…cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring for to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground… (Gen. 3:17-19).
Have you ever skipped a meal? Perhaps you were fasting, or too busy. Perhaps you were broke at the moment and away from home? Have you ever felt how the stomach turns upon itself when you haven’t eaten? If you’ve ever experienced that hunger, then you know what you do in that situation: you go get something to eat. But what if it wasn’t that easy? What if getting something to eat required a tremendous effort beyond your ability? Then you might end up like one of those… street people. And what if you found yourself always hungering while at the same time watching everyone else around you live in relative ease? Would not the question arise, “Why?” Why is this happening to me? If you had a religious fiber in you, you may ask the corollary question, “Why is God letting this happen to me?”
Good Question; one difficult answer; one that surely will cause dissent—like all God questions; but also like many God questions, the answer will almost certainly rub against the grain of what we want to think and feel, especially if we’re the ones suffering. The answer is hard for us to swallow, difficult to digest. It is going to challenge our view of God, our view of ourselves, and our view of how the world works. In short, the answer is part of a worldview, a way of life, a closed-system of living. And therefore, “A Christian View of the Causes of Poverty,” begins with a Christian view of thinking and behaving. Satisfying the social hunger of poverty must begin with feeding on the Bread of Life, the word of God.
Let me begin, then, by saying that we can address no topic of economics properly without considering what God’s Law says about it, for there we find the ultimate blueprints for human society and social life.[] It is also where the essential underlying issues which few if any other sources give us, are revealed. These are: the existence of a personal God, the creation of mankind, the gift of law, the gift of historical rewards and penalties for faithfulness or unfaithfulness to the law, and the promise of Eternity. The Bible also reveals to us the doctrine—vital to our understanding of work and poverty—the Fall of Man. It is through the fall that sin enters the world, and with sin enters shame, guilt, selfishness, sloth, blame and envy—all factors that play a part in the causes of poverty. Compounding these problems, upon the fall of man God cursed the ground for his sake, thereafter adding the burdens particularly of thorns and sweat.
A big part of what all of this means, and why the Bible plays such an important role here, is that poverty is an ethical issue, not merely a material one. In all of the multitude of programs and institutions aimed at abolishing poverty, proponents and activists rarely discuss the theological dimensions of the problem. Some even adopt biblical language about helping the poor, but few put the whole problem within a biblical context. Poverty is a negative historical sanction. It is the result of sin. Not in the sense that every impoverished and oppressed person suffers that condition because of some particular sin (though that can very well be the case—sin does often have material consequences), but in the sense that sin in general has brought a condition of extra labor and intensity in our work that our fallen nature wants to skirt. The punishment for the fall of man was that In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground, and the sweat comes because the ground itself has been cursed: cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring for to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field (Gen. 3:17-19). This struggle with the hardship of labor, and the sweat that is wrought upon our brow is a constant testimony to our fallenness.
It is no wonder, therefore, that mankind tries to escape the witness of hard work, just as Adam tried to pass the blame for his sin upon Eve, and Eve to the Serpent, and just as they tried to hide their shame with fig leaves. Fallen man runs from responsibility because he is running from the face of God. Mankind wants above all things to escape judgment—an impossible feat. And, just as the Sin of Adam and Eve got them expelled from the blessings of Eden, so does our sin bar us from blessings in our society as well. And they are most likely to do so when we neglect our day-to-day faithfulness to the work of God’s Kingdom, in the light of our fallen nature, for it is then that hidden desires to escape work, responsibility, and thrift tempt us to lay aside the plow, and lie into the lap of sin. The Puritan writer William Gurnall put it like this, “Since man was turned out of Paradise, he can do nothing without labour, except sin.”[] Sin is the one thing that “comes easy.”
At the point that such sins as sloth, selfishness, and envy begin to manifest socially, cultures begin truly to experience poverty. This does not mean that in highly moral cultures poverty will not exist to some degree—it always will—but in those situations it is generally due to the uncontrollable misfortunes of individuals who, through no fault of their own, fall into desperation and helplessness. Puritan preacher George Webb noted this well in his 1621 publication Augur’s Prayer (based on Proverb 30):
Poverty… may befall a wise man, virtuous man, a faithful man… Extreme poverty and necessity may befall the godly.… [But these] are the poor of God’s making, and our duty in respect to them, is… to pity them… comfort them… relieve them, and support them in deeds.[]
Biblical charity and the doctrine of calling and work quickly remedy such cases and get people back on their feet (more on that in a minute); but when the general morality of a society slides, embraces degeneracy, promotes self-centeredness in all forms, then right around the corner stand tyrants to exploit and eventually oppress the masses with promises, narcotics, pornography, and right there with them will clamor the masses, handing over their cash, and their power, to buy thrills and entertainment, and to buy false hopes, until they’re broke. And then you can bet that the very people who squandered themselves to the gutter, will be the first ones to say that they deserve a handout (or a bailout).
Such people Solomon so often addresses as fools: He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand, but the hand of the diligent maketh rich (Prov. 10:4); He that tilleth his land shall be satisfied with bread: but he that followeth vain persons is void of understanding (Prov. 12:11); The sluggard will not plow by reason of the cold; therefore shall he beg in harvest, and have nothing (Prov. 20:4). Poverty more often comes as a result of refusing to accept responsibility, and in this way it is a sanction for sin; and in this way it serves as a living symbol of the ultimate sanction for sin, damnation. In suffering and in poverty, we have a brush not with mere hardship, but with Hell. And as such, poverty testifies to us as individuals and as a society, of what happens when we depart from our personal callings—both occupationally (that for which we get paid) and vocationally (that for which God has particularly gifted us). The blight of destitution in itself provides an illustrated sermon: Solomon said,
I went by the field of the slothful, and the vineyard of the man void of understanding: and lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down. Then I saw, and considered it well: I looked upon it, and received instruction. Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep: So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth; and thy want as an armed man (Prov. 24:30-4).
As an illustrated sermon, it is also a call to repentance. The heart and the mind of a people must change before that people can overcome the effects of poverty. Because poverty is not primarily a material problem, but rather an ethical one, it will do little good to rearrange (or redistribute) the goods of society if we do not change its heart.
It is helpful to remember that it was not until relatively recently in our own nation that this virtuous attitude toward poverty was forgotten. A more proper view extends all the way back to the Elizabethan “Poor Laws,” and perhaps even further (even if these particular laws themselves were imperfect in both form and scope).[] This view believes that cities simply do not allow their poor to starve, but feed them, yet at the same time teach them to return to profitable work. The “Poor Laws” from 1601 aimed to “set the poor back to work,” and create “a hive of industry.” They built work houses and labor yards, and made provision for apprenticeships so that the youth would be “accustomed and brought up in labor, work, thrift, and responsibility.”[] And no wonder, for the laws of that society and the culture immersed itself in Biblical teaching. During the English Reformation, along with the Articles of Faith, they wrote two books of approved Homilies for reading in churches. In one of those books, among such lofty doctrines as Of Prayer, Of the Nativity of Christ, Of the Resurrection of Christ, Of the Gifts of the Holy Ghost—cardinal doctrines of the faith—appears this title: Against Idleness. Something so seemingly harmless as Idleness was seen necessary as an official homily for the church. The Homily begins like this:
For as much as man, being not born to ease and rest, but to labor and travail, is by corruption of nature through sin, so far degenerated and grown out of kind, that he takes Idleness to be no evil at all, but rather a commendable thing… and all labor and travail is diligently avoided, as a thing painful and repugnant to the pleasure of the flesh: It is necessary to be declared unto you, that by the ordinance of God, which he has set in the nature of man, everyone ought, in his lawful vocation and calling, to give himself to labor: and that idleness, being repugnant to the same ordinance, is a grievous sin… to the intent that… ye may diligently flee from it, and on the other part earnestly apply yourselves, every man to his vocation, to honest labor and business, which as it is enjoined unto man by God’s appointment, so it wants not his manifold blessings and benefits.
This ethic of calling and work characterized the entire Puritan era. William Perkins, around 1598, defended the doctrine of calling:
It is a foul disorder in any commonwealth that there should be suffered rogues, beggars, vagabonds; for such kinds of persons commonly are of no civil society or corporation, nor of any particular church.… To wander up and down from year to year to this end, to seek and to procure bodily maintenance, is no calling, but the life of a beast: and consequently a condition or state of life flat against the rule, that every one must have a particular calling. And therefore the Statute made at the last Parliament [1597] for the restraining of beggars and rogues is an excellent statute, and being in substance the very law of God, is never to be repealed.[]
Thomas Taylor, in his 1658 Commentary on… Titus writes,
Whereas all other creatures live unto themselves, man was appointed to live as well to others as to himself; the church, the country, the family, the poor, every man challenges a part in every man.… Ask yourself, then, “What good does my life to church, to commonwealth, to family, to men?” and if your conscience answer, “Truly, little or none” then you must conclude “Surely I am rather a belly than a man.”[]
And the popular writer of her time, Elizabeth Joceline, added this warning:
Be ashamed of idleness as thou art a man, but tremble as thou art a Christian.… What more wretched state can there be in the world? First to be hated of God as an idle drone, not fit for His service; then through extreme poverty to be contemned of all the world.[]
These people had a serious understanding of work and sloth. They knew God’s blessings and curses attach to faithfulness in this life, and they set out to structure society accordingly. It was like this from day one with God and Man. Man was created to take dominion over the earth, and subdue it (Gen 1:27–8). This was possible for man because he was created in the Image of God—meant to display God’s character in creating and producing a world, in governing and ruling that world, naming and ordering, in reproducing others in his own image, and in resting regularly as God Himself did. But the fall and subsequent curse has introduced hardship and sweat into the effort of dominion, making it seem impossible. Many give up and quit, and in doing so they are submitting to the rulership of sin out of sloth and spiritual laziness.[] The excuse, “I can’t,” reveals innate fear and rebellion for which mankind must repent before God. Man was made to rule the earth, and to do so through ethical business and organization.
The tradition of viewing work as a remedy for poverty continued in America as well. Alexander Hamilton (ironically, the greatest big-government advocate among the fathers) wrote, “Americans hold their greatest liberty in this, our poor arise from their plight of their own accord, in cooperation with, but not dependent upon, Christian generosities.”[] Thomas McKay added, “American welfare consists in a recreation and development of the arts of independence and industry.”[] Even Franklin Roosevelt, infamous for his massive government welfare and social security moves, once stated, “The federal government must, and shall quit this business of relief. To dole out relief is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”[] Harry Truman said, “no more soup lines, no more dole, and no more battlefields, that’s what I want to see,”[] and even JFK used the slogan, “Give a hand, not a handout.”[]
But this viewpoint breathed its last in this nation in 1964, when government programs finally thoroughly rejected Biblical law the cause of poverty. The result has been that the poor are treated as dependents instead of morally responsible human beings whose greatest neediness is redemption not appeasement. An army of facts and figures have shown many times over that the more money that is spent by government programs—to the tune of multiple billions—the less people really benefit, and the less society benefits in many ways. To face reality we must admit: the federal confiscation of charitable giving has become a cause of poverty in itself.
The reasons for this are simple. First, it is simply not the civil government’s job, Biblically speaking, to force charitable giving. It intrudes upon the church and family, subverts the market of opportunity, and diverts resources from the faithfully productive and responsible. Secondly, it denies that poverty is an ethical issue. By institutionalizing welfare, statistics and politics take over and the theological dimensions of work and responsibility are abandoned. Poverty becomes a political issue and not one of social ethics.
But the fact cannot be escaped that the moral and ethical dimension is primary. P. T. Bauer of the London School of Economics spent his entire life studying the development of economic patterns. He long ago made the major point that in the long run, people’s attitudes are more important to economic growth than money itself.[] Now as you read his rather lengthy passage, think to yourself of all the images of abject poverty that you have ever seen on TV, or even in person, at home or globally, individually and nationally:
Examples of significant attitudes, beliefs and modes of conduct unfavorable to material progress include lack of interest in material advance, combined with resignation in the face of poverty; lack of initiative, self-reliance and a sense of personal responsibility for the economic future of oneself and one’s family; high leisure preference, together with a lassitude found in tropical climates; relatively high prestige of passive or contemplative life compared to active life; the prestige of mysticism and of renunciation of the world compared to acquisition and achievement; acceptance of the idea of a preordained, unchanging and unchangeable universe; emphasis on performance of duties and acceptance of obligation, rather than on achievement of results, or assertion or even a recognition of personal rights; lack of sustained curiosity, experimentation and interest in change; belief in the efficacy of supernatural and occult forces and of their influence over one’s destiny; insistence of the unity of the organic universe, and on the need to live with nature rather than conquer it or harness it to man’s needs, an attitude of which reluctance to take animal life is a corollary; belief in perpetual reincarnation, which reduces the significance of effort in the course of the present life; recognized status of beggary, together with a lack of stigma in the acceptance of charity; opposition to women’s work outside the home.[]
Notice that all these things pertain to culture, lifestyle and religion; and in each case they go directly against what has been called the “Protestant Work Ethic.” They trade responsibility for ease in every case, to the point that a person stoops so low as to prefer a handout over putting their own hand to the plow. This is not an institutional or political problem, it is a moral and ethical problem, and its tolerance and furtherance by government programs that have over and over proven ineffective, is itself an ethical abomination. To keep demanding that we throw money into the gutters of a society that has long since rejected the Biblical mandate of productivity, that is saturated with every selfish, rebellious, and slothful attitude filtered through modern music, television, and public education, is to slap God in the face and then demand from Him His utmost blessings.
Instead, we should look to God’s way of solving poverty, and that means looking to God’s salvation in Christ, in whose death, burial, and resurrection He has begun the reversal of that curse. The word “sweat” only appears twice in the Bible in a theological context (once slightly differently). Those two involve 1) the curse we have read of this morning: the curse of the ground as the first Adam got expelled from the garden, and work eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; and 2) as Christ knelt in another garden, beginning His passion, bearing the curse of sin upon Himself, and prayed until he sweat as it were drops of blood upon his brow. And upon that same brow He bore the curse of those same thorns. He was buried in that cursed ground. But then He overcame it all, and now lifts us and shows us the way.
Nothing less than a return to the biblical standard of work, thrift, saving, spiritual humility before God, and responsibility before God and Neighbor will even begin to lift society out of poverty. We cannot expect to be rich in bread when we are destitute in faith and works. Our real hunger is in our hearts, our real impoverishment is theological: we must repent and turn to God, and then return to the plow. “The argument over poverty and its cure is ultimately an argument over hell and its cure. The cure for hell is faith in the saving work of Jesus Christ at Calvary. This is also the cure for poverty.”[]
Endnotes:
Related posts:
- Poverty: A Self-Inflicted Disease
- The Southern Poverty Law Center Has Lost Its Way
- Southern Poverty Law Center Exposed
- Some Latin Words and Phrases We Should Know
- The Politics of Poverty
A Few Words on Poverty
…cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring for to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground… (Gen. 3:17-19).
Have you ever skipped a meal? Perhaps you were fasting, or too busy. Perhaps you were broke at the moment and away from home? Have you ever felt how the stomach turns upon itself when you haven’t eaten? If you’ve ever experienced that hunger, then you know what you do in that situation: you go get something to eat. But what if it wasn’t that easy? What if getting something to eat required a tremendous effort beyond your ability? Then you might end up like one of those… street people. And what if you found yourself always hungering while at the same time watching everyone else around you live in relative ease? Would not the question arise, “Why?” Why is this happening to me? If you had a religious fiber in you, you may ask the corollary question, “Why is God letting this happen to me?”
Good Question; one difficult answer; one that surely will cause dissent—like all God questions; but also like many God questions, the answer will almost certainly rub against the grain of what we want to think and feel, especially if we’re the ones suffering. The answer is hard for us to swallow, difficult to digest. It is going to challenge our view of God, our view of ourselves, and our view of how the world works. In short, the answer is part of a worldview, a way of life, a closed-system of living. And therefore, “A Christian View of the Causes of Poverty,” begins with a Christian view of thinking and behaving. Satisfying the social hunger of poverty must begin with feeding on the Bread of Life, the word of God.
Let me begin, then, by saying that we can address no topic of economics properly without considering what God’s Law says about it, for there we find the ultimate blueprints for human society and social life.[1] It is also where the essential underlying issues which few if any other sources give us, are revealed. These are: the existence of a personal God, the creation of mankind, the gift of law, the gift of historical rewards and penalties for faithfulness or unfaithfulness to the law, and the promise of Eternity. The Bible also reveals to us the doctrine—vital to our understanding of work and poverty—the Fall of Man. It is through the fall that sin enters the world, and with sin enters shame, guilt, selfishness, sloth, blame and envy—all factors that play a part in the causes of poverty. Compounding these problems, upon the fall of man God cursed the ground for his sake, thereafter adding the burdens particularly of thorns and sweat.
A big part of what all of this means, and why the Bible plays such an important role here, is that poverty is an ethical issue, not merely a material one. In all of the multitude of programs and institutions aimed at abolishing poverty, proponents and activists rarely discuss the theological dimensions of the problem. Some even adopt biblical language about helping the poor, but few put the whole problem within a biblical context. Poverty is a negative historical sanction. It is the result of sin. Not in the sense that every impoverished and oppressed person suffers that condition because of some particular sin (though that can very well be the case—sin does often have material consequences), but in the sense that sin in general has brought a condition of extra labor and intensity in our work that our fallen nature wants to skirt. The punishment for the fall of man was that In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground, and the sweat comes because the ground itself has been cursed: cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring for to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field (Gen. 3:17-19). This struggle with the hardship of labor, and the sweat that is wrought upon our brow is a constant testimony to our fallenness.
It is no wonder, therefore, that mankind tries to escape the witness of hard work, just as Adam tried to pass the blame for his sin upon Eve, and Eve to the Serpent, and just as they tried to hide their shame with fig leaves. Fallen man runs from responsibility because he is running from the face of God. Mankind wants above all things to escape judgment—an impossible feat. And, just as the Sin of Adam and Eve got them expelled from the blessings of Eden, so does our sin bar us from blessings in our society as well. And they are most likely to do so when we neglect our day-to-day faithfulness to the work of God’s Kingdom, in the light of our fallen nature, for it is then that hidden desires to escape work, responsibility, and thrift tempt us to lay aside the plow, and lie into the lap of sin. The Puritan writer William Gurnall put it like this, “Since man was turned out of Paradise, he can do nothing without labour, except sin.”[2] Sin is the one thing that “comes easy.”
At the point that such sins as sloth, selfishness, and envy begin to manifest socially, cultures begin truly to experience poverty. This does not mean that in highly moral cultures poverty will not exist to some degree—it always will—but in those situations it is generally due to the uncontrollable misfortunes of individuals who, through no fault of their own, fall into desperation and helplessness. Puritan preacher George Webb noted this well in his 1621 publication Augur’s Prayer (based on Proverb 30):
Poverty… may befall a wise man, virtuous man, a faithful man… Extreme poverty and necessity may befall the godly.… [But these] are the poor of God’s making, and our duty in respect to them, is… to pity them… comfort them… relieve them, and support them in deeds.[3]
Biblical charity and the doctrine of calling and work quickly remedy such cases and get people back on their feet (more on that in a minute); but when the general morality of a society slides, embraces degeneracy, promotes self-centeredness in all forms, then right around the corner stand tyrants to exploit and eventually oppress the masses with promises, narcotics, pornography, and right there with them will clamor the masses, handing over their cash, and their power, to buy thrills and entertainment, and to buy false hopes, until they’re broke. And then you can bet that the very people who squandered themselves to the gutter, will be the first ones to say that they deserve a handout (or a bailout).
Such people Solomon so often addresses as fools: He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand, but the hand of the diligent maketh rich (Prov. 10:4); He that tilleth his land shall be satisfied with bread: but he that followeth vain persons is void of understanding (Prov. 12:11); The sluggard will not plow by reason of the cold; therefore shall he beg in harvest, and have nothing (Prov. 20:4). Poverty more often comes as a result of refusing to accept responsibility, and in this way it is a sanction for sin; and in this way it serves as a living symbol of the ultimate sanction for sin, damnation. In suffering and in poverty, we have a brush not with mere hardship, but with Hell. And as such, poverty testifies to us as individuals and as a society, of what happens when we depart from our personal callings—both occupationally (that for which we get paid) and vocationally (that for which God has particularly gifted us). The blight of destitution in itself provides an illustrated sermon: Solomon said,
I went by the field of the slothful, and the vineyard of the man void of understanding: and lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down. Then I saw, and considered it well: I looked upon it, and received instruction. Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep: So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth; and thy want as an armed man (Prov. 24:30-4).
As an illustrated sermon, it is also a call to repentance. The heart and the mind of a people must change before that people can overcome the effects of poverty. Because poverty is not primarily a material problem, but rather an ethical one, it will do little good to rearrange (or redistribute) the goods of society if we do not change its heart.
It is helpful to remember that it was not until relatively recently in our own nation that this virtuous attitude toward poverty was forgotten. A more proper view extends all the way back to the Elizabethan “Poor Laws,” and perhaps even further (even if these particular laws themselves were imperfect in both form and scope).[4] This view believes that cities simply do not allow their poor to starve, but feed them, yet at the same time teach them to return to profitable work. The “Poor Laws” from 1601 aimed to “set the poor back to work,” and create “a hive of industry.” They built work houses and labor yards, and made provision for apprenticeships so that the youth would be “accustomed and brought up in labor, work, thrift, and responsibility.”[5] And no wonder, for the laws of that society and the culture immersed itself in Biblical teaching. During the English Reformation, along with the Articles of Faith, they wrote two books of approved Homilies for reading in churches. In one of those books, among such lofty doctrines as Of Prayer, Of the Nativity of Christ, Of the Resurrection of Christ, Of the Gifts of the Holy Ghost—cardinal doctrines of the faith—appears this title: Against Idleness. Something so seemingly harmless as Idleness was seen necessary as an official homily for the church. The Homily begins like this:
For as much as man, being not born to ease and rest, but to labor and travail, is by corruption of nature through sin, so far degenerated and grown out of kind, that he takes Idleness to be no evil at all, but rather a commendable thing… and all labor and travail is diligently avoided, as a thing painful and repugnant to the pleasure of the flesh: It is necessary to be declared unto you, that by the ordinance of God, which he has set in the nature of man, everyone ought, in his lawful vocation and calling, to give himself to labor: and that idleness, being repugnant to the same ordinance, is a grievous sin… to the intent that… ye may diligently flee from it, and on the other part earnestly apply yourselves, every man to his vocation, to honest labor and business, which as it is enjoined unto man by God’s appointment, so it wants not his manifold blessings and benefits.
This ethic of calling and work characterized the entire Puritan era. William Perkins, around 1598, defended the doctrine of calling:
It is a foul disorder in any commonwealth that there should be suffered rogues, beggars, vagabonds; for such kinds of persons commonly are of no civil society or corporation, nor of any particular church.… To wander up and down from year to year to this end, to seek and to procure bodily maintenance, is no calling, but the life of a beast: and consequently a condition or state of life flat against the rule, that every one must have a particular calling. And therefore the Statute made at the last Parliament [1597] for the restraining of beggars and rogues is an excellent statute, and being in substance the very law of God, is never to be repealed.[6]
Thomas Taylor, in his 1658 Commentary on… Titus writes,
Whereas all other creatures live unto themselves, man was appointed to live as well to others as to himself; the church, the country, the family, the poor, every man challenges a part in every man.… Ask yourself, then, “What good does my life to church, to commonwealth, to family, to men?” and if your conscience answer, “Truly, little or none” then you must conclude “Surely I am rather a belly than a man.”[7]
And the popular writer of her time, Elizabeth Joceline, added this warning:
Be ashamed of idleness as thou art a man, but tremble as thou art a Christian.… What more wretched state can there be in the world? First to be hated of God as an idle drone, not fit for His service; then through extreme poverty to be contemned of all the world.[8]
These people had a serious understanding of work and sloth. They knew God’s blessings and curses attach to faithfulness in this life, and they set out to structure society accordingly. It was like this from day one with God and Man. Man was created to take dominion over the earth, and subdue it (Gen 1:27–8). This was possible for man because he was created in the Image of God—meant to display God’s character in creating and producing a world, in governing and ruling that world, naming and ordering, in reproducing others in his own image, and in resting regularly as God Himself did. But the fall and subsequent curse has introduced hardship and sweat into the effort of dominion, making it seem impossible. Many give up and quit, and in doing so they are submitting to the rulership of sin out of sloth and spiritual laziness.[9] The excuse, “I can’t,” reveals innate fear and rebellion for which mankind must repent before God. Man was made to rule the earth, and to do so through ethical business and organization.
The tradition of viewing work as a remedy for poverty continued in America as well. Alexander Hamilton (ironically, the greatest big-government advocate among the fathers) wrote, “Americans hold their greatest liberty in this, our poor arise from their plight of their own accord, in cooperation with, but not dependent upon, Christian generosities.”[10] Thomas McKay added, “American welfare consists in a recreation and development of the arts of independence and industry.”[11] Even Franklin Roosevelt, infamous for his massive government welfare and social security moves, once stated, “The federal government must, and shall quit this business of relief. To dole out relief is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”[12] Harry Truman said, “no more soup lines, no more dole, and no more battlefields, that’s what I want to see,”[13] and even JFK used the slogan, “Give a hand, not a handout.”[14]
But this viewpoint breathed its last in this nation in 1964, when government programs finally thoroughly rejected Biblical law the cause of poverty. The result has been that the poor are treated as dependents instead of morally responsible human beings whose greatest neediness is redemption not appeasement. An army of facts and figures have shown many times over that the more money that is spent by government programs—to the tune of multiple billions—the less people really benefit, and the less society benefits in many ways. To face reality we must admit: the federal confiscation of charitable giving has become a cause of poverty in itself.
The reasons for this are simple. First, it is simply not the civil government’s job, Biblically speaking, to force charitable giving. It intrudes upon the church and family, subverts the market of opportunity, and diverts resources from the faithfully productive and responsible. Secondly, it denies that poverty is an ethical issue. By institutionalizing welfare, statistics and politics take over and the theological dimensions of work and responsibility are abandoned. Poverty becomes a political issue and not one of social ethics.
But the fact cannot be escaped that the moral and ethical dimension is primary. P. T. Bauer of the London School of Economics spent his entire life studying the development of economic patterns. He long ago made the major point that in the long run, people’s attitudes are more important to economic growth than money itself.[15] Now as you read his rather lengthy passage, think to yourself of all the images of abject poverty that you have ever seen on TV, or even in person, at home or globally, individually and nationally:
Examples of significant attitudes, beliefs and modes of conduct unfavorable to material progress include lack of interest in material advance, combined with resignation in the face of poverty; lack of initiative, self-reliance and a sense of personal responsibility for the economic future of oneself and one’s family; high leisure preference, together with a lassitude found in tropical climates; relatively high prestige of passive or contemplative life compared to active life; the prestige of mysticism and of renunciation of the world compared to acquisition and achievement; acceptance of the idea of a preordained, unchanging and unchangeable universe; emphasis on performance of duties and acceptance of obligation, rather than on achievement of results, or assertion or even a recognition of personal rights; lack of sustained curiosity, experimentation and interest in change; belief in the efficacy of supernatural and occult forces and of their influence over one’s destiny; insistence of the unity of the organic universe, and on the need to live with nature rather than conquer it or harness it to man’s needs, an attitude of which reluctance to take animal life is a corollary; belief in perpetual reincarnation, which reduces the significance of effort in the course of the present life; recognized status of beggary, together with a lack of stigma in the acceptance of charity; opposition to women’s work outside the home.[16]
Notice that all these things pertain to culture, lifestyle and religion; and in each case they go directly against what has been called the “Protestant Work Ethic.” They trade responsibility for ease in every case, to the point that a person stoops so low as to prefer a handout over putting their own hand to the plow. This is not an institutional or political problem, it is a moral and ethical problem, and its tolerance and furtherance by government programs that have over and over proven ineffective, is itself an ethical abomination. To keep demanding that we throw money into the gutters of a society that has long since rejected the Biblical mandate of productivity, that is saturated with every selfish, rebellious, and slothful attitude filtered through modern music, television, and public education, is to slap God in the face and then demand from Him His utmost blessings.
Instead, we should look to God’s way of solving poverty, and that means looking to God’s salvation in Christ, in whose death, burial, and resurrection He has begun the reversal of that curse. The word “sweat” only appears twice in the Bible in a theological context (once slightly differently). Those two involve 1) the curse we have read of this morning: the curse of the ground as the first Adam got expelled from the garden, and work eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; and 2) as Christ knelt in another garden, beginning His passion, bearing the curse of sin upon Himself, and prayed until he sweat as it were drops of blood upon his brow. And upon that same brow He bore the curse of those same thorns. He was buried in that cursed ground. But then He overcame it all, and now lifts us and shows us the way.
Nothing less than a return to the biblical standard of work, thrift, saving, spiritual humility before God, and responsibility before God and Neighbor will even begin to lift society out of poverty. We cannot expect to be rich in bread when we are destitute in faith and works. Our real hunger is in our hearts, our real impoverishment is theological: we must repent and turn to God, and then return to the plow. “The argument over poverty and its cure is ultimately an argument over hell and its cure. The cure for hell is faith in the saving work of Jesus Christ at Calvary. This is also the cure for poverty.”[17]
Endnotes:Related posts: