At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

Honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase: So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine.

Proverbs 3:9–10

One of the very practical theological problems that Christians frequently have concerns the issue of God’s temporal blessings. A very common framework is to relegate temporal blessings to the Old Testament and spiritual blessings to the new. Not only is this too facile, but it leaves modern Christians without any real direction on what to do with their (very real) wealth.

If our temporal blessings are from God, then we are responsible to God (and to His Word) for how we serve as stewards of what He has given. But if our wealth is entirely “accidental,” and not connected in any way to how we are living before Him, then we don’t have to answer for what we do—only provided we don’t actively sin with it.

But it is my conviction that Christians are supposed to live before God in such a way as to enjoy what we might call the Deuteronomic blessings—“blessed shall be thy basket and thy store” (Deut. 28:5). How we live our lives generally, and how we honor God with the first fruits of our labors (as in this passage from Proverbs), has a financial impact on our lives. And that impact is generally one of palpable blessing.

Of course there are temporal exceptions in the Christian era, but there were also exceptions in the Old Testament. And when those exceptions occur (poverty and a hard life instead of tangible blessings), there were compensatory spiritual blessings. Some Old Testament saints wandered in deserts, mountains, dens and caves (Heb. 11:38), despite it being all in the Old Testament.

There were temporal blessings back then, but there were also spiritual blessings. Between the covenants, no principle has changed. What has changed, however, is the practical amount of enormous wealth that we enjoy. When Paul told Timothy to instruct the “rich in this present world” in a particular way (1 Tim. 6:17), he was telling him how to instruct a tiny percentage of the church. Today, at least in the West, it is a large majority in the church.

That is no reason for the instruction to change. In fact, it is all the more reason for us to emphasize the teaching of Scripture on this subject—including Deuteronomy and Proverbs.

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

The righteous considereth the cause of the poor: But the wicked regardeth not to know it.

Proverbs 29:7

The causes of poverty are various and complicated. It is the task of the righteous and the wise to seek them out, and to ponder and evaluate the cause of the poor. The wicked, however, cannot be bothered. When the righteous seek out the causes of poverty, they do so in such a way as to enable them to take up the cause of the poor—to take the case, in other words.

At the same time, at least in our era, the wicked have used the poor very effectively in their sloganeering. For the one who “regards not to know it,” it is very easy to proceed straight to the speech in which you cry up as a solution another elephant dose of the problem. And when the righteous seeks out the causes of poverty, and takes up the cause of the poor, his righteousness is evident—but it is not evident to the wicked, who readily accuse him of being heartless and cold.

Examples can be readily multiplied, but let’s take the simple one of wage and price fixing. If the poor people have a hard time buying things, then why don’t we just institute price controls to keep prices from rising too high, and why don’t we establish minimum wage laws to keep wages from falling too low, and presto! Haven’t we fixed the problem? The poor now have a job that pays well, and the prices have thoughtfully remained low for them. Well, we have fixed the problem for all those who “regard not to know it.” But for the man who “considereth” what is going on, we have done nothing of the kind.

Why were we so stingy in our solution? In our price controls, why didn’t we cut the price of everything in half? And why didn’t we triple the minimum wage? The reason we did not do that is that it would have revealed how this entire scam is being run by charlatans. If we cut the prices in half, we could afford to buy absolutely anything we found on the empty shelves. And if we tripled the minimum wage, we would be receiving a very fine wage if we had a job anymore, which we don’t. In the name of fighting poverty, we have transformed poverty into grinding poverty.

The righteous thinks about it. The wicked can’t be bothered.

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

When the wicked rise, men hide themselves: But when they perish, the righteous increase.

Proverbs 28:28

The wicked and the righteous cannot occupy the same space. They are incompossible. One of the first things that God did after the Fall was to establish this as the foundational antithesis—the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent were not going to be able to “just get along” (Gen. 3:15). The history of the world is bound up with the history of this long war.

In this proverb, we see that when the wicked are in the ascendancy, other men need to take shelter. This is a natural consequence of the wicked exhibiting either their cruelty or their vainglory. When they are being cruel, they destroy the lives of others on purpose (Ps. 71:4). The impulses of malice provide their own justification. But when they want to be known as “benefactors” (Luke 22:25), they do all their damage by means of blundering and incompetence. In either case, reasonable men must take measures to protect themselves. Gideon has to thresh wheat in the wine vat (Judg. 6:11), hiding from the Midianite IRS.

The alternative is not found when the righteous and unrighteous work out a deal. The alternative is found when the wicked perish. And when the wicked perish, often done in by their very own bad ideas, the righteous are able to flourish and increase.

And this is what our basic prayer should be, that God give His people room to grow. But this is not going to happen apart from the wicked being removed—either by removal, or by conversion.

“I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour; Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:1–4).

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

He that tilleth his land shall have plenty of bread: But he that followeth after vain persons shall have poverty enough.

Proverbs 28:19

There are some things we shouldn’t have to be told, but because we are a sinful race, we do have to be told them, and repeatedly. Notice the upshot of this particular proverb. If you work hard and intelligently in the field, you will have plenty of food. But if, instead of this, you chase after the fellow promising rainbows for everybody, you are going to have plenty of something else, and that something else is poverty. Some people are grain farmers and other people are poverty farmers. In either case, you will always get plenty of whatever you are growing.

There are two applications of this that we should make. The first is to remember that we are dealing with proverbs about real life, not axioms in geometry. “All hard workers have plenty of bread” is certainly true, but it is not true the same way that “all triangle have three sides” is true. There are exceptions, but there are not so many exceptions that it should in any way alter the way you live. Working hard is the right thing to do, period, and it usually pays off. But even when it does not “pay off,” it was still the right thing. Hard work and diligence are valued by all of God’s true disciples, as they are found in every nation.

But the second application is that in our day there are certain liars (the same kind of vain persons that our proverb mentions) who are maintaining that things like industry, hard work, showing up on time, diligence, and so on, are “white” values, and that to live in this way is to perpetuate white supremacy. If you are struggling to understand how anybody could argue for anything so stupid, that probably means that you were educated in white supremacist categories, and are still trapped in them.

But God’s Word is always sure, even if Solomon was white, and people who pursue vanities like this are pursuing poverty. They will find it, and if they don’t repent, their only consolation in that poverty will be that they successfully stuck it to the Man. Showed him.

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

As a roaring lion, and a ranging bear; so is a wicked ruler over the poor people. The prince that wanteth understanding is also a great oppressor: But he that hateth covetousness shall prolong his days.

Proverbs 28:15–16

Simple people get worked over in two distinct ways. The first is when their rulers are cruel and wicked. Those who have this kind of rule are like a lion, roaring for its prey, or a hungry bear, ranging here and there, looking for a meal. The poor are like a vulnerable gazelle or deer. Those who rule in this way are arrogant, cruel, vindictive, and driven by their insolence. When this is the case, things are bad, but at least we all know where we are.

But Solomon goes on. The poor people are also greatly oppressed by ignorant rulers. This is the curse of our day. In days gone by, there were rulers like Tamerlane who exulted in his cruelty, ordering towers to be fashioned out of the skulls of his enemies. That kind of thing is generally frowned on these days. 

But progressive leftist politics is still a great destroyer. It is a destroyer in the hands of a Stalin, who had the heart of a Tamerlane, and it is a destroyer in the hands of an Eleanor Roosevelt, who had a heart of a goop. It doesn’t matter how syrupy the intentions are, the poor are still wiped out by the grand intentions of the social engineers.

Notice the antidote to both cruelty and incompetence is hatred of covetousness. When a man is qualified under God to bear rule, one of his principle qualifications is his hatred of covetousness. “Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens” (Exodus 18:21). This qualification is so important that it is applied all the way down to “rulers of tens.”

Men who hate covetousness will obviously refrain from the smash and grab approach to wealth that the cruel love to employ. But they will also reject all the schemes of uplift and social betterment that some think will be rendered effective simply because they were inspired by good intentions. But cruelty hath slain its thousands; good intentions its tens of thousands.  

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