With great insight, the wise man in Proverbs 30, writes:
Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonour the name of my God. (Proverbs 30:8-9)
Previously we have looked at poverty, now we’re thinking about riches – about wealth. And I think our first reaction when considering our response to world poverty – is guilt. We feel guilty for being, by global standards, rich.
When I was 21 I went on a 3 months mission trip to the Philippines. I can still remember sitting in a restaurant, after having been there for only few days, and having some poor person come up to the window – tapping on the window with their medicine bottle – wanting money for more medicine. They saw white Westerners as rich people.
We lived in London for six years. And one of the first things that struck me was beggars in the underground stations, in London. I was ready for it in a developing nation – but I was surprised by it in a developed nation. We don’t see people needing to sleep rough in New Zealand. They saw all those commuters as rich people.
One of the components of my job as pastor here is dealing with people who coming knocking on the church’s door for a handout. They need petrol money or bus fare or some such thing – but they never want you to buy it for them – they just want you to give them the cash. They see churches and Christians as rich people.
And in all those situations – my first reaction is to feel guilty.
Guilty that I have money and they don’t.
Guilty because I’m not always sure what the best response is – I frequently feel I’m being manipulated, being conned, not sure if the need is genuine.
Guilty because may be I’m just being selfish, greedy, not wanting to share.
Whether I do give or whether I don’t give, either way I feel guilty afterwards: I’m sure I haven’t done the right thing.
And the easiest thing for you to be feeling as we come to a consideration of riches and wealth (in comparison with the world’s poorest people) is to feel guilty because we are rich.
The Goodness of Wealth
Well, the first thing to do is stop feeling guilty for being rich. I say that assuming you haven’t done something illegal in order to get rich: that would be a cause for true guilt. But I’m assuming that our wealth, our riches (of whatever scale they be) have come through work and savings and inheritance and even possibly, in God’s providence, a few windfalls in your direction.
I say you shouldn’t feel guilty because when we come to the Bible and we lay a biblical foundation for understanding wealth, the first foundation stone that we find is that: wealth is good. Material possessions are a good gift from God for his people to enjoy. In creating the world and declaring it to be good, God affirms the goodness, the rightness, of material possessions. Seven times in Genesis 1, after each major stage of creation, the refrain comes: “and God saw that it was good”. The blessing and abundance of the garden were created for humans to enjoy.
Christians are materialists. That is, we believe in the goodness of the creation, the material world. And it is from the creation that wealth comes. Wealth and material prosperity are rewards given by God to his people. The foundation promise, the establishing covenant, made with Abraham and his descendants involved material blessing, riches, wealth.
Material possessions are blessings for obedience. Throughout the Old Testament people like Job and Abraham and David and Solomon and a variety of others demonstrate that obedience to the covenant made with God brings material blessings. Wealth is good.
For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land - a land with streams and pools of water, with springs flowing in the valleys and hills; a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig-trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where bread will not be scarce and you will lack nothing; a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills … remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today. (Deuteronomy 8:7-9, 18)
Wealth and honour come from you; you are the ruler of all things. In your hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength to all. (1 Chronicles 29:12)
When God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work - this is a gift of God. (Ecclesiastes 5:19)
For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving. (1 Timothy 4:4)
Wealth is the reward of hard work and diligence:
“He who works his land will have abundant food, but he who chases fantasies lacks judgment.” (Proverbs 12:11)
“All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.” (Proverbs 14:23)
“The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.” (Proverbs 21:5)
Proverbs offers its observations on life as generalisations rather than prescriptive rules. It isn’t always the case that hard work will produce a good return. But generally speaking there is much in the Bible – and particular in the Old Testament - about the prosperity of the people of God.
And from this material has come what is often called the “Health and Wealth Gospel” and “Prosperity Teaching”.
A Health and Wealth Gospel?
There is a clear element of truth here: God’s intention is to bless his people with material wealth.
So you tune into early morning Christian TV programmes and there is that preacher or that speaker promising you that if you live God’s way then you will become rich. And books are written and conferences held and courses run – all along the lines of helping Christians make their first million. You’ll hear that the gospel is enhanced when the world sees Christians in expensive clothes, with big houses, Ford Explorers, the power boat and the Harley.
But the world generally looks at all that as being out of sync with the lifestyle of Jesus. However, they open up their plush leather Bibles and point to all these verses promising abundant material blessing for the people of God.
How are we to reconcile the simplicity of lifestyle according to Jesus with the sumptuous lifestyle according to those proclaiming the gospel of health and wealth?
I think the key issue is timing. The promises of prosperity relate particularly to the past and particularly to the future.
Remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today.” (Deuteronomy 8:18)
God gave first the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) and their descendants the Israelites unique promises about enjoying a special land (Canaan) in prosperity whenever they obeyed him adequately. This arrangement, this covenant, wasn’t made with any other nation or any other people. And it is these covenant promises of material blessing between God and the Israelites – that get plucked out of their Old Testament covenant context and then are misapplied to us today.
The unique covenantal arrangements between God and Israel won’t allow us to generalise these promises and say that God must materially reward his faithful people in other nations or other eras. Yes, wealth can be a sign of God’s blessing, but we can’t whip out these Old Testament promises and arm-wrestle with God for a pay-rise. They were promises particularly for those people then – and sadly they often failed to realise them through their persistent disobedience.
The promises of prosperity relate particularly to the past and particularly to the future. The prosperity that Israel was meant to model, and occasion did experience, is fundamentally a pointer to the future.
Just as the Promised Land itself was a paradigm for God’s intentions for the world, so also the promises of prosperity find their ultimate fulfilment in the world to come. So that when we turn to the end of the Bible story in the book of Revelation, we read about a restored and a renewed world of incredible wealth – with gold and silver and precious stones; with no more hunger or thirst; no more sickness or death; but a life of abundant material blessings.
But for now, while we wait for the coming of Christ and the new world, for that in between period, the New Testament has no promises of automatic wealth and prosperity for Christians. And when we look at the exemplars of the Christians faith, the apostles, Paul can say of himself:
I have laboured and toiled and often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. (2 Corinthians 11:27)
Here was someone living for God who did not automatically become rich. Are we to say the apostle Paul failed to “name it and claim”?
My point is, that we live in a day, when wealth is not automatic for the Christian if we just follow the five-step prosperity programme of the latest Christian guru. And in our consideration of global poverty, in which millions of Christians are amongst the poorest people on the planet, the health-and-wealth claims of these gurus seem totally ludicrous for significantly changing their circumstances.
I agree with John Stott who says: “We have to have the courage to reject the health-and-wealth gospel absolutely. It’s a false gospel”.
But we do live in an ordered world, where generally, faithful Christian living will usually produce a more prosperous outcome. It is simply the wisdom of living wisely in the world God has made. And at the broad brush level all you have to do is look at a map of the world to see that. The so-called wealthy western countries are by and large the countries that we would associate with a history of Protestant Christianity. It’s not a straight-line equation, but it is a correlation factor that can’t be ignored.
So I think the first thing to do as we think about being rich in this world is to stop feeling guilty. In God’s providence we have been blessed to live in the country in which we do. He has given each of us gifts of education and work and health – and most have made a reasonable fist of those opportunities – there has been hard work and perseverance and sacrifice. And you are by global standards, wealthy.
Give thanks to God for what you have received. Enjoy his generosity to you. Material possessions are a good gift from God for his people to enjoy.
The Danger of Wealth
Now the second thing to do as we think about being rich in this world is to recognise the dangers of wealth.
I have said look at a world map to see how a history of Protestant Christianity has led to national wealth. Now if you go to that same map and look at the world’s wealthiest nations – by and large you will find that the reigning worldview in those countries is atheism.
A key danger of wealth is that people turn away from God in their prosperity.
When the LORD your God brings you into the land he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give you - a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant - then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the LORD, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. (Deuteronomy 6:1-12)
Forgetting the Lord is exactly what Israel did, and that is exactly what the Western world is doing today. And as it happens at the level of nations, so it happens in individuals. The danger of wealth, the risk of riches, is a theme throughout the Bible, but no-one addresses it more head-on than Jesus.
No-one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money. (Matthew 6:24)
Jesus is saying that wealth and possessions are a master that rivals God. Literally our riches can be an idol that rivals God. It’s no coincidence that pagan idols are made of the most precious materials, like gold and silver. Wealth is an idol that is worshipped through greed. And for that reason the Bible describes greed as idolatry.
Greed has been glamorised and is the forgotten sin. Although greed can be profitably analysed in terms of sociological, psychological and economic factors, its root cause can be understood only with the help of theology. Greed is a theological problem. To leave the question of God out of our attempts to understand greed is to treat the problem superficially.
What do idolaters do with their idols which believers are meant to do with God? The answer is they offer their idols love, trust and obedience. In each case, that is exactly what the greedy do with their money.
One preacher put it this way: “anything that you and I tend to set up as the big thing, the central thing, in our lives, the thing about which we think and dream, the thing that engages our imagination, the thing that we live for, the thing that gives us the biggest thrill, if it is anything other than God, it is idolatry.”
Wealth in the end makes for a very poor substitute for God. It can’t be trusted, it can’t be relied upon:
“Whoever trusts in his riches will fall” (Proverbs 11:28)
“The wealth of the rich is their fortified city; they imagine it an unscalable wall.” (Proverbs 18:11)
Most people assume that they are the master and that money is their servant. But how tragic is the reality that Jesus speaks of: “You cannot serve both God and Money”. He assumes that we are servants, literally slaves, of either God or Money. In no part of the equation are we the master. Slavery to money can affect those at every level of society. Money has a grip on people at every socio-economic level. But there is nothing like having a lot of it to reinforce its power of slavery over us. It’s indeed a rare person who can make a decision which reduces their income. Many of us are slaves rather than masters when it comes to our money.
Yes, wealth and riches as we experience them should be a cause to give thanks to God for all he so generously gives us. But with that gift comes the danger of being seduced by our own wealth. Falling in love with what we can do with our wealth; trusting our wealth to gives us security and protection; and ultimately reinforcing our slavery to the idol of money through our own greed.
A key danger of wealth is that people turn away from God in their prosperity.
The Oppressive Rich
But there is yet one further step that the rich can take beyond piercing themselves with many griefs through being eager for money. Beyond the damage to themselves, is the damage the rich can inflict on the poor.
For the greed of the “haves” is a breeding ground for injustice perpetrated against the “have-nots”.
There is a conspiracy of her princes within her like a roaring lion tearing its prey; they devour people, take treasures and precious things and make many widows within her … Her officials within her are like wolves tearing their prey; they shed blood and kill people to make unjust gain … The people of the land practise extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and ill-treat the alien, denying them justice. (Ezekiel 22:25, 27, 29)
Woe to those who plan iniquity, to those who plot evil on their beds! At morning's light they carry it out because it is in their power to do it. They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them. They defraud a man of his home, a fellow-man of his inheritance. (Micah 2:1-2)
You trample on the poor and force him to give you grain. Therefore, though you have built stone mansions, you will not live in them; though you have planted lush vineyards, you will not drink their wine. For I know how many are your offences and how great your sins. You oppress the righteous and take bribes and you deprive the poor of justice in the courts. (Amos 5:11-12)
The dominant thrust of the Old Testament Prophets is that God will judge the exploitative rich as part of his plan to create a perfectly just society and redeemed the material world. Zechariah 7:10 enshrines a recurring theme that aptly summarises God’s heart: “Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor”
There is a close association in the Bible of material poverty with a recognition of spiritual poverty – so that often when the Bible speaks of the poor, it is shorthand for the pious poor – the poor who though they lack material, are rich spiritually. There is a similar association in the Bible with the material rich and injustice. So that the Bible frequently warns of the many wicked rich.
In the same way that not all poor people are given to spiritual piety, not all rich people are given to wickedness. Nevertheless that is the shape of the biblical stereotypes.
Conclusion
How are we to respond to all this? What should we be doing?
If wealth is good, then as I have said, we shouldn’t feel guilty for our relative richness – we should feel grateful to God. We should give him our praise and thanks, not just on Sunday’s but as we enjoy the things we have been entrusted with. The house, the car, the job, the toys, the clothes, the food: thank God for his generosity to you.
If wealth is good, then you should try and get as much of it as you can. John Wesley’s saying was: “Gain all you can, save all you can, give all you can”. Christians should try and gain wealth. A few of us will be better at that than most of us.
But if wealth is seductive, then giving away some of our surplus is a good strategy for resisting the temptation to overvalue it. And those who are exceptional at gaining wealth, have the responsibility and the privilege of being exceptional at giving it away.
And if it is the temptation of the rich to oppress the poor, we need to be concerned about justice. Perhaps most of us won’t have a direct opportunity to impact the poor for either good or ill, but we will be concerned about our indirect impact.
Our impact as consumers: who made the clothes I wear? Were they paid a fair wage? Who grew the food I eat? Were they paid a fair price? I’m sure 99% of the time we’ll probably never know the answer to those questions but that shouldn’t stop us from make a purchasing decision for justice that 1% of the time when we do know.
Our impact as voters and those who lobby our government to play it’s part, small though it may be, on the world stage for the benefit of the poor.
And lastly, we have an opportunity to use some of our wealth, to redress injustice for a small group of people in one or two places on the planet, through our participation in giving money towards missionary endeavours. Not out of guilt but out of privilege; out of opportunity and out of responsibility.
Let us do what we can, giving thanks to God for what he has given to us.
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