The demand of God upon his covenant people has always been to embody God’s special concern for the poor. God tells the Hebrews before they enter the promised land not to “be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor, since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth. I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land’” (Deut. 15:7,11) consider The Proverbs, which are full of commands that connect our love for God to how well we treat the poor. For example, Proverbs 14:29: “Those who oppress the poor insult their maker but those who are kind to the needy honor God.” The intent of this episode is to strengthen, not weaken, our concern for the plight of the poor. But deeply rooted in our commitment to love the poor must be a commitment to helping the poor and doing so in the right, God-ordained way. This episode seeks to call us to care for the poor, to shun passivity, but to understand the biblical guidance God gives for HOW to help, and not harm, them.
CALL TO HEART COMPASSION & PURSUIT OF JUSTICE FOR THE POOR
Outraged OT prophets like Amos announced God's judgment on Israel “for bringing to ruin the poor of the land God” (8:4-6). God let the Babylonians and Assyrians carry off the Jews into captivity because the Jews worshipped false gods and failed to care for the poor and needy. It's the same story in the NT. God became flesh and was born to a humble woman in a stable filled with animals. Poor shepherds were the first to hear the news and to see God become man. And Luke tells us at the very beginning of his ministry that Jesus entered the synagogue of Nazareth and read from the prophet Isaiah that he had come to bring good news to the poor. Most shockingly, Matthew 25 records Jesus saying that the Son of man will return to establish his Kingdom and on that day, he will separate the sheep from the goats depending on how they have treated people who are hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, sick, and imprisoned.
THE HISTORIC LOSS OF THIS FOCUS IN 20TH CENTURY AMERICA
In the early 20th century, somewhat in response to Darwinism and Enlightenment humanism and rationalism, many in the church lost confidence in the Bible as the Word of God and its teaching that man is a sinner in need of redemption through the blood sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Instead, Jesus became to them a good moral example, and the message of these churches became a cry for social justice.
In response, the majority of Bible-believing Christians, seeing that these churches had become corrupted by the thinking of “the world,” withdrew from culture, redefined “the gospel” as “Jesus coming to save individuals who trusted in Christ to save them from eternity in hell,” and called for escaping from the corruption of this evil world. They abandoned the true gospel: that Christ did come to save individuals who trusted in him to be justified, declared righteousness, and thus be delivered from punishment in hell. But the gospel has always been so much more, beginning with a positive, not negative, view of the earth God loves and created for humans to develop and enjoy. Jesus is the second Adam who has come to take back Adam’s throne over Kingdom Earth, recover Adam’s original calling, develop earth’s potential and spread Jesus’ kingdom of righteousness over Kingdom Earth.
So, many Bible-believing Christians abandoned the proper concern for the poor and disenfranchised right now on this earth that was always to characterize God’s people. They deemed this concern “the heretical social gospel of liberalism.” But the rising generation is calling the church back to the full gospel—personally redeemed through faith in Jesus but called to go into this world as agents of reconciliation, spreading Jesus’ kingdom righteousness and justice into every corner of the human heart and over every square inch of earth. A refreshing component of this movement is the recognition that sin has not only corrupted our hearts making us indifferent to the suffering of the disenfranchised, but sin has also corrupted the human cultural systems of economics and government: Cornelius Plantiga explains: (Engaging God’s World).
“We are born into a world in which for centuries, sin has damaged the great interactive network of shalom—snapping or twisting the thousands of bonds that give particular beings integrity and that tie them to others. Corruption is thus a dynamic motif in the Christian understanding of sin: it is not so much a particular sin as the multiplying power of all sin to spoil a good creation and to breach its defense against invaders. We might describe corruption as spiritual AIDS—a systemic and progressive devastation of our spiritual immune system that eventually breaks down and opens the way for hordes of opportunistic sins.
This sinful corruption of systems has come to the forefront of guiding our children and churches into a biblical understanding of economic systems. The free market with specific help for the poor, called capitalism, is under assault. The materialism and hard-hearted disregards for the poor in the church is being properly assaulted. Consider the following statistics.
- The average America home contains 300,000 items.
- The average American house has almost tripled in size over the past 50 years.
- Of the world’s children, 3.1 percent live in America but Americans purchase 40 percent of the toys sold worldwide.
- On average, American women have 30 outfits (that figure was 9 in 1930).
- There are more television sets than people in the average American home.
- Americans spend 11.2% of total consumer spending on non-necessary goods like jewelry, alcohol, recreation, gambling, etc. compared to 4% in 1959.
Americans are far more enslaved to consumerism than we realize. The challenge that has been confronting today’s church is this: To blindly embrace capitalism along with the consumerism that goes with it is wrong—especially in light of the biblical requirement of God’s people to be concerned for the poor. But there is a biblical caveat. Christians are not called to a naïve compassion for the poor, but to a wise compassion for the poor that actually helps them. We are not called just to a naked, concern but equally to support the biblical pathway to help them. Caring feelings, without truth, are never love.
CALLED TO WISDOM & ACTION THAT ACTUALLY HELPS THE POOR
Ideas, and Policies that Don’t
A. Last week we identified a popular ideology that sounds good but is rooted in the overthrow of God—economic equality. If ECONOMIC INEQULITY is unjust, God is an immoral monster, since by his providence he has caused one child to be born fabulously wealthy into the House of Saud—the royal family that rules Saudi Arabia, and another child into the poverty of a single mom who is a crack addict in Chicago. Rich and poor have this in common: The Lord is the Maker of them all (Prov 22:2). Perhaps worse, it undermines justice by substituting equal OUTCOMES for equal TREATMENT UNDER THE LAW. It is a destructive ideology that seeks to undermine the creation principle that you sow what you reap. For this reason, it has led to more poor being harmed than any ideology in the history of the world. Social media is attracting foolish Christians to embrace the Marxist redefinition of JUSTICE. As Christian thinker, Jay Richards looked back on his college deception. Being a teenager from a conservative Texas town the redefinition of economic justice, “was heady stuff. Professor Clark offered me a rare commodity: a chance to rebel against authority and feel self-righteous doing it” (Jay Richards, Money, Greed, and God).
B. Richards calls attention to many economic ideas and policies championed by misguided advocates for the poor. Consider the idea of “a living wage.” There is an upside to this concept, but the downside is often worse. He writes.
What would happen if the minimum wage were $1000/hr? Wouldn't that be great? Even the gal cleaning the restroom down at the mall would pull in $40,000 a week. The problem is 5 minutes after the law went into effect nobody would be getting paid to clean the restroom at the mall and the poorly educated woman with a good work ethic would be out of a job…To business employee wages are costs. That's why countries with high minimum wages like France tend to have higher unemployment than countries with low minimum wages like the United States. A wage is a price on the commodity labor. The people most likely to suffer from these laws are those at the bottom—the unskilled, young, inarticulate and handicapped workers who need to grab the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Raise it too high and the rung is out of reach in a diverse economy. Remember low paying jobs are entry level jobs. Like it or not, some people need entry level jobs very close to ground floor. Few people stay in these jobs forever. The experience and connections that such jobs provide can be more valuable than the salary itself.
Fair Trade coffee is another idea that has been promoted among Christians as helping poor coffee growers. But this practice amounts to supplementing a farmer’s profit, which can temporarily help him. But in the long run, it harms producers to interfere with the market. Subsidizing this farmer as he must transition to using his land to make it more profitable may be an act of love. But making him dependent upon Western contributions to stay in business when his market is changing and it would be much wiser for him to adjust to the market and use his land in a more productive manner is not loving.
C. Deception by the Nirvana Myth is widespread even among Christians. This mythology is contrasting capitalism with an UNREALIZABLE IDEAL rather than its actual alternatives. Marxism has always failed, horribly, but it has captured many hearts because of its idealism. Richards explains.
The grand communist experiment is the delusion that we can build a utopia if we try hard enough and that every real society is intolerably wicked because it doesn't measure up to utopia. When we ask whether we can build a “just” society we need to keep the question nailed to the solid ground. Just compared with what? It doesn't do any good to tear down a society that is unjust compared with perfection if that society is more just than any of the ones that will replace. No real society looks good compared with utopia. The differences between them may seem trivial. Nirvana myth dazzles the eyes. The free exchange of wages for work in the marketplace starts to look like slavery. Tough competition for market share between companies is confused with theft and survival of the fittest. Banking is confused with Usery and exploitation. This shouldn't surprise us. Of course, modern capitalist societies like the United States look terrible compared with perfection. The question isn't whether capitalism is perfect. The question is whether there's a better alternative in this life?
Free market capitalism with provisions for the poor has its flaws. But unlike Marxism and socialism, it works. More important for us though is the question, “Is free market capitalism with provisions for the poor biblical?”
BIBLICAL PRINCIPLES OF A JUST ECONOMIC SYSTEM
That system is a free-market system of private ownership, that enables capital investment, is regulated to punish theft and dishonesty, and contains provisions of some form of safety-net for the poor.
A. As we saw last week, Gensis 1-2 places humans in the garden to cultivate it, i.e. develop its potential to make life better for humans. This process can be expected to take capital investment so that scientists, inventors, and manufacturers are paid before the product is purchased from the retailer. Cultivating the earth for the reward of individual economic benefit is assumed by Paul in establishing the principle that if a man does not work, neither should he eat (2 Thes 3:10).
B. The Ten Commandments affirm a free-market system. Commandment 8, “You shall not steal,” teaches private property. Commandment 9 “You shall not bear false witness” requires the integrity that a free market requires to flourish. Commandment 10, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house…or anything that is your neighbor’s” clearly teaches a free market that assumes ownership, the right to acquire wealth, and a disparity in wealth.
C. This free market system always had this caveat. Some produce must be left for the poor Leviticus 19:9–10: "When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.
Every free-market society must employ policies that are based upon this principle. Several that come to mind are our anti-trust laws which prevent the richest and biggest companies from using their economic strength to drive competitors out of business. Another in a non-agrarian society is a graduated income tax with no income tax for those under a minimum. We shouldn’t necessarily be satisfied with these provisions; there may be better ways to help the poor.
BIBLICAL VIEW OF HELPING THE POOR
Adam and Eve were designed to be God’s image bearers, reflecting his nature as a worker and moral ruler. As moral rulers who had the law of God written on their hearts, they were to exercise dominion in a way that pleased God as culture developed and diversified. Human flourishing was the result of shalom in the four relationships of life: 1) Walking in harmony with God’s righteousness, they would have respected private ownership (theft forbidden by the 8th commandment), honest business practices (lying forbidden by the 9th commandment). 2) Experiencing pre-fall wholeness--internal peace with themselves—no sense of inferiority, insecurity, competitiveness, or envy. Sinful selfishness has not exerted itself—and their call to vocation was the call to use their talents, innovation, and resources to make products to serve others. 3) Experiencing pre-fall harmony in their horizontal relationships with each other; their hearts were not governed by greed, selfishness, cheating each other, or jealousy. 4) There was harmony in the created order. There was no poverty that had resulted from natural calamity like earthquakes, floods, or volcanoes erupting. And work was a joy, not a toil.
A. Overcoming the poverty of being. Only God knows how profoundly slavery and racism have crushed black men and women’s dignity. I wonder how many centuries it may take to undo such evil attacks on the self-esteem of those who bear the image of God. I’m told by those engaged in youth ministry that this shattered self-esteem is linked to many outward symptoms of this brokenness:
- a teen boy’s desire to prove himself a man through his sexual prowess.
- a teen girl looking for love in the arms of a male who just wants sex.
- a teen girl who wants to feel needed by getting pregnant and having a baby who needs her and, to some degree, loves her back.
- a boy committing violence to win the respect of the others in his gang.
B. Overcoming a poverty of family relationships. In my view the single most significant cause of poverty in our cities is father absence. We will apply this approach to the inner-city next week.
C. Overcoming spiritual poverty. A recent L.A. County Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration study found that of the homeless
- 38% are alcoholics.
- 26% are addicted to drugs and other substances.
- 25% suffer from Mental illness. (Cited by John Dean, Saint Sophia Cathedral)
Poverty’s cause is not a shortage of money, but the result of complex components to human brokenness that only Christians have the resources to restore.
D. Overcoming a poverty of stewardship. The biblical alleviation of poverty requires helping every human discover and develop his or her potential, gifts and talents becoming economically self-sufficient. Several years ago, a small group of Christian Congressional staffers who wanted to do something about the problems they saw with education in Washington, D.C. began to meet each week in the basement of the Capitol building to pray and seek God’s will. They decided to open an academically rigorous, Christian school in the city, in the heart of Southeast Washington, D.C. Cornerstone now has 180 students K-12, 30 teachers and staff. 96% are Black or African American, 2% Hispanic, 2% White.
The above fourfold restoration is exactly what the first century Christians practiced in the Roman empire. Roman cities were characterized by poor sanitation, contaminated water, high population densities, open sewers, filthy streets, unbelievable stench, rampant crime, collapsing buildings, and frequent illness and plagues. Rather than fleeing urban cesspools, the early church found a niche there. The Christian concept of self-sacrificial love for others, emanating from God’s love for them was a revolutionary concept to the pagan mind, which viewed the extension of mercy as an emotional act to be avoided by rational people. Hence paganism provided no ethical foundations to justify caring for the sick and the destitute. Sociologist Rodney Stark notes,
“To cities filled with homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violence and ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity, and to cities faced with epidemics, fires, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services.’”
The rising generation is right in calling the church back to compassionate care for the poor and disenfranchised. That is certainly NOT embracing political movements that embrace “economic equality,” “the Marxist worldview that labels the rich oppressors.” It is not mistakenly calling the idyllic NT example of believers generously looking at none of their possessions as belonging to themselves, socialism. Those generous actions had nothing to do with socialism, which is state ownership of the means of production. Nevertheless, if we would have hearts like Jesus, we can’t just rest upon defending capitalism. We must care enough about the plight of the poor that we notice them and pursue efforts to help them with biblical wisdom.
For Further Prayerful Thought.
- What rationalizations among Christians have you seen for allowing American consumerism to shape us too much to care significantly about sacrificing to help the poor?
- Which instances of compassion without biblical wisdom stood out to you.
- Why do you think that selling the dream of utopia to the masses by Lenin in the Soviet Union, Mao in China and other communist dictators worked to cause them to overthrow the government allowing them to seize dictatorial control?
