Let’s review something that applies to several current conversations I’m having. Review the Bible, and Proverbs in particular. You gain the worldview that God is the maker and owner of all things. He portions out His property to whomever He desires, and on terms that suit His purpose.
His purpose is to reveal His glory. The whole dispute He has with Satan and his allies on God’s staff turns on the question of who merits glory and worship from humans. On the way to asserting His truth, God has granted provisional limited control of parts of His Creation to Satan’s feudal authority. As humans, we are by default under Satan’s authority. We can trump his authority by appealing to Christ.
Doing so requires that we embrace His Covenant. His Covenant includes referring back to Proverbs, where we learn that God grants us our bodies and all the means to glorify Him while here in this world. Everything we can possibly have is on loan from God. When we acknowledge that and give Him due glory and worship, He asserts His privilege, and inserts Himself into the authority structure of Satan.
Because we acknowledge God’s ownership of our property, we are careful what we do with it. If you abstract the clear statements of Biblical Law, you learn that buying stuff is one thing. You may not have too many choices in vendors and what you buy, but you naturally strive to glorify God in how you do business. When He grants us a surplus, we try to honor His name (His reputation) by how we use it.
The Covenant defines that as doing everything we can to bless our covenant family. We put their human needs in the same basket as ours. If we have still more surplus after meeting our convictions on that issue, then we can invest in their future welfare in other ways.
This is where we bump squarely into sources like Proverbs. When you read passages telling you not to cosign a loan for a stranger, there’s a lot more than what’s in the words themselves. Hebrew proverbs are like that. It’s not the words themselves, but what they indicate about the larger issues of life under the Covenant. The main principle is that you don’t let God’s loans to you get tied up in affairs that you cannot directly observe, and over which you cannot assert some control.
You are responsible for seeing that what God gives you goes to His glory. You don’t invest in the lives of strangers who are not under your moral covering. Unless you are directly involved in the business, it is a sin to invest in it. You have no idea how your investment is being used. At the least, you must have a trusted proxy (under your covering) working for you in that business. God Himself requires of you a personal interface.
Thus, you cannot ever invest God’s money in a stock market, for example. Most financial markets are designed specifically to keep you away from your investment. You can audit all you want, but if you are not involved in the business, you cannot possibly see whether God is glorified in the operations.
As it is, the whole world of western contracts and labor are inherently wicked in God’s eyes. The legal system itself directly contradicts God’s Word. The mere existence of corporations as persons is purely Satanic. It is about as defiant as you can get against God’s Word.
Here’s something most people never consider: The entire structure of things like stock markets is bogus. Your investment is real, but nothing else about the market is. The whole thing is entirely notional; there is no real property exchanged. It’s all nothing but electronic noise. These days you can’t even get real currency out of the market, only numbers on a computer at some bank. And that bank could collapse for no reason you could understand, taking all your imaginary dollars with it.
We have very little choice about banking and currency. Every day we are creeping closer to virtual money only. Under the Covenant, you aren’t obliged to fight that monster. But you are obliged to stay out of the stock market and similar means of gambling. You are not permitted to invest God’s resources in places you are not directly involved.
Giving outright gifts/charity is another matter. The only constraint is your convictions; share according to your heart. You can give anything to anyone at all, and you are off the hook for how it gets used once it leaves your hands.
