Proverbs 14:31 ESV
Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him.
[https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+14%3A31&version=ESV]
God made man in His image. The Fall marred that image but did not destroy it. Therefore, when man harms his fellow man, he assaults the image of God, not mere arrangements of matter and delusion (as the atheist is eventually forced to call man). When man has power over other men and abuses it, we call that ‘oppression’. God despises such evil, but why? Why and how does oppression ‘insult’ God?
Near the base of the sin, men oppress other men because they value themselves and their desires more than they value the wellbeing of their fellow man, more than they value the commands of God. As with all sins, this sin inherently says, “My will be done, not Yours.” The surface-level and conscious motives of oppression, however, are rarely so clear.
Pretexts are the name of the game, and we humans are masters of such deceptions. ‘Kindness’ and ‘progress’ was the watchword for the horrific eugenics undertaken in America during the 1920s, the thousands upon thousands of forced sterilizations. The Jews were slaughtered in Germany because they were alleged to be plotting against the human race, because they were called plague-bearers, because they had been ‘scientifically’ judged less than their fellow men. Our governments, nowadays, impose tyranny manifold and sometimes murderous- injections, theft, sexual perversion, neglect, injustice- and they say it’s “for the children”. ‘Public safety’ covers a multitude of sins.
Oppression isn’t just a corporate sin, either, though generally organizations, institutions, and governments make it easier (churches and companies and families all have their skeletons too). Fundamentally, ‘oppression’ is an individual’s act, even if he coordinates with a billion others to implement it. ‘Oppression’, at its core, is a man using power to render to his neighbor less good than he ought to render to that neighbor and more evil. Oppression may mean outright theft, the type that doesn’t bother with nighttime, extortion and protection rackets and legal warfare intended to drain funds without intent of justice. Oppression may mean taking advantage of weakness- usury, shoddy work for those who can’t remonstrate, abusing elders and invalids and children. It may mean withholding that which is due, refusing to fulfil an agreement or refusing to hear a case in court or casting a thousand procedural barriers in the way of inconvenient obligations. ‘Oppression’ can be the distortion of justice- bias in judgement, giving favor to one or to the other, denying the truth out of self-interest or sin (and in these cases, even an apparently favorable judgement can be oppression; to unjustly award an alcoholic a thousand gallons of whiskey is as much oppression as to take it from its rightful owner, in a sense. Governmental welfare programs are this type of oppression, incentivizing vice).
How does all this sin insult God, though, beyond how any other sin would?
When we oppress our neighbor, we say of the image of God that it does not matter. We declare that a man created by God in His image is not worthy of justice, of kindness, of care. We say, in other words, that we don’t care about the image of God. Furthermore, we say this by word and deed right to God’s face- God being omnipresent and omniscient. It makes moving to North Korea and calling the current Kim a ‘fatso’ look like small potatoes on the insult scale, so much so it’s almost an insult to imply the analogy.
How, conversely, does generosity to the poor honor God?
In Scripture, the ‘poor’ are often singled out as the weak of society, alongside widows and orphans. To the weak of society the Christian has been given a responsibility: “To share your bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked to cover him…” (Is. 58:7). Man is made in God’s image, and therefore we, who worship God, have a responsibility to care for our fellow man, to be his neighbor in the tradition of the Good Samaritan and not the Pharisee, who saw weakness and despised (Luke 10:25-37).
This responsibility to aid the weak who are in His image- all men- is a responsibility to honor His image because we honor Him, in order to honor Him. It is because man is made in God’s image that kindness and generosity- exercised in love, which does not enable vice but supports virtue (blind charity all too often damns more than it aids)- it is because of this truth of Genesis 1:26 that lovingkindness to man is honor towards God. The ultimate generosity and ultimate form of this duty, though, is the Gospel shared. The good news of Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection; the glorious calling to repentance and faith; the assurance that God does not fail to save even the chief of sinners when He wishes (1 Tim. 1:15), to give to man this news is the greatest generosity a Christian can bestow upon another, a great honor to God.
Let us thank Him who gave us this news, and who gave to others to teach us of it, to their own blessing and to ours.
God bless.
Written by Colson Potter
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
