Biblical Morality: Chapter 12

Tribal Economy

You cannot gain economic efficiency without denying God.

There are lots of good moral reasons for doing things that make no economic sense. Living the otherworldly tribal life in this world doesn’t mean we don’t understand economics as the world sees things, any more than we could forget all the evil we leave behind to walk in God’s moral justice. We are wise as serpents and harmless as doves. We know how predation works, but we aren’t predators.

In the Bible, the fundamental economic unit is the family. The family first seeks God’s face and His justice to receive His promises. While the common Hebrew term is shalom to describe family and social stability, it’s easy to explain to Western minds how that can mean so much more. It refers to a reasonable level of prosperity for food, clothing and shelter. It also implies health, with protection from diseases and other natural threats. Finally, there is frequent mention of protection from human threats.

As we know, these promises were never absolute in the Western intellectual sense. There will always be times when God will afflict humanity broadly with various natural disasters, plagues, and provoking one or another political entity to rise up for whatever reason. Rather, in the midst of all this, God promised to let us find as much peace as anyone is going to get in this world. If your family is killed in a tsunami, that’s your ticket home. Celebrate! If wild animals or wildfires overrun your area, God will help you face that threat. And so it goes with everything that threatens life and comfort on this earth. Even when it seems God has done nothing in particular to protect you, that otherworldly viewpoint reminds you it’s not that important in the first place.

However, quite frequently God picks your holy household out of the mess and offers divine protection. Maybe it will seem random to human eyes, and maybe you’ll never convince them, but you will know the difference. We keep in mind when so-called acts of God strike people anywhere at any time, it’s not that He’s picking on anyone, but we all deserve it and worse. Any deliverance from the default human fate is purely His mercy.

So it is when we engage in economic activity. We aren’t actually worried about success as humans measure things. We worry about obeying God’s laws and clinging to His moral fabric. There is only one reason we bother in the first place: Human life requires a certain minimum of goods and services. If God intends to take our lives, then failure is okay. If He intends to keep us around awhile for His glory, then we had better not be lazy and ignore His leading to do something useful. No loaf for the loafer; everyone does his share in the family calling. But the whole point is not the stuff, but the people.

A fundamental moral disaster in the West is distancing economics from genuine human need. The vile merchant culture makes their profit the one great god of all things. The Bible culture makes people the center of all such activity. Depersonalizing business is anathema. Contracts are Satan’s perversion of covenants. The latter bind persons together; the former bind performance and goods. The focus is all wrong. Your business must of necessity always be a family under covenant, not a bunch of disembodied performances and a pile of goods. You can hire anybody you like, but you are obliged by God to treat them as distant cousins.

There is no place in God’s morals for the corporation. If you aren’t directly involved personally in running things, you should receive no profit. Indirect investment is forbidden unless it is a blood kin interest. That’s because you are investing in the person, not the business. The whole idea is not a cash profit, but a blessing to the people involved. Instead of slashing staff to raise profits, you hire as much kinfolk or covenant family as possible. The purpose is to spread the blessings of God around to family first. Piling up wealth without using it is poking a finger in God’s eye. Nobody says you have to give it away, but you have to use it as a tool for His glory.

In the meantime, you are most certainly serving the customer. You are giving love first, and receiving back some sales in response. It will always be the best you can offer at the price. Think in terms of the blessings of Joseph in Egypt: Everything he touched prospered because he worked in God’s justice. Everything he did was in the name of his God, intended to make Him look good.

Granted, there are some folks who can never be pleased. This brings us back to general obedience so that we can know God will answer our prayers for guidance. Don’t place prior restraints on the answers He might give, but expect Him to speak to your conscience. Nobody says you have be all super nice as is so popular in Western culture; you have to be honest and decent.

Capitalism is evil; it is a heartless desecration of the command from God to love your neighbor as yourself. Communism is just as bad, because it is just as materialistic. So it is with every other economic theory springing from mere human intelligence. God designed, built and authorized only one economic system: ANE feudalism, which is nothing like Western feudalism. It is the one best answer to meeting all the real needs of humans after the Fall. Every other system is a perversion from Hell.

We don’t serve Mammon.