What Does Gold Represent in the Bible? Holiness, Kingship, Faith

In the Bible, gold represents what is most precious and holy. It covered the ark where God met his people. It was a gift fit for a king when the wise men gave it to the child Jesus. Refined gold pictures faith that has come through the fire. And gold made the golden calf.

Its first appearance is near Eden, in the land of Havilah, where one of the rivers flowing out of the garden ran: “the gold of that land is good” (Genesis 2:12). Exodus then shows the same people doing two things with the same kind of ornament. At the foot of Sinai they broke off their golden earrings for Aaron, who threw them into the fire, “and there came out this calf” (Exodus 32:24). A few chapters later, “as many as were willing hearted” brought “bracelets, and earrings, and rings, and tablets, all jewels of gold” for the house of the LORD (Exodus 35:22). Gold goes where our hearts send it, and the Bible keeps asking, gently, where we will send ours.

The King James Version says “gold” 417 times and “golden” 66 times, 483 in all. Nearly all of them, 442, are in the Old Testament, and Exodus has the most by far, 105, because so much of it describes the tabernacle and the things inside it. Chronicles and Kings come next, with Solomon’s temple and treasury. The New Testament has 41, and more than half of those are in Revelation.

The first is that river flowing out of Eden, which “compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold” (Genesis 2:11). The last is the holy city at the end of the book: “the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass” (Revelation 21:21). Other translations give slightly different totals, because they word some verses differently, but in any translation gold runs from the first garden to the last city.

God asked for it as a gift. “Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring me an offering: of every man that giveth it willingly with his heart ye shall take my offering” (Exodus 25:2). They had gold to give because, on the night they left Egypt, they asked their neighbours for “jewels of silver, and jewels of gold” (Exodus 12:35). Slaves walked out of slavery wearing gold, and God asked them to offer some of it back to him, freely.

The gold went to the holiest things. The ark of the covenant was wood, and God told Moses, “thou shalt overlay it with pure gold, within and without” (Exodus 25:11). Its lid, the mercy seat, was solid “pure gold”, with two golden cherubim facing each other over it, and there God made his promise: “there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat” (Exodus 25:17–22). The lampstand was “of pure gold” too (Exodus 25:31). Centuries later Solomon went further: “the whole house he overlaid with gold, until he had finished all the house” (1 Kings 6:22). You can walk through the whole tent in our guide to the tabernacle.

Exodus never stops to explain why gold. What it tells us is where the gold was: on the place where God said he would meet his people. The finest thing they owned was set closest to him.

It was the gold turned the other way. While Moses was still on the mountain, the people lost patience and said to Aaron, “Up, make us gods, which shall go before us.” Aaron told them, “Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me.” He shaped a calf, “and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:1–4). The God who had brought them out was on the mountain above them, speaking with Moses, and they gave the credit to a lump of their own jewellery.

Aaron’s excuse to Moses is almost funny, and very human: “I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf” (Exodus 32:24). Moses burned the calf, “ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it” (Exodus 32:20). Paul says the same thing to the Athenians in kinder words: “we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device” (Acts 17:29). Gold can honour God. It cannot be him.

Both, and Scripture holds them together without embarrassment. “The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, saith the LORD of hosts” (Haggai 2:8). The gold of Havilah is good. Yet the law warned Israel’s future king that he must not “greatly multiply to himself silver and gold” (Deuteronomy 17:17). Solomon received “six hundred threescore and six talents of gold” in a single year (1 Kings 10:14), and silver “was nothing accounted of in the days of Solomon” (1 Kings 10:21). When his heart turned from the LORD in old age, Scripture names only his wives as the cause (1 Kings 11:4).

The danger is never the metal. It is trusting it. James writes to the rich who hoard, “Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you” (James 5:3). Jesus put it in one line about the heart: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21).

Yes, and the psalms say so in the language of people who knew what gold was worth. Of God’s judgments, Psalm 19 says, “More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb” (Psalm 19:10). Psalm 119 says it twice: “The law of thy mouth is better unto me than thousands of gold and silver” (119:72), and “I love thy commandments above gold; yea, above fine gold” (119:127).

Wisdom gets the same praise. “How much better is it to get wisdom than gold!” (Proverbs 16:16). Job searches the mines of the earth for it and comes back saying, “It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof” (Job 28:15). They take the most valuable thing a reader can hold and say there is something better, and God gives it to anyone who asks: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not” (James 1:5).

Matthew tells us what they did and lets the gifts speak: “they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh” (Matthew 2:11). He does not explain each gift. Early Christian writers soon did; one of the first was Irenaeus of Lyons, who around 180 read them as a confession of who the child was: myrrh because he would die and be buried, frankincense because he was God, and “gold, because He was a King, of whose kingdom is no end.”

It fits the scene. Wise men “from the east” (Matthew 2:1) bowed before a child in a house and opened their treasures. It is the tabernacle again, in small: the most precious thing set down where God has come to meet us. Frankincense has its own page, frankincense in the Bible.

Very little, and what he said is sharp. Sending out the twelve, he told them, “Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses” (Matthew 10:9). They were to trust God for their keep, “for the workman is worthy of his meat” (Matthew 10:10). Against teachers who said an oath by the temple meant nothing but an oath by its gold was binding, he asked, “Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifieth the gold?” (Matthew 23:17). The gold of the temple was holy because of the God who dwelt there, never the other way round.

His apostles learned it. At the temple gate called Beautiful, a man “lame from his mother’s womb” asked Peter and John for alms (Acts 3:2–3), and Peter answered, “Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk” (Acts 3:6). Peter later wrote that we “were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold”, but “with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Peter 1:18–19). The ransom that set us free was not paid in gold.

In John’s vision of the new Jerusalem they are. “The city was pure gold, like unto clear glass” (Revelation 21:18), “and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass” (21:21). The word is “street”, one great street, and the gold is so pure you can see through it. Revelation is a book of visions, and Christians differ on how literally to read its pictures. Read either way, the picture says the same thing. What was once laid over one small ark in a tent now fills a whole city, and the voice from the throne explains why: “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them” (Revelation 21:3).

The Bible gives no meanings for dreams about gold, or for any image in our own dreams. The one dream of gold it records is King Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, whose “head was of fine gold” (Daniel 2:32), and Daniel told the king that no wise man could explain it, “But there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets” (Daniel 2:28). Joseph said the same to two frightened men in prison: “Do not interpretations belong to God?” (Genesis 40:8). If a dream of gold has stayed with you, the surest place to take it is to him in prayer, and to the gold Scripture does speak of: the treasure of a heart set on God.

Because gold is purified by fire, and so are we. Proverbs puts the two side by side: “The fining pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold: but the LORD trieth the hearts” (Proverbs 17:3). The prophets took up the picture. God promises through Zechariah to “try them as gold is tried: they shall call on my name, and I will hear them” (Zechariah 13:9), and Malachi sees the Lord sitting “as a refiner and purifier of silver”, who will “purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the LORD an offering in righteousness” (Malachi 3:3). The refiner in Malachi does not leave the fire. He sits at it.

The New Testament carries the fire into our own lives. Peter writes to Christians who were “in heaviness through manifold temptations” (1 Peter 1:6) that “the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:7). To a church that thought itself rich, Jesus says, “I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich” (Revelation 3:18). The calf came out of the fire as an idol. Faith comes out of it as gold.

Job said it best, with everything taken from him and no answer yet from heaven: “But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold” (Job 23:10).

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• Yellow Barely Exists in the Bible — Gold Does the Work
• Frankincense: Biblical Symbolism And Meaning
• What Was the Tabernacle in the Bible? Israel’s Tent Sanctuary, Its Layout and Meaning
• What Did Jesus Say About Money and Wealth? No One Can Serve God and Mammon
• How Old Was Jesus When the Wise Men Came? Probably Under 2
• What Does Blue Mean in the Bible? Holiness and Remembering God