I’m going to handle this as fairly
as I can, and I’m going to start by looking for possible exceptions to the
(probably) controversial statement: “To my knowledge, the pattern of just giving a
handout to an individual in need is never smiled upon in Scripture.”
Really?
How’s about Deut.14:28-29?
“At the end of every three years, bring all the tithes of that year’s produce
and store it in your towns, so that the Levites (who have no allotment or inheritance
of their own) and the foreigners, the fatherless and the widows who live in
your towns may come and eat and be satisfied, and so that the Lord your God may
bless you in all the work of your hands.” Well, OK, first off you bring your
tithes which could include money, but
in the context of vss.
22-27, are mostly farm products, such as grain, new wine, olive oil,
firstborn from your flocks, etc. If you had to travel a long way to Jerusalem,
you could exchange the product for money to take with you to the Temple. But
every third year you were supposed to bring the tithe (which is assumed to be
mostly food, not money) to put in a localized storage facility, the rough
equivalent of a food bank, so that. . . just anyone could just come up and ask for a free meal or a handout? Um,
no. It’s specifically there for the “Levites. . . . [and] foreigners, the
fatherless and the widows who live in your towns may come and eat and be
satisfied.” The Lord says that the reason why Levites were included in this
food program was because they didn’t have a tribal land inheritance of their
own. The others listed would commonly be those with the least “voice” and most
easily taken advantage of.
If someone would like to make the
case that a physically disabled person like a blind person (whose job prospects
were virtually nil) could qualify for this local food program, I’d probably
agree with him. The Lord specifically warns against taking advantage of them in
other passages, such as these,
so he had special concern for them.
But what I don’t see here is the
Lord advocating handing money to someone, especially if they’re on the street
and you don’t know their situation. A person in charge of a food bank can
distinguish between someone coming forward who’s truly needy versus someone who
has a dysfunctional behavioral pattern, such as drunkenness. They can keep
records. They know the people in their town. And most of the stuff in their
storage is going to be food, not money.
The other references I find in the
Torah are in reference to someone loaning
something to someone. Granted, you’re supposed to be generous to someone in
need and treat them with dignity,
and this affects how you collect the repayment. And of course Jesus commanded
us to go out of our way to loan without expecting to be paid back and to invite
people over for supper who could never repay our generosity.
But just handing money to someone,
especially on a regular basis? Especially if you don’t know why they’re poor? I don’t see that
advocated in Scripture, particularly in light of 2
Thes. 3:10.
As we discussed before,
Solomon gives lots of reasons why people are poor: Bad spending habits or other
bad financial decisions, bad work ethic, or other personally dysfunctional
behaviors such as addictions, etc. And if you hand over money to someone who
falls into one of these categories, you are not showing them love at all.
You’re doing the equivalent of handing booze to an alcoholic.
I’ve seen this in my last church. I remember one case in particular. We were a small struggling church of about 20-30 members. A family came to us for financial assistance, a common occurrence. They were about to have their lights turned off. One of our elders, who’s done financial counseling, sat down with them and made out a budget. We had an extra car which was donated by another member which we basically gave to them. And we gave them some financial assistance. . . .and six months later they came to us again. After confirming consensus among the elders, the one who’d helped them went back to them and asked them if they’d followed the budget he’d laid out for them. They said no. And that was our answer to their request for assistance: No.
Anyone who’s worked for any length
of time with the poor can tell you this is a pattern they see over and over and
over and over. Someone comes to them for assistance, they help them, only to
see them exhibiting the same behaviors which made them poor in the first place.
Solomon does address this, if only
indirectly. For example, he says
that “Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth.” He’s
extolling hard work, providing the general principle that if you work hard,
you’ll tend to be wealthier than if
you’re lazy. If you’re lazy and thus poor, quite frankly, you deserve to be. Get off your backside and get to work.
This is implied in every verse where
he extols good financial habits and discourages bad ones, along with their
attendant promises/threats. Again, my TAWG Blog discussed this here.
In
Prov. 19:19 he lays
out another principle I believe we need to apply to this issue: “A hot-tempered
person must pay the penalty; rescue them, and you will have to do it again.”
Yes, it’s talking about a hot-tempered man instead of someone with financially
dysfunctional habits. But the underlying principle is still the same: If you
rescue them without addressing the underlying issues, the “root causes,” so to
speak, you’re only enabling (and thus perpetuating) self-destructive behavior.
Are there people out there in America, who through absolutely no fault of either their own or their parents’, are perpetually poor, such as those physically disabled? Or maybe held back by racism? Or maybe undereducated in an underperforming school so they’re completely unprepared for the outside world? Of course there are.
Are there people out there in America, who through absolutely no fault of either their own or their parents’, are perpetually poor, such as those physically disabled? Or maybe held back by racism? Or maybe undereducated in an underperforming school so they’re completely unprepared for the outside world? Of course there are.
And we definitely need to help them.
Sacrificially. And in fact, we need to offer help—real help—even to those whose
behavior is self-destructive, who are poor because of bad choices they’ve made.
But we do that by offering them a heart-change via the Good News of Jesus,
which will affect their lives from the inside-out. If they don’t show any
interest in that, and if their behavior is self-destructive, then
we do them no favors by enabling it.
If we’re going to be really
following the example of our Savior, then we need to consider this: The Good
News of Christ is completely free, but if our Message has no expression of
heart-change which culminates in a changed life, it’s not the message of Paul
or the apostles or Jesus himself. And that will eventually filter out into the
way we conduct our finances.
We’ll spend more time on positive ideas on how to help
the poor on the next posting.
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