At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand: But the hand of the diligent maketh rich.
Proverbs 10:4
This is a proverb that is proverbially true, and everybody knows it, and yet we live in a time where we somehow want to invert the meaning of the proverb, where we want to make the exception the rule. But laziness still leads to poverty, and diligence leads to wealth. A little sleep, a little slumber, and poverty is waiting for you just around the corner like an armed thug (Prov. 6:10). And I saw a poster once in a (very) industrious tire center which read, “Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.”
We live in an envious age, which wants to assume that wealth is a zero sum game, meaning that there is a certain amount of available goods, like a pie on the table, and if the rich guy gets a big piece of pie, then that is the reason why the poor guy has such a thin piece. And, because there are thieves in the world, that sometimes happens. Sometimes someone makes off with your piece of pie (James 5:1-6). But there are many other times when the truth of this proverb is on display, front and center. The poverty of many has more to do with their own behavior than it has to do with a systemic anything. The same goes for the diligent.
A slack hand is not your friend, and an industrious hand is.
As noted earlier, this proverb is proverbially true, not universally true. In other words, sometimes a lazy man wins the lottery, thus learning all the wrong life lessons. Sometimes an industrious man is plagued with a series of mishaps. But, as a general rule, money follows the one who works for it.
Because it is not universally true, there are exceptions. Because there are exceptions, those egalitarians who do not want to live in biblical wisdom seize on the exceptions and try to make them the rule. They find one man who is poor because of the injustice of his employer, and then they use that fact to erase the wisdom of Scripture, and what pretty much everybody’s grandma knows about that boy.
