Biblical Prosperity

Even though the Bible does not teach socialism, the Bible does teach us to have social responsibilities. The same Lord who said, “to everyone who has, more shall be given” also said “to the extent you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, you have did it to me.” The New Testament places strong moral values on compassion for the needy.

Thanks to the influence of Judeo-Christian values, the Western world was instilled with compassion for the needy, which separated it from the rest of the world. Ancient pagan religions offered no motive for helping the needy. Romans were ruthless and offered no compassion for the less fortunate. In contrast, the early Christians held to the Jewish belief that all people are created in the image of God. Hebrew society had many ways of making provision for the needy. They gave alms to the poor and purposely did not harvest all that was in the fields so the poor could have the rest.

Christians cared for widows, orphans and the poor. This came from their Jewish roots but also the standard Jesus set by the life he lived, many times interacting and helping the downtrodden. In the book of Acts, the early Christians took care of the needy. Deacons were assigned to care for the widows. Tertullian wrote how Christians voluntarily contributed to a common fund to help the poor. Justin Martyr wrote about collections taken during church services for orphans.

Throughout the 2,000 years of Western history, Christians have been at the forefront of building hospitals and running orphanages. YMCA and YWCA (Young Men’s/Women’s Christian Association) are institutions founded with Christian ethics to alleviate suffering, provide help, etc. Christians founded the United Way in 1887. Henri Dunant (1828-1910) founded the International Red Cross in Switzerland in 1864. Free market, capitalist nations from the West, that have been influenced by Judeo-Christian values, give multiple billions of dollars every year to help the poor around the world.

As Harold Eberle says, “The Judeo-Christian ethic was one of benevolent capitalism. People worked hard, lived frugally, saved and gave.”

Source: Compassionate Capitalism – A Judeo-Christian Value by Harold Eberle, 2010, Worldcast Publishing.

I received the following question from a friend and blog reader in the Caribbean…

How best can we protect the well being of the disadvantaged under free market capitalism, without supporting some social policies? Harmony and prosperity sounds lovely but it’s not easy to adequately opportune all participants.

The major problems with free market capitalism are greed and lack of integrity, as well as governmental intrusion, not the Biblically based principles of capitalism. We have already spoken extensively in these blogs about greed so let’s talk about the government’s role.

Can governments be trusted to take care of the poor? Their track record is not good. Consider the Roman government into which the Christian church was born and prospered. Many abortions were allowed to take place in the Greco-Roman world. Slavery was legal and encouraged by the government. It was estimated that in time of Christ about 75 % of Athens and over 50% of Roman population were slaves. Much of ancient society believed that the hungry and sick should be left alone. Plato’s statement, “a poor man should be left to die if he could no longer work, ” was symptomatic of the societal and governmental thought of the day.

Thanks to Judea/Christian influence and reformers this has changed over the centuries. Now the other extreme is true. Those in government feel they are the best at taking care of the poor; better than the churches, private individuals and private organizations. The problem with government programs that help the poor is that they tend to keep the poor “poor”, if I can say it like that; and sadly, dependent on the government.

On the other hand, research does show the best way to get people out of poverty is to create wealth. “Wealthier nations are healthier nations,” reported a 1996 study in the Journal of Human Resources. Researchers found that life expectancy sharply increases and infant mortality sharply decreases along with gains in per capita income. Wealth is such a powerful factor in public health that study authors reported that in a single year, more than “half a million child deaths in the developing world” were attributable to the poor economic performance of the previous decade.

So yes…governments have a role to care for the poor, but they will never lift the poor out of poverty. This has been accomplished historically by individuals and groups fueled by free market capitalism. For example, consider the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. They now give close to $3 billion annually to help the poor with public health around the world. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, American taxpayers spent $12.8 billion last year on global public health. So one private foundation is giving a third of what the entire US government is giving and with a “business savvy” attention to results that cannot be matched in the government sector.

And progress is being made; there is a significant decline in global poverty. Consider that in 1990, 35% of the world population was living below the international poverty line. Last year, in 2016 this percentage has decreased to 9% (Brookings Institute).

When I first met Gilbert Mwale he was a student from Zambia studying in Mysore, India and attending Destiny Center Church there led by Phillip Omondi. But he had a vision for business and since I was teaching on Biblical finance and God’s abundant economy I had the opportunity to talk and help fuel his vision for business. He plan was to graduate from college, return to his native Zambia, start a business and get married. He has done all of these.

Gilbert returned to Lusaka, Zambia and started E-msika, an e-commerce company. Some coaching at the beginning helped Gilbert get off to a good start. His company started to win awards and recognition as it grew.

A recent article in the Times of Zambia newspaper explains what E-msika does and highlighted its success: E-msika is an e-commerce platform company that helps farmers find, buy and receive farm inputs in a fast, safe and convenient way and is working with over 2,000 farmers across the country. The company’s chief executive officer, Gilbert Mwale, said in a Lusaka interview that the e-commerce company was helping farmers with agricultural inputs that helped them eliminate the middleman.

Mr. Mwale said the company was helping out farmers to increase productivity in order to improve food security and increase household income. He said, “Farmers face a lot of challenges like lack of transportation, accidents, especially during the rainy season, but our company address such challenges.” Mr. Mwale explained that local farmers who have the potential to produce more food could do better with resource and technological assistance such as E-msika.

Recently E-msika was selected by the COMMON MARKET FOR EASTERN AND SOUTHERN AFRICA (CMOSA) as a showcase company with best practices to be a model and present a workshop on “youth entrepreneurship” at the CMOSA regional workshop.

Gilbert’s response to this success is simple…Glory be to Jesus. We keep moving.

“In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under 9 feet of manure.” With this 1894 prediction, the London Times warned that the era’s primary source of transportation energy—the horse—would soon create an environmental crisis.

In New York City, about 100,000 working horses produced roughly 2.5 million pounds of manure a day. Residents were exposed not only to the stench but to biohazards like anthrax. One commentator estimated in 1908 that roughly 20,000 New Yorkers died each year from diseases related to horse waste.

But the deluge of dung predicted by the Times never arrived. Instead the free market solved the problem in roughly 25 years, while creating new goods and industries that transformed society. The enormous demand for a cleaner and more efficient source of energy led to remarkable innovations in the internal combustion engine. By 1920 horses in cities had been almost entirely replaced by affordable autos and trucks.

Of course we know the internal combustion engine creates waste as well, but never fear because God created man in his image…and He created man to create (solve problems). When the Bible says, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them”, it means God finished His work of creation with a “personal touch.” It means in the simplest terms, that we were made to resemble God.

Humanity is unique among all God’s creations, having both a material body and an immaterial soul/spirit. Human beings can reason and choose, and thus progress. This is a reflection of God’s intellect and freedom. Anytime someone invents a machine, writes a book, paints a landscape, enjoys a symphony, calculates a sum, or names a pet, he or she is proclaiming the fact that we are made in God’s image. It sets human beings apart from the animal world, fits them for the dominion God intended them to have over the earth (Genesis 1:28).

Those of us alive right now will have the privilege to see a metamorphosis of energy forms in the next 10-15 years driven not by government decree, but by the demand for a cleaner and more efficient sources of energy.

Sources:

My Kingdom for a Renewable Energy Source: What 19th-century British horses teach us about free markets. Wall Street Journal by Lee E. Ohanian and Ted Temzelides, 11-12-17

Gotquestions.org, https://www.gotquestions.org/image-of-God.html

The above headline appeared in the Wall Street Journal this week. Oddly enough last week we celebrated 5 centuries ago when Martin Luther’s 95 theses began the Protestant Reformation which emancipated individuals from the control of the Catholic Church. This releasing of individual freedom, led to the application of Biblical capitalism, which has elevated so many out of poverty. But this week, one century ago modern communism was founded with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Was this good or bad? The article subtitle gives us a hint by stating, “The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history.” 

The article continues…Armed Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg—100 years ago this week and arrested ministers of Russia’s provisional government. They set in motion a chain of events that would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization. The revolutionaries’ capture of train stations, post offices and telegraphs took place as the city slept and resembled a changing of the guard. But when residents of the Russian capital awoke, they found they were living in a different universe.

Although the Bolsheviks called for the abolition of private property, their real goal was spiritual: to translate Marxist-Leninist ideology into reality. For the first time, a state was created that was based explicitly on atheism and claimed infallibility. This was totally incompatible with Western civilization, which presumes the existence of a higher power over and above society and the state. The Bolshevik coup degraded the individual and turned them into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors.

Such convictions set the stage for decades of murder on an industrial scale. In total, no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies. This does not include the millions who died in the wars, epidemics and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies, if not directly caused by them. The victims include 200,000 killed during the Red Terror (1918-22); 11 million dead from famine and dekulakization; 700,000 executed during the Great Terror (1937-38); 400,000 more executed between 1929 and 1953; 1.6 million dead during forced population transfers; and a minimum 2.7 million dead in the Gulag, labor colonies and special settlements.

If we add to this list the deaths caused by communist regimes that the Soviet Union created and supported—including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia—the total number of victims is closer to 100 million. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history.

The assumption was that communism, a socialist system of forced collective ownership, was virtuous in itself. When the killing became too obvious to deny, Western intellectual sympathizers excused what was happening because of the Soviets’ supposed noble intentions. Their reasoning was simple: Capitalism was unjust; socialism would end this injustice; so socialism had to be supported unconditionally, notwithstanding any amount of its own injustice.

As I have stated in these blogs capitalism is not perfect, but the principles are Biblical and lead people to experience God’s blessing and lift them out of poverty. Yes…there is a danger of greed tainting these Biblical principles, but the alternatives of socialism and communism continue to demonstrate failure both morally and economically (Venezuela and Cuba).

I would not take the time to write about the failure of socialism and communism, as it seems to be obvious to all who lived through their failure; however I continue to observe the millennial generation flirting with these economic systems. Likely this is because of the influence of socialist university intellectuals and also the fact that they did not live through this onerous time of world history to observe it.

Source: 100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead. The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history. Satter. D. Wall Street Journal. November 7, 2017. Mr. Satter is the author of “Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union” (Yale).

Five centuries ago this week, Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation by couragously  hammering his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, an article appeared speaking of this historic event and its effects on the world. The title of the article, What 500 Years of Protestantism Teaches Us About Capitalism’s Future, indicates it is focusing on more than spiritual issues. Luther himself merely wanted to grow closer to God, but in doing so he released the power of individuals fueled by freedom.

The article spoke about how the Protestant Reformation led to an increase of individual freedom. Martin Luther mattered because of his huge cultural impact of confronting and challenging the Catholic Church’s iron grip (control) on society. It is said that Luther ushered in what is called the “the age of the individual,” and thus Luther laid the groundwork for capitalism, which is built around individual freedoms.

Freedom is one of Adam Smith’s three pillars of capitalism found is his book The Wealth of Nations. We don’t want to enslave others or control them, rather we want to help all mankind be free and at liberty. We want the gifts and talents God has given us to be used for His glory and the benefit of others. The Biblical principles of capitalism generally embrace individual freedom of choice and individual responsibility.

Capitalism should help us to embrace Jesus command to love our neighbor as ourselves. We love our neighbor so we seek to make a product or provide a service that will enhance people’s lives. Since we care about our neighbor we do not want to make an inferior product that we ourselves would not be delighted to use. Since we care about others we do not want to abuse them as employees. We don’t want to steal from others because we want to be a blessing to them.

Certainly Martin Luther could not have imagined the full spiritual and economic impact of his 95 theses that has resounded down through these centuries.

I had the opportunity to see some of you at the Kingdom Business Association gathering last week in Charlotte, South Carolina. My topic was He Gives Us the Ability to Produce Wealth. This title comes from Deuteronomy 8:18 which states. “But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability (power) to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors, as it is today.” Let’s break that down for a moment.

The “ability to produce wealth” seems to speak of something more than just hard work. Here are a couple of reasons why: One, I think we all know of people that work really hard and are not wealthy. Also, verse 17 speaks a warning so that we don’t “say to yourself, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.’” So in light of this we understand this ability to produce wealth is more of a Biblical revelation and maybe away of thinking than it is only a strong work ethic.

So what was the covenant with your ancestors spoken of here? At the time of the writing of this scripture, these ancestors were of course Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. As I have written in these blogs, it was God that introduced himself to these early Hebrews as El Shaddai…the God of more than enough… and this was the covenant spoken of here in Deuteronomy. But as I have said, there is a social side of this as well that goes with these scriptures about experiencing God’s abundance. God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12 is that he would be “blessed to be a blessing.”

Wealth created in a free society like the Bible teaches does not stay with a few powerful kings, nobles, lords or dukes. Instead it expands to touch all within reach and all are lifted. This was true for Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Jesus, the good Samaritan and we hope it is true for us too.

Last week one of the DOVE Canada pastors, Lynn Ironside, led a prayer and intercession team to the nation of Columbia. It is a country that is filled with abject poverty and this was one of the issues the prayer team was led to address in prayer. Here is Lynn’s post in which she quotes Walt Whitman on poverty…

“I do not know how to express what I experienced today as we took a gondola up to the top of the mountain in Medellin. Perhaps Walt Whitman’s quote is worth sharing … “What a devil art thou, Poverty! How many desires – how many aspirations after goodness and truth – how many noble thoughts, loving wishes toward our fellows, beautiful imaginings thou hast crushed under thy heel, without remorse or pause!”

And so today we did what may, to some seem trivial when you consider the desperate need, but which I believe to be of great worth – we prayed for the poor of Medellin. Thankfully there has been some improvements in these remote communities on the hillsides overlooking the city but there is still so much to be done. If you would – please join us in praying that Colombia would rise up and take a stand to end the horrors of children being sold or lured into the sex trade.” 

Columbia is a Catholic nation so why is it so poor? The answer is found in what has been taught by the Catholic Church. I noticed many years ago on my many trips to Brazil that these nations with catholic influence had no middle class. It was only the rich and the poor. How did this happen? In a recent conversation with a South American immigrant who is now a pastor in Florida, I ask him why? His answer confirmed my suspicion.

Quite simply the Catholic Church taught that it was more spiritual to be poor. So the Catholics stayed poor. In his book Find Your Promised Land, Korean businessman Israel Kim targets this incorrect thinking taught by the Catholic Church.

One of the lies taught about resources is that holy people should be poor. This concept of poverty and piety was developed during the Dark Ages by monastic orders of Catholic monks who were reacting to the audacious wealth, greed and corruption of the Roman Church. In those circumstances it may have seemed right, but in truth it is a curse that has kept many talented and anointed people from fulfilling their God-given destiny. The idea that poverty is a sign of humility and devotion to the Lord is simply false. If it were true the poor within the “10-40 Window” would have no need for evangelization.

Many Christians will say God is good, but because they have always struggled financially, they have developed a mindset that God is stingy and is holding back blessings. There are two sides of this coin. We must be convinced that poverty and lack is a curse and we must be convinced that God is a loving, abundant provider.

Source

Kim, Israel. Find your promised land : getting through your wilderness, (Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image Publishers, 2009).

The Biblical principles of capitalism must be blended with social values to present a thorough safeguard from greed and other excesses prevalent in capitalism. Jesus spoke clearly of the need to care for the less fortunate. Right after the parable of the talents, which teaches capitalistic concepts, Jesus described the end of time when the sheep will be separated from the goats according to judgment based on how well we care for the needy. Let’s read it.

 The King will say to those on His right, “Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me…to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.” Matt. 25:34-36,40

We find a similar theme in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke16: 19-31). The rich man who smugly lived a life of luxury without helping the poor, is compared to Lazarus, who was longing to eat the crumbs off his table. After the two died the rich man was sent to a place of torment and Lazarus to a place of blessings. Clearly Jesus was teaching that we should use what we have to help others. Jesus also modeled this as well by directing his ministry to the needy. Harold Eberle states it like this:

Jesus associated with the downtrodden and lowly. He revealed the heart of God and established a pattern by which all Christians should live. It is also important to note the blessings associated with helping the poor. Not only in the next life, but God has promised to bless in this life those who care for the needy.

That is practical. That is Biblical. That is Christian.

As we previously discussed, in the Old Testament God helped to break the tribal, cyclical Hebrew thinking by having Moses develop a written linear record of their history. Very few other cultures had any written record at this time. From this record the people could see the progression and growth of their society and themselves as individuals. To build on this God gave them promises for their future. He promised His Kingdom would take over the entire earth and last forever.

As you looked, a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces…But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. And in the days of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever.           Dan. 2:34-35, 44

Thus God’s people developed a consciousness of their past and future. They thought of time as linear with the world moving forward. They were able to plan for the future. Living for the moment or the week-end was no longer a viable option. This affected every area of their lives, including their finances. They made long term decisions because they could depend on His promises. They learned the value of an inheritance to future generations in many different ways. They learned the value of being frugal and saving for the future.

Jesus taught this same theme in the New Testament in His parables. He reaffirmed the Jewish concept of linear time and progress. He taught this about His kingdom in the parable of the mustard seed and the yeast. He told us that his kingdom was like the mustard seed that would grow anywhere—that it was like yeast that takes over the entire loaf of bread—that His kingdom would grow and grow and take over the entire world (Matt. 13, Luke 13). He also taught us in the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6) that His kingdom would come and that His will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. We are taught that the future is secure and that we can invest and build His kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Let’s do it.

Source:

Economics 101- What is God’s plan?; Dr. Art Mathias; Wellspring Ministries, 2016