Solomon was a king in Jerusalem about a thousand years before Jesus, and he was the richest man his people ever produced. He was so rich that the old books wrote it down and people remembered it for a thousand years.
The story of his wealth is not in the gospels. It is in First Kings, one of the older history books his people kept about their kings, written centuries before Jesus was born.
It says his drinking cups were gold. Not gold on the outside. Solid gold. And it says silver was not counted as worth anything in his day, because there was so much of it.
When those people wanted to say the best there is, they said Solomon. To them, his gold was the proof that God was pleased with him.
The field
Matthew tells this in chapter 6, in the long teaching on the hill that people call the Sermon on the Mount. Just before it, Jesus says no one can serve both God and money. Just after it, he tells them to seek God's kingdom first and stop worrying about tomorrow.
Jesus is outdoors, talking to a crowd about worry. These were people who knew what it was to be afraid of not having enough to eat.
And he points at a flower.
Not one someone planted. A wild flower, the kind that comes up on its own in a field.
Jesus told them to look at it.
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. (Matthew 6:28)
Then Jesus says this.
Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. (Matthew 6:29)
He put the richest king below a weed
He took the richest man in his people's whole history, the man everyone held up as the proof of God's blessing, and he put him below a weed.
Not level with it. Below it. Solomon "in all his glory" loses.
Then Jesus says what happens to that flower.
The grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven. (Matthew 6:30)
Dried, and thrown into the oven.
So the thing that is better dressed than the richest king is a weed that will be burned tomorrow. He did not pick a rose. He picked something nobody wanted, and he still ranked it over Solomon.
He threw out the old rule about blessing
The old books teach a plain rule. Obey, and God will bless you with crops, herds, and full barns. Disobey, and you will lose them. If God is pleased with you, you can tell by what you own.
Solomon was that rule's best proof. If the rule were true, he was the man it was true about.
Jesus took that proof and set a roadside weed above it. He did it in front of a crowd, on purpose. He was telling them that the rule was wrong. Money was never God's way of showing who he loves. That rule did not come from God. People made it, and people said it was God's.
He was not telling them to be poor. In the same breath he told them their Father knows they need food and clothes. He was telling them to stop measuring.
The rich man is not closer to God. The poor man is not further away.
Cheats get rich too
Here is something anyone can see without opening a book.
Some people get rich by cheating. They lie about what they sell. They pay a worker less than the work was worth. They take things from people who cannot stop them. Jesus walked into the temple and turned over the tables of men making money there.
If cheats get rich, then being rich cannot be a sign that God is pleased with you. Both things cannot be true.
What is left
If money is not a reward, then not having it is not a sign that God passed you by.
Some people have spent years believing that other people got the blessing and they did not. That belief comes from the old rule Jesus threw out.
He fed people. He told a rich man to sell what he had and give it to the poor. He was laid in a borrowed tomb, and when a crowd tried to make him king, he went up a hill by himself.
The man God sent owned almost nothing. That tells you how much the Father cares about what you own.
If you have felt behind
If you have looked at someone with more and felt that it said something about you, it does not. That feeling is old and common, and it is wrong.
Jesus pointed at a weed that would be burned by the next evening and said the richest man who ever lived never looked that good. He said it to people worried about their next meal, so they would stop measuring.
Here is something for today. The next time you catch yourself comparing what you have with what someone else has, stop and thank God for one thing you already have. You are not behind. God never kept that list.