Jeremiah 22:21

THE PERILS OF PROSPERITY

‘I spake unto thee in thy prosperity; but thou saidst, I will not hear. This hath been thy manner from thy youth, that thou obeyedst not My voice.’

Jeremiah 22:21

Nine centuries after Moses’ day the prophet of the broken heart utters the Divine complaint—‘I spake to thee in thy prosperity; but thou saidst, I will not hear.’ The latest generation is linked to the earliest by the sad indictment—‘This hath been thy manner from thy youth, that thou obeyedst not My voice.’ It is a record of going steadily from bad to worse. ‘Your fathers have forsaken Me, and ye have done worse than your fathers. Therefore I will cast you out of this land into a land … where I will not shew you favour’ (Jeremiah 16:11). The lessons suggested by the national history of Israel are a message to our own nation to-day. But it is into the narrower area of individual life that I wish to gather the teaching of the text. Does not every man need to be warned of the ‘dereligionising power’ of prosperity? May not all men be roughly divided into three classes: (1) those who have been prosperous; (2) those who are so; (3) those who desire and endeavour to become so? The gospel of ‘getting on’ is everywhere popular and palatable. And, under limitations, God means and helps us to ‘get on.’ The Gospel is in the interests of comfort and prosperity. ‘Godliness has promise of the life that now is.’ ‘No good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly.’ And it ought to be so with us, that every good gift, every fresh token of God’s fatherly love should remind us of the Giver, and bind us anew to His service. But, alas! experience teaches that the tendency of prosperity is to make men forget God. We are likely to be more devout when we are hungry than when we have ‘eaten and are full.’ Grace before meat comes more readily to our lips than grace after meat.

I. There is great danger of prosperity making us proud.—Instead of remembering that it is God who ‘giveth us power to get wealth,’ there is the constant temptation to say, ‘ My power and the might of my hand hath gotten me this wealth,’ (Deuteronomy 8:17). Ezekiel reminds the captives by the river Chebar that the ‘pride’ and ‘haughtiness’ of Sodom had been associated with ‘fulness of bread.’ ‘Thine own’ is apt to become ‘mine own’ in thought and word. ‘I will pull down my barns and build greater; and there I will bestow all my fruits and my goods.’ Is it surprising that the aged Paul, writing to his young colleague, re-opens his already finished letter to add another solemn charge on this very subject? ‘Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches’ (1 Timothy 6:17). The prosperous ‘self-made’ man is likely to become so self-confident as to make no account of Providence. His social superiors are respectful, his equals are deferential, his inferiors are obsequious. He finds wealth to be a golden key, opening doors into places of honour and trust. The aristocrat is more likely to be deficient in money-power and brain-power. He has oftener an emptier purse and a more retreating forehead than the shrewd, energetic, persevering plutocrat. Is there not even something of the God-forgetting spirit in the common phrase, ‘a self-made man’? And yet it is just such an one who needs the reminder, ‘What hast thou which thou hast not received?’ How frequent the sight of a prosperous man ignoring the friends and companions of his earlier and humbler days; becoming ashamed of the poor and uncultured parents, whose self-denying toil first lifted him to a round of the social ladder, higher than that on which they are left to stand; exchanging the humble meeting-house, with its bald, unæsthetic worship, for a fashionable church, where the forms of worship and social status of the worshippers are accessories of a religion more ‘fit for a gentleman.’

II. Another peril incident to prosperity is worldliness.—What is worldliness? Here is a recent answer—‘Want of spiritual sympathy, spiritual perception, spiritual taste, spiritual power.’ The seen and temporal becomes everything, the unseen and eternal nothing. The gradual growth of wealth too often means the gradual eclipse of the face of God. ‘Ye cannot serve God and mammon.’ Devotion to material interests tends to renunciation of spiritual aims, means becoming a ‘man of the world, who has his portion in this life.’ Here, then, emerges the problem of the Christian life to those engaged in trade and commerce. Engagement is likely to become immersion. The godly business man cannot help being thrown into commercial relations with secular men, to whom God and heaven are nothing but words. The reflex influence of the ungodly on the good is to make the latter insensibly set too much store on earthly possessions. In such a chilling atmosphere fervent young Christians tone down to lukewarmness, and give less and less of time and labour to personal Christian service. Little by little, first by a kind of necessity, then by habit, and at last by choice, the world draws them, broken-winged, down to its own level, and they fly no more. Bunyan’s ‘Man with the Muck-rake’ could look no way but downwards. Not that poverty is free from perils. Among the well-to-do there may be fewer theoretical unbelievers than among the poor, but there are likely to be more who show by their conduct that to them the spiritual world is a mere fancy. To ‘walk with God,’ to ‘set affection on things above,’ to ‘lay up treasure in heaven’—on whose ears are these counsels most likely to fall unheeded? On the ears of those who ‘have eaten and are full’ of earth’s good. There we shall often discover no spiritual appetite, no hunger and thirst after righteousness. It was the ‘better class’ who refused to come to the feast (Matthew 22:5). It was the wealthy church of Laodicea which was profoundly unconscious of its spiritual destitution (Revelation 3:17). Busy with ‘the straws and small sticks and dust of the floor,’ Muck-rake had no eyes for the celestial crown in the angel’s hand. A humbling picture, is it not? Yes, but, alas! it is drawn from the life.

III. A third peril attaching to prosperity is selfishness.—The increase of wealth is likely to be associated with a decrease in the spirit of beneficence. The ‘social indifferentist’ is too common among the well-to-do. In the Mosaic system this was guarded against. Provision was made for supplying the needs of ‘the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow.’ But the writings of the prophets frequently testify how grossly these Divine injunctions were violated. Even where the rich and poor dwelt together they became separated by the gulf of social disdain and cynical indifference. Are there not ominous symptoms of the same disastrous separation between rich and poor in our own time? Those who prosper in the world are tempted to withdraw from the saddening sights and bitter cries of the destitute and the neglected, to the suburbs or the country. Suburbanism, doubtless, has its advantages; but one of its greatest drawbacks is the inevitable weakening of the social bond that ought to unite the prosperous and the poor.

Illustration

‘The purse cannot answer the command—“Go, work in My vineyard.” Our Divine Exemplar shared our lot, and gave Himself for us. And as greed can only be kept in check by generous giving, so selfishness can only be crushed by personal service rendered in the spirit of the “brother’s keeper.” “Better than wealth given away are the gifts for men, which consist in gracious, tender sympathy, in love, and in tears.” Here is the secret of escape from the enchanted circle with which selfishness surrounds us. “Gold must be given, doubtless, but so must individual effort, so must the sympathy which alone can come from personal contact.” ’