Unlike our forebears, people today flounder in a sea of greed, materialism, and waste. Christians included. A bad attitude to money is a constant temptation. We must listen carefully to the words of Jesus in Proverbs on money, and we must also listen to the words of the incarnate Jesus on money: for he knew its power and danger, and had very much to say about it.

When my grandmother sold her 1976 Toyota Corona in 1996, the sun visors and doors were still covered with the protective plastic from the factory. The car’s original green paint was brilliant and immaculate, and it had been serviced within an inch of its life. In fact, when it rained Grandma had to go out with raincoat and umbrella because Grandad didn’t want to risk rusting their beautiful car.
It wasn’t just the car. Grandma only ever owned one electric toaster, a 1948 wedding present. It had flip down doors on either side, and you had to manually turn the bread. She only ever used one carving knife the one her blacksmith grandfather had repurposed, using forge and hammer from a worn-out steel file in the early 1900s.
In her last years, in the blazing Perth summers, she still cooled herself using a damp towel and electric fan, reluctant to waste electricity on her perfectly good split-system air conditioner.
Grandma was born in 1926, and so she lived her girlhood through the Great Depression. Her family had no car or cart, and they traveled by foot or bus. Her father, a school master, supplemented the family table by hunting rabbits. Her mother had to sell her beloved piano to buy food: “We ate the piano,” Grandma would sometimes say. Butter was scarce, and drippings on bread with salt and pepper made a frequent meal. (Dripping was the fat from a cooked roast, collected into used tins.) Grandma, like just about every other Australian in the 1930s, had to live frugally, and she never lost those childhood habits. She treasured and looked after every possession.
How different my life has been. I have had many cars, and I haven’t looked after any of them especially well. Cheap electric appliances come and go. My worn-out clothes are discarded instead of repaired. Every now and then we have to clear uneaten leftovers out of the fridge. If it’s cold, we put on the heater without much thought.
By any standard of history and place, the Australian middle class enjoys spectacular wealth. And with wealth comes wastage, greed, forgetfulness of the poor, pride, a sense of entitlement, and spiritual apathy.
These are not small dangers. And so we turn urgently to God’s word for help and guidance. Here are seven things the book of Proverbs teaches us about poverty and wealth, riches and want.
1.  Wealth comes from the Lord.
“The blessing of the LORD brings wealth” (Prov. 10:22). If God is sovereign, if he governs all creation, then both riches and poverty come ultimately from him. Poor and barren Hannah recognized this: “The LORD sends poverty and wealth; he humbles and he exalts” (1 Sam. 2:7; Scripture quotes from NIV version unless otherwise noted). And Moses warned rich Israelites never to forget this:

You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth. (Deut. 8:17)

Godliness and riches are linked: “Humility is the fear of the LORD; its wages are riches and honor and life” (Prov. 22:4). Psalm 112 concurs:

Praise the Lord.
Blessed are those who fear the Lord,who find great delight in his commands.
Their children will be mighty in the land;the generation of the upright will be blessed.Wealth and riches are in their houses,and their righteousness endures forever. (Ps. 112:1-3)

In a fallen world, however, the correlation is far from robust. The godly can be destitute (like Hannah, Job in his trials, Elijah, and Mary), and the godless can be rich (like Pharaoh, Nabal, Darius, and the glutton who pretended Lazarus didn’t exist). The rich should not presume that God smiles on them, nor should the poor assume that he frowns on them.
2. The Lord normally bestows wealth by hard work, frugality, and saving.
“Dishonest money dwindles away, but he who gathers money little by little makes it grow” (Prov. 13:11). “All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty” (Prov. 14:23). “The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty” (Prov. 21:5).
And so indolent epicureans tend to impoverish themselves: “He who loves pleasure will become poor; whoever loves wine and oil will never be rich” (Prov. 21:17). “He who works his land will have abundant food, but the one who chases fantasies will have his fill of poverty” (Prov. 28:19).
Some will inherit the benefits of the hard work, frugality, and saving of others. “Houses and wealth are inherited from parents” (Prov. 19:14a). The godly will want this for their children: “A good man leaves an inheritance for his children’s children, but a sinner’s wealth is stored up for the righteous” (Prov. 13:22). A patrimony does not however come without its dangers: “An inheritance quickly gained at the beginning will not be blessed at the end” (Prov. 20:21).
3. Greed is evil.
Gordon Gecko, the fictional Wall Street swindler, urged that “greed is good.” Scripture urges instead that greed is godless. The greedy fall easy prey to “get rich by corruption, stinginess, and bribery” schemes: “A greedy man brings trouble to his family, but he who hates bribes will live” (Prov. 15:27).
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Don’t let the eloquent voices of our culture make you doubt your faith. There is no magical argument that disproves Christianity. For many generations, people have claimed that it is foolish to trust in Jesus who died and rose again. They have based this view on their understanding of science, on their philosophical positions, and on their personal preference to be free of some higher authority. Yet there is no killer argument that disproves our faith. There cannot be one, for what Christians believe is true. The message of the gospel is uncomplicated. It is simple enough that small children can understand it.

The Assyrian army threatened the city of Jerusalem in 2 Kings 18. A great army massed outside the walls and a spokesperson (with the memorable title of the Rabshakeh) came out to speak to the people of Judah. This man was clearly educated and clever. The Rabshakeh spoke to the official delegates of the king and to the common people in their own language. And his speeches are eloquent, full of rhetoric and repetition, convincingly putting his case across.
The message of the Rabshakeh was clear: you should surrender to Assyria. Don’t believe that King Hezekiah or your God or your own strength can save you, for they cannot do it. No other nation has been able to resist Assyria, and you are no different. You face certain ruin, so save yourselves now.
This reminds us of the eloquent voices of our own culture. There are spokespeople like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry who use any opportunity to mock Christianity as being ridiculous. University professors write books against our faith and television writers and producers present a vision for the world without God in it. This message is put forward with cleverness and force. At times, we might even wonder if we have chosen the right side. All the power and eloquence of this world seems to be united against our faith.
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Equals do not need to fear, obey, and serve each other. But we are NOT equals. We will never be God, and we will forever know our place and know who we are as we worship him and revere him. Again, we rejoice in having a relationship with God, but we still treat God as God. Yes we do it gladly and with a grateful heart, but we still recognise who he is and our proper place before him.

That people all the time get things wrong about God is not surprising. Most folks want to make God in their own image, so they will distort and misrepresent him. That is to be expected of non-believers. But sadly it can often be the case with believers as well. They can get even Christian basics wrong, and twist and mar the fullness of biblical revelation.
Having an interactive website with over 1300 theological articles – among others – I find this happening on a regular basis. People come here all the time. Some will send in comments looking to pick a fight and argue with me about something. Sometimes they are just way off – pushing theological error, heresy and the like.
Sometimes they will get part of the biblical worldview right while getting other parts wrong. As I have said countless times on this site, we must get the biblical balance right on so many key issues. Theological error easily creeps in when we try to undo the biblical balance that is found there.
I also have the recurring problem of someone coming along and missing the point of an article, and/or going off on a tangent. Often this will greatly detract from the point I was seeking to make in a piece. They may just be insistent on pushing their pet theological peeves, or have taken upon themselves the role of a theological enforcer, ‘correcting’ anyone who dares to have a slightly different view on things.
Yet another incident of this took place recently. I had written a piece on atheists, and how they reject the one true God, often setting themselves or something else up as god. In that piece I said this:
They want to be king, not subject.They want to rule, not be ruled.They want to give orders, not take orders.They want to call the shots, not be told what to do.They want to determine what is true and false, not God.They want to determine what is right and wrong, not God.They want to be independent, not dependent.They want to do their own will, not God’s will.They want to live like the devil, not God.They want to rule in hell, not serve in heaven. billmuehlenberg.com/2022/06/23/romans-1-and-atheism/
Now all that happens to be perfectly true. Yet I got a comment – not from an angry atheist – but some Christian who thought I was quite wrong. He managed to do two things in his comment that I just mentioned above: he missed the whole point of my article and managed to derail the whole thing, and he managed to present some aspects of biblical truth while rejecting other key aspects. He said this:
The gospel is not that upon regeneration we become a subject people, ruled, ordered and told what to do. This is as far from the great relationship Yahweh promises in Christ as could be conceived. Upon regeneration we are re-born and are filled with Christ’s Spirit caught up at last into his family, adopted sons of the great Yahweh, our goals perfectly aligned with his, our life now in line with his will and in joy unimaginable as Paul teaches us.
If your preaching of the gospel is to ‘repent and become a subject, ruled, ordered and told what to do’ you are inviting people to become prisoners, not members of the family of God and feeding into the atheist’s vain distortion of who our Creator is and his call to live in step with him.
Oh dear. As I say, this was all rather off topic. My piece was on atheism and how Paul in Romans 1 views such things. But also, as I said, he presents some biblical truth with one hand while taking away some biblical truth with the other. Losing the biblical balance just gets us into more difficulty and error. Let me deal with each of these two matters.
As to the atheism issue, sadly this fellow missed the point of my article. Does the atheist and non-Christian want to be boss, to call the shots, and not have anyone rule over them? Of course they do. The only way they will get right with God is to lay down their arms and surrender.
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