When
God liberates the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, God proceeds to give
them a law to guide and shape their new community. Egypt did not have such a law. In Egypt, Pharaoh was the law. But God gives the Israelites a written law specifically to
prevent a system developing that had institutions like a Pharaoh or slavery.
God
knows that, if humans are left to themselves, what “naturally” emerges is a
system in which the strong bully their way to the top, and the weak get shoved
to the bottom. That’s what
happened in Egypt, which reduced the Hebrews to a slave class. (Unrestricted Libertarianism always
results with some having more rights than others.)
That
kind of a system is unsustainable, and eventually draws down upon itself some
kind of catastrophe. With Egypt it
was a series of ecological disasters we know as the 10 plagues. When a society is out of balance and
out of synch with the laws of the Creator, the creation itself rebels and the
balance is reset at great cost.
To
prevent this, God gives the Israelites a set of laws to live by. These laws have the effect of reducing
the rights of the powerful and wealthy, while enhancing the rights of the weak
and poor. They are designed to
keep one class from accumulating too much wealth and power.
Nowhere
is this clearer than in the Sabbath and Jubilee laws of Leviticus 25 and
Deuteronomy 15. Basically, all
accrued wealth was to revert periodically to the original owners (according to
the distribution to tribes and clans during the conquest of Canaan. That conquest itself, by the way, was
at least in part a rebellion against wealth inequality imposed by the corrupt petty
rulers of Canaanite cities). This
meant that wealth inequality was contradicted; equality was required to be
reestablished every few years. At
that time all debts were to be remitted, and all property restored to an
equitable distribution. If you
lost money during that time you got it back; if you made money you gave it up.
Notice
that the Bible has no concern for “personal responsibility,” “rewarding the
successful,” or any of the other self-serving rationalizations of wealth
inequality. The philosophy here is
that there is to be no wealth inequality among God’s people; equality is periodically
restored. And it is restored
without any prejudice or bias in favor of what supposedly supports “economic
growth.”
Jesus
himself agrees with this. (He is
the source and fulfillment of Scripture in any case.) In his inaugural sermon in Nazareth he quotes the prophet
Isaiah, and asserts that proclaiming Jubilee (“the year of the Lord’s favor”)
is an important aspect of his work as the Messiah (Luke 4:18-19; Isaiah 61:1-3). The rest of his ministry features sharp
criticism of the wealthy, and deep sympathy for the poor (Luke 1:51-53;
6:20-26; 12:16-21; 16:19-31; 18:18-25; 21:1-4; etc. And that’s just a sampling from one gospel).
Wealth
inequality always results in disaster because it is against God’s will and plan
for a healthy creation. Disaster
is the inevitable and necessary consequence of wealth inequality in a social
system.
That
is why it is imperative that we take seriously the wealth inequalities evident
in our own economy. This situation
goes against God’s will. If it
persists, the consequences will not be pretty.
And
that’s just our national economy.
The global economy is in dramatically worse shape, with about 5 billion
people in grinding poverty while a mere few million have a firm grip on nearly
all the wealth.
Even
if it is unintelligible or offensive for some to hear that “global warming is
God’s punishment,” it is quite clear that global warming is a result of a comparative
handful of humans in the industrialized world making themselves wildly wealthy
at the expense of everyone else on the planet, and now at the expense of the
planet itself. Call it the wrath
of the Creator, or call it the consequence of imbalance in the creation, the
result is the same.
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