by Norman D. Fox -
“Poverty” is a relative term. People with less money and fewer goods than people around them are “poor,” and that kind of poverty will always exist. This is what Moses must have meant (Deut. 15:11) when he wrote that there will always be poor people. (Jesus quoted this statement in Matt. 26:11.) Yet Moses wrote in the same context (Deut. 15:4) that there would be no poverty in a nation that thoroughly obeyed God. Thus, part of understanding poverty is knowing how sin can be its cause. Sin can bring about one’s own poverty (Prov. 11:24, 23:21, 28:22) or that of others (Amos 8:4-6).
God often speaks of the poor as vulnerable
people who must not be exploited.
Defending and providing for the poor is a virtue praised and even
commanded in many passages of scripture, especially in Psalms, Proverbs and the
prophets. Conversely, Psalm 10:4-14 condemns the man who
thinks “There is no God,” and proceeds to prey upon the poor. The fear of the Lord (awareness of His
reality and presence) figures into our treatment of the poor, for better or
worse. Prov. 14:31 says, “He who oppresses the poor reproaches his Maker,
but he who is gracious to the needy honors Him.” Generosity to the poor will be repaid by the
Lord, according to Prov. 19:17.
Relieving poverty in scripture sometimes
comes in response to natural disasters, such as the cases of famine relief in
passages like Acts 11:28-30 and 24:17, I Cor. 16:1-3 and II Cor. 9. To this day, Christian individuals, churches
and organizations, in the spirit of Matt.
25:34-46, generally do better at getting help to disaster areas than secular or governmental agencies
do.
Whose responsibility is it to prevent or
remedy poverty? Scripture says it is the
individual first, the family second and the church third. (Notice that this sequence includes precisely
the three forms of government ordained by God as described in Essay #1, Government, A Creation of God.) Some Christians find a lesser role for civil
government in alleviating poverty, but that is debatable as we shall see.
Individuals, as much as they are capable, have the first responsibility to provide for themselves (II Thes. 3:10). When the individual’s needs are beyond his/her ability to provide, the family unit has secondary responsibility (I Tim. 5:8, 16). The same passage shows the church, (an extended spiritual family) bearing the next level of responsibility. Acts 6:1-6 shows the church ministering to needy widows from its earliest days.
But is there a biblical mandate for civil
government to relieve poverty? Your
answer will depend on your view of certain passages in the Law of Moses, and
the extent to which you consider that law a model for civil governments
today. Deut. 15:7-11 instructs the Israelites to give generously to the
needy. Some see this as charity enforced
by law, which could be equated with “welfare” in the modern sense. Further, Moses’ law required an extra tithe
every third year to assist the needy, and required that farmers leave some
crops unharvested to be gleaned by the poor at certain times (Ex. 23:11) and places (Lev. 19:9-10). But these acts of charity were administered
by the priesthood (equivalent to the apostles in Acts 4:34-35), and the law was not always specific as to the value
of the gift to be given. The command was
for person-to-person charitable giving, not a government-enforced
“redistribution of wealth.” (See Essay
#49, Socialism, the Bible, and America.)
Civil government is ill-suited to effectively provide for the poor, especially considering the spiritual roots of much poverty. America’s experiment with gigantic welfare programs has often resulted in entrenching rather than solving the problem, sometimes producing a multi-generational addiction to government help. Government welfare by its nature deals with people institutionally rather than spiritually, and consumes a huge proportion (some say well over 50%) of the funds on the machinery of the system itself.
Law enforcement, of course, should prevent
and correct the intentional impoverishment of the innocent by criminal
oppressors. Beyond that, our Founding
Fathers saw virtually no role for the state in dealing with poverty. The poor were assisted quite successfully by
the “private sector” (family, church, and voluntary charities) through much of
America’s history. Marvin Olasky has
documented this very well in several of his writings. (See below)
Besides the problem of social and financial
inefficiency in our current approach to welfare, there is also the spiritual
impoverishment of the “taxpayer-donors” in the system. That would be all of us who “give” by
compulsion (in contrast with II Cor.
9:6-14), and have no human contact with the needy persons being “ministered
to.” We are losing out on the
“blessedness” (Acts 20:35) that God
wants givers to experience.
God clearly assigned the care of the truly
needy to His people, serving others voluntarily in obedience to Him, and He promised
success and prosperity to those who obeyed (Isa. 58:1-12). Jesus’
prophecy of Judgment Day (Matt. 25:31-46)
reemphasizes the eternal importance of serving Him through serving the needy.
If the civil government has taken over the
role of poverty relief that properly belongs to the individual, family and
church, who is at fault for that? Is it
the state, for usurping authority, or all the others for abdicating
responsibility? There is certainly some
of both in the story, and each fault feeds on the other, but God’s people
should be doing all they can to restore the biblical order of things whenever
possible.
And what can be done to prevent
poverty? As we have seen, obedience to
God is a preventative in many ways. One
outstanding example would be obedience to God’s standards for marriage and
family. The Domestic Policy Council’s
report to President Reagan in 1986 indicated that 45% of all new welfare
caseloads resulted from divorce or separation, and another 30% from births out
of wedlock. That means that fully
three-fourths of the growth in the government dependency rolls came from
failure to live up to God’s design for the family! Tragically, other studies have found that
these statistics are not significantly different among Christians when compared
with non-Christians. As usual,
repentance needs to begin with God’s own household so that we can experience
and model to others the spiritual and financial prosperity that comes from
obeying God.
For further study:
Marvin
Olasky, The Tragedy of American
Compassion, 1992,
Regnery Gateway, www.regnery.com/catalog
Marvin
Olasky, Renewing American Compassion,
1996,
The Free Press, New York, NY
Rus
Walton, Biblical Solutions to
Contemporary Problems (Ch. 21), 1988, Christian Liberty Press,
502 W Euclid Ave,
Arlington Heights, IL 60004
E.
Calvin Beisner, Prosperity and Poverty,
1988, Good News Publishers,
1300 Crescent St., Wheaton, IL 60187
Gary
DeMar, God and Government, Vol. 2 (Ch
9-10), 1989,
Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1749 Mallory Ln, Suite 110,
Brentwood, TN 37027, www.americanvision.org
No comments:
Post a Comment