Where Your Treasure Is (part 1)

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. – Luke 12:34  (NET)

As is almost always the case, Jesus does not offer up these words as a disconnected aphorism.  Though it can be taken as a truth, it is only taken as such because of the context provided to it by Jesus and the Lukan narrative.  Though we will not here touch on the overall movement of Luke’s Gospel, we dare not make an attempt to rightly comprehend a statement such as this without operating within a mental framework that is consistently cognizant that Luke is telling a story so as to communicate a particular point of view, and that every component of that story is serving a greater end.  That greater end is Jesus’ conception of the kingdom of heaven.  In fact, it is a reflection upon the kingdom of heaven that is the immediate precursor to the series of statements that concludes with “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  To this point, prior to this telling statement, Jesus has said to “pursue His kingdom” (12:31), and that the “Father is well pleased to give you the kingdom” (12:32b). 

Before we move any further, we must be careful not to make the serious mistake of thinking of the kingdom of heaven as something distant, whether that distance be a matter of time or space.  For a Jew such as Jesus, the kingdom of heaven was defined as God’s rule on earth.  Heaven was not the eternally blessed attainment, after death, of a life well-lived.  It is incredibly important to establish such things, as it is incumbent upon us to know what Jesus would have had in mind, along with what His hearers would have had in mind, knowing that they had to share a common verbal and mental vocabulary, so that Jesus might be understood.  The idea of heaven, and the attached idea of an eternal realm to be occupied by disembodied souls, would have been foreign to the religious thought-world of the Israel of Jesus’ day.  As a matter of fact, it would have been heavily resisted, as an alien invader.  It was Greek thought, popularized by Plato, that divided the physical from the spiritual, positing that the physical world was only a shabby reflection of the spiritual world.  Essentially, for the Greeks and for those influenced by Greek thought, physical equaled bad, whereas spiritual equaled good. 

This would not have been the position of one of the covenant people of the Creator God.  They knew that God had created a world that was very good, that the good world He had created had been corrupted, and that God was eventually going to act to not only restore this world to its very good condition, but that His restoring, redeeming operation, which would occur in history, was going to create a world even better than the one that had suffered a fall. 

Heaven was the realm of God’s abode, and the ongoing movement of God that occurred through His people was for the purpose of causing heaven and earth to come together.  When acts in accordance with the covenant responsibilities of the covenant people were performed, such as caring for orphans and widows (an extraordinarily prominent theme throughout the Hebrew Scriptures), that was when heaven and earth were over-lapping and God’s will was being done on earth as in heaven.  The long-sought-after kingdom of heaven was the time when this overlap of the abode of God and the realm of man (the creation in which the creatures made in God’s image dwelt and were called to steward) would finally and completely take place.  When the kingdom of heaven was fully and finally manifest, and God ruled over His redeemed creation, it would then be said that “Death has been swallowed up in victory,” and questions such as “Where, O death, is your victory?  Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:54b-55) could be asked.  The Apostle Paul rightly connects the coming of the kingdom of heaven with the resurrection of the dead, thus indicating, among other things, that this was a feature of first century Jewish thought.