“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
“No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.
Matthew 6:19-24 (NIV)
Pastor Caleb Ingersoll preached on this passage several weeks ago. I've always wondered why Jesus stuck that paragraph about the eye being a lamp right in between his lecture on earthly vs. heavenly wealth. The first paragraph talks about storing treasure in heaven, and the third paragraph about serving either God or money. Both are about heavenly vs. earthly wealth. So what does the eye being a lamp have anything to do with it?
Caleb did an awesome job explaining to me from the Greek how it is related. The NIV uses the word "good" to describe the eyes. In Greek, the common word translated as "good" is ἀγαθός. The interesting thing is, that is not the word used in this verse. The word in this verse is ἁπλοῦς which means "single". In other words, if your eyes are single-focused, your whole body will be full of light. The Greek word translated as "bad" in the NIV is not the typical κακός but the word πονηρός, which, in a physical sense, means "diseased". Eyes that are diseased usually cause problems in vision, like the inability to focus on things clearly.
The passage makes much more sense after looking at the Greek. Those verses in the second paragraph are leading up to Jesus' statement about God and money. You need to be single-focused in your devotion to God. A divided focus between heavenly and earthly wealth is a diseased focus. It brings only darkness.
Just wanted to share that cool tidbit I learned from the sermon. Discoveries like this send shivers of excitement down my spine.
