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 nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. -Matthew 6:19-21 (NKJV)
I was excavating my son’s toy box the other day, getting frustrated as I tried to dig deeper to find some tiny toy that might or might not be at the bottom. It was especially frustrating because other toys higher up in the toy box (ones I’d moved out of the way) kept collapsing back over the deeper areas I was trying to sift through and look at.
This reminded me of a place that fascinated me when I was a child: Oak Island. Do you remember it?
Oak Island is off of Nova Scotia, Canada, where pirates supposedly buried treasure very, very deep under the earth, and all the land above it was so thoroughly booby trapped that all attempts to get to the treasure have failed. Some who have dug to get there were flooded out, while others have even lost their lives.
The fact that there appears to be unnatural placement of wood and other materials every 10 feet or so into the ground, and the boobytrapping that keeps confounding treasure seekers, only fires up people’s imaginations even more. It’s been rumored that all kinds of valuables could be down there, from Spanish treasure to the Ark of the Covenant.
Only God knows what is–or isn’t–down there. One thing I do know for sure about Oak Island: It’s a powerful worldly distraction enticing us to look down, rather than upward to the Lord. If there’s anything we begin to obsess over that isn’t God–making those things false idols–we have to ask what is it we’re pursuing, and why? Because once we stop pursuing God, we’ve chosen our own path, and not the one He’s designated for us.
What do you treasure?
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