Proverbs 16:8 ESV
Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues with injustice.
[https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+16%3A8&version=ESV]
Envy lives strong in mankind’s heart. Envy, the strong right hand of greed, topples empires and slaughters innocents; envy brings first seeming justice and then damning evil; envy finds a pretext for every deed, so long as its victim is sufficiently above the one committing. Wealth in particular earns men envy, the poor envying the rich and the rich envying the very rich and the middle class envying the upper middle class and all of us embroiled in wanting ‘great revenues’, accusing others that to merely possess such is a grave injustice. Yet Scripture does not condemn wealth or envy it; instead, it places wealth in context, gives it motive, and sets it aside.
Let’s take these four points one by one.
First, Scripture does not condemn wealth or envy it. That wealth is not condemned clearly appears in the blessing God gave to Solomon: “I will also give you riches, possessions, and honor, such as none of the kings had who were before you, and none after you shall have the like” (2 Chr. 1:12). It beggars sense to believe God would give to Solomon such wealth if wealth itself were an evil thing. If this were not enough, we have also the blessings given to Job and to the church in general (Job 42:10-17; Is. 61:7). Yet Scripture does not present wealth as something to be envied, either; quite the contrary, we are commanded not to covet (the action and attitude envy blooms into) in the Ten Commandments, and James warns us from acting upon partiality of any sort, of envy or of cupidity (Ex. 20:17; Ja. 2:1-13).
Second, Scripture places wealth in context. Wealth is not the sheer power or priority, in Scripture, which mankind makes it. Wealth is merely a tool, merely a thing of this earth. Solomon’s wealth is great, but it is not the true treasure he is given (2 Chr. 1:1-13). Why? Because wealth fades. On this earth, it is true, to have wealth is of great comfort to man, such as man is. Upon the back of wealth does the rich man wear purple and feast sumptuously all the day (Luke 6:19). This world ends, though, and this world is eternal compared to us mayfly-men.
The earth has six millennia of age, ten or twelve perhaps, and who knows how many to come (for perhaps we live but in the first gasp of the church). Then it will end, but twenty-thousand years, perhaps, is not so bad. If wealth lasted all that time, its worth might seem great, to our minds which see anything so long as it is not eternity. Wealth, though, only lasts so long as the man who is wealthy; when he passes, he has no longer its benefit, and we live but a hundred and twenty years, if we be blessed, perhaps forty, perhaps twenty, perhaps eighty. Even Methuselah lived not a millennium. Wealth will pass because we will pass, our worlds ending even if the world of man and his sin still persists.
Third, Scripture gives wealth a motive. Which is to say, in Scripture wealth is not for wealth’s sake. Instead, whatever we have is to be turned towards righteousness. This does not rise truly from self-interest. It is the act of self-interest, of course; to act according to God’s law is best pragmatically in the long term. The motive at the base of true righteousness, however, is love of God and of His people, of His creation. This is the Greatest Commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37). It is by love of Him that we are spurred to honor Him, and by love that He chose to give His own life for us. Indeed, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). If Christ so loved, who are we to do otherwise? Thus wealth and its lack alike are given a purpose and a goal and a motive.
Fourth and finally, Scripture sets wealth aside. It does not do so in hatred or malice or fear. It does not do so in the envy which is so familiar to us, the envy which we find when we see wealth of money or of companionship or of self-assurance or of all else which man can desire. No, Scripture sets wealth aside not for being evil but for being, at the end of the day, not worth much at all and not truly ours. Yes, it is pleasant on this earth, but it will be of no use in the life to come ((John 14:2). More, all wealth ultimately belongs not to its declared human owner but to God, the Maker and Creator of us all (Gen. 1:1).
Wealth, to the Christian eye, is a means of glorifying God, not an end in itself, and therefore to be dispensed with upon the instant it becomes a hindrance, upon the instant that loss will be to Him a greater act of love (Matt. 5:29, 10:37). Meanwhile, to the one who knows not God, who seeks fulfillment and value apart from Him, the words of Ecclesiastes have pronounced a doom. When the Shepherd sought with all his unparalleled wealth the happiness it should bring, he came to a simple and terrible conclusion: “Then I considered,… and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” (Ecc. 2:11).
The final end and result of all this, for us, should be that we turn our minds towards heaven. In doing so, then, we will find the full truth of this proverb: to know Him and to know His grace is to discover that nothing at all upon this earth can compare. As little as I and you, with our feeble hearts, may comprehend it in our fleshly fears, when the fire comes and the world melts away, the true son of God discovers that all the wealth and all the surety-of-the-world he might have gained is naught before the surpassing excellence of the Cross. Then, like the martyrs of old, like the Waldenses in their caves, like the Covenanters upon the moors, let us turn to Him, not our own power, and find in His righteousness our consolation.
“And it will be well for the one who seeks mercy, consolation from the Father in heaven, where for us all stability stands.” ~ The Wanderer1
God Bless
Written by Colson Potter
1 – The Wanderer is an old Anglo-Saxon poem found in a translated form here. I highly recommend it.
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.
