Be AGITATED, GRIEVED, MOVED by the way poverty assaults the dignity of every poor image-bearer of God. We cannot be Christ-like and be apathetic. We cannot be Jesus-followers and be passive about the plight of the poor. Cherishing every human being is required of anyone who claims to love God—because there is a direct link between loving God and loving his image bearers.

After loving the Lord, Himself, with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, the Christian’s second responsibility is to love our neighbor as ourselves. When asked what this command meant for our everyday living, Jesus told the outrageous story of a man walking down the dangerous road between Jerusalem and Jericho, being attacked, robbed, and left for dead but how the good Samaritan, at risk to his own safety, stopped, bandaged his wounds, transported him on his own donkey to an inn where he spent the rest of the day caring for him. The next day he left a considerable sum of money with the inn keeper to continue to care for the wounded man, saying, “if this is not enough, I will cover the extra costs when I return.” Commenting on this passage, author/pastor Tim Keller writes:
“Jesus commands us to provide shelter, finances, medical care, and friendship to people who lack them. We have nothing less than an order from our Lord in the most categorical of terms, ‘Go and do likewise.’ Our paradigm is the Samaritan who risked his safety, destroyed his schedule, and became dirty and bloody through personal involvement with a needy person of another race and social class. Are we as Christians obeying this command personally? Are we as a church obeying it corporately?” (Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road). This episode seeks to look at poverty through a biblical lens, understanding it’s causes, misguided attempts to solve it, and especially what fulfilling our responsibility to care for the poor looks like.
God’s Design for Mankind to Flourish Econimically
As we saw in the first episode in this series, God’s design to provide humans with the sustenance they need to flourish was not just a lush garden full of fruit trees; it was a plan for them to “subdue” the earth. The command “to subdue” implies that, although all that God made is good, it is, to some degree, underdeveloped. God left creation with deep untapped potential for cultivation that humans are to unlock through our labor. Tim Keller elaborates:
We are not to relate to the world as park rangers, whose job is not to change their space but preserve things as they are. Nor are we to “pave over the garden” of the created world to make a parking lot. No, we are to be gardeners who take an active stance towards their charge. They do not leave the land as it is. They rearrange it to make it more fruitful, to draw the potentialities for growth and development out of the soil. They dig up the ground and rearrange it with a goal in mind: to rearrange the raw material of the garden so that it produces food, flowers, and beauty. And that is the pattern for all work. It is rearranging the raw materials of God’s creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people, in particular, thrive and flourish (Every Good Endeavor).
The development of creation’s potential is built upon and requires shalom—the OT word for harmony and flourishing in relationships. God’s design for economic flourishing as described above in Genesis 1 requires harmony in the four basic relationships of life:

Right relationship with GOD—My mission is to exercise dominion over all of life for him, out of love for him.
Right relationship with SELF—My worth and dignity are eternally assigned to me by God who made me his image bearer and equipped me with the abilities to do the good works he planned for me to do from eternity.
Right relationship with OTHERS—My responsibility is summed up in the second greatest commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Right relationship with CREATION—I am to be its steward developing the potential God placed in it for God’s glory.

The Cause of Economic Poverty
In his book, Walking With the Poor, Bryant Myers describes the fundamental nature of poverty, “Poverty is the result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable. Poverty is the absence of shalom in all its meanings.” Due to the comprehensive nature of the fall, every human being is poor in the sense of not experiencing the flourishing of these four relationships in the way God intended. Every human being is suffering from a poverty of spiritual intimacy with God, a poverty of internal wholeness and emotional health within himself, a poverty of community, and a poverty of stewardship. Let’s dig deeper.
Adam and Eve were designed to be God’s image bearers, reflecting his nature as a worker and moral ruler. As moral rulers who had the law of God written on their hearts, they were to exercise dominion in a way that pleased God as culture developed and diversified. Human flourishing was the result of shalom in the four relationships of life: 1) Walking in harmony with God’s righteousness, they would have respected private ownership (theft forbidden by the 8th commandment), honest business practices (lying forbidden by the 9th commandment). 2) Experiencing pre-fall wholeness–internal peace with themselves—no sense of inferiority, insecurity, competitiveness, or envy. Sinful selfishness has not exerted itself—and their call to vocation was the call to use their talents, innovation, and resources to make products to serve others. 3) Experiencing pre-fall harmony in their horizontal relationships with each other; their hearts were not governed by greed, selfishness, cheating each other, or jealousy. 4) There was harmony in the created order. There was no poverty that had resulted from natural calamity like earthquakes, floods, or volcanoes erupting. Let’s use this lens to consider the holistic, biblical approach to alleviating poverty in our cities—restoration.
A. Overcoming the poverty of being. Only God knows how profoundly slavery and racism have crushed black men and women’s dignity. I wonder how many centuries it may take to undo such evil attacks on the self-esteem of those who bear the image of God. I’m told by those engaged in city ministry that this shattered self-esteem is linked to many outward symptoms of this brokenness:

a teen boy’s desire to prove himself a man through his sexual prowess.
a teen girl looking for love in the arms of a male who just wants sex.
a teen girl who wants to feel needed by getting pregnant and having a baby who needs her and, to some degree, loves her back.
a boy committing violence to win the respect of the others in his gang.

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Of course, those with power oppress those with less. That is an obvious conclusion from biblical teaching about how the fall corrupted human nature. But the radical fall of Adam’s race transmitted his sinful nature to all humans, not just the rich. Using the oppressor/oppressed lens of Marx to interpret all of history and explain the most basic human motivations is nowhere close to accurate.

The spiritual battle in which Christian men are called to engage is largely a battle of ideas. After Paul devotes eleven chapters of Romans to the glory of the gospel, and challenges Christians that the only proper response is to offer ourselves back to God as a living sacrifice, the very next command is a reference to this battle over ideas: Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. In Ephesians 6 the list of equipment for warfare begins with the belt of truth and ends with the sword of the Spirit, the word of God, indispensable tools for this battle of ideas.
This reality presents Christian men with an enormous challenge. We are created to be warriors (Gen 2:15). But few of us are philosophy majors. The world of ideas that we know best matches our vocation and avocation. Yet, as warriors in the spiritual battle of ideas and as protectors of our families, WE are the ones God expects to lead the way to destroy arguments, and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Cor 10:5). How can we possibly do this? The missing ingredient is EQUIPPING. The church must find ways to equip the saints (Eph 4:12). This podcast series, “Election 2024 and Biblical Worldview” is intended to equip men to understand the worldview issues that lie beneath the upcoming election.
As an economics major at Penn State, I got to take an economics class from an expert on Mao Zedong’s take over of China by his Red Guard in 1949, just twenty years earlier. I discovered with horror the Red Guard’s slaughter of millions of Chinese landowners to collectivize farming, and how this experiment led to the economic ruin of China and the starvation of twenty million people. I studied how Mao implemented his unique brand of Marxism and how he deceived the naïve into ceding more and more power to his regime. In his Little Red Book, I read his argument that class and class struggle justify violent revolution making it necessary for peasants and the Chinese people to murder business owners and seize their assets . I saw how Mao played on class envy, enflaming violent hatred in Chinese peasants towards the wealthy, justifying the brutal annihilation of factory owners. I saw how he brainwashed the young and naïve to accomplish his slaughter of farmers through the slogan, “From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.” History reveals that eventually 65 million Chinese lost their lives through Mao’s evil Marxist policies. 65 million! So, perhaps, I am more alarmed than most at the spread of a very similar ideology throughout the institutions of America over the last twenty years. It is called cultural Marxism and is also known as critical theory, a subset of which is critical race theory.  
Origin and Growth of Critical Theory
Critical theory is a comprehensive way of viewing society that is rooted in Karl Marx’s dichotomy of society into the oppressed proletariat laboring class and the oppressor bourgeoisie land and business owner class. Italian Marxist Antonia Gramsci extended this oppressor/oppressed lens into every aspect of culture. Thus, not only are laborers oppressed by business owners, but the poor are oppressed by the rich, blacks are oppressed by whites, women are oppressed by men, homosexuals and transgendered oppressed by cisgendered people. Poor nations are oppressed by wealthy nations, immigrants wanting to cross our borders are oppressed by Americans citizens who want closed borders. Palestinian Muslims are oppressed by Israel. Gramsci called the force that enables these oppressors to oppress “unjust, cultural hegemony.” You may remember this term from history class, which usually refers to the influence of stronger nations over weaker ones. Hegemony means the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group.
After the Marxist revolution failed to topple capitalism in the early twentieth century, Marxists, who had gone back to the drawing board, picked up Gramsci’s hegemony concept. One such group, the Frankfurt School, following Gramsci’s lead, expanded Marx’s oppressor/oppressed economic lens to every sphere of social injustice. All inequities are caused by the cultural power of the OPPRESSORS, which these OPPRESSORS cling to through their religious, political, social, and cultural structures. These structures, such as Christianity, the US Constitution, the free market, accurate history, and the structure of the family must be torn down to accomplish social justice. One’s membership in oppressed groups is called his intersectionality rating and determines the legitimacy of one’s truth claim. Thus, a black, female, gay immigrant has more credibility than just a black man. During the last 25 years among Christians in the West there has come a welcome return to a concern for social justice and especially opposition to racism. But tragically, many Christians who lack an awareness of the tenets of cultural Marxism are being seduced into its anti-biblical thinking, including their thinking about politics.
Four Characteristics of Cultural Marxism
1. Cultural Marxism Is Based on a Corrupt, Anti-Biblical View of Justice
Amplification: This view argues, “all inequalities are unjust.” Privilege is evil and the cause of oppression. Equal opportunity is replaced by the call for equity. Whereas equality means that each individual or group is given the same opportunity or resources, equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and, therefore allocates the exact resources needed to reach an equal outcome among all. This is pure Marxism—the redistribution of wealth, i.e. the state stealing from the rich and giving those funds to the poor. After all, why should some have so much and others so little? It is not fair! Mao fomented revolution through his slogan “from each according to his ability and to each according to his need.” This utopian ideal to force “equality” upon others led ultimately to the slaughter of 65 million Chinese by Mao, and 20 million in the USSR by Lenin and Stalin (cited from Money Greed and God, by Jay Richardson). That this Marxist view of justice is seen in critical theory is obvious. For example, Ibram Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, and leading spokesman for CRT writes, “As an anti-racist, when I see racial DISPARITIES, I see racism” (Cited by Ted Cruz, Unwoke). Think of it, ANY inequity PROVES racism.
Thinking Biblically:

Inequality is not unjust. It is God who has ordained the exact circumstances of every creature. In Romans 9 Paul gives God’s response to the accusation of being unjust in treating humans differently, Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion” (vs 14).
There is zero biblical case for the state redistributing wealth. The eighth commandment, which prohibits theft, underscores the ownership of private property while the tenth commandment warns against the covetousness that is at the core of critical theory’s oppressor/oppressed social binary.
The chief obstacle to defining justice as equal outcomes is the Bible. It overwhelmingly teaches that outcomes are a result of numerous factors, including the blessing of God upon righteousness as well as potentially being unjustly oppressed.

The Biblical law requiring landowners to harvest only once leaving the leftovers for the poor needs to be recognized; but to act justly is not just defending the marginalized.
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Must Christians renounce political and cultural power in order not to lose sight of the fact that heaven is their true home? Many evangelical leaders believe so. C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, recognized that it is entirely the other way round: “It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.”

Last week we took a look at the debates over whether the elites in charge of evangelical colleges, seminaries, and other institutions, in their desire to gain a hearing in the world, have compromised key Christian convictions in the process.
This week we dive into a related topic making the rounds, the current fracturing of the evangelical world. Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote a much cited article in the Atlantic entitled “The Evangelical World is Breaking Apart” in which he contends that the evangelical churches are fracturing because they have become politicized and tribal “repositories of grievances.” David French (unsurprisingly) agrees.
Wehner and French’s contention can be boiled down to this: Christians who are politically active, more often than not, have exchanged Christian faithfulness for the resentful rage that defines the contemporary political scene.
A slightly different angle is found in Collin Hansen’s recent article about the final Together For the Gospel conference, to be held in 2022, where he laments the fact that “many pastors find more in common with even unbelievers who share their political and cultural assumptions than with believers who affirm the same doctrine.”
Unlike Wehner and French, Hansen doesn’t throw every politically right-leaning Christian under the bus, but he is also troubled by the same basic dynamic: those who would strongly insist that evangelicals should adhere to certain cultural and political priorities. Russell Moore shares Hansen’s concern, although he places those he criticizes in the category of heretics.
Wehner, French, and the myriad other writers churning out slightly different forms of the same basic claim, of course, always have only one group of evangelicals in mind: those on the right. While they may throw in a brief comment here or there about how this is a bipartisan issue, they never really examine left-leaning evangelicals at all. When Wehner mentions a pastor who has recently resigned his pulpit and left the ministry altogether because “he felt undermined by people in his congregation…who, it turned out, were less animated by spiritual matters than by political agendas” you know he isn’t talking about supporters of President Biden. Trump and evangelicals who support him are the problem. They are the ones who angrily denounce, ridicule, persecute, slander, and hound pastors from their pulpits. Crickets regarding those on the left.
One of the main ways this comes out is the anecdotes and quotes these authors choose to highlight. There will be a lengthy litany of abuses coming from those on the right, with an equally lengthy recounting of how mistreated and abused those are who righteously stand apart from politics, simply feeding God’s people with the unadulterated truths of Scripture. No doubt such mistreatment does occur. It should be opposed. But the selectivity of these authors is not accidental. It builds up a one-sided picture meant to send shivers of revulsion down the spine of any decent human being: “That kind of evangelicals, they are the problem. They have made an idol of politics. They must be stopped.” The recent special on CBS is a particularly egregious example of this kind of intentional selectivity. Those who, it is claimed, are politically neutral, are always carefully portrayed as being above the fray, their hands unsullied by worldly affairs. Instead, such pastors and leaders—so we are told—simply want to show us how the gospel shapes our understanding of race, gender relations, immigration, and more. Nothing political in that, right?
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