Do you hear the call?
From the introduction of Make Poverty Personal: Taking the Poor as Seriously as the Bible Does by Ash Barker
The Bible is like a precious weaving made by God through oppressed people. Yet, its cry for help is mostly ignored. The call is loud and obvious, but people are so distracted with other agendas that those who need to hear it most miss it.
Jim Wallis, from the Sojourners Community in Washington, is one Western Christian leader who hasn’t missed the Bible’s concern for the poor. In the 1970s he and a colleague actually went through the whole Bible with a pair of scissors and cut out every one of the 2,000 verses that related to poverty and injustice. His was a very hole-y Bible indeed! People in pews were aghast as this cut-and-paste Bible was held up. But, as he pointed out, this is what most Christians do with this most holy book.
Some might say that ending poverty is really the domain of activists, economists, and politicians. What does Christianity have to offer to help end poverty? It is time that Christians reconsider what the Bible has to say about poverty. Specifically, what are its concerns about the nature of poverty, and what does God require of us?
While there are differences between life in Bible times and today- global banking, travel, and commerce, to name just a few- what I found was that God reveals the very nature of poverty and sews a thread of response throughout the Bible. As I took time most mornings to trace and reflect prayerfully on this threads, I better understood what our response to poverty can be if we take poverty as seriously and as personally as God does.
The Bible too often has been reduced to children’s entertainment, rather than the greatest revealed response to poverty and injustice ever written. For when it comes to understanding and responding to poverty, the best book to read is still the Bible. Taken collectively, its concerns show us how to respond to the suffering and tragedy that causes and leaves humans in poverty, both in Bible times and today. Yet this library of insights and pleas is rarely appreciated, and even more rarely acted upon.
If you take the thread of this message out of the Bible, the Bible will quickly unravel. God’s special concern for the poor is developed as a stronger and stronger theme as the revelation of God’s will becomes clearer. Will we read God’s Word with eyes wide open? Will we allow Scripture to inspire and inform what we do with our lives?
If the people of our volatile world are to have a common future together, then poverty has to go. No one deserves poverty… and yet, in a fallen world everyone is vulnerable to it. Jesus says, “The rain falls on the just and the unjust” (Matt. 5:45).
There is something spiritual about poverty that can’t be sorted out only by cash, economics, medicines, or government structures. Surely, despair is an integral part of poverty, and the only lasting antidote to despair is the hope that the living Christ can bring. Scott Bessenecker, who works with InterVarsity in helping American Christians engage with poverty, put it this way:
“Governments cannot grant true hope. We must acknowledge the spiritual dimension of poverty. There are also, I believe, demonic forces at work that the UN knows little about except in the most generic sense (greed, corruption, oppressions are some of the faces but there are deep demonic roots). It will take discerning, spirit-filled people moving into these communities to confront demonic issues that surround poverty. Satan’s plan in the garden was essentially a plan to perpetually impoverish God’s image-bearers. One of God’s original commands was to ‘subdue the earth.’ I think this relates to God’s mission for humans to vanquish his enemy. Believers are called, equipped, and set apart to confront the powers of evil that keep people trapped in intractable (difficult) poverty.”
Could it be that Christians could play a crucial role in ending the despair of poverty through the authority of the One who overcomes death? Poverty is not just a lack of cash, medicine, or technology. It is also about the confidence, skills, and belief that people can use what they have for the community’s good. Surely poverty is as much about identity, meaning, and belonging as material goods. Surely God’s hope needs to be involved to change the world and rid it of poverty.
