Biblical Prosperity

God continued to train the Hebrews to think as free people. People who are free work for themselves and their loved ones. They benefit from their own labors. Only when people are free will they be motivated to be creative, work longer and produce more. They take responsibility. Wealth created in a free society does not stay with a few powerful kings, nobles and lords or dukes. Instead it expands to touch all mankind and all are lifted.

After coming out of Egypt, God taught the Children of Israel to self govern themselves. As slaves they did not have to hold each other accountable to act in civilized ways. However before they could successfully occupy the Promised Land they had to learn to take responsibility for themselves and others. God met with Moses and gave him the laws that they would need to govern themselves. He was fashioning them in to the people that would one day be a blessing to every family on earth. Free people need to self govern.

The first of the Ten Commandments was to worship the one true God and have no other gods. The concept of one God was essential for people to understand and mange the world. It was also important for an effective government and a successful economic system. Only people who fear God will govern themselves. No amount of government control will restrict sin, selfish ambition and greed. The economic system God built for the Hebrew people could be used for evil ends if submission to God was not the first commandment. Moses cautioned the people to always remember that it was God who blessed and prospered them:

But 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 ancestors, as it is today. Det. 8:18

Herein is the starting point for your Biblical and practical financial prosperity. He gives you the ability to produce wealth. Thank Him. Don’t apologize for it. Ask Him for insight into the ability he has given to you personally. Always remember it comes from him.

It is not easy to lean how to live as free people. It was a long, hard road for the children of Abraham to learn how to live as free individuals. After a desperate famine they found themselves enslaved to Egyptian masters. They were resigned to live as slaves in Egypt and did for 400 years until God raised up Moses to deliver them from slavery.

Although once out of physical slavery in Egypt, they still had to break out of the slavery mindset that had been engrained into their thinking. Oddly enough they repeatedly thought about Egypt and stated they wanted to go back.They were so entrenched in the mindset of slavery they constantly grumbled against Moses and God instead of advancing with God. Because of their stubbornness to change, God let a whole generation die in the wilderness.

You see…it was easier to be slaves. No decisions to make. No need to push ahead and do anything other than what they were told. For the children of Israel (and us today) it was easier to be full of fear than full of faith. Wow!  Slaves can passively submit to their masters and as long as they obey them they will be fed.

God had to pull them out of this kind of thinking and teach them to govern their lives and steward the earth. He confronted this slavery mindset with his plan for them. During the 40 years in the desert they had to look to God rather than human masters. After that first generation died off, the next generation represented a group that had never lived as slaves. They had no memory of anything to go back to so they had to advance with God and experience his prosperity. He molded a people that would not long for the past.

Harold Eberle likens it to the Spanish expedition to conquer the Aztec empire in the 1520s. After landing in Mexico their general, Hernando Cortes, had all the ships burned so his men had only one option: move ahead and fight. This is what God is saying to the Christian today. Move ahead and fight…in your finances and every area of your life. Time to burn some bridges with your past and move ahead to create some new things that will be a blessing to you and others.

Though the United States has many challenges today, it was started  on the foundation of honoring God the Creator. It was sown into the government and culture. The basic image of God in which man was created was the expression of God’s creativity. The closer man gets to God the more creative he will be. Regardless of how revisionist historians have attempted to change history, this was a basic foundation in America. True creativity requires liberty.

The American form of government released initiative by protecting it and its rewards. American innovation is not the result of Americans being smarter. It has been simply the result of human initiative being promoted, honored, and protected. Now consider this: Chinese Americans are as innovative as any other Americans, but Chinese in China are not. China is prospering and growing economically, but virtually all of this growth is the result of copying what others are doing, not by innovation.

As America grew, immigrants from all over the world flocked there. Why?…so someone could redistribute wealth to them? No. They came for the opportunity to work and be rewarded by it. Socialist redistribution of a forced nature is theft. People can give willingly and freely to whatever cause they choose, but the moment it is forced freedom is lost. Your income is yours . It is your property, given to you by God.

Next we will take a closer look at how God got the slavery out of the minds of the Children of Israel after he got them out of slavery in Egypt.

The Power of Personal Incentive and Initiative

Posted on July 6, 2016 by briansauder

A number of years ago I had the opportunity to visit post communist Bulgaria after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As we drove along the roads there we saw miles and miles of state housing…all the houses were the same design and all the same color…drab gray! As we met the people we found it was hard for them, even the Christians, to think creatively and start and do new things on their own. Their thinking became limited from the many years of having someone telling them what to do. God is redeeming this nation; especially by raising up younger leaders who did not experience the years of Marxist/communist indoctrination. They have the ability to think individually, freely and creatively.

Marxism is the ideology developed by Karl Marx in the middle to late 1800’s. Under pure Marxism, everything is about the collective. Everything belonged to the state, the collective, including your children, your spouse, even your life. They all could be taken from you at any time. Because of this, no one wanted to stand out. Soon anyone, or any group, that did stand out was quickly destroyed. Therefore, no system has ever so completely destroyed creativity and initiative as Marxism and its cousin Socialism. 

Some may protest that in Communist China now there is a great proliferation of private enterprise and private property. This is true and the government of China has made a very intentional and systematic break from the basic tenets of Marxism/Socialism. In their published studies of the West, they began to understand that the powers of personal incentive and initiative were the powers that have driven the advance of civilization and that these were released through Christianity. Indeed Christianity is growing rapidly in China today. Although many Western nations have turned against Christianity, the foundation of their prosperity is built on the basic principles of Christianity and its individual freedom.

True creativity requires liberty, which is why we are told that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (see II Corinthians 3:17).

God continued to reveal his Kingdom to the Children of Israel in Genesis and it separated them from the pagans around them. There is one God…not many gods. Man is created in the image of God; with dignity and identity. Work and be fruitful. Initiative is rewarded. All of these revelations are basic building blocks of the Biblical Worldview.

Next God taught them the importance of individual freedom, a concept foreign to the ancient pagan world. The pagan world was enslaved by superstitiously believing that spirits controlled everything in the universe. Tribalism and slavery made the lack of personal freedom worse. In the ancient tribes, the chiefs ruled and owned everything. Tribes that were conquered by other tribes were commonly enslaved by their new masters. People saw themselves as helpless with no way to improve their personal place in the world. Slaves were thought to be slaves by fate and people were very fatalistic.

In the midst of this came the biblical revelation that people were created in the image of God. People have a free will. God created people with the ability to make decisions, and subsequently improve their lives. They have certain rights given to them by their creator. God took the descendants of Abraham out of slavery in Egypt. He did not allow the Hebrews to remain slaves. He would soon teach them to think like free people. Only when people are free do they advance.

Individual freedom is central to the Biblical worldview…for the ancient Hebrews and the Christian today.

Physical land was central to God’s plan to prosper Abraham. In light of this link between economic development and land ownership, it is important to look at the developing and former Communist nations of the world that are hamstrung from economic growth because of weak or nonexistent property rights. For prosperity to come to the individuals in these nations, one of the first needs is to improve the laws governing property ownership so people can own property free and clear.

Sadly, in many nations of the world, a piece of real estate might have as many as five or ten different people claiming ownership of it, and there is no functioning system to determine who owns the deed to this land. One person claims his uncle gave him the land, another says he bought it for an amount of money from the neighbor; another claims it is theirs because they have been squatting on it for the last few years. As long as it cannot be determined who the actual owner of the land is and that it is free of claims against it, no bank will accept this land as collateral for a loan that might be used to start a business.

Hernando De Soto in his book, The Mystery of Capital, describes this predicament. Imagine a country where nobody can identify who owns what, addresses cannot be easily verified, people cannot be made to pay their debts, resources cannot conveniently be turned into money, ownership cannot be divided into shares, descriptions of assets are not standardized and cannot be easily compared, and the rules that govern property vary from neighborhood to neighborhood or even street to street. You have just put yourself into the life of a developing country or former communist nation. More precisely, you have imagined life for 80 percent of its population … 80 percent of the world is undercapitalized; people cannot draw economic life from their buildings (or any other asset) to generate capital. In Haiti, according to our surveys, 68 percent of city dwellers and 97 percent of people in the countryside live in housing to which nobody has a clear legal title. Legal property empowers individuals in any culture.

Perhaps rather than sending billions of dollars of aid to developing nations, we should provide finances for their young people to get legal training in property law to put these legal structures in place so the people can prosper. Such laws also protect ownership as many people(s) have suffered the taking of their land unjustly as well. This is stealing, and God cannot bless land that is taken from others unjustly. Though some cultures celebrate common ownership of land, in most cases this does not allow for economic prosperity. The idea of private property rights is embedded in the Ten Commandments. “You shall not steal” underlines this principle. God’s plan is individual ownership and stewardship.

There is something about land that is really important to God. The story of Ruth is, of course, a great love story. But it is also the story of God giving a woman physical land. God took her from gleaning leftovers along the edge of the field to the owner of the field. When she married Boaz, who owned the field, she became an owner of the very field she formerly gleaned in as a pauper.

Land is on God’s heart. It is a key to how he prospers his people. Our experience has been one where the most significant increases in our personal net worth have come as the result of real estate transactions. If you do not own land, it is very likely that God wants to help you get some. If you own land, possibly God wants to give you more. Rick Joyner states that the great thing about real estate is that it is “real.” It not a piece of paper related to a stock option purchase in a market somewhere. It is real. You can go there and walk on it. You can grow corn on it if you want.

Research in the United States shows the number one way that people finance new business ventures is by borrowing money against their house, which is of course located on land. So the best preparation for starting a business is to purchase a house and start paying it off. This will eventually build equity that will allow you to finance a business start up. Small business start ups create 70 percent of new jobs. Most of these businesses are family businesses, and as with Abraham and his sons, land is often central to birthing these new businesses.

Fundamental to the value the Biblical Worldview gives the individual is the individual’s right to own private property and have it protected. If someone builds something, then the government should protect the fruit of their initiative and/or innovation. In the Bible, this is considered both the right thing to do and the just thing to do. As we are told in Psalm 89:14, righteousness and justice are the foundations of His throne. These are the foundations of the kingdom of God, which is why in the kingdom of God there will actually be private property. In God’s economy “the righteous will receive the results of their own work” (see Isaiah 3:10).

The Biblical view of individual land ownership was different than what the rest of the ancient world knew and practiced. Previous to this promise from God to give his children a (real) promised land, all the world was ruled by a “class” system. Whatever class you were born into was where you were stuck. If you were born as peasant with no land then you would live and die that way. If you were born into noble birth, as a land owner you could live a life of privilege. It was a bit like the class system we still see today in Hinduism with its defeating fatalism. But the Biblical view of individual land onwership allowed an individual to change their state in life if they so desired. God wants the Christian to advance.

Think about it..a person did not have to covet their neighbors land or live in greed and envy, they could take steps to change their status or situation in life. This is a perfect picture of the heart of God we are seeing in these blogs. He is a loving father who wants to see his children blessed, using their gifts, growing and expanding. So to take away individual property rights and give them the property to a ruling class or to the state is to undermine the plan of God to prosper his people.

One of the primary pillars of Marxism and Socialism is the idea that there is no such thing as private property. Under pure Marxism, everything belonged to the state, the collective, including land, your children, your spouse, even your life. They all could be taken from you at any time. Personal initiative was discouraged and often violently crushed. In many basic ways, Marxism and true, biblical Christianity are exactly opposite to one another. Marx realized this, which is why one of his basic goals was the destruction of Christianity. In their pure forms, Christianity and Marxism cannot coexist.

In contrast God gives land to his children so they can prosper. When we say in first person that we “own” land, it is with the understanding that God gave us the ability to acquire the land. We joyfully steward what he has given us, and we are examples to others of how they can rise out of poverty. We will examine more scriptures about land and home ownership in future blogs.

As He was teaching his children how to live, God made property rights a theme in the Ten Commandments…He wanted this concept to be in the center of life for the children of Israel so they could prosper. It is a basic building block in the Biblical Worldview. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house” is specifically how it is stated in Exodus 20:17. Your neighbor’s house is theirs because they worked for it and built it. It is not yours and also not the government that is to own their house.

The founders of America believed strongly in property rights, because they understood without them people would not be motivated to fight and win a revolution to preserve their land. Jim Morrison talks about this, “The founders of America believed that property was in fact a spiritual thing. It was an extension of who you are. You put your blood, sweat and tears in to securing that property. You also experience profound joys on or in your property-raising kids, children playing and growing on the land and seeing the land yield its produce as you worked it. The property, the home, reflected who you and your family were, and still do today.”

God made a covenant with Abraham about a land where Israel would become a great nation. He is serious about ownership and coveting what is not yours. The founders of America understood through the example of ancient Israel the wisdom of not coveting your neighbors’ possessions. The idea of property rights serves as a powerful incentive to prosper; the idea of owning your own land, your house, your car, a place on the beach, or the serenity of a mountain retreat, a place to retire or a place to raise your kids. This is a good and godly desire. What a wonderful reflection on Gods heart to have the opportunity to rise from the depths of poverty and prosper in a land for you and your family.