Over these last several talks we’ve seen, from a few different angles, that the Bible ties our work inextricably to worship. The things we do in our vocations here on earth are meant to lead us — and the people around us — to focus on God and to love him. Our role as God’s image-bearers, the dominion we exercise over creation as kings, is meant to lead us also to function as priests: to be devoted to God, to dwell in his presence, to delight in him. And if the labors of this world are ultimately aimed at enjoying the rest of the world to come, then all of it together means that our work should honor and reflect God.
And our technology should too — because our technology is an extension of our work, of the human mandate to create and to cultivate, all for God’s glory. In this final talk I want to bring the whole series home by pressing into the one technology that sits at the very center of our lives together: money. Money is a form of technology, and so it should honor and reflect God like any other. But money is also a unique technology, and that makes everything about it — its promise and its peril — sharper than anything else we’ve considered.
The creation mandate, renewed and renewed again
Technology is one aspect of what we’ve been calling the creation mandate, from Genesis 1, where God makes Adam and Eve and sends them out to exercise dominion over the whole world:
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Genesis 1:28
You could think of it as a call to spread the Garden of Eden out to the whole world. And of course, sin enters in soon afterward — we’ve talked about that, and we’ll feel its weight again in a moment. But it’s striking that even after the fall, this mandate doesn’t get cancelled; it gets renewed. In Genesis 9, after the flood has swept away almost the entire planet, Noah comes off the ark, and God renews the covenant and hands him the very same task: be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth. Even in a world of sin, the call to cultivate and to rule on God’s behalf still stands. And technology — itself now living in a world of sin — is part of what it means to carry it out.
Arguably the mandate gets renewed once more, and most gloriously, by Jesus himself, just before he ascends into heaven. In the Great Commission he tells the church, through the apostles, to go and teach men and women, boys and girls, in all the nations to obey everything he has commanded. Jesus is the final and the great prophet, the pinnacle of God’s revelation; everything Scripture teaches comes to a head in him. When you obey the Bible, you are obeying Jesus. And he says: go out now, church, and teach the whole world to live as my disciples. Our work, our wealth, and our technology are not the main thing in discipleship, and they are certainly not the only thing — but they are part of it. Our work is meant to lead us to worship. It is part of what it means to obey God and to honor Christ.
Money — a unique technology
So money, as a form of technology, should honor and reflect God. But money is not just one invention among many. It does something almost more important than anything else we’ve come up with. It sits at the center of so much of our lives and so many of our dealings with one another. We use money to account for things — to measure and communicate how much they are worth to us. We use it to transfer wealth to other people, to trade with them, to relate to them. And we use it to store and to save our wealth over time. Economists call these the three functions of money: a unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value.
Money is bound up tightly with our wealth. Not every kind of wealth is currency, of course, but money is intimately related to how we hold wealth and what we do with it. And our wealth is the fruit of our work. When our labors are productive enough, by God’s generosity, when we enjoy enough blessing at his hand, we end up with more than we need simply to survive. We work in order to gain wealth, to save it, to protect ourselves and to care for those around us. Money facilitates trust, relationship, and trade — and that is what makes it such a unique and important technology.
As we’ve argued throughout this series, Bitcoin uniquely reflects God in a way that no money ever has in human history. It honors him. It shares in some of his attributes in ways that older forms of money have often struggled to do. Bitcoin is honest. It is trustworthy. It is predictable. Because it is decentralized, no one is in charge of it and no one can control it. And because it is secure, its rules cannot be changed, and it cannot be stolen with any technology we have today or are likely to have anytime soon. Those two properties — decentralization and security — give Bitcoin the qualities that make money good. It cannot be counterfeited. It cannot be inflated away. Most things would make terrible money precisely because they are liable to be counterfeited, or inflated, or simply found in great quantity with very little work. Bitcoin is a genuinely good form of money — one that makes it easier for people to trade with one another, to save for the future, and to be honest about how much they and their neighbors actually have.
The danger that hides inside a gift
But here is the other side of the truth. Precisely because money is so important, and so closely tied to securing and transferring wealth, it is uniquely able to take the place of God. It easily becomes a false god, because it plays such a central role in our lives and our relationships that it can seem to promise us the very things only God can give. It looks like it can secure for us the present and the future.
So all through Scripture, money and wealth are named as gifts from God that also come laden with danger. Because money is such a good and necessary thing, sinful people are forever tempted to treat it as though it were God — to expect, demand, and desire from it what we are meant to seek in him alone. In Matthew 19, Jesus says it is only with difficulty that a rich person enters the kingdom of heaven; indeed, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. The disciples are stunned, because they assumed — as many still do — that wealth must mean God’s favor. Jesus tells them no: in many cases the wealthy are very far from God, however much they may speak of him. And then he says something wonderful. He reminds them that this is a God of miracles, a God who can even save the rich:
With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.
Matthew 19:26
Earlier in Matthew, Jesus had already issued the warning that stands behind all of this:
No one can serve two masters, 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 God and money.
Matthew 6:24
The word translated “money” there is a transliteration of an Aramaic word — mammon — and Jesus seems to use it almost as a name, personifying money as a kind of dark and mysterious power, something like a demon that can enslave you. You cannot, he says, take both God and money as your master and claim to live for both. Pick one. Money tends to subjugate us; wealth tends to make us its slaves, so that we are forever obsessed with getting more and more, always living for it.
Jesus says something similar in the parable of the soils, where the seed of God’s word falls among thorns. When he explains it, the thorns turn out to be “the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things,” which enter in and choke the word so that it proves unfruitful. So Matthew 6 shows us that money tends to subjugate us in our sin, and the parable of the soils shows us that it also tends to deceive us — tricking us into thinking it is something it isn’t, or that it can give what it cannot.
Generosity as worship
Money is a great danger, and a lot of Christians get nervous when we start talking about it. People have said to me, “Why are you talking about Bitcoin? Christians shouldn’t think about these things. They should just think about heaven.” But the Bible talks about money constantly, and Jesus talks about it all the time. It does carry real dangers, and Scripture warns about them relentlessly. Yet Scripture does not only warn. It also tells us that what we do with our wealth — giving it away, sacrificing it — is central to what it means to worship God. We show that God is first in our hearts, as the old hymn puts it, by giving away the very wealth we worked so hard to produce: to the church, to our neighbors, to the poor, and in care for our own families.
You see this from the beginning. In Exodus 25, at Mount Sinai, Moses receives the plans for the tabernacle — the special tent where God will dwell among a sinful people and meet with them through sacrifice. God does not say, “Just have a private little meeting with me inside your heart.” He says he genuinely wants to be present in the midst of creation, in a physical building. And so the instructions open like this:
Speak to the people of Israel, that they take for me a contribution. From every man whose heart moves him you shall receive the contribution for me.
Exodus 25:2
Notice that God calls the people’s generosity — their gold and silver and bronze and fabric — a contribution for me. It is something they do for God, even though in the larger sense the tabernacle is entirely God’s gift to them: his idea, his gracious offering, so that undeserving people can dwell with him.
Much later, in 2 Corinthians 9, the apostle Paul reflects at length on why generosity matters so much for Christians. God does not give everyone wealth, but when he does, he expects us to give it away freely, to show that he comes first.
Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.
2 Corinthians 9:7–8
The Corinthians were a physically wealthy church with many spiritual problems, and Paul tightens the screws: take the abundance you have and give it to churches far poorer than you. God has given you these physical things, he says, precisely so that you can abound in every good work. He promises that God will supply the seed and increase the harvest of their righteousness — that they will be enriched in every way, so that they can be generous in every way, and that their giving will overflow in thanksgiving and bring glory to God through many people. Their generosity is the very means God has chosen to work in the world, so that countless people might come to know him and enjoy him forever.
Remember that in Matthew 6, just before the warning about two masters, Jesus is talking about exactly this:
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven… For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Matthew 6:19–21
As the rest of the New Testament makes clear, laying up treasure in heaven means using your treasures here on earth in a way that honors God, especially in giving to the poor. The question Jesus presses is simple: what do I care about most, and what am I using my wealth for — the things of God, or my own pleasure? In that same passage he adds a line that sounds odd in English: if your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body is full of darkness. In the language of the Old Testament, an “evil eye” means a person who is stingy, who will not part with his wealth, while a “good eye” means someone open-handed and generous. So Jesus is saying, right before he tells us we cannot serve both God and money, that generosity fills the whole body with light and stinginess fills it with darkness. What we do with our money has a way of revealing what is really going on in our souls. It manifests our true posture toward God.
The rich young ruler — and our own hearts
This is exactly why Jesus presses so hard on the rich young ruler in Matthew 19. A wealthy young man comes asking what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus tells him to keep God’s commandments, and the man insists he has kept them all. Jesus does not argue the point. Instead he goes straight to the place where this man’s heart is bound:
If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.
Matthew 19:21
Jesus knows that for all the good this young man has done, he has been desperately stingy, and that his wealth has become functionally a god to him. So Jesus dials in on precisely that: the way you treat your wealth reveals that you are actually very far from God. Change your posture toward it — be so attached to God that you could say, “If he asks me to, I will give it all away; I don’t need it.” All through the Bible, a person’s attitude toward money reveals the state of his heart — toward God, toward other people, and toward God’s creation. And so, like every other kind of money and wealth, we should be open-handed and generous with Bitcoin too.
Honest money for a long obedience
Here is where Bitcoin’s particular character comes back into view. Because it is such a durable, long-term way of saving and of protecting wealth from inflation, Bitcoin encourages a focus on the long term — and that cuts in two directions at once. On one hand, because it is such a good form of money, it is all the more tempting to worship it, to treat it as the solution to every problem in the world. On the other hand, that same goodness can actually make generosity easier: when you are not forever watching your savings melt away to an inflation you cannot control, you are freer to think and to give for the long haul. One scholar, summarizing the economist Ludwig von Mises, puts the danger of inflation this way:
Inflation encourages a mentality of immediate gratification that is at variance with the discipline and the eternal perspective required in biblical stewardship.
summarizing Ludwig von Mises
Long-term investment, providing for generations to come, sustained giving to the church — these all assume a kind of patience that inflation quietly erodes. Are there dangers with Bitcoin, then, just as with any other form of money? Of course. Plenty of people treat Bitcoin as the greatest thing in the world, as the cure for every ill — some openly speak of it as a kind of god, or even as the second coming of Jesus. Those are real spiritual dangers. But the fact that it is dangerous to be blessed with good things does not let us off the hook. We cannot simply shrug and refuse to think carefully about how we earn and spend, how we save for the future, and how we can best be generous.
Yes, even good, God-honoring, God-reflecting money can be idolized. And still we should seek out money that best reflects God and his character — because honest money makes it easier both to save and to give, while sparing churches, ministries, and mission works from watching the value of their wealth, and of every gift they receive, constantly melt beneath them. Bitcoin is a unique form of money, and money is a unique form of technology. It is woven into so much of our world, and into so many of the blessings God wants this world to enjoy here and now, so that we might be made ready to enjoy the rest of the world to come.
And so this is where our whole journey lands. We began by confessing that God made the world out of nothing and owns it all; that he made us in his image to work and to cultivate it for his glory; that our work and our technology are eternally significant because they are bound up with worship. Now we arrive at money — the most ordinary and the most dangerous of our tools — and we find the same calling waiting for us there. Let us use Bitcoin, and all our wealth, not merely for ourselves, but so that we may be more generous, think longer term about what God is doing in the world, and make the church’s mission to make Jesus known easier and more fruitful. Honest money, handled with an open hand, turns out to be one more way of answering a holy calling: to glorify God, and to point a watching world to his beauty.