Life only seems to be getting harder. If you watch the news, and I would recommend against it, you notice that the world is a place of turmoil and heartache. Here in the United States, despite record numbers of people unable to work, the official unemployment rate slowly drops, defying simple logic. If so many people are out of work, have given up looking, why is this number touted as economic success? They are not fooling me!
The wealthy get blamed for so much. It would be nice for a change if some of the rest of us took on some responsibility for the mess we are in. We have gotten ourselves over-extended, and under financed. We took on loans that we couldn’t afford. We made purchases that were luxuries and neglected the necessities, knowing that someone would be there to bail us out.
Wealth can corrupt our minds. It deceives us into thinking it provides safety and security, when only the LORD can provide that. In Jesus ongoing discussion with His disciples, Jesus has loved a rich man to the point of telling him the truth: his wealth was getting in the way of his pursuit of God’s Kingdom. If he wanted the Kingdom, he would have to get rid of the wealth.
And now Jesus turns his attentions to His disciples, wanting to drive home the lesson on wealth’s poison. He states simply that being wealthy and going to heaven is a difficult journey. It isn’t impossible, but very hard to accomplish. And when the disciples here this they stand amazed. Jesus is speaking in such straight forward and stark terms about wealth, that they don’t quite know what to make of it.
And if Jesus had not intended to be so stark, He could have backed away from His statements, softening them. But instead He makes it even more pointed. Entry for anyone is difficult, not just the wealthy. The bar is very high when it comes to heaven. No one will scrape through, just barely making it. We are either in, or we are out. We either walk upright, or we have the proverbial gate slammed in our face. If we get there it is not because of something we have done or something we failed to do. It has nothing to do with ‘doing’.
Jesus then gives a simple illustration that drives home the point. There are two primary ways of looking at this illustration, and both of them point to the same truth: getting to heaven is extremely difficult for anyone. The difference turns on the meaning of the phrase “camel through the eye of a needle” use here. The first meaning relies on a misspelled word, the word camel. It is only one letter different from the word rope. So if the first copy of the text had made this mistake, switching letters, then we get “rope through the eye of a needle” instead. And the illustration makes sense. It would be impossible to put a large ship’s rope through a home sewing needle. It would take a miracle!
The second way to understand this phrase is to hear a reference to a small door in a city gate, barely large enough for a person to fit through. When the large city gates were closed at night for security purposes, there was a small door in the large door that would allow limited access into the city. This small opening would be easy to defend if the enemy broke through it. Only one person could get through at a time. You could possibly get a camel through it, if the camel were stripped of all its cargo, forced down on its belly and dragged and wedged through the door, quite a feat with stubborn camels!
So the truth is clear either way you understand this phrase. Either it takes a miracle or we have to abandon everything in order to enter. In the context of the rich, if they hold onto their riches, they won’t make it. If we hold onto anything with more tenacity than we hold onto the LORD, we won’t get in.
What are you carrying that won’t fit through the door?
The Arnold Journey 