Matthew 6:33 — and what “all these things” refers to

“All these things” is a list, and the passage prints it

Read alone, the promise sounds like it covers everything. Read from verse 25, the phrase has a plain antecedent — named once, then repeated twice more in the four verses immediately before it.

Verse 25 opens the subject: what you will eat, or what you will drink; nor yet for your body, what you will wear. Verse 31 puts the same three things into the mouths of the people worrying about them, and verse 32 names them again, twice:

“Therefore don’t be anxious, saying, ‘What will we eat?’, ‘What will we drink?’ or, ‘With what will we be clothed?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.Matthew 6:31-32 · World English Bible

So by the time the famous verse arrives, all these things has been defined three times in four verses, and nothing in between has changed the subject. The promise attached to seeking first is specific: food, drink and clothing.

That is a promise about needs, made to a crowd for whom those were live questions rather than line items on a budget. It is not a small promise. It is simply not the promise it is usually quoted as.

“First” is an order, not a prohibition

The opposite misreading is just as common: that the passage is against caring about material things at all. Verse 32 rules that out in nine words. Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. The need is not denied, dismissed or spiritualised. It is stated as fact, by the same speaker, in the sentence before the instruction.

Nor does the passage say the Gentiles are wrong to want dinner. It says they seek after these things — that this is what their looking is organised around. What follows is a ranking. Something goes first; everything else is still there, behind it.

That distinction matters to anyone reading this with a real money problem, because the guilt usually arrives in the form of I shouldn’t be worrying about this. On verse 32’s account the worry is about something real, and the passage’s answer is not that you were wrong to notice. We have collected the rest of what Scripture says about that on our page of Bible verses about money worries.

What it does not say

• It does not promise wealth. Nothing on the list is a surplus. Food, drink, clothing — the same three things named as sufficient in 1 Timothy 6:8.
• It does not promise a career, a house or an outcome. Those are the things it is most often quoted about, and none of them are in the paragraph.
• It is not a technique. The word is first. Seeking the Kingdom in order to obtain the things puts the things back in first place, which is the arrangement verse 24 has already described.
• It does not promise timing. The very next verse is about tomorrow being its own problem, which is not the sentence of someone announcing that the trouble stops.

Therefore don’t be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Each day’s own evil is sufficient.Matthew 6:34 · World English Bible

Worth reading twice if this verse has been quoted at you as a guarantee. Each day’s own evil is sufficient is a strange line to put immediately after a promise of plenty, and Jesus put it there. If the anxiety is the part you came for rather than the money, our verses for anxiety page starts in this same paragraph.

Luke has the same saying, shorter

But seek God’s Kingdom, and all these things will be added to you.Luke 12:31 · World English Bible

Luke 12 carries the whole passage — ravens instead of the birds of the sky, the same lilies, the same anxiety about food and clothing — and its version of this line has neither first nor and his righteousness.

This site keeps three kinds of textual difference apart, so it is worth saying which this is: it is none of them. It is not a manuscript question and not a translation choice. It is two Gospels reporting the same teaching in slightly different words, which is ordinary in the first three and not a problem to be solved. What it does is make the antecedent even harder to miss — strip out first and righteousness and all these things still points back at exactly the same list.

“His righteousness” is Matthew’s word

The half Luke leaves out is worth a second look. Righteousness is dikaiosune (1343), and it belongs to Matthew. We counted the word in the King James text of the first three Gospels: six times in Matthew, once in Luke (Zechariah’s song, 1:75), and not once in Mark. Four of Matthew’s six are in this same sermon, chapters 5 to 7 — the Beatitudes at 5:6 and 5:10, the righteousness that must exceed the Pharisees’ at 5:20, and this verse. The first of them:

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.Matthew 5:6 · World English Bible

So and his righteousness is not a stray phrase. It ties the verse back to the hunger in the Beatitudes, a chapter earlier.

There may be a seventh, and both our translations are on the same side of it. At 6:1, the opening line of this chapter, the critical Greek editions read righteousness while the Byzantine text and the Textus Receptus read alms (the editions side by side). The King James has alms and the modern rendering charitable giving, so you would never see the split from the text on this page. If the critical reading is right, the chapter’s first verse and its second-to-last share the word.

“The Kingdom”, or “the Kingdom of God”?

Both translations above name God: the World English Bible has God’s Kingdom, the King James the kingdom of God. Several of the printed Greek editions do not. Nestle’s 1904 text, Westcott and Hort’s 1881 text and Tischendorf’s eighth edition all read simply the kingdom; the Byzantine majority text has the kingdom of God; and the modern critical editions print the two words in brackets, which is the editorial signal for evidence that does not settle the matter.

This is the manuscript kind of difference — a question about what the Greek text says, the same footing as Romans 8:28 and the ending of Mark. It is not the translation kind, where the original is not in dispute and the English simply diverges, as with Proverbs 3:5-6. We are not in a position to settle it and do not try.

What can be said is how little rides on it here. Matthew’s habitual phrase is not the kingdom of God in the first place: he writes “the kingdom of heaven”, a phrase no other gospel uses, some thirty-two times. Whichever reading is original, the Kingdom being named is the one the whole chapter has been describing.

Using it

Both texts above are public domain — the King James by age, the modern rendering by the translators’ choice. Print either on a card, a leaving gift, an order of service or a wall with no permission and no fee. Most modern translations are licensed, which is why so many sites show you one verse and a copyright notice.

Where you've heard it

The reason so many English speakers know this verse in the King James wording is a song, and the song has a story that happens to be about the verse’s actual subject.

• “Seek Ye First”, Karen Lafferty. Lafferty had left a job in entertainment and run out of money. In her own account she went to a Bible study on Matthew 6:33 while unable to make her car payments, went home, wrote the tune, recorded it on a tape recorder and added the descant. It is copyrighted 1972 to Maranatha! Music, and Hymnary lists it in around a hundred hymnals — which is why the verse is more often half-sung than read.
• Card and gift shops — where it sits beside Jeremiah 29:11 and Proverbs 3:5-6, all three read as promises about how things will turn out. Both of those have the same problem and we have written it up: Jeremiah 29:11 in context and Proverbs 3:5-6.

The Lafferty story is worth keeping next to the text, because it is the passage read the way the passage reads itself: a person who genuinely did not know how the bills were getting paid, and a promise about needs rather than about a windfall.