Two Masters and a Universal Law
Why can’t we serve two masters? According to Jesus, “no one can serve two masters,” but I don’t think that’s necessarily a self-evident fact. It doesn’t seem impossible to serve two masters. In the end, it will depend on what Jesus means by “master,” and I think it’s a fruitful topic because it helps clarify the claims Jesus makes on our lives.
“No one can serve two masters, for 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 God and money” (Matthew 6:24).
Consider the full context of Jesus’ declaration. He says you cannot love or be devoted to two masters. Now it’s certainly possible to love one person without hating another. Unless my parents are lying, they love me and my siblings equally and simultaneously. Likewise, people can be devoted to the football team from their city without despising their local baseball team.
The key is that the above examples are all mutually exclusive. When my parents love me, that love doesn’t interfere with their love for my brother and sister. Similarly, rooting for the Steelers will never require me to root against the Pirates or Penguins. As a result, it’s totally feasible for me to be devoted to two distinct people, teams, or any other entities, so long as the two entities are mutually exclusive.
But Jesus isn’t referring to just any two masters. Obviously, one of the two masters will be God. And this demonstrates just how profound God’s role as master truly is. Jesus can confidently and authoritatively say that no one can serve two masters because nothing is mutually exclusive with God. That’s the implicit claim in Jesus’ statement. Jesus’ claim on our lives extends to literally every aspect of our existence. As Abraham Kuyper famously said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”
This is the same reason Augustine can write the following:
“He loves Thee too little who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for Thy sake” (Augustine, Confessions, X.29).
Augustine recognized that we can only ever love one thing for its own sake, because only one thing exists for its own sake. Only God exists for his own sake. Every created thing exists not for its own sake, but for God’s sake. There is no potential object of our love, devotion, or service over which God does not cry, “Mine!” Christ is the source and purpose of all things. Every object we see, every person we meet, and every idea we ponder proceeds from Christ. Without Christ’s perpetual sustaining grace, these objects, people, and ideas would cease to exist. We can love any number of things, but Christ is always in, around, before, behind, above, and below those things.
As such, we cannot rightly separate God from our love for anything else. We can love other things, but it would be pure folly to love those things more than the person for whom those things exist. We can only love those things for the sake of the person for whom they exist. Just as Augustine said, we can only love those things for Christ’s sake.
Of course, this just happens to be the best way to love things that are not God. God didn’t design anything in his creation to be the absolute object of our love or service. We will be frustrated if we love money for its own sake, because God didn’t design money to be loved for its own sake. And this doesn’t just apply to things that we naturally think of as evil like money. For instance, a husband will be frustrated if he loves his wife for her own sake rather than for Christ’s sake. In fact, this is what C.S. Lewis called a “universal law:”
“The longer I looked into it the more I came to suspect that I was perceiving a universal law . . . The woman who makes a dog the centre of her life loses, in the end, not only her human usefulness and dignity but even the proper pleasure of dog-keeping. The man who makes alcohol his chief good loses not only his job but his palate and all power of enjoying the earlier (and only pleasurable) levels of intoxication. It is a glorious thing to feel for a moment or two that the whole meaning of the universe is summed up in one woman — glorious so long as other duties and pleasures keep tearing you away from her. But clear the decks and so arrange your life (it is sometimes feasible) that you will have nothing to do but contemplate her, and what happens? Of course this law has been discovered before, but it will stand re-discovery. It may be stated as follows: every preference of a small good to a great, or partial good to a total good, involves the loss of the small or partial good for which the sacrifice is made.
Apparently the world is made that way . . . You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first” (Lewis, “First and Second Things”).