“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
Growing Dominion, Part 80
“There is that maketh himself rich, yet hath nothing: there is that maketh himself poor, yet hath great riches” (Prov. 13:5).
There is a little bit of doggerel from John Bunyan, which sums this up nicely. “There was a man, some thought him mad, the more he gave the more he had.” Scripture does not teach us that money is an inert unit of exchange. Rather, the Bible routinely speaks of money as seed, and what we do with that money being different kinds of soil. When a farmer puts seed in the ground, in a certain sense it would be possible to say that he is “throwing it all away.” But in another sense, he is doing nothing of the kind. But if a man were to throw the same amount of seed out of an airplane, or out of a boat on the lake, he would be throwing it all away.
There is a generosity that looks toward the harvest, and there is “generosity” that is simply mindless folly. But to the man in the proverb who keeps, hoards, gathers, both kinds of “throwing it away” look like madness to him. And it continues to look like madness even though his hoarding leads only to poverty.