Matthew 6:33 Meaning: “Seek Ye First the Kingdom of God”

The verse means this: make God’s reign, and the right living he asks, your first concern, and trust your Father in heaven for food, drink and clothing. Jesus says it at the end of his teaching on worry in the Sermon on the Mount, just after telling his listeners that their heavenly Father already knows they need these things.

33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Matthew 6:33 (King James Version)

Everything in the verse leans on the sentence just before it: “your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things” (Matthew 6:32). To worried people Jesus says, in effect, someone already knows. Luke records the same saying in a shorter form (Luke 12:31), and in both Gospels it is the turn in a longer argument. Jesus has spent several verses telling his disciples not to be anxious, and here he tells them what to put in anxiety’s place.

What is the spiritual meaning of Matthew 6:33?

At heart the verse is about what we live for. Every life is aimed at something, and Jesus names two aims. Just before this verse he says that the Gentiles, the other nations, seek food, drink and clothing. Then he turns to his own: “But seek ye first the kingdom of God.” That small “But” is the hinge. The same hunger for security that can drive a whole life, Jesus asks his disciples to point at God.

He has already said a heart cannot be split this way: “Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). Mammon means riches, and Jesus’ wider teaching on money and possessions keeps coming back to the same choice. Here he puts it positively. A disciple still eats, dresses and pays for things. Those needs simply stop being what the disciple lives for.

John Chrysostom, preaching on the passage, said it plainly: “we were not born for this end, that we should eat and drink and be clothed, but that we might please God, and attain unto the good things to come.”

What comes before Matthew 6:33?

Matthew 6:25-34 is one unbroken piece of teaching, and it opens with a command: “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” In the King James Version, “take no thought” stands for a Greek verb that Thayer’s lexicon defines as “to be anxious; to be troubled with cares”.

Then Jesus gives his reasons, and he takes them from outdoors. “Behold the fowls of the air”: they do not sow or reap, yet the Father feeds them. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow”: they do not spin, yet Solomon was never dressed as well. Worry cannot add a cubit to anyone’s height. He names the anxious questions themselves, “What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?”, and answers them with a fact about God: “your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things” (Matthew 6:32).

Verse 33 follows straight on. The command to seek the kingdom rests on the Father’s knowledge of what his children need. Then the passage closes: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matthew 6:34).

Luke sets the same teaching straight after the parable of the rich fool, the farmer who planned bigger barns and heard God say, “this night thy soul shall be required of thee” (Luke 12:16-21). The two versions differ in small ways:

Only Matthew has “first” and “his righteousness”. The promise is word for word the same in both.

What does each phrase of Matthew 6:33 mean?

“Seek ye”

The Greek verb, zēteō, is the ordinary word for looking for something, and Thayer’s lexicon files Matthew 6:33 under “to seek after, seek for, aim at, strive after”. It is a command in the present tense, which suits a habit of life more than a single act. The nations in verse 32 “seek” with a related verb that Thayer glosses as to “crave”. Jesus uses the plain verb again in the next chapter: “seek, and ye shall find” (Matthew 7:7).

“First”

“First” could be read as a timetable: God in the morning, everything else after. Augustine of Hippo, in his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, read it as a ranking. Food and clothing, he says, are “to be sought later, not in point of time, but in point of importance”. The kingdom is the good we live for, and food and clothing are what we need on the way. John Calvin, the Reformer of Geneva, draws the same line through worry: “He who assigns the first rank to the kingdom of God, will not carry beyond moderation his anxiety about food.”

“The kingdom of God”

The kingdom of God is God’s reign. A handbook for Bible translators published by the United Bible Societies says the phrase refers “primarily to God’s kingly rule”. Jesus taught his disciples to pray for that reign a few verses earlier: “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). Announcing it was at the heart of Jesus’ message, and his parables make it treasure worth everything else. The merchant “seeking goodly pearls” finds one of great price, and “went and sold all that he had, and bought it” (Matthew 13:45-46). Whoever finds it lets everything else go.

Some Greek manuscripts of this verse lack the words “of God” and say only “the kingdom”. The SBL Greek New Testament and the Westcott and Hort edition print the shorter text, the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland text keeps “of God” in square brackets, and the United Bible Societies’ committee, the translators’ handbook reports, was “uncertain regarding ‘of God.’” The meaning does not change. In Matthew the kingdom can only be God’s.

“And his righteousness”

In Matthew, righteousness usually means doing what God asks. Thayer reads the phrase here as “the righteousness which God demands”, and the translators’ handbook calls it “the doing of what God requires and of what pleases him”. Jesus has spoken of it twice already in the Sermon on the Mount. In the Beatitudes he says, “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled” (Matthew 5:6). And he warns that “except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:20). The hungry are filled; the seekers find.

Calvin notes that “his” may point either to God or to the kingdom. He explains the kingdom’s righteousness from Paul’s line that “the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost” (Romans 14:17), and calls it “the newness of spiritual life”. Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians explain differently how God makes a person righteous. Augustine, Chrysostom and Calvin still read this verse alike, as a call to want God’s way of life more than the comforts of this one.

“All these things shall be added unto you”

“All these things” points back to the anxious questions of verse 31: what to eat, what to drink, what to wear. The verb means to add to what a person already has; Thayer places this verse under “to add viz. to what one already possesses”. Chrysostom caught the choice of word: “He said not, shall be given, but shall be added, that you might learn, that the things present are no great part of His gifts, compared with the greatness of the things to come.” Calvin calls the necessities of this life “favorable appendages” to the kingdom, welcome extras that come with it. The kingdom is the gift. Bread comes along with it.

Does Matthew 6:33 promise money or success?

No. What it promises is what the passage names: food, drink and clothing. Lifted out of its place, the verse can sound like a pledge of wealth to anyone who puts God first, and that reading belongs to what is often called the prosperity gospel. In 2008 and 2009 the Africa chapter of the Lausanne Theology Working Group met at Akropong in Ghana to study that teaching. They described it as the belief “that believers have a right to the blessings of health and wealth” through confessions of faith and gifts to the church. They agreed that the Bible includes material welfare in God’s blessing, and still rejected “the unbiblical notion that spiritual welfare can be measured in terms of material welfare, or that wealth is always a sign of God’s blessing”.

The passage itself rules out a life without hardship. The very next sentence is “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Paul spent his life preaching the kingdom, and he describes his days “in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness” (2 Corinthians 11:27). To the Philippians he wrote, “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content,” and he knew how “both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need” (Philippians 4:11-12). When Jesus promised his disciples a hundredfold return for what they had left, he added two words: “with persecutions” (Mark 10:30).

Augustine faced the objection that Paul’s hunger seems to break this promise. When we read of it, he wrote, “let us not imagine that the promises of God have wavered”. God may let such things run short for a while, in his reading, to train his people in patience. Hardship is no sign that God has turned away. The Lausanne group says so in plain words, rejecting the idea that “poverty or illness or early death, is always a sign of God’s curse, or lack of faith”.

The promise is a Father’s promise, made one day at a time. If you came to this verse worried about rent, a job or a diagnosis, it will not tell you how things will turn out. It does tell you three things. Your Father knows what you need (6:32). Each day has trouble enough of its own, so you need not add tomorrow’s to it (6:34). And your needs are in your Father’s hands even when they run short, as Paul’s did. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, explaining the Lord’s Prayer’s request for daily bread, says Jesus “wants to relieve us from nagging worry and preoccupation”. It adds that the hunger of others “calls Christians who pray sincerely to exercise responsibility toward their brethren”. The promise is made to a people, and one way the Father gives bread is through those who share theirs.

Does seeking the kingdom first mean you should not work or plan?

No. The Catechism, which cites this passage when it explains the prayer for daily bread, says it outright: “He is not inviting us to idleness.” Calvin, writing on verse 34, says the saying “does not condemn every kind of care, but only that which wanders, by indirect and endless circuits, beyond limits.” Augustine pointed out that Jesus and his disciples kept a common purse, and that Paul worked with his hands to support himself. From such examples, he concluded, “our Lord does not disapprove of it, when one looks after such things in the ordinary way that men do”. What Jesus forbids, as Augustine read him, is serving God for the sake of these things, with the eye fixed on them instead of on the kingdom.

Earning a living, saving and planning for a family all fit inside the verse. Only their place changes. They serve the kingdom and stop competing with it.

How does Matthew 6:33 connect to the Lord’s Prayer?

The Lord’s Prayer comes earlier in the same chapter, and it keeps the same order. It asks first, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven,” and only then, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:10-11). Every time we pray it, we practise this verse.

Chrysostom raised the obvious question. If Jesus says not to seek these things, why did he teach his disciples to ask for bread? “Nay, He added, daily, and to this again, this day.” The prayer asks for today’s bread, which is exactly the limit Matthew 6:34 puts on worry: today, and no further.

How do other Bibles translate Matthew 6:33?

Four classic Bibles in French, Spanish, Portuguese and German say the same thing, each with its own shade:

• Louis Segond (1910): “Cherchez premièrement le royaume et la justice de Dieu; et toutes ces choses vous seront données par-dessus.” Segond puts “de Dieu” after both nouns, so the kingdom and the righteousness both belong to God. It says the necessities will be “données”, given, the very word Chrysostom set aside, but “par-dessus” keeps his point: they come on top of the kingdom, as an extra.
• Reina-Valera 1960: “Mas buscad primeramente el reino de Dios y su justicia, y todas estas cosas os serán añadidas.” “Añadidas” pictures something set alongside what a person already has, the same picture as the Greek verb.
• Almeida Revista e Corrigida: “Mas buscai primeiro o Reino de Deus, e a sua justiça, e todas essas coisas vos serão acrescentadas.” “Acrescentadas” carries the same picture of something put on top of what a person already has.
• Luther Bible (2017 revision): “Trachtet zuerst nach dem Reich Gottes und nach seiner Gerechtigkeit, so wird euch das alles zufallen.” “Trachten” names a steady striving toward a goal. “Zufallen” says the necessities come to us as a gift, without being what we strive for.

Where English has “righteousness”, all four use a word that also names fairness between people, in law and in daily life. In those languages one word in the verse holds both right living before God and fair dealing with our neighbour.

Questions for a devotion or Bible study on Matthew 6:33

For a group reading Matthew 6:25-34 together, three questions keep the talk close to the text:

1. Jesus answers anxiety with a fact about God, “your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things”. Which need are you most tempted to carry as if no one knew about it?
2. Augustine read “first” as first in importance, not first in the day. What would change in an ordinary week if the kingdom came first in that sense?
3. The promise is to “you”, plural. How might your church or group become part of the way God adds these things to someone who lacks them?

Whatever answers the group finds, Jesus’ own answer is still outside the window: “Behold the fowls of the air.” They did not plan today’s food, and the Father fed them.

Related reading

• Matthew 11:28-30 meaning: the easy yoke and the light burden
• Matthew 5:14-16 meaning: “Ye are the light of the world”
• Is worrying a sin?
• Bible verses about worry and anxiety
• Bible verses about provision
• Why is the Catholic Lord’s Prayer different?