A Layer of Pea Gravel

John Schneider continues his good work in chapter four, and reminds me of another book I am currently reading (and which I would recommend), which is Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth. She says that when evangelicals begin their presentation of the gospel with the fact and reality of sin, they are presenting the gospel out of context. The basic reality is not sin. That is not the foundation. The presentation of the gospel needs to be creation, fall, and then redemption. If we begin by assuming the fall, then we are skewing the nature of the universe before talking about the Lord of the universe. Everything was foundationally good, man rebelled, and God has provided a way back.

This really is important and Schneider does a wonderful job with this. He begins his discussion of affluence where all affluence began, in the Garden of Eden. Then after the rebellion, which marred everything, God began His redemptive work with His people Israel, and brought them into the land of Canaan, which was the beginning of the restoration of Eden. When He brought them back into the land, He gave them His law. Initially it had been “stay away from that tree,” but now, because of our experience with sin, the law had to be more detailed and specifc, but it was still all about the restoration of Eden.

But when you create Edens, you create the possibility of serpents. And that is what this chapter is about. God began to restore Israel to Eden, and they responded by falling again. The literature of the prophets is a literature that confronts, time and again, the misuse of the blessings of God. “The writings of the prophets are largely about the unique evils that people can bring about by means of affluence. All the prophets describe behaviors that realize the worst fears of the speaker in Deuteronomy” (p. 91).

And this is what gets us to the nub of the matter. Guiltmongers like Ron Sider tend to assume that the mere possession of wealth in this world means that you are living above the level of “sufficiency” while others are suffering (with sufficiency being fuzzily defined), which in turn means that you, the affluent one, are necessarily sinning. The prophets and the wisdom literature (the subject of this chapter) are far more nuanced than this. Can one sin grotesquely with the affluence God gives? Absolutely, and the prophet Amos will take off your head, and scoop your insides out with a spoon. Can one receive God’s blessing of wealth and be a dolt with it? Yes again. But Schneider demonstrates a wisdom here that neither the Siderians nor the health and wealthers can comprehend. They fall into the same error, actually. But Schneider quotes all kinds of Bible verses.

“Better is a little with righteousness than large income with injustice” (Prov. 16:8, p. 112).

“The faithful will abound with blessings, but one who is in a hurry to be rich will not go unpunished” (Prov. 28:20, p. 113).

“Whoever trusts in the Lord will be enriched” (Prov. 28:25, p. 110).

“A slack hand causes poverty” (Prov. 10:4, p. 111)

When you set one set of passages against another set, you will get either Ron Sider or the Rev. Jake T. Purvis. When you accept them all, and live in accordance with them all, the Lord brings blessing and he adds no grief to it. But for many believers, they assume that when God brings blessing, there has to be catch somewhere. They sit down to the hot apple pie He brought them, expecting to find a layer of pea gravel in it.