Matthew 6:24

Matthew 6:24 is the twenty-fourth verse of the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament and is part of the Sermon on the Mount.

In the King James Version of the Bible the text reads:

The World English Bible translates the passage as:

For a collection of other versions see BibRef Matthew 6:24

This famous verse continues the discussion of wealth, and makes explicit what was implied in Matthew 6:21: a person cannot pursue both material goods and spiritual well being. The two goals are mutually exclusive.

This famous saying also appears at Luke 16:13, but there it comes at the end of the Parable of the Unjust Steward. In Luke's Gospel, the saying is thus clearly one about God and money. In Matthew, the previous verses imply it can mean placing anything above God.

Leon Morris notes that the Greek: δουλεύειν, douleuein, translated as serve, literally means be a slave to, unlike in Luke where the reference is to servants. The Holman Christian Standard Bible translated the phrase as "No one can be a slave of two masters". David Hill notes that while labourers would frequently have more than one employer, it was impossible for a slave to have two masters and the author of Matthew may have chosen the slave metaphor as the clearer one. However, Morris notes that Acts 16:16 mentions a slave with more than one master. What Jesus is noting is not a legal impossibility, but a psychological one. While the slave might at first believe he can serve both masters equally eventually he will come to prefer one over the other. The slavery metaphor also can mitigate Jesus' warning. One cannot be a slave to both God and money, but it does not mean that one cannot be both a slave to God and also pursue a reasonable interest in money. This verse is not a call for the renunciation of all wealth, merely a warning against the idolization of the pursuit of money.

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