Money

The true genius of our country is that it is based on a truth that all value flows from God, as ultimately He is the only valuable thing. God made it, God places the value on it, and only God is ultimately able to redeem it. God placed that value in each individual and it is expressed most vividly through our free and willing desire to enjoy our Creator. The problem of money is at the root of this issue. Any kind of large scale currency system must end up becoming a tyrannical control mechanism that manipulates and thwarts the liberty of the individual and that ultimately ends in chaos as the currency increasingly fails to redeem the value demanded. This failure is because there is no human endeavor that can redeem the true value placed within each one of us as image bearors of the Creator of the universe. This is the value we are chasing, God Himself, and the satisfaction of finding our own relationship with God is only fleetingly counterfieted by the satisfaction derived from the exchange of money.

Money, especially fiat currency (which is the only kind of currency in use in all the world), has to chase value since it has no value of it's own. It's a funny thing to serve mammon over God. Since money only chases value and must be traded for the thing that has the real value, and value can only be determined by calculating what a person who is capable of paying is willing to pay for the item being valued, it's strange that we would hoard and lust after money so much. No matter how much money you have you cannot trade it for yourself in order to give yourself value. That's because you are niether capable nor willing to pay for yourself what you are worth, only God is and he did by laying down the life of his son as a ransom, the only way to redeem the value in you. He did this not so much because of a flaw in you, but more because of the great value that He can provide in your being with Him. So it's true we cannot serve both God and money, because a service to money only leads to an insane attempt to accumulate more in a vain attempt to redeem the value in ourselves that only an infinite God is capable of redeeming.