Hedging Your Bets and Hoarding Your Assets

On the relationship between idolatry and injustice

This is a follow up to a previous reflection on idolatry called Idolatry Grows in the Soil of Fear.

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Idolatry and injustice always travel together. Wherever you spot one, you can be sure the other is nearby. Like these guys: 

Grover Dill and Scut Farkus (a toady and his bully) in A Christmas Story (1983)

At least that’s how I imagine it.

Jeremiah 7 is typical of this pattern in the Bible. The prophet addresses injustice first—“If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place”—and then idolatry—“and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your ancestors for ever and ever” (Jeremiah 7:5-7).

It makes sense that God would be concerned about both idolatry and injustice. Jesus identified two commandments that summarize the whole Law and the concerns of the Prophets: ”Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-41). If loving God and loving our neighbors form the irreducible core of God’s Law, then idolatry and injustice are both violations of the most fundamental kind.

What has always been less clear to me is why the Israelites were consistently guilty of both idolatry and injustice. I understood how they are connected conceptually. I was less clear how they are connected practically. Take the prophet Isaiah, for example. He starts a long list of Israel’s crimes with accounts of injustice— 

“Your hands are full of blood! …

Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow.” (1:15-17)

moves on to idolatry—

“Their land is full of silver and gold...
Their land is full of horses…
Their land is full of idols;
they bow down to the work of their hands,
to what their fingers have made.” (2:7-8, my italics)

and returns to injustice—

“The vineyard of the Lord Almighty
is the nation of Israel,
and the people of Judah
are the vines he delighted in.

And he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed;
for righteousness, but heard cries of distress.” (5:7)

The people of God are rarely, if ever, guilty of only idolatry or injustice. They are more commonly depicted as guilty of both. For Isaiah, at least, the relationship between the two is causative, not correlative. The peoples’ land is full of silver and gold (wealth) and full of horses (power) because it is full of idols. A land full of idols results in hands full of blood.

The question this raises for me is pretty straightforward. I live in a land full of idols. My own heart is an idol factory—just cranking those bad boys out one after another. If I live in a land full of idols and am prone to idolatry myself, are my hands necessarily full of blood? If so, why? 

Injustice, Idolatry, and Fear

If idolatry is hedging your bets, injustice is hoarding your assets. Idolatry maximizes income by supplementing God’s promised provision with additional sources of revenue (other gods who provide others services). Injustice is maximizing profit by minimizing costs. Idolatry opens the front door; injustice closes the back door. A root source of both activities is fear.

Think about it: 

The Law limits the amount of time the Israelites can spend earning a living. They must stop working every seventh day. Fifteen percent of the week is mandatory time off. On this sabbath day, they can’t outsource work to someone else. There’s no “passive income” on the Sabbath. Children, animals, servants, employees, and temporary hired hands—every body—is required to rest (Deuteronomy 5:14).

The Law limits how much of a household’s capital they can leverage for their own income. They aren’t allowed to maximize earnings to the last penny. Instead of picking every head of wheat or piece of fruit, they must leave some for people who own no land or have no job to pick up for themselves (Deuteronomy 24:19ff). They are required to leave money on the table.

The Law limits how exacting a lender can be toward a debtor. If a poor man leaves his coat for collateral, the lender is not allowed to keep it overnight, because that coat becomes the poor man’s comforter at bedtime. The lender must return the collateral even if the debt remains unpaid (Deuteronomy 24:6). They can’t hold someone’s means of production or the tools of his trade as collateral (Deuteronomy 24:11). They can’t charge their neighbor interest (Deuteronomy 23:19). All loans are interest free and collateral is no guarantee of repayment.

The Law makes the Israelites financially responsible for the livelihood of priests, who have no land and (therefore) any way to make a living (Deuteronomy 14:27). This support requires a tithe at the beginning of the agricultural season, at the firstfruits, and at the harvest.

The Law makes God’s people financially responsible for the poor who live in their towns, which includes giving them the entire tithe every three years (Deuteronomy 14:28) and, every seven years, settling all debts, releasing all indentured servants, and returning any land they’ve purchased back to its ancestral tribe. That means all contracts and real estate deals are short term.

When God’s people celebrate the three major festivals (Unleavened Bread, Weeks, Booths), they are on the hook for covering the cost for “you, your son and your daughter, and your male and female slaves, and the Levite who is in your town, and the stranger, the orphan, and the widow who are in your midst” (Deuteronomy 16:11). Everyone is entitled to hospitality.

Note that in these passages, the Bible doesn’t divide economic responsibilities neatly into categories of sacred and secular. Faithfulness isn’t limited to a 10 percent tithe on income. It includes how much capital someone is allowed to accumulate and for how long, how completely they are allowed to leverage that capital, and what measures they are allowed to take to ensure returns on their investments. Furthermore, the Bible doesn’t seem to make a clear distinction between justice (what I owe my neighbor) and generosity (what I give my neighbor voluntarily). It might not matter if it did, because the Bible suggests I owe my neighbor a lot.

(Note, too, that the commands and prohibitions above make for really bad middle-class home economics in contemporary America.)

In short, justice is expensive.

Here’s where idolatry comes in. It’s the cost of justice that makes idolatry tempting. When God says, “You shall have no other gods before me” (Deuteronomy 5:7), he means, Trust that I am sufficient to meet your material needs. Don’t hedge your bets with other gods. When God says, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” he means, Trust that I am sufficient to meet your material needs so prodigiously that you can afford to live justly and generously. Don’t hoard your assets out of fear. 

Idolatry and injustice are both rooted in the fear that God cannot be trusted to do what he promised. 

Of course hoarding can easily turn to exploiting. When I’m no longer satisfied that what I have is enough, I might be tempted to take what’s yours too. That’s why God proactively prohibits cheating people in the market by rigging your scales, so that you overcharge for produce (Deuteronomy 25:15) and bribing judges to rule in your favor in court (Deuteronomy 16:19). God prohibits these things because he knows we’re inclined to do them. Fear can justify all manner of sin.

I feel this deeply. Just recently I realized that while my income has increased significantly over the last 20 years, I frequently feel the same anxiety about my finances that I felt 20 years ago. However much I have never quite seems enough. There’s always another milestone—always in the future—at which I am sure I’ll feel secure. At best I am deferring generosity. More likely I’m deferring justice. 

If other people feel like I do, it’s easy to understand why Americans are so divided, Christians included. None of us is immune to fear. There are many who profit from our fear. We have to be careful: fear can justify all manner of sin. And so I have to ask myself a question every person of faith has to answer, again and again: 

Do I trust that God is sufficient to meet my material needs so prodigiously that I can afford to live justly and generously?