SID: Hello Sid Roth, welcome to my world where it is naturally supernatural. You know when I talk about the supernatural I can be talking about natural things but used in a supernatural fashion, for instance, money. My guest Craig Hill did a study of money. How often is money mentioned in the Bible?
CRAIG: You know the amazing thing Sid, that just in the New Testament there are 215 verses on faith, 218 verses on salvation, 2084 verses on money. That’s a fact most people don’t realize.
Why would the Bible be talking so much about money? Was Jesus after money? Is God after people’s money?
SID: there’s a lot of non-Christians that would say preach it brother. But why have you got such a fascination over money?
CRAIG: Well I have found that I really started out Sid dealing with families and marriages and I found that looking at people’s marriages money was a point of contention for so many people. And we have found that there are supernatural things that happen with money that people don’t realize. People just think oh this is just natural stuff.
SID: Okay, give me an example of, for instance, someone that has read your book “Wealth, Riches and Money,” or attended one of your seminars on money; tell me a real life example.
CRAIG: Sure, I was just talking to a man a couple of days ago that was sharing with me a little bit of his own life where he said all his adult life he had just barely scraped by, and just couldn’t ever seem to have enough to pay his bills, was always just, how could I do something you know just to make it. He attended one of our seminars on finance and realized that not only was it that his thinking probably was blocking him, but that there were actual spiritual forces that were coming against him, he realized that there actually is a spirit of mammon, and when they prayed
and broke the power of that spirit of mammon, he was telling me that within two months his income had doubled and within just another few months after that his income had tripled.
SID: What did he do, did he just work harder?
CRAIG: You know I asked him are you doing anything different.
SID: Yeah.
CRAIG: Did you get a new job? He said no, I have the same job I had before, he said what actually happened is he said the job that I had that some key decisions were made, they decided
to give me a raise, they decided to give me a benefits package that I didn’t have before, and he said I had been asking for years for something like that. And he said the only thing I can determine is that there was a little spirit that had been working through my family, he figured probably for generations, that had blocked and stopped his ability to generate finances.
SID: I have seen so many people that no matter how much money they make they are always behind the eight ball. That could be a spirit is what you are saying.
CRAIG: I think there are two factors that are involved in that: one is a spirit, the second one is forces on the inside of people that block and stop and cause them to think wrongly and misuse money and not really realize they are doing it.
SID: Now you mentioned something interesting to me because I read it in your book, the notes on the book, Jesus said you can’t love God or money, at least the footnotes in most Bibles say when you look up mammon it says money, so you can’t love God and money but you said that is not what it really means.
CRAIG: Well it is that scripture Matthew 6:24 where he said you cannot serve God and mammon, and it uses that word mammon, and I had always been taught all my life well mammon is just another word for money. And as you said in some Bibles it actually uses that word money, and some people think well maybe it is an attitude of greed or something like that. I didn’t what it was until a friend of mine did a study on the origin of that word and I was shocked to discover that what that word mammon actually was, it doesn’t mean money, it doesn’t mean greed, or an attitude, it was actually the name of a god that was worshipped. An idolatrous god that was worshipped in the days that Yeshua walked on the earth. And that god was worshipped by Canaanite peoples and it was a god they prayed to for prosperity.
SID: So when you say a spirit of mammon you literally mean a demonic spirit from this mammon.
CRAIG: Yeah, I found that to be true. And you know the insidious thing about that Sid is people
don’t realize that it is there, they don’t realize it is impacting their life, they just think well no matter how hard I work I just can’t seem to get ahead and they don’t realize, no, it is a spirit there that was actually messing up their thinking, it is actually blocking and stopping their life from functioning financially.
SID: What are some of the thing we can look for to identify if perhaps it is a spirit of mammon?
CRAIG: Well I think that spirit many times pervades all of society, so that is why it is so insidious. But what you find is people actually measure the worth and value of other human beings in terms of money, that is a symptom right there. You hear somebody say; ah did you realize he is worth seven billion dollars?
SID: and everyone will cup their ear when they hear it.
CRAIG: He is not worth millions, he is worth billions, and you stop and think, now wait a minute, is that the value of a human being, a man is worth a certain amount of money? That is certainly not how God values people, but yet that is a symptom of that spirit of mammon. We find some other symptoms of mammon are bondage to debt, people, no matter how hard they work, no matter what they do, can’t seem to break a bondage to debt.
SID: And you know this generation thinks it is always been a debt society, but you pointed out this is something new.
CRAIG: Yeah, it really has only been a couple of generations and of course none of us have lived longer than a hundred years by and large to really know that, but I would bet that for any of our viewers today if they were able to check with their great-grandparents, four generations ago, most people would find that their great grandparents carried no debt, zero debt. And yet they had a house, they had a life, how was it that they were able to live without debt? And I began thinking what has happened over four generations, how can we have changed from the whole society having no debt to the whole society having debt. I don’t think it would have even entered into someone’s mind four generations ago to go to a stranger to borrow money for thirty years, or fifty years, to have a house. But yet everybody thinks that way today.
SID: Now Craig, you have an interesting background, he studied geology, economics and Russian, and more important than that, he has supernatural revelation on finances, don’t go away, we will be right back.
