13 No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” Luke 16:13 (NASB)
When the Protestant Reformation took off in the early 16th Century one of the motivating factors for the cruel retaliation by the Roman church was the teaching by the reformers from God’s Word to the common people that wealth and power were not indicators of God’s blessing on the prelates, priests, monks, bishops, and the Popes….
Luther preached a sermon on the parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16:1-13) telling all who heard it and read the published versions of it that salvation is by grace through faith alone and it is for all who trust in Christ alone, not for those who accumulate wealth and power as a pretense of God’s blessing.
William Tyndale took Luther’s sermon, expanded it and went deeper in his first published work after his English New Testament in 1526. The title of this “book” is The Parable of the Wicked Mammon. In the third part of the introduction to this book he wrote: