John Calvin Commentary 1 Timothy 6:10

"For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil: which some reaching after have been led astray from the faith, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows." — 1 Timothy 6:10 (ASV)

For the root of all evils is avarice. There is no need to be overly scrupulous in comparing other vices with this. It is certain that ambition and pride often produce worse fruits than covetousness does; yet ambition does not stem from covetousness. The same can be said of the sins forbidden by the seventh commandment.

But Paul’s intention was not to include every kind of vice that can be named under covetousness. What then? He simply meant that innumerable evils arise from it, just as we customarily say, when speaking of discord, gluttony, drunkenness, or any other vice of that kind, that there is no evil it does not produce.

Indeed, we can most truly affirm, regarding the base desire for gain, that there is no kind of evil not copiously produced by it every day: innumerable frauds, falsehoods, perjury, cheating, robbery, cruelty, judicial corruption, quarrels, hatred, poisonings, murders, and, in short, almost every sort of crime.

Statements of this nature occur everywhere in heathen writers. Therefore, it is improper for those who would applaud Horace or Ovid for speaking in that manner to complain that Paul used extravagant language. I wish daily experience did not prove this to be a plain description of facts as they are. But let us remember that the same crimes which spring from avarice may also arise, as they undoubtedly do, from ambition, envy, or other sinful dispositions.

Which some eagerly desiring. The Greek word ὀρεγόμενοι is overstrained when the Apostle says that avarice is “eagerly desired”; however, it does not obscure the sense. He affirms that the most severe of all evils springs from avarice—revolting from the faith. For those afflicted by this disease gradually degenerate until they entirely renounce the faith. Hence the sorrows that he mentions; by this term, I understand frightful torments of conscience, which usually befall those past all hope, though God has other methods of testing the covetous by making them their own tormentors.