sinful hearts and minds.   The grace God offers you in Christ gives you the true understanding of God’s inherent kind and righteous sovereignty.  Jesus lays this before us in the previous two images he gives of the kingdom.  God with his kingdom is the superlative treasure.  When one comes to see this then his whole life is flooded with light. So the kind of service one renders to God is not coerced or the response to threats or based on fulfilling certain conditions.  Rather the kind of service one renders to God rises from a transformed grace-filled heart that treasures God and whose mind is illuminated by the value of the kingdom and focuses on it as the ultimate goal for one’s life. 

So let’s take a closer look at what Jesus teaches about the impossibility of you serving two masters.

First Jesus states emphatically the impossibility of you serving two masters.  Now why does he do this?  He wants to address all those professing Christians who either consciously or unconsciously try to do this.  We all have tried to do this.  We have made attempts to serve God and something else with the same degree of allegiance and loyalty.  It can’t be done.  It is psychologically, morally and spiritually impossible. 

Then Jesus tells us why: “for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.”  You cannot serve two masters who call for equal loyalty and obedience.  You must decide, you must choose and you will.  Yet you will decide and you will chose the master that your heart treasures and on which your mind and thoughts are fixed.  You will willingly give yourself to that master that best reflects the true nature of your heart and mind.  You will give yourself to what you want the most and what you want the most will rule your heart.  There can be no neutrality here.  If you are pressed between two competing masters who call for equal loyalty then sooner or later you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to one and despise the other.  There are no half way measures here. 

It is important that you understand that you ought to serve God as your greatest treasure.  Yet you cannot and will not do this unless your entire nature is transformed.  In our sin we abandon our rightful master but we don’t become free.  In fact being under the sovereign, benevolent rule of the gracious Creator/Owner is exchanged in our rebellion for the bondage of sin and idolatry.  Though in our sin we rebel against the authority of God we come under the bondage to false gods – we come into the bondage of sinful desires and passions that rule over us and lead us toward ruin and death.  

Do not fool yourself.  If you profess faith in Jesus Christ does that faith come from a regenerated and renewed heart?  Have you been born from above and thus by the grace of the Holy Spirit been given a new nature, one that finds growing appreciation for the value and priorities of the Kingdom so that it is this relationship you now have with Christ that is your greatest treasure?   What Jesus stresses here is that it is one thing to say that you treasure the kingdom and that you have a single devotion and appreciation for the kingdom but what do you do with your life?  How do you spend your time and what preoccupies your thoughts?  What kind of choices, decisions and actions do you carry out?  Your choices are the product of your will and these choices shape your behavior and your behavior determines the way you actually live – your lifestyle or manner of life. 

Jesus then makes a particular application that in essence becomes a case study for all masters that would usurp the place of the kingdom in your heart and mind.  He says you cannot serve God and mammon.  Now mammon is material wealth, possessions, property and money.  How do you serve mammon?  By giving yourself to the pursuit of mammon and living in such a way as to guard and keep what you have.  It spawns such heart sins as covetousness, greed, selfishness, uncharitableness, worry and care.  You serve mammon by giving yourself to mammon and the security, comfort that material wealth and possessions afford.   Well how do you serve God?  You serve God by giving yourself to God through faith and obedience.  The focus is on obedience – you serve God by obeying him but the only obedience that God accepts is that which rises from saving faith in Jesus Christ.   So what master you serve will be the master/treasure that ultimately shapes your will – your choices, your behavior, habits and then way of life.  

So Jesus wants you to really consider what he is saying.  Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are really serving God when in reality you are trying to serve God and mammon or for that matter any other treasure that has sway over your affections, mind and will.  Sooner or later the master you really have affection for will become evident and you will hate and despise the other (if not to you then to others and always to God).  

Another point that needs to be made is that what these two masters want from you is contradictory.  They want different things yet both call for ultimate allegiance.

Serving any other master than the True and Living God is bondage that leads to death.  Yet such bondage produces deceit in the heart and many think that they are free when in fact they are in servile bondage to their passions and desires. 

Serving God places you before the One who has inherent creative rights over your heart and life and who is the caring, gracious, kind, righteous, holy sovereign Master.  We are certainly beholding to Him but never under bondage to him.  We submit to his rightful authority only when we come to see how gracious his authority and rule really are. 

Now I do not want any one who may read this to become discouraged and distraught.  You may say I struggle with this matter.  I know that there are times in my life when I have tried to serve God and other masters.  It grieves me that I have and still do.  Okay, listen.  Every true believer has this problem.  One of the marks that you are indeed a genuine believer is that you struggle with this.  It grieves your heart.  The hypocrite on the other hand deceives himself- he thinks he is serving God but in reality the overall landscape of his manner of life shows that he is taken up with other concerns.  He does not see and he is not troubled in the least.  Jesus wants this one to wake up and to see how truly deceived that one is.

This does not mean that you will be free from temptations from remaining and competing masters.  You may even at times experience great turmoil inside your heart and your mind over who you will serve.   Your renewed heart will press you to do what you ought, yet the remaining sin that abides within will press you to give your allegiance to other masters who lie to you and promise the passions and desires of your flesh fulfillment in a variety of ways. 

Yet you cannot serve two masters.  You just cannot.  If you are truly born again by the Holy Spirit, while there remains a conflict and while you may have to do battle daily, you will not allow the masters of sinful desires to rule over your heart, mind and thus govern your will, priorities, choices and behavior.   In Christ you are not under the law any longer.  You are now under grace and Paul writes: For sin shall not have dominion over you for you are not under law but under grace. 

As believers in and followers of the Lord Jesus Christ we are also citizens of the Kingdom of God and as such that Kingdom and the way of life we should live as its citizens must take ultimate priority over our affections, our minds and our wills. 

Our affections are to be enamored with the Kingdom as our greatest treasure and this will be seen by storing up treasures in heaven and not on earth.

Our minds are to be illuminated by the reality of the Kingdom so that the darkness within us in minimized and the light is maximized.  

Our wills are to be increasingly shaped by the Kingdom.  We must see God as the kind, gracious and holy Master that he truly is.  So that through faith in Jesus Christ we see the true freedom that serving Him in obedience brings.  His authority is never bondage but a coming to terms with how we were created – to be under his kind, gracious, loving, righteous, holy and sovereign mastery.  It is only when we come to this mastery of the rightful creator and now redeemer that we really now freedom.  That is the paradox of the Kingdom!  To be free you must come under the gracious and holy authority of God, which is never bondage but a treasure worth possessing!

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Preserve This Peace

Conserva hanc pacem 

You who have this peace, peace above, peace within, labour to keep it: it is a precious jewel, do not lose it. It is sad to have the league of national peace broken, but it is worse to have the peace of conscience broken. Oh, preserve this peace! First, take heed of relapses. Has God spoken peace? Do not turn again to folly. Psalm 85:5. Besides ingratitude, there is folly in relapses. It was long ere God was reconciled and the breach made up, and will you again eclipse and forfeit your peace? Has God healed the wound of conscience, and will you tear it open again? Will you break another vein? Will you cut a new artery? This is returning indeed to folly. What madness is it to meddle again with that sin, which will breed the worm of conscience! Secondly, make up your spiritual accounts daily; see how matters stand between God and your souls. 'I commune with my own heart.' Psalm 77:7. Often reckonings keep God and conscience friends. Do with your hearts as you do with your watches, wind them up every morning by prayer, and at night examine whether your hearts have gone true all that day, whether the wheels of your affections have moved swiftly towards heaven. Oh, call yourselves often to account! Keep your reckonings even, for that is the way to keep your peace.

Thomas Watson

Christ's Blood Gives Peace

Sanguis Christi Pacem Dat

Go to Christ's blood for peace. Some go to fetch their peace from their own righteousness, not Christ's: they go for peace to their holy life, not Christ's death. If conscience be troubled, they strive to quiet it with their duties. This is not the right way to peace. Duties must not be neglected, nor yet idolized. Look to the blood of sprinkling. Heb 12:24. That blood of Christ which pacified God, must pacify conscience. Christ's blood being sucked in by faith, gives peace. 'Being justified by faith, we have peace with God.' Rom 5:5: No balm to cure a wounded conscience, but the blood of Christ.

Thomas Watson

A New Creation That Is Permanently Justified

The Gospel is really very counter intuitive.  We are wired as Pharisees.  We have a hard time understanding the nature of grace.    Even though we confess that we believe God saves us by grace, we tend to operate in the arena of works.  We are basically performance driven.  We live on a treadmill of performance in how we conceive of God dealing with us.  We are treated by others this way and we treat others this way.   But God does not treat his born again and justified children in this way!!!

Now it is important to understand two realities about being a Christian and living as a Christian. 

First, a Christian is a new creation.  This means that God’s grace has worked and continues to work in the heart or inner life of every true disciple of Jesus Christ.  Paul emphasizes this inward work of grace in many verses in his letters.  It is summarized clearly in 2 Corinthians 5:17.  “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has passed away, behold the new has come.”  Paul is saying that those who are really in Christ have become new creatures.  Here he is speaking of our being by the Holy Spirit united to Christ.  We are in relationship with Christ by the Holy Spirit and we have become new people.  It is also clear from the rest of the New Testament that while the old has passed away it has not done so completely and while the new has come it likewise has not come completely.   Yet, because as a believer you are joined to Christ you are new and God’s grace is at work within you.   In part this means that the Holy Spirit is working in you, giving you new affections, desires and will-power to live obediently, even though it is still a struggle.   It means that you have a whole new disposition toward sin – though you sin you cannot live with it – you are not at peace with your sin and with the Spirit’s help you will make it your aim to put it to death by not allowing it to come to expression in you. 

Second, a Christian is one for whom Christ offered his life upon the cross to atone for sin, so that those who trust in him might be accounted righteous in Christ.   Again, we find this in many, many places in the Bible.   In 2 Corinthians 5 and verse 21 we read. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”   What a wonderful verse this is!   If you are a believer in Jesus Christ you are included in the phrase “For our sake.”   Packed into this phrase is the infinite love and grace of God the Father for the ungodly.    What did the Father do for our sake?  The one who knew no sin, the one who had lived an obedient life, the one who loved God with all his heart, soul and mind and the one who loved his neighbor as himself, the Father made him sin.  This does not mean that the Father made him to be a sinner or made him to be inherently sinful.   What this verse does is not only get at the nature of Christ objective historic atoning work but also the nature of the believing sinner’s justification before God.  Rather here is an image or a figure of speech that basically says that the Father accounted this sinless one with our sin and this is why he died upon the cross.  There are echoes of Isaiah 53 here in this verse and we will look at that too.  Yet here are a few statements from that very important of prophetic Old Testament texts. 

“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.” (Isa 53:4-5 ESV)

Here we see the willingness of the suffering servant to do what he did for our sakes.  He bore our sins, yet it was God who struck him and smote him and afflicted him.  It was God who wounded him for our transgressions, who crushed him for our iniquities, who placed the chastisement upon him that brought us peace and whose stripes at the Father’s hand is our healing.

“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned--everyone--to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isa 53:6 ESV)

Like stupid yet unruly sheep we have stayed from our creator – turning from his rightful and good way to our own idolatrous self-serving paths.   Yet it was Yahweh who laid upon him our iniquity.  Here is what Paul means when he says that God made him who knew no sin to be sin for our sakes. 

On the cross God was imputing to Christ the sin of all who would believe upon him, the sin of his people, the sin of the ungodly.   Jesus did not become sinful, he became a sin offering by substituting himself for our sakes in taking the punishment due us for our sins and making full payment thus satisfying the just wrath of God. 

Now the benefit of what Christ did by becoming sin for us becomes ours by faith.  This is captured in the next clause, “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”   This does not mean that we become personally righteous in the same way that Jesus did not become personally sinful.  Here is a figurative expression that captures the grace of justification.  This righteousness of God is conveyed to us in the Gospel and it is the gift-righteousness of God.    

Jesus suffered greatly yet he also triumphed.  Part of his victory was his seeing the benefits of his suffering.  He was satisfied by this.  It was worth it all.   The particular benefit that Isaiah describes is how by his knowledge – that is his personal experience of suffering and particularly his obedience proving that he was the righteous one – he makes many to be accounted righteous.   This verse describes both the active obedience of Jesus “by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many accounted righteous” and the passive obedience of Jesus by freely laying down his life in keeping with the Father’s will and bearing our iniquities secured our salvation.  

If you are in Christ – joined to him by faith (really a Christian and not a pretend one) then you are both a new creation and a justified child of God.   This is the Gospel and this is what you are to rehearse or preach to yourself every day.  Here is what is true about you.  You are joined to Jesus Christ on your good days and your bad days.   What this means is that by being united or joined to Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit you have His life working in you and his righteousness working for you.   It is this reality that gives you grace to live obediently before Father and it is this reality that gives you comfort and assurance when you sin and repent.   You are joined to Christ as new and justified people!  

Rev. William Still provides some encouraging insights into how the Gospel is about your being in Christ.

“I had been ‘going at it’ one Sunday evening about living your whole life in Christ and for Christ, and one chap, because he thought that I must live my life on my knees, came to me, wringing his hands, because he was not being as holy as he thought he ought to be.  I said to him, ‘You foolish boy, do you think this means winding yourself up into a kind of robot existence, forever clicking your heels before a ruthless sergeant-major Christ?  You have got it all wrong.  Christ is a world of being, not a set of rules.  You live your life in him, you are naughty in him, alas, as well as good in him.  You have fun there as well as seriousness.  You must learn that Christ is no mere censor, but a Savior who saves us by gaining our trust and confidence more and more, and letting us live our total life in him.  He is much more concerned about where we are going than about how far on we have got.'”  

This means that even when you sin you have not lost God’s love if indeed you are in Christ.  If you persist in your sin God in love will chastise and correct you.  What good father would not?  Yet your sin as a believer does not mean that you lose God’s favor, or the Holy Spirit who works within you or your status of being credited with Christ’s righteousness.  This very fact itself when rehearsed daily will give you the motivation and power not to sin!   Milton Vincent puts it well in his Gospel Poem from his book "A Gospel Primer for Christians." 

So now God relates to me only with grace

The former wrath banished without any trace

And each day I’m made a bit more as I should

His grace using all things to render me good.

Yes, even in trials God’s grace abounds too

And does me the good He assigns it to do

And when I am sinning God’s grace does abound

Ensuring my justified status is sound

No wrath is awakened in God at my sin,

Because Christ appeased it (to say it again).

God’s heart pulses only with passionate grace,

Which jealously wants me back in His embrace.

God does not require even that I confess

Before He desires His forgiveness to press

Forgiveness has been in His heart all along:

And when I approach Him to make right my wrong,

He runs up to greet me and draws to me near,

Embracing and kissing and ready to clear.

God does see my sins and He grieve at them so,

For when I am sinning, His love I don’t know.

He even will send me some heart-rending pain,

So I’ll learn new ways and His holiness gain.

His disciplines always are with love imbued,

A love that seeks ever my ultimate good. 

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Augustine on the Kenosis

But because, on account of the incarnation of the Word of God for the working out of our salvation, that the man Christ Jesus might be the Mediator between God and men, many things are so said in the sacred books as to signify, or even most expressly declare, the Father to be greater than the Son; men have erred through a want of careful examination or consideration of the whole tenor of the Scriptures, and have endeavored to transfer those things which are said of Jesus Christ according to the flesh, to that substance of His which was eternal before the incarnation, and is eternal. 

They say, for instance, that the Son is less than the Father, because it is written that the Lord Himself said, “My Father is greater than I.” But the truth shows that after the same sense the Son is less also than Himself; for how was He not made less also than Himself, who “emptied Himself, and took upon Him the form of a servant?” For He did not so take the form of a servant as that He should lose the form of God, in which He was equal to the Father. If, then, the form of a servant was so taken that the form of God was not lost, since both in the form of a servant and in the form of God He Himself is the same only-begotten Son of God the Father, in the form of God equal to the Father, in the form of a servant the Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; is there any one who cannot perceive that He Himself in the form of God is also greater than Himself, but yet likewise in the form of a servant less than Himself? 

And not, therefore, without cause the Scripture says both the one and the other, both that the Son is equal to the Father, and that the Father is greater than the Son. For there is no confusion when the former is understood as on account of the form of God, and the latter as on account of the form of a servant. And, in truth, this rule for clearing the question through all the sacred Scriptures is set forth in one chapter of an epistle of the Apostle Paul, where this distinction is commended to us plainly enough. For he says, “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but emptied Himself, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and was found in fashion as a man.” 

The Son of God, then, is equal to God the Father in nature, but less in “fashion.” For in the form of a servant which He took He is less than the Father; but in the form of God, in which also He was before He took the form of a servant, He is equal to the Father. In the form of God He is the Word, “by whom all things are made;” but in the form of a servant He was “made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law.” 

In like manner, in the form of God He made man; in the form of a servant He was made man. For if the Father alone had made man without the Son, it would not have been written, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Therefore, because the form of God took the form of a servant, both is God and both is man; but both God, on account of God who takes; and both man, on account of man who is taken. For neither by that taking is the one of them turned and changed into the other: the Divinity is not changed into the creature, so as to cease to be Divinity; nor the creature into Divinity, so as to cease to be creature.

Aurelius Augustine, "De Trinitate" - On the Trinity

The Gospel Changes One's Relation to the Law

But while it is clear that the law is not changed, and cannot be changed either in itself or in its claims, it is as clear that our relation to the law, and the law’s relation to us, is altered upon our believing on Him who is “the end by fulfilling of the law, for righteousness to every one that believeth.” If, indeed, the effect of Christ’s death had been to make what is called “evangelical obedience to a milder law,” our justifying righteousness, then there would be a change in the law itself, though not in our relation to it, which would in that case remain the same, only operating on a lower scale of duty.  But if the end of Christ’s life and death be to substitute His obedience for ours entirely, in the matter of justification, so that His doings meet every thing in law that our doings should have met, then the relationship between us and law is altered; we are placed upon a new footing in regard to it, while it remains unchanged and unrelaxed.

So long, then, as the old relationship continued between us and law; or, in the apostle’s words, so long as we were “under law,” there was nothing but condemnation and an evil conscience, and the fearful looking for of judgment. But with the change of relationship there came pardon and liberty and gladness. “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us” (Gal 3: 13); and so we are no longer under law, but under grace. The law is the same law, but it has lost its hold of us, its power over us. It cannot cease to challenge perfect obedience from every being under heaven, but to us  its threat and terror are gone. It can still say “Obey,” but it cannot now say, “Disobey and perish.” Our new relationship to the law is that of Christ Himself to it. It is that of men who have met all its claims, exhausted its penalties, satisfied its demands, magnified it, and made it honorable. For our faith in God’s testimony to Christ’s surety obedience has made us one with Him. The relation of the law to Him is its relation to us who believe in His name. His feelings toward the law ought to be our feelings. The law looks on us as it looks on Him; we look on the law as He looks on it. And does not He say. “I delight to do thy will, 0 my God; yea thy law is within my heart” (Psa 40: 8)?

Horatius Bonar, "God’s Way of Holiness"

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The Best of Humanity and the Crucifixion of The Son of Man

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The prediction of Jesus' passion conceals a great irony, for the suffering and death of the Son of Man will not come, as we would expect, at the hands of godless and wicked people.  The suffering of the Son of Man comes rather at the hands of "the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law."  It is not humanity at its worst that will crucify the Son of God but humanity at its absolute best.  The death of Jesus will not be the result of a momentary lapse or aberration of human nature, but rather the result of careful deliberations from respected religious leaders who will justify their actions by the highest standards of law and morality, even believing them to render service to God (John 16:2).   Jesus will not be lynched by an enraged mob or beaten to death in a criminal act.  He will be arrested with official warrants, and tried and executed by the world's envy or jurisprudence - the Jewish Sanhedrin and the principia juris Romanorum.    

James R Edwards from the Pillar New Testament Commentary Series - The Gospel According to Mark.