PROVERBS #6: THE SON PREPARES FOR A LIFE OF POVERTY

‘Better is the poor who walks in his integrity than one who is perverse in his lips, and is a fool’ (Proverbs 19:1).

‘For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich’ (2 Corinthians 8:9).

We are looking at the Proverbs as the Father’s instruction to His Son as He prepares to take on human flesh and enter a life bracketed by space and time. The divine Son must learn what it is to be human, which means the Son must learn what it means to be poor. A little preparation is always a good thing, even for the Son of God.

It was ordained of old that Jesus was to be a poor man. He was to enter this world not in ivory palaces but in a feeding trough for barn animals. For this reason Proverbs speaks freely about the poor because the Savior of men would be among their number. In a culture where poverty is often looked down upon as a unfortunate accident, the book of Proverbs almost always protects the poor as special to God and often sees poverty as a cousin to piety. Jesus was to be a poor man in order to highlight the honor attached to a humble existence. What is it about poverty that fits in so nicely with Christian piety? The reasons are perhaps many but two seem to stand out. First, poor men are wonderfully free from all the encumbrances of wealth that stultify one’s vision of God. Having less and less allows the soul to breath God’s air more and more. Now a disclaimer must be made. By poverty the Book of Proverbs is not talking about that extreme poverty which deprives the body of all comforts and deflates the human spirit. It speaks of poverty as the state of most men who must live without all the posh advantages of wealth and who must fight the land and their own body as they work by the sweat of their brow. It is the dignified poverty of the curse, not a cursed penury. And while Proverbs speaks protectively about poverty in general it never affirms a poverty that comes by a refusal to work. As Proverbs 10:4 says, “Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth.” We are talking, rather, of those noble souls who choose to walk upright while struggling to pay their bills. To these God grants a blessing, “Better the poor whose walk is blameless than the rich whose ways are perverse” (28:6). This man is contrasted with the one who bows to the idol of wealth and so compromises his personal integrity. The advantage of poverty is that it allows a man to see more clearly the heavenly realm, like Bunyan’s Celestial City. The reason is obvious; in the poor man’s world the murky haze of accumulated things is much thinner. This is perhaps why Jesus must be a poor. He must show us that the goal of life is to maximize intimacy with the Father and that is facilitated by distancing oneself from distractions. We see this pattern throughout the life of Jesus. He was a man who exuded the very presence of God because He had much time for God. He had no house to care for (Mt 8:20), no bank accounts, no itinerary, no payments, no calendar, no pets, no chariots, no phone calls, and, God forbid, no podcasts. No man was ever more free to serve God and His fellow man with such sacrifice, such economy. He did much with little, because little is the kingdom’s secret to doing more. “The last shall be first and the first last.” Jesus was instructed about the life of poverty and He capitalized on that poverty by living for God as no one had ever lived.

Secondly, the Son was made poor to show how poverty strengthens faith. Now if faith is the queen of the virtues -and it is - then anything that increases it must be good. God says, “For without faith it is impossible to please Him.” Now if faith is the virtue of trusting God in all things, and especially in those things for which we have no possible solution, then poverty puts us in a advantageous (or desperate) position to trust God. The psalms are replete with poor people crying out to God in the midst of impossible situations. Psalm 34:6 says, “This poor man called, and the LORD heard him; he saved him out of all his troubles.” For poor people faith is their arm of strength. For the self-sufficient faith is but a time-honored principle hung up in the vestry of one’s mind but has no practical value. Like the appendix, it is nothing more than a vestigial organ that exists only to talk about. Most of us see our faith most clearly when we trust God to help us do what we are unable to do. Jesus lived this way all the time… because Jesus had nothing. For Him, faith was not a principle of life but life itself. He lived His entire thirty-three years as a poor man who must trust God. In this dire context He taught us how to live by faith. And what a life He lived! He feared nothing and He had nothing. And when He encountered want, He prayed and His Father always raised up a plethora of supports, whether that be the women who followed behind, the fish that paid his tax, the friend’s extra bed room, the shady spot under a tree, or a rival who fed Him over for dinner. He had full assurance that every need would be met by divine bounty. To say that his life was the complete opposite of those who live in affluence and self-sufficiency, would be a great understatement. Jesus must be poor so we who are so very poor might learn the beauty and the power of faith. And in doing this, we come to understand the presence and the magnanimity of God, just as He did.

The poverty of Jesus simply redefined the term forever. Because of Jesus’ poverty men and women are made rich. Wealth comes not from the abundance of stuff but in knowing the meek and lowly, and yes, poor, Savior. And so Proverbs is correct to extol the place of the poor. As it says in 19:22, “Better to be poor than a liar.” What comfort it is to those who live with the pressure of constant shortage to remember the poverty of the Savior. But there is more here than mere remembrance. The poverty of Jesus was more than an example to inspire; His poverty was the vehicle by which men would be made rich. Rich men never make men rich. They talk, they fleece, they parade but they never enrich. Conferences often feature the rich and famous who try to tell the lowly how to be like them. But nothing ever happens. Only a poor man can make a poor man rich, because only a man who has learned to be rich toward God while still sweating for His daily bread, can impact the life of another. This is exactly what the Son did. He lived as a poor man to lift up other poor men. The irony of all this is striking, for as we become more and more monetarily independent we become poorer and poorer and to the degree with look to God in our poverty we become richer and richer. This fact more than any other explains why the Western Church is so impoverished. When God is small in our hearts then we turn to snappy music thinking that will fill the void. When God is small to us, His Word no longer moves us so we turn to finely crafted pep talks that make us feel better for a moment. Sadly, our churches are filled with much stuff and little of God, expensive carpets but poor hearts. And while nodding our heads to Jesus we have refused to be like Him. He is an inspirational rally point, not a King. And why should we listen to Him anyway when we smugly think we have everything we need through our own efforts. We sit on our rich, fat, patios of ease thinking they are heaven whereas in reality they may be hell in disguise.

In being poor Jesus was voluntarily agreeing to suffer. Yes, the instructions given in Proverbs clearly taught Him that the poor will suffer at the hands of the rich. Note these words,

“An unplowed field produces food for the poor, but injustice sweeps it away” (13:23).

“The poor are shunned even by their neighbors, but the rich have many friends” (14:20).

“The poor are shunned by all their relatives— how much more do their friends avoid them! Though the poor pursue them with pleading, they are nowhere to be found” (19:7).

“The poor plead for mercy, but the rich answer harshly” (18:23).

‘“A ruler who oppresses the poor is like a driving rain that leaves no crops” (28:3).

And this describes the life of Jesus, does it not? Was He not victimized by injustice? Was He not was shunned by friends and relatives? Did He not constantly receive the debilitating effects of verbal abuse? Was He not mistreated, falsely condemned and nailed to a cross by narcissistic leaders? And so in His lowliness He died as a poor, worthless slave. And He knew all this would happen! The Father had told Him. And even though He knew all this would happen to Him, He came to save us anyway. He came as a poor, poor man though He was King over all. He came in poverty in order to raise us up to eternal life, yes, we who were by name impoverished by sin. And on that fateful day outside the city walls of Jerusalem, that poor man put a legion of other poor men on His back and with one final cry of triumph ushered them into a land where poverty will be no more, not poverty of life, nor poverty of soul.