What Are Our Obligations to the Poor? Part 6
May 18, 2010
Dear Friends,
One of the key relationships that became dysfunctional in Eden is our relationships with other people. Extreme examples of our behavioral dysfunction with other people are war, stealing, rape, terrorism and genocide. Yet, we see milder forms every day in rudeness, self-centeredness, lying, manipulation and other discourtesies. A common result of peoples' dysfunctional relations is poverty.
Our solution today for this problem is more often than not a governmental program. The social safety net in Biblical times was a system that had no governmental programs but was instead built on laws to protect the poor, families, hard work and, finally as a last resort, alms.
If the Biblical system was followed, God promised an amazing blessing. God told Israel,
However, there should be no poor among you, for in the land the LORD your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you. (Deuteronomy 15:4 NIV)
Israel was supposed to be a witness to God. (Is. 43:10) In theory, the surrounding nations were supposed to look at Israel and see a system that worked so well that this was clear evidence that God is and was working in this nation. Imagine a country with no poor people. Wouldn't this be clear evidence of a Divine system at work?
Let me suggest to you that Israel, had they followed the Lord's commands, would have come as close as is humanly possible in this dispensation of eliminating poverty. It was truly and literally a Divine system that addressed all of the key elements. One of the key elements of this system (which is very dissimilar to today's social safety net) is the near absence of handouts. Only in the most severe cases, usually when someone was completely disabled, did the system not require the individual or their family to be the solution to their predicament. This goes back to our study on the relationship with self. When we deny the poor a participation in their own solution, we deny them dignity and eliminate the Divine prerequisite of work to share in the reward.
So, with this in mind, let's take a look at the Divine system of the Old Testament and see how it governed the interpersonal relationships of the nation of Israel especially regarding the poor.
1. Prohibition against Permanent Transfer of Basic Assets
The Old Testament system itself had stopgap measures to prevent what we see so much of today – the permanent transfer of wealth from one class of people to another. The land and its assets were divided up among the tribes of Israel. Each family was permanently allotted a piece of property with all of its assets (homes, fields, water, etc.). If a family fell on hard times, it could in essence lease these assets to another for a fixed period of time not to exceed the next jubilee (max of 50 years). At that time, the asset returned back to its original owners or heirs. Thus, families were never permanently deprived of their most valuable assets even by mismanagement or extreme deprivation of their ancestors.
Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each one of you is to return to his family property and each to his own clan. In this Year of Jubilee everyone is to return to his own property. If you sell land to one of your countrymen or buy any from him, do not take advantage of each other. You are to buy from your countryman on the basis of the number of years since the Jubilee. And he is to sell to you on the basis of the number of years left for harvesting crops. When the years are many, you are to increase the price, and when the years are few, you are to decrease the price, because what he is really selling you is the number of crops. Do not take advantage of each other, but fear your God. I am the LORD your God. (Lev. 25:10, 13- 17 NIV)
There is a Divine principle behind this idea:
The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants.(Lev. 25:23 NIV)
In Israel's culture, everything was God's including the people themselves. This again, hearkens back to the proper relationship between God and men and indirectly to our relationship with each other. We alone belong to God – rich, poor, old, young, any race, any nationality – such that we should honor God who owns us and treat each other as children of the Most High.
God warns against the attempt by the rich to permanently take away the inheritance of the poor by repeating again and again the admonition "Do not take advantage of each other." We have examples of wicked men in the Bible like Ahab trying to take away the inheritance of others. (see 1 Kings 21)
By virtue of our society's allowance for the permanent transfer of wealth from one class to another, we now see wide disparities between the wealth of rich and poor in individual countries, but we also see the ever increasing discrepancies between the wealth of rich countries and poor countries. Despite this ever increasing gap between rich and poor, many Christians will look at you with a straight face and tell you this system is a God-ordained economic system. In the book When Helping Hurts, the authors note that in 1820, the difference in the average income per person between the richest countries in the world and the poorest was about four times. Today, the average American lives on $90 per day while 40% of the world's population lives in less than $2 per day.
Our modern culture impoverishes people because we have no Jubilee principle. We take from the poor in the same way Pharaoh took advantage of the Egyptian in the great famine of Joseph's day. We take their money, houses, lands and finally the people themselves until they have nothing left. There is no restoration. A principle that we can learn from this is the principle of restoration. We should never put people in a position where they cannot restore themselves by faithfulness and hard work. As God said "Do not take advantage of each other."
Have a great week,
