Hunger that cannot be satisfied

Christ said you cannot chase wealth and God. You cannot lust for riches and love God. Mammon and God are mutually exclusive. They pull you in very different directions. And that comes straight from the Son of God. There is no theological wiggle room in what Jesus said.

The Apostle Paul wrote that love of money is the root of all sorts of evil. Loving money means the Evil One knows you will sell your soul and your asking price.

Given the words of Christ and Paul, it is hard to understand why so few Christians confront greed as a mortal sin. How hard do you have to work to overlook what was said by the Prophets, the Messiah, and the Lord's Disciples? You cannot miss it. But you find legions of Christians bleating about sexual morality, particularly the sexual activities of other people. It is strange to find such outrage over sex and barely a peep about lust for money.

The problem with greed is that it causes you to hurt many people. The victims will include people that work for a company or buy its products. Executives routinely receive bonuses for cutting jobs, salaries, and benefits of employees. The suffering of those workers does not matter. Financial mismanagement, theft, pollution, and waste disrupts the lives of millions. Lust for money makes you glad there are people with less and covet the wealth of those with more. You do not care about anyone but yourself and your family. Everyone else be damned. You cannot follow Christ and have an attitude like that. You cannot serve God and money.

Take a look at Mammon in the news during the past week.

Here we have lies. Duke Energy made false promises to facilitate the purchase of Progress Energy.

"I do not believe that a single director of Progress would have voted for this transaction as structured with the knowledge that the CEO of Duke, Jim Rogers, would remain as the CEO of the combined company," former board member John Mullin III told WSJ.

"In my opinion this is the most blatant example of corporate deceit that I have witnessed during a long career on Wall Street," he continued in a letter shared with The News & Observer, "and as a director of ten publicly traded companies and as a former Trustee of Putnam's numerous mutual funds."

The CEO for a day "walked away with a severance package that could be worth up to $44.4 million."

Here we have theft, lies and even an attempted suicide. An Iowa brokerage firm is fined $700,000 for deceptive sales practices, sued for facilitating a $190,000,000 Ponzi scheme, and then $220,000,000 of customer funds suddenly disappears. The CEO attempts to kill himself, the feds file fraud charges, and the company declares bankruptcy. Tens of thousands of investors have been completely ruined financially by these shenanigans.

Here we have lies and theft on scale "too huge to wrap our mortal heads around." Rate fixing by Barclays and other securities firms on $800 trillion in trades. And it may only be the tip of the iceberg.

Combining the penalties assessed by a trio of U.S. and British regulators, and the roughly $155 million that Barclays spent during the multiyear investigation, this one bank alone has incurred more than $600 million in charges. The bank's CEO, Bob Diamond, has resigned in disgrace, and the familiar Barclays name has been significantly tarnished.

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) -- the propped-up bank in which, in a royally cruel twist of fate, British taxpayers hold an 82% stake -- will reportedly be next on the hook with penalties of $233 million for its role in the rate-setting scandal. Swiss bank UBS (UBS) received "conditional immunity" from prosecution last year in return for its cooperation with the Justice Department's ongoing investigation. Meanwhile, authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are reportedly looking into potential misconduct by, among others: Citigroup (C), HSBC (HBC), Deutsche Bank (DB), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Lloyds, and Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi.

The victims include anyone with adjustable rate loans, pension funds, corporations with financed debt, and stockholders. In short, millions of people have been hurt. The Motley Fool asks if "there any corner of our financial markets that can be deemed safe from such reckless and deceptive behavior?" Here is the moral of the story:

Where opportunity and motive coincide for banks to pursue their own agenda through secretive and unsavory means, it seems far safer to presume that they will rather than to trust that they will not.

Lies, theft, and breaking the law is becoming the rule rather than exception.

A quarter of Wall Street executives see wrongdoing as a key to success, according to a survey by whistleblower law firm Labaton Sucharow released on Tuesday.

In a survey of 500 senior executives in the United States and the UK, 26 percent of respondents said they had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace, while 24 percent said they believed financial services professionals may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct to be successful.

Sixteen percent of respondents said they would commit insider trading if they could get away with it, according to Labaton Sucharow. And 30 percent said their compensation plans created pressure to compromise ethical standards or violate the law.

Greed and sin go hand in hand. You cannot serve God and Mammon. There is no way to satisfy the hunger created by love of money. So why are Christians silent on all the evils that come from love of money, particularly when it has become a global epidemic? Greed destroys souls and causes suffering across the world. The people with little or nothing are living in despair because of the wretchedness of people with more than they can spend.

Yes, the hogs will be slaughtered (James 5:1-6):

Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.

So why are we, the body of Christ, silent on the morass caused by greed? Are we afraid? Are we blind? Have we been misled into obsessing about sex while ignoring the depravity of Mammon? Whatever the reasons, the Lord will not be amused.