It’s revolutionary, and I am hardly the first to suggest it: Don’t invest with a material calculus, but in moral terms.
Literally, not merely as a figure of speech — switch to an entirely different form of reckoning. Put that spreadsheet away. Let God handle the results; trust His promises in accordance with His Laws. Measure value in terms of the moral fabric of God’s character. It’s not sinful to be aware of the monetary price tag, but it’s wrong to make it significant. It should count as nothing more than awareness of what you have to invest.
I suppose I should note here that I do not at all support the Western Christian teaching about tithing. In the Bible, tithing was restricted entirely to agricultural products. If it grew from natural processes, then you tithed it directly as Firstfruits. There were lots of straight wage-earners in ancient Israel and they did not pay a tithe. It would be regarded as an error, an insult to God because it would tend to make the priests avaricious. Let them count only on their share of what God allows to grow with each season. Everything else was waiting on God to move in the hearts of men to make freewill offerings. In all seriousness, brothers and sisters, do not tithe anything you didn’t grow from natural processes. If you ain’t a farmer or herder, everything and anything you give is a freewill offering.
(Note: In response to an offline query, let me add one thing. Tithing is generally necessary for Western churches, but not essential to holiness.)
Still, the whole idea is that you offer tribute to your Sovereign. Insofar as people in ancient times thought about investments, it was in terms of the koinonia, a fancy word we stole from Greek to describe a tribal enterprise. By whatever means, you intended to enrich your own extended household. Their wealth was yours, and yours theirs. Not like communism where some committee with no real bond to you can rape your household, but genuine family that kept you alive when things were tough. There was no material calculus at the core of things. If you were catastrophically disabled, you had nothing to fear. Your family loved you and would count it their divine duty to take care of your needs and to keep your life meaningful. Your sovereign was your head of household, your own family point-man.
I’ll give you a startling concrete example of how it works out. Let’s look at ancient warfare, with the assumption that a particular battle was entirely morally necessary for defense. The battle began with the warlord rushing off to meet the enemy physically himself, and all the other warriors following behind him. That’s a serious investment of the self. Could a leading man not make himself do that, he was no longer your actual leader, just an adviser at most. The kind of ethics that allows a commander to hide behind his troops is a shocking immorality as God views things. If he’s not all in, he is unfit to command. Think about how that applies to investment of more mundane resources.
You and I will never persuade many in our world to buy into such a value system. But we also know this is fundamental to how God designed Creation. So we have the mass hypnosis of the human race that it can be handled by the calculus of investment and loss on a spreadsheet. It seems to work that way as far as they can tell. But in the long term, it does not. You can’t take that spreadsheet with you when you stand before God to account for your life under His Laws. While that has the effect in human psychology of pushing off accountability to some future point, some consideration that is practically infinite in terms of emotional impact, it simply shows how utterly fallen is our modern society.
And it also shows how the whole thing rests on a miracle of God. If you don’t feel a daily sense of intense accountability to God, nothing I say or do can make it happen. The only thing I can offer here is an exercise in conscious awareness, an attempt to help you train your mind to serve the heart. This is our revolution, the one that most of the world will hardly notice. When people mock your moral considerations, just smile and laugh with them, because they wouldn’t understand if you wept at their moral blindness. Their hearts are asleep. But you keep your loyalty to the unseen koinonia, the divine economy and financing of His Heavenly Tribe. We belong to an economic system that can’t fit on a spreadsheet.
I can testify that it works well in concrete reality, but that in itself rests on whether God makes you believe it.
