The Rich Young Ruler, Part II: From the earthly Law of More money = More divinely blessed to the eternal treasures given and received in the spiritual Law of Love

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A true object lesson…and a false

In our last writing, we transitioned from the Parable of the Rich Man & Lazarus to Christ’s encounter with the Rich Young Ruler, where we saw, as it were, the Parable embodied right before us, being worked out in a rather stunning object lesson.

As we examine it still further, we immediately perceive an important nuance. In the Parable, the Rich Man had no great pretensions to religion. He had identified with his wealth to such a degree that that his riches categorically defined him. He was, in Jesus’ words, simply a “certain rich man” (tis ploúsios).

No vital relationship with JHWH; none with his brother.

No love; only “riches” (ploûtos) that would grow up as thorns in his soul to “choke the Word” and make it “unfruitful” (Mt 13:22).

And while he was, nevertheless, still quite shocked that his wealth did not propel him into the riches of God’s eternal Kingdom, Abraham makes it clear to him that the “lived conditions” (p. 7) of his life bore witness to a functional rejection of “Moses and the Prophets”…such that when JHWH Himself stands before him as One “risen from the dead”, the delusional Rich Man will reject Him too.

In stark contrast, it is absolutely clear that this Rich Young Ruler, though standing at that very moment in the presence of Messiah, still believed himself to be very religious. (And, for that matter, so did the disciples too, as we will find).

His riches, in his own self-understanding, did not actually define him. Far from it!

They were, instead, a sign of Covenant Blessings.

They displayed to those around him—in fact, they proved—that he was actually the spiritual one. Or, more accurately, the moral one, and as such, the more blessed one; for he had fastidiously kept the Law to such an extent that God Himself had honored his good deeds by sending down upon him great material blessings. And these material blessings, far from defining him as a mere “rich man”, demonstrated to those around him that his pathway of life, in no uncertain terms, now stood as the object lesson of a life well-lived.

From the Rich Young Ruler and Worthington’s Law…

That is to say, in comparison to the Rich Man in Christ’s Parable, the Rich Young Ruler parades himself as one who had, in fact, heard Moses and the Prophets and had been blessed by God for it.

In this way, we have passed from Worthington’s Law that more money = better than to the more spiritualized Law of the Rich Young Ruler (which, we might add, is the functional Law of the Mormon church…followed by many in “evangelical” denominations who functionally hold that) more money = more divinely blessed. That is to say, the health-wealth Gospel has been in operation from 1st century Judea all the way up to our present cultural moment…

As to how exactly it hides itself in the folds of Christian religion, this encounter of the Rich Young Ruler with Jesus is incredibly elucidating. And we in the modern Western church would do well to take heed…given that many of us are both rich and religious.

The opening scene with a word from the Fathers

The scene opens with the Rich Young Ruler’s religious activism on immediate display. “Running to” Christ, he “knelt down before Him” as a seeming, humble suppliant (Mk 10:17: gonupetéō, cf, Mt 27:29…).

Yet how does he then address Him?

“Teacher.”

Jesus is not his “Lord” or“Master” or even“Rabbi.” Though kneeling down at His feet in a physical posture of humility, the way he titles Jesus articulates, not a relationship of humble submission, but rather one of attainable degrees.

To reinforce this, he adds the modifier, “good.”

Jesus is not the Incarnate Son of God Whose Word brought into existence the entire cosmos. He is, rather, a “good Teacher" and His words can teach him, who, no doubt, is already good a little bit more about being good so that he himself may become even better.

The “lived conditions” of his life (to again quote Taylor’s phrase regarding how belief vs unbelief are demonstrated in A Secular Age) prove something quite different. From the available evidence, this man is not a humble suppliant…but rather, a lover of money (philárgyros).

“He approaches Jesus eager to learn how he, along with his wealth, might inherit eternal life. For there is no one who loves prolonged life as much as a man who loves money. Therefore this man thought that Jesus could show him some way in which he could live forever enjoying his possession of wealth. But when the Lord told him that non-possession is what bestows eternal life, he went away as if he regretted both his question and Jesus answer.

In his mind he needed eternal life for the very reason that he had great wealth. If he were to give up his possessions, why would he want eternal life, he thought, since that life was to be the life of a pauper?” (Theophylact, The Explanation of the Gospel of St. Luke).

The next religious question…a contradiction in terms

The Rich Young Ruler, knowing that he is beginning to be exposed, seeks to reassert his high level of religiosity. And he does this (as many students do) by asking a “profound” religious question:

“What shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?”

Yet this questions is an absolute contradiction in terms.

How can one “do” anything in order to “inherit” something from his father? (For even the prodigal son had received an inheritance…not because he was righteous, but because he was a son.)

An inheritance, in short, is received.

Jesus had just made this clear in his words regarding the little children:

“Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein…” (Mk 10:15).

That is to say, we must receive our inheritance as a little child. No more can we work to receive it than we can work our way back into our mother‘s womb to make ourselves a son.

Jesus’ Response: From the religious to the ontological

Despite his spiritual-sounding words uttered in a show of outward humility, Jesus immediately sees beyond his external religiosity into his heart and asks him a penetrating question:

“Why do you call Me good?

No one is good but One, that is, God” (10:18).

By this He means,

"You call Me good; why then do you also call Me a teacher? It appears that you think that I am one among many men. But if this were so, I would not be good, for no man is good in and of himself. Only God is.

Furthermore,

“If you want to call Me good, you must call Me good because I am God;

Do not approach Me then as if I were merely a man. But if you think I am only a man, do not call Me good. For in truth God is good, and the source of goodness, and the first cause of goodness itself.

If any man is good, he is not good in and of himself, but only because he receives a share of God's goodness” (ibid).

Jesus directs him out of the web of self, wherein the Rich Young Ruler…and we ourselves are most often trapped, to the Person of God. Out of our self-referential, works-based life of projected religiosity; out of our deceitfulness; out of our suppressions; out of our vainglorious delusions onto God Who is Himself eternal Goodness and Truth.

Before any commandments, that is, Jesus directs him first to God, which is where all the commandments begin:

“Here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one!” (Deut 6:4)

Yet the fundamental problem is that he does not know God and does not know, therefore, true Goodness (ṭôwv). While he is wealthy (ploúsios), he posses no true riches (thēsaurós). Though outwardly “good”, he is, in reality, “miserable, wretched, poor, blind and naked.”

His religious life has effectively blinded him from these spiritual realities such that he cannot see the miserable wretchedness of his truly impoverished state…and cannot, therefore, understand his true need for JHWH.

Kyrie eleison upon us and our religiosity!

From the first table of the Law to the second

Jesus had first directed this poor rich man to the infinite riches in God. And He had done this, we might say, by showing him in only a few words the first table of the Law. Knowing, however, that his sight is limited only to the human realm of external action, Jesus then moves forward into the second table.

But in so doing, He will demonstrate that the second table of commands (#5-#10) can in no way be kept unless they flow out of the first (#1-#4). That is to say, as the Apostle makes explicit, if he

“does not not love his brother whom he has seen (the second table of the Law), how can he love God whom he has not seen” (the first table, I Jn 4:20)?

Sadly, though, the rich young ruler does not dwell in the love of God, but is rather trapped in the religious idolatry of the self life and all the externalities that go along with it (1st and 2nd commandments). While, nevertheless claiming a religious life, albeit one that is ‘vain’, ‘empty’, ‘powerless’ and ‘false’—literally, in Hebrew a ‘lie’ (shâv, 3rd commandment), he has absolutely no opening to the life of Heaven (4th commandment).

Again, he is trapped in self and on the human level of external action. This being the case, Jesus takes him calmly and steadily through each of the commandments of the second table; yet we find, by what He adds and by what He takes away, that Jesus reveals the utter futility of his works’ righteousness.

The order, the addition and the subtraction

a) The order

Jesus begins by laying out the commandments…almost in order. Skipping the fifth command for the moment, Jesus moves in sequence over the next four. He says, in answer to his question about inheriting eternal life?

“You know the commandments:

‘Do not murder’ (6th)

‘Do not commit adultery’ (7th)

‘Do not steal’ (8th)

‘Do not bear false witness’ (9th, Mk 10:19a).

But here, instead of taking him to the 10th commandment, Christ first adds another command not found in the Ten.

Note: The order of the commandments in Mark (following Matthew) is in the majority tests (UGNT+WH+NA+SBL): 6-7-8-9-5

In the remainder (RP+ST+KJTR) it begins with adultery which could be highlighting, as did the Prophets, the primary spiritual sin of the rich man.

b) The addition

To these four commands, Jesus adds:

“Defraud not” (aposteréō), or put another way, “Do not defraud or deprive someone of something.” Or even more bluntly, “Do not rob.” i.e. A double on the Eighth Commandment, “Do not steal.”

Allowing the Scriptures to speak still further, Christ’s use of this particular word takes us back to the final book of the OT:

And I will come near to you in judgment;

And I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers (phármakos),

And against the adulterers (7th command), and against those who swear falsely by lies (9th command),

And against those that defraud/rob (aposteréō) the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless (8th command),

And who refuse to help the resident foreigner and in this way show they do not fear me, says the LORD of hosts (LXX, Mal 3:5).

The question, then, to be considered is has he defrauded? Has he oppressed and robbed the poor? Either by what he has done, or more likely, by what he has left undone?

Has he become like the Rich Man in Christ’s Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, who “fared sumptuously every day” while disregarding—even stepping over the bodies of—the dying poor?

We are not told.

But what we do know is that Jesus deemed this aside to be so vitally important that He places it after the Ninth Commandment while refraining altogether from the Tenth.

The point is clear: In the man’s supposed fulfillment of the second Book of the Law, he has not only failed to love his neighbor, but his wealth has led him to defraud the poor, whether in an active or, most likely, passive sense (cf. I John 4:20-21; Jam 2:5-10…Exod 22:21; Lev 19:33-34; Deut 10:18-19; 24:14, 17, etc.).

c) The subtraction

The point, then, is beginning to be made that the Rich Young Ruler’s wealth was, in actuality, not a divine blessing showered upon him for his righteous law-keeping, but rather thorns of the deceitfulness of riches, that were growing deep into his soul, choking the word that was fulfilled in the divine commandments of Love.

As such, Jesus halts the order. Instead of posing the Tenth Commandment:

“You shall not covet” (khamad, cf. Ex 20:17…with its first two uses in Gen 2:9 & 3:6, as we will see below),

which would have revealed the actual state of his heart, Jesus moves back to the Fifth:

“Honor your father and mother.”

And, now as expected, the Rich Young Ruler, in the full prelest of his righteous self-confidence, asserts without even a pause that he has fully

“Teacher, all these things I have kept from my youth.”

Yet even if he had indeed“kept all these” (which we know cannot be the case based upon Jesus’ own exegesis of the commandments in the Sermon on the Mount…), there is absolutely no way he could have kept the Tenth.

Concluding word: From the Rich Young Ruler back to the Garden…

In the word that Jesus leaves out—“Do not covet” (khamad)—the commandment focuses, not on an external act, but on an inner spiritual activity behind the act, which is the motivation for it.

This verb first appeared in the story of the Garden of Eden, where the text says that the tree that was “desired” (khamad, Gen 2:9 & 3:6, NET note 17).

This is not without note.

The commandment, it seems, that was first broken by mankind, whose breaking brought into the world all the horror of sin’s splintering and destructive division, was…covetousness!

The covetous desire, the lust (to use a New Testamental term, epithymía), this entitlement for more, drove our first parents to reject God and His commands, casting themselves out of His presence into a state of self-determined death.

And so the question with which we close this writing and which will open the next is,

What is it that we desire, seek…lust after…which will cause us to reject God and the eternal riches (thēsaurós) of His coming Kingdom?