If this is you or someone you know, you might want to read this!

 

Part of all you earn is yours to keep. — The Richest Man in Babylon

(The book, The Richest Man in Babylon, was originally written as a series of pamphlets around the early 1900’s. Bankers had them written to encourage people to save their money. The pamphlets were eventually combined into a book)

 

While my wife and I were watching TV the other night and visiting about this book, a commercial came on advertising a TV show called:  BLOOD AND OIL. The tag line at the end of the commercial was:  “Sometimes you have to play dirty to get filthy rich.”

To get a better understanding of prosperity from the Bible’s point of view, we need to look at where this idea of filthy rich or the idea of money being filthy came from.

The term “filthy lucre” means:  greed for wealth or material gain.

Lucre:
Oxford Dictionary:
(http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/lucre)

Money, especially when regarded as sordid or distasteful or gained in a dishonorable way — “officials getting their hands grubby with filthy lucre.”

Filthy rich:
Very rich, possibly having become so by unfair means. This little phrase can’t be explained without looking at the word “lucre”. From the 14th century lucre has meant money and is referred to as such by no less writers than Chaucer and John Wycliffe. These references generally included a negative connotation and gave rise to the terms “foul lucre” and “filthy lucre”, which have been in use since the 16th century. “Filthy lucre” appears first in print in 1526 in the works of William Tyndale: “Teaching things which they ought not, because of filthy lucre.” Here, Tyndale was using the term to mean dishonorable gain.

Following on the term “filthy lucre”, money became known by the slang term “the filthy”, and it isn’t a great leap from there to the rich being called the “filthy rich”. This was first used as a noun phrase meaning “rich people; who have become so by dishonorable means”.

(http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/filthy-rich.html)

The pairing of filthy and lucre was meant, of course, to highlight the sinfulness of immoderate, greedy or shameful desire for wealth, but this was soon applied to the money itself and then onto the people that had a lot of money. How much is a lot of money? Generally, it is just more than what you have!!!

You can also see how the idea that if you have very much money, you must have had some greed in your life and gained it through dishonest or shameful dealings. Therefore, you have been tainted as well as the money. In some churches, the wealthy feel shunned or closed off because others think that the wealthy must have gained their money through dishonesty. (But they will accept their tithe to help run the church!) While discussing this book in my chiropractor’s office he volunteered the information that his family, that is made up of doctors and lawyers who are very well off, are avoided by most people in their church because the people feel that the family is too well off.

The idea of having much money being sinful started as early as 100 AD and came into its own around 300 AD. Here are some quotes from the early Church Fathers:

You are not making a gift of your possession to the poor person. You are handing over to him what is his.
Ambrose of Milan, 340-397.

The property of the wealthy holds them in chains . . . which shackle their courage and choke their faith and hamper their judgment and throttle their souls. They think of themselves as owners, whereas it is they rather who are owned: enslaved as they are to their own property, they are not the masters of their money but its slaves.
Cyprian, 300 A.D.

The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry man; the coat hanging in your closet belongs to the man who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the man who has no shoes; the money which you put into the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help but fail to help.
Basil of Caesarea, 330-370 A.D.

Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours but theirs.
John Chrysostom, 347-407 AD

Instead of the tithes which the law commanded, the Lord said to divide everything we have with the poor. And he said to love not only our neighbors but also our enemies, and to be givers and sharers not only with the good but also to be liberal givers toward those who take away our possessions.
Irenaeus, 130-200 AD

The rich are in possession of the goods of the poor, even if they have acquired them honestly or inherited them legally.
John Chrysostom, 347-407

Share everything with your brother. Do not say, “It is private property.” If you share what is everlasting, you should be that much more willing to share things which do not last.
The Didache

Let the strong take care of the weak; let the weak respect the strong. Let the rich man minister to the poor man; let the poor man give thanks to God that he gave him one through whom his need might be satisfied.
Clement of Rome, 1st Century

How can I make you realize the misery of the poor? How can I make you understand that your wealth comes from their weeping?
Basil of Caesarea, 330-370 A.D.

At some point these ideas moved from the religious realm into the political realm. In this book, we are trying to get our understanding and thoughts straightened out so we can see the promises of God’s Word come to pass in our lives.

About eight or ten years ago I was in a meeting where the teacher said that in the dark ages, the people desperately wanted out of their poverty and serfdom. The church, which was very wealthy, did not want a lot of people striving to become clergy or priests. The landowners, who gave a lot of money to the church, did not want the lower classes striving to join their ranks. So the church taught that it was sin to try to climb out of poverty. God had put each person where he wanted them, and that if they were content in this life, their reward would come in the next life. That is where they would be rewarded. To keep the people down or content with their poverty, the church taught that to save money was sin and to have much was sin and caused by greed.

A few years later I ran across this on a web search:

In 2009 Alan S. Kahan published Mind vs. Money: The War between Intellectuals and Capitalism.

According to Kahan, there is a strand of Christianity that views the wealthy man as “especially sinful.” This brand asserts that the day of judgment is viewed as a time when “the social order will be turned upside down and… the poor will turn out to be the ones truly blessed.” Many of the church fathers condemned private property and advocated the communal ownership of property as an ideal for Christians to follow. However, they recognized early on that this was an idea that was not practical in everyday life and viewed private property as a “necessary evil resulting from the fall of man.”

According to Kahan, Christian theologians regularly condemned merchants or as we would call them, wholesalers. Honorius of Autun wrote that merchants had little chance of going to heaven whereas farmers were likely to be saved. Gratian wrote that “the man who buys something in order that he may gain by selling it again unchanged and as he bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from God’s temple.

By the 11th century, Benedictine monasteries had become wealthy, owing to the generous donations of monarchs and nobility. In reaction to this wealth, a reform movement arose which sought a simpler, more austere monastic life in which monks worked with their hands rather than acting as landlords over serfs.

By the 13th century some Dominican and Franciscan monks departed from the practice of existing religious order by taking vows of extreme poverty and maintaining an active presence preaching and serving the community rather than withdrawing into monasteries. Francis of Assisi vowed poverty as a key element of the imitation of Christ who was “poor at birth in the manger, poor as he lived in the world, and naked as he died on the cross.”

The contrast between the wealth of the church which at one point owned 20 to 30 percent of the land in Western Europe and the monks that took vows of poverty, caused some uncomfortable questions to be asked about the church’s wealth.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_poverty_and_wealth)

In the book, Mind vs. Money: The War between Intellectuals and Capitalism, Kahan distinguishes three ways of holding money in disdain, “the Three Don’ts,” with a fourth supplementary one thrown in for good measure. The first Don’t recognizes that sufficient money is needed to live a good life but nonetheless disdains commerce:

1. “Don’t Make Money (Just Have It)” (p. 31). If this mandate brings to mind Plato and Aristotle, the next has an altogether different origin.
2. “Don’t Have Money (Give It to the Poor)” (p. 42) inevitably recalls the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. Though few have been able to adhere in full to the rigors of this precept, its influence has been vast. Kahan’s final Don’t has a more modern ring.
3. “Don’t Have or Make More Money Than Others Do (It’s Not Fair).”
4. “Don’t Make Money; Take It and Spend It.”

Another line of Protestant thinking viewed the pursuit of wealth as not only acceptable but as a religious calling or duty. These were generally Calvinist or Puritan theologies which viewed hard work and frugal lifestyles as spiritual acts in themselves. John Wesley was a strong proponent of wealth creation. However, to avoid wealth becoming an obstacle to faith, Wesley exhorted his audiences to “earn all you can, save all you can and give away all you can.” Out of that thinking comes today’s prosperity theology.

(http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=886)

You can see from the quotes of the early church fathers that their idea of giving it all away to be a good Christian became the doctrine of the church.

As a preacher’s son I heard this expression many times, referring to the preacher, “God, you keep him humble, and we will keep him poor.” To take a vow of poverty, to be poor, was considered very religious.

I have seen some people with money in the church, but mostly those without. There are many references in the Bible about trusting God. We are taught not to worry about the future, not to worry about our needs being met, not to be fearful and so on. Along this line then, some teach that it is not trusting God to save money. These people would say that you trust more in the bank and yourself in a financial emergency and your saving shows you may say you trust God with your future, but in your hearts you do not.

I heard many times the warnings from the Bible. Here are some as I remember them.

1. The love of money is the root of all evil.
2. While some coveted after, they pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
3. Give what you have to the poor and follow me.
4. Those that love silver will not be satisfied with silver…
5. Their eyes stand out with fatness; they have more than heart could wish.
6. Not given to much wine, not greedy of filthy lucre
7. Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.

I did not want to be one that was greedy or that loved money or that was pierced through, so I had decided to just live from payday to payday and trust that God would meet my needs, which He did.

But as I read His Word, I ran into verses that troubled me. For instance:

1 Timothy 5:8-9 But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel. Let not a widow be taken into the number under threescore years old, having been the wife of one man,

Proverbs 13:22 A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just.

Proverbs 21:20 There is treasure to be desired and oil in the dwelling of the wise; but a foolish man spendeth it up.

If we are to give everything away to the poor, and are not to save but to trust God from day to day, what do we do with these verses?

Since we have seen where some of this poverty teaching in the church came from, we will be able to see better through the haze to understand what God really expects of us in this life as we wait for the return of His son from heaven.

“Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can.”
— John Wesley (1703 – 1791)

To learn more about this topic Amazon has the book Poverty vs Wealth in paperback, as a Kindle download or on Audible

Live long and Prosper