A Thought For The Week Of November 23, 2015

"God doesn't favour princes. God treats rich people and poor people the same. God's hands created all of them." (Job 34:19) The point of this verse is clear: God doesn't play favourites. Rich and poor are the same in the eyes of God - all are created by God. If one were to read this improperly, mind you, it could be a troubling verse. It could be taken to mean that God created certain people TO BE rich or poor. In other words, that God assigned to each their station in life. Perhaps even that God desires that some people be rich and that some people be poor. That I don't believe is the case. Rich and poor are human creations. Socio-economic status is the result of human choices - not that people choose to be poor, but that humans have created a system that creates the two categories. And it's very tempting to place the blame for that on God. (Or, I suppose, to give the credit for that to God, if you're among the rich.) So it becomes an opportunity to declare the rich to be blessed and the poor to be cursed, or at least to suggest that the poor are to blame for their own poverty. That's not the case, of course. That's "prosperity gospel" thinking - a line of thought you can detect in some Old Testament writings, including the Book of Job. This verse to me, however, actually seems to be a counter to such thinking. Here we see that the rich  are neither more loved nor more blessed than the poor, and the poor are neither cursed nor unloved by God. Both groups are created by God and loved by God equally. God shows no partiality. Neither should we allow the distinctions of rich vs. poor to affect how we treat people.