For the Christian, there are additional factors regarding wealth in the fallen world. Christians are called to be stewards of their labor and money and to use them for God’s kingdom. They do this by first providing for themselves and their loved ones (1 Tim. 5:8; 2 Thess. 3:10-12) and also caring for those who are not able to care for themselves (Eph. 4:28; 1 Tim. 6:17-19). Moreover, the Christian’s attitude toward wealth must always be tempered by a love for Christ (Lk. 12:33; 14:33) and a willingness to follow Jesus no matter what (Matt. 8:20; Lk. 9:3). Whatever wealth Christians possess, they possess it temporarily as stewards of God.

It is difficult to say where American society is headed in the near future, but it is likely not toward greater economic freedom. With each economic crisis, politicians and cultural elites preach about the virtues of state-controlled, collectivist-style economics and the unmitigated evils of free market capitalism.
Worse are calls within evangelicalism for Christians to address economic inequality through redistributive policies, calls which seem to grow louder by the day.
Christians who are serious about economic justice should be concerned about this move away from economic freedom, for it reveals a pervasive and fundamental misunderstanding of the Bible’s view of wealth and poverty. We need to respond to this shift by using sound biblical and philosophical arguments, but many Christians might not know how.
What does the Bible actually say about wealth, poverty, and economic inequality? What role should governments, churches, families, and individuals play in addressing economic problems? And is any economic theory compatible with a biblical worldview?
These are big questions, but let’s briefly try to answer them.
A Biblical View of Wealth
The Bible’s view of wealth is morally ambiguous. Wealth can be good or bad depending on how it is gained, valued, and used. As ethicist Daniel Heimbach explains,
[Scripture] distinguishes valuing wealth the right way from lusting for it, earning it the right way from stealing it, and using it the right way from using it badly.
Heimbach goes on to explain that, on the one hand, the Bible commends hard work and savings (Gen. 41:35-36; Prov. 6:6-8) and using wealth to honor God (Prov. 3:9; Acts 2:45). Wealth can be used to support the ministry and to care for those in need, both of which are commendable. On the other hand, Heimbach notes, the Bible condemns wealth if it is acquired through violence (Mic. 2:2; Jas. 5:6), oppression (Isa. 10:1-2), or deception (Mic. 6:11-12). For this reason, the Bible contains many warnings about the dangers of wealth (Prov. 16:8, 19) as it can lead to pride, self-sufficiency, and idolatry (Matt 13:22; Mk. 4:19; Lk. 8:14).
Wealth gained through sin is obviously not good, but poverty is also not good (Prov. 10:15; 19:6-7). Poverty can cause pain and suffering (Prov. 10:15), social isolation and shame (Prov. 14:20), economic dependency (Prov. 18:23), and even rejection of God (Prov. 17:5). None of this means poor people are sinful, but only that the condition of poverty presents many challenges and it is not how God originally intended human beings to live.
To see this, consider that a world of material abundance — rather than a world of poverty and starvation — is closer to the way God originally ordered creation. In the beginning, God created a good world that could provide material abundance for all human beings, but sin broke that world.
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The Lord is teaching you to fly. To trust him. And if you fail, there is a gracious safety net. Look back and remember “what you yourselves have seen”—how the Lord has borne you up on eagles’ wings so many times before. Remember how he did it for Israel, not just here in the wilderness but countless times throughout their history.

In Exodus 19.4 God says that he bore his people on eagles’ wings. What does that mean? It’s a picture he returns to in Deuteronomy 32.11, where he says he dealt with Israel Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on its pinions…
When an eagle judges that its young are ready to fly, it pushes them out of the nest, forcing them to flap their wings and try to fly. If the eaglet isn’t able to do this immediately, it will drop like a stone. But the eagle swoops down underneath and catches its young and bears it up to safety. Then the process is repeated until the young bird learns how to use its wings. It sounds cruel—but it’s for the eaglet’s good. It needs to learn to fly and that will never happen in the security of the nest. But the mother is watchful, strong and swift to come to the rescue if needed.
That’s the Lord’s own description of those two or three months Israel has spent in the wilderness since leaving Egypt. The Lord has been disciplining his people, testing them and training them to trust him. Perhaps at times his methods have seemed harsh, even cruel.
Think of how he led the Israelites in a circle until they were trapped, with the Red Sea behind them and the whole Egyptian army racing towards them. How distressing that must have been for them! How damaging for their mental health! Ex 14.10 says that they ‘feared greatly’. But the Lord swooped down to catch them, parting the Red Sea and bringing them safely through.
Think of how he led them for three days with no water—right on the brink of what the human body can endure. He brought them to Marah where there was water—only for them to find the water was bitter! The Lord is tossing them out of the nest. Will they flap their wings of faith and fly? Will they trust him? No—so he swoops down to catch them and makes the water sweet.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, May 16, 2023
Nietzsche noted it takes a long time for societies to grasp the significance of the death of God. But we are surely at that point now. Our artistic class makes that very clear, and so it is time to put these artists in the dock: We get it. You hate Christianity and the Western cultures that it informed.

One of the hallmarks of the modern age has been the death of the sacred. Nietzsche’s Madman understood that this was one of the central consequences of the death of God. But he, unlike the polite atheists he berated in the town square, knew that this was both an exhilarating and a terrifying matter: Now human beings would themselves have to rise to be gods, to create their own systems of value, their own sacred rites, their own meaning of life.
This was never going to be either easy or stable. Nor has it ultimately led human beings to transcend themselves and ascend to some higher, übermenschlich plane. Today we witness merely the desecration of all that was once held to be sacred. Our culture remains trapped by the sacred idioms of the past and doomed to the constant and increasingly conformist transgression of old boundaries.
Take, for example, the latest “art” promoted by the European Union: A series of photographs, currently on display at the European Parliament building, taken by lesbian artist Elisabeth Ohlson. The images depict, among other things, scenes of Jesus surrounded by gay men dressed in leather bondage gear. Now, if Jesus were alive today he would certainly be speaking to such people, as he spoke to prostitutes and tax collectors in first-century Palestine. But Ohlson claims that her work represents Christ “loving LGBT rights.” Whether all gay people like to see themselves caricatured in bondage gear might itself be an interesting question to ask. The left’s favored word “fetishization” came to my mind as I looked at the pictures. What is not interesting, however, is the artwork itself.
The display represents both the bankruptcy of modern culture and its inability to offer anything even approximating a positive vision for humanity. For generations now the artistic establishment has been in thrall to the notion of transgression. But transgression is only significant if there is something—some rule, some custom, something sacred—to transgress. Without such, transgression itself rapidly degenerates into a series of empty gestures that tend to become both more extreme and more vacuous at the same time. Art then ceases to be about embodying and transmitting cultural value and is instead a momentary iconoclastic performance that parasitically and paradoxically depends upon resurrecting icons that have long since fallen. Only because there is a folk memory of religion does the general public have some notion that these banal photographs are meant to be shocking. And only to the increasingly marginal numbers of actual Christians are they truly so.
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