God, Your Gold, and Your Soul!

Fort Knox is a 109,054 acre army base near Louisville, Kentucky, built during World War I. In 1936 an area within Fort Knox was transferred from the army to the Treasury Department for the purpose of building the United States Bullion Depository. A fascinating online article by Shimon Rosenberg @ zmanmagazine.com describes Fort Knox as "the most secure building on the planet." He refers to Fort Knox as "America’s Treasure Chest." Security measures at the fort are extensive and extreme to the max, and for good reason. Locked inside the vault of the depository building are many billions of dollars worth of gold, secured by 30,000 soldiers and hundreds of army tanks with cutting edge weaponry. The vault "is constructed of such robust materials and protected by such advanced security measures that it is literally impenetrable." According to Rosenberg, the 5,000 tons of gold bars stored there equal 2.5% of all the gold ever mined in the history of the world! The underground vault housing all that gold has a 250-ton door that no bomb is capable of blasting through. Truly, the gold and other treasures laid up at Fort Knox are protected in one of the mightiest bunkers this world has ever seen!

If you could get your earthly treasures into the vault at Fort Knox, they would be in the most secure place on earth. The bad news is you can’t get them in there! Even so, there is good news. There is a vault that is even more secure than the one in Fort Knox, and the treasures it protects are quite literally out of this world! The treasures and the vault that protects them are described by Jesus Christ in Matthew 6:19-21 where He charges His disciples: "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal." Heaven stretches human imagination. Its glory is (many believe) metaphorically described by the apostle John in Revelation 21. Verse 18 says "the city was pure gold" and shortly later he wrote "the street of the city was pure gold." Besides gold, along the way John also mentions the most precious and valuable gemstones known to man (verses 19-21). And yet, astonishingly, Jesus, declares other even more precious treasures are being "laid / stored up" in heaven. Not in the form of gold bars. Instead, to coin words used by William M. Golden in his gospel song "A Beautiful Life" (1936), the "treasures" Christians put on deposit in heaven are "golden deeds." Verse one of Golden’s hymn says, "Each day I’ll do a golden deed, By helping those who are in need." We don’t think of common, everyday little things we do for others as "golden" or as something we would call a "treasure." But the Lord does. Jesus Himself attached great worth to the smallest of good deeds, promising that whoever gives "only a cup of cold water in the name of a disciple shall by no means lose his reward" (Matthew 10:42). There is no eternal reward in simply heaping and laying up gold here on earth. If you owned all the gold in Fort Knox, and if no thief could break in there to take it away from you, the cold, hard fact remains that death would take you away from it. That’s the inherent weakness in ALL earthly treasures and the vaults we deposit them in. Now, how much treasure have you laid up in heaven? Let me encourage you to make daily deposits. God will take good care of your gold, and your soul – forever. Even Fort Knox can’t do that.

    by: Dan Gulley, Smithville, TN