Sell Some of Your Possessions Or ALL that You Have?

The King James Version (KJV) is mostly used in these lessons. Click here to access the KJV online.

Here we must not forget the text in Luke 12:33 where the Messiah is not just speaking to the rich young ruler, he's speaking to a crowd of many thousands of people. He says - sell your possessions [apparently not everything] and give to the poor, make money bags for yourselves that won't grow old, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. So he said that to everybody, but he told the rich young ruler specifically - sell everything that you have and give the money to the poor.

So, why everything? There are two schools of thought.

One school of thought is that the rich young ruler had acquired his riches by exploiting and defrauding other people.

As a point of reference, one of the early church fathers reportedly commented on this.

The real church fathers are actually the apostles, but the people that are called the ‘church fathers’ are some early professing Christians in the second and third centuries. They are called anti-Nicene fathers, they're Christians that come before the council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. One of them, his name is Origen [185 A.D to 254 A.D] and in his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, he cites a writing called the Gospel of the Nazarenes. He says it speaks of the rich young ruler’s mistreatment of the poor. Quote - and the lord said to him, the rich young ruler, how can you say I have fulfilled the law and the prophets, for it stands written in the law - love thy neighbor as thyself - and behold many of thy brethren, sons of Abraham are grinded with dirt and die of hunger and thy house is full of many good things and nothing at all comes forth from it to them - end of quote.If this citation is correct, and we think it carries a lot of weight, then the rich young ruler accumulated his wealth sinfully and furthermore he wasn't using it as the Torah commanded.

He wasn't using his wealth to help the poor, so, therefore his master was his wealth, his master was not Yahuwah. Remember what Yahushua said in Matthew 6 - you can't serve Yahuwah and money. The way you tell if you're serving money is if you have that evil eye rather than the good eye. So thus there was the specific requirement for him to sell everything he owned and give the money away to the poor. Yahushua knew that's what it would take for him personally to pay back all the wrong that he had done. So, extreme yes, but apparently that's what it would take in his case.

The other [more popular] school of thought is that Yahushua was hitting the man with the first table of the law - not having other gods before Yahuwah. This interpretation says that the man loved and served his wealth over Yahuwah. So Yahushua challenged him on idolatry.

Whichever school of thought is chosen, notice what Yahushua says.

Go sell all you have and give to the poor and you will have treasure in Heaven. The Messiah links up the giving away of money to the poor with the treasure a person has in heaven. There's a direct co-relation between the two. In order to store up treasure in heaven, you must give your alms to those who are in need. That's how you store up treasure in heaven - by giving to the poor.

Mark 10:22 tells us that the young man was stunned [HBSC]. Some Bible versions say – he was sad, some say he was gloomy. It says that he went away and he was grieving because he had many possessions.

We believe this because it is in scripture - selling possessions, giving to the poor, treasure in heaven, all that goes along with it. It is hard to wrap your mind around it because it doesn’t seem real. Because you cannot see it, it's not something tangible, you can't reach out and touch it but yet we must believe it is true. We read it and it's difficult but it's true.