The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender. Proverbs 22: 7, NIV.
Merciful God, as we bow in Your presence we give You thanks for all the blessings we receive in the study of Your Word; and we ask You to please clear our minds, as we continue our study today, in the precious name of Jesus. Amen!
Our proverb for today is divided into the rich and the poor, the borrower and the lender, the slave, and the slave master. The slave master is tacit in the proverb. But I believe, that it is clearly understood by all, that there can only be slaves, if there is a slave master. If no one owns no one, then we are all free! I have dealt with the topic of slavery from the point of view of yielding oneself. This stance indicates that some forms of slavery is voluntary. I came upon two definitions of slave, that I would like to share with you:
“1. a bond servant divested of all freedom and personal rights; a human being who is owned by and wholly suject to the will of another, as by capture, purchase, or birth.
“2. one who has lost the power of resistance, or one who surrenders himself to any power whatever; as a slave to passion, lust, ambition, etc. (Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged, p. 1705).
It is such a wonderful thing to sit at the feet of Jesus and allow His Holy Spirit to impress our minds with deep truths from the Word of God! At the feet of Jesus You see things that You could not see anywhere else. The greatest discovery oftentimes, is what we find out about ourselves! Praise God! Because the topic is so profound, I believe that we will need at least, two days to deal with it! We will go from the abstract (how riches can become the masters, and the lenders, and we their slaves) to the concrete (how slavery affects both master and servant)! That the rich rules over the poor is not a mystery. We live with that. Our world is a show case to that fact. Money talks. Money rules. And sad to say, money, in the hands of the wrong people can also oppress.
Let me begin by saying that there is nothing wrong with riches. There is nothing wrong with money. We have a problem, when our attitude toward them, and our use of them, is wrong. Sacred Scripture informs us, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows” (1 Timothy 6 10). The adversary is always looking to see how he can counterfeit God’s blessings, and turn them into traps! As Christians it is our duty to always know who is seated upon the throne of our lives! If allowed to carry the scepter, money could become a cruel slave driver. It tends to create workaholics, and absentee spouses and parents. It is a grave digger, as people work themselves to death, not out of necessity, but out of greed! It will become our master as it divests us of “all freedom . . . and wholly subject [us] to [its will] . . . by capture.”
Money will try to capture you by all the things that it can purchase. But it will never show you all that you could lose in the process. Here’s a little saying I once saw. I do not know who the author is: “Money can buy you a bed, but not sleep. It can purchase food, but not appetite. It can buy you a house, but not a home.” This little saying had more to it that I cannot remember right now. But how much truth there is to it! It can purchase things, but not fulfillment! and yet we allow it to rule over us. We allow it to become the lender, and we borrow from it, and become its slave. One area where this applies, literally, is in regards to credit cards. We borrow from these pieces of plastic, until they become the owner of our pay checks! We find ourselves working just to pay off credit cards! They give us these false impressions that we have money that we really do not have. What they do, is they lend us money, and things, that many times, we really do not need! They usually begin with very low interest rates until they have us in their clutches. Then when we have run up those ridiculous bills, and begin to fall behind in our payments – it is then they increase our interest rates, until it is almost impossible to keep up with even the minimum payments! Beware of lenders under the names of VISA and MASTERCARD! You can easily become their slaves!