Humphrey Yang makes personal finance relatable and interesting. His content includes videos on how young people should be thinking about savings, how to invest your first $1000, and why minimalistic principles are healthy antidotes to chronic consumerism. Recently, he made a TikTok video that went viral in which he shows what wealth looks like when symbolically represented in rice. With one grain equaling $100 thousand and ten grains of rice equaling $1 million, he builds successive piles and offers examples of what they could buy. A few grains of rice can procure someone a Lamborghini, a few more a house in Malibu. The final pile is nearly 60 lbs of rice on a blue tarp in his living room. This, we are informed, is Jeff Bezos’ wealth.

With Lamborghinis being wildly outside the realm of the possible for so many of us, a blue tarp with a mounded pile of rice the size of a fifth grader is hard to conceptualize as translatable wealth. This guy could buy the world. At least, that’s what we are inclined to believe. With the over-reach of big tech being a daily occurrence, that’s what we’re left to consider. The truth is that, far from having that much weight to throw around, Bezos and anyone who trusts in wealth, become increasingly ineffective the more they rely on its power. That is because, as Scripture teaches, the vain or illusory characteristic of wealth so permeates its essence that it turns its devotees into ghosts themselves. Listen to the words of David:

“Show me, Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is. You have made my days a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before you. Everyone is but a breath, even those who seem secure. “Surely everyone goes around like a mere phantom; in vain they rush about, heaping up wealth without knowing whose it will finally be. - Psalm 39:4-6

There is an illusion of weight that a pile of wealth displays. The Bible, however, puts the emphasis on illusion rather than weight. Interestingly, the Hebrew verb for heaping up (tsaw-bar’) is an agricultural term for what is done with grains at the harvest. Yang’s use of rice is fitting. 

Here is a question: why do the rich so rarely ever arrive at a fixed point of contentment? Because contentment cannot be acquired through gain. If you didn’t have it before you got money, then the joke’s on you. Scripture shows the formula as actually working the other way around. Contentment is the gain. It is acquired through thankfulness, which is anti-covetousness. 

Yet true godliness with contentment is itself great wealth. - 1 Timothy 6:6

Throughout history, Christians have regularly fallen for the carnival tricks of the enemy. We look at Bezos’ pile of rice and we think, like unbelieving Israel, ‘That giant is bigger than anyone in our camp. We don’t have anything that can compete.’ That’s because the Church is making the mistake of looking at John Piper, Franklin Graham, or N.T. Wright. None of these men are as big a player as Jeff Bezos when it comes to wealth and apparent power . . . but place the proper emphasis on apparent. Praise God that there are people worshipping God with their financial success and cultural influence . . . but the weight, the glory, is God’s alone. Apart from Him, wealth is just flour . . . more potential bread than one person can eat in a lifetime. Everything in the cupboard will either rot or be spread around to others and Bezos will have very little to say about it. Let’s not forget the kingdoms of Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander the Great, and others, whose empires were of a far-surpassing superiority to that of Bezos’. All of them chunked out like firewood and shared between rulers of the next generation irrespective of the wishes of the deceased. The even greater news is that, while wealth may be used in God’s service and to His glory, it is not necessary. The conquering of the nations is going to be accomplished by what comes out of Christ’s mouth, not what is in the Vatican’s coffers. No weapon fashioned against it can stand. Empires crumble beneath the weight of the Kingdom of God’s mountainous advancement. The door is open to Christians to be a part of shaping the future. It is a door that Christ, Himself, has opened and no one can shut. Wealth is admissible in the process, but is not a necessary tool. 

From his mouth came a sharp sword to strike down the nations. He will rule them with an iron rod. He will release the fierce wrath of God, the Almighty, like juice flowing from a winepress. - Revelation 19:15