Many people first heard “Money is the root of all evil” from a parent or a grandparent, meant kindly, as a warning. I have also heard it in the church lobby, said cheerfully about somebody who wasn’t in the room. The Bible does not say it in those words. What it says, in 1 Timothy 6:10, is that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” The three words that drop out of the saying decide whom the verse is talking to, and the warning in it is real.
The verse, whole
For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
1 Timothy 6:10 (KJV)
Paul is warning about an appetite. The people in his sentence “coveted after” money, and the wanting is what led them off, until they “pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” The World English Bible makes a smaller claim about how far the root reaches: “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” In both, the thing named is love, and love does not need a bank balance to work with. Someone with very little can want money as hard as someone with a great deal.
The verse before names the people it has in view. The King James calls them “they that will be rich,” meaning those who are set on being rich, and says they “fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts.”
Said about somebody else, the saying keeps the danger inside their wallet. The verse puts it wherever the wanting is, including in us.
Why Paul was writing about it
Paul is writing to Timothy, a younger co-worker he had left at Ephesus. The paragraph opens with men who were “supposing that gain is godliness,” in verse 5, people treating faith as a way to make money. Paul takes their word and turns it around in verse 6: “But godliness with contentment is great gain.” Then he says how much gain is enough:
For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment let us be therewith content.
1 Timothy 6:7-8 (KJV)
Raiment is clothing. We arrive owning nothing and we leave the same way, so the only profit that survives the trip was never property. Paul’s measure of enough is food and clothing, and the skill he asks for is stopping there.
Money can also be put to good work in the New Testament. Women who followed Jesus “ministered unto him of their substance,” in Luke 8:3, which means they supported him out of their own means, and Paul gathered a collection over more than a year “for the poor saints which are at Jerusalem,” in Romans 15:26.
Jesus and the rich
Jesus warned the rich, and hard. “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!” he said in Mark 10:23, and his disciples were astonished. Then, in the King James wording, he names what makes it hard: “Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God!” in Mark 10:24.
Paul aims at the same thing when he turns to the wealthy at the end of the chapter.
Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy; That they do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to distribute, willing to communicate; Laying up in store for themselves a good foundation against the time to come, that they may lay hold on eternal life.
1 Timothy 6:17-19 (KJV)
Having money is dangerous for what it invites you to lean on. Paul does not tell these people to get rid of it. He tells them where their hope belongs, and he gives them work to do with what they have: do good, be ready to give, be willing to share. More money is not a sin. What the money is for is the question Paul leaves the rich with.
Where your treasure is
Jesus gave the test for all of this in one sentence:
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
Matthew 6:21 (KJV)
The test works on anybody, rich or short of rent. It asks what you price and count beyond food and clothing, what you check first, and whether “enough” has a number for you that keeps moving. Groceries are a need. Paul put food and clothing inside enough, and Jesus, later in the same chapter, says the Father “knoweth that ye have need of all these things,” in Matthew 6:32. The love of money is the part that keeps reaching past them, and Ecclesiastes knew how that goes: “He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver,” in Ecclesiastes 5:10. The number that would be enough moves every time you reach it.
Try it on one thing you keep pricing beyond what you need, or on the next bit of extra money that comes in. Decide what it is for before it arrives. Wherever your attention keeps going is where your treasure is, and Jesus said your heart would be found right there with it.