Continuing on from my last post, lately I have been reading one of my personal favourite books when it comes to increasing financial literacy – the Bible. Now if you don’t have the same beliefs as me, don’t worry there are still some great lessons to learn here so I encourage you to not cut yourself off. I have a feeling that this knowledge will be just as new and challenging for all of you, no-matter what your beliefs or backgrounds are!
So lately I have been exploring the concept of earning money. Now I like to strip things right back to the foundations, starting off with a blank canvas so that I don’t taint any of the learnings. My first question was, ”is working to earn money even a biblical principle?” The answer is that it’s a clear yes from the very beginning. Even in the very first book of the Bible which is set in a time where the earth was pretty fresh, we can see the concept of earning money coming in. In Genesis 29:14-15 there was this nephew who stayed and worked with his uncle. Now, by the sounds of the conversation this uncle could have not paid his nephew if he didn’t want to, but he says to his Nephew, ”just because you are a relative of mine, should you work for me for nothing? Tell me what your wages should be”. There we go, an example of wages at the beginning of time, and it’s not in some bad context where it’s something that wasn’t in line with God’s design. To further confirm that earning money is a thing in the bible, there are so many verses that talk about working hard and earning a living. Now, I’m aware that what we think of money today isn’t exactly the same design they had back then, and stripping it back to its purpose, it’s a way of defining the value of resources so that we can trade them easily. So back then, they probably had a decent idea of how much bread was worth compared to a fish and so on. Getting back to my point, here is just snippet from one book of the bible:
- Proverbs 10:4 “Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth.”
- Proverbs 14:23 “All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.”
- Proverbs 13:4 “Lazy people want much but get little, but those who work hard will prosper.”
Not only do these verses confirm it’s good to earn wages, but it teaches us to be hard workers. It outlines that we shouldn’t be lazy doing nothing at home or sit around solely talking, even if it’s talking about business ideas. If you don’t put your hands to work, if it’s just mere talk, if it’s just a desire for more, then there’s no bank to be made.
So now that it’s clear that working to earn a living is biblical, and pretty straight forward wisdom, my next thought is on how to earn money. Is there a limit to earning money and if you cross that limit then we’re just being greedy? What ways does God want me to earn money? I explored these questions and this next lesson that I came across is a really good moral compass on how to answer these questions and how we can go about earning money. When I break it down the lesson is this:
“The way you earn money does matter”
I think everyone has a piece inside of them that knows that we shouldn’t be stealing, but there are many people that get lost in the pursuit of money and end up making profits off immoral business. The thing with money is that the money itself is objective, so if someone hands you $10 then that’s worth $10 regardless of where it came from. I think this is where people start to get fixated on money, and the only compass they have to navigate decisions is ‘if it gives profits then it’s a good thing’. If someone walks up to this sort of person and says, “here’s an investment opportunity, 30% fixed return per annum”, then they will most likely put their money in as it’s ‘good for them’, and yes they will see physical gains and profits come in. Now what if somewhere further down the chain this money goes towards immoral business practices, does that even matter to the investor who simply gives money and gets money back? Sadly, there are many money making practices out there from ‘not good’ to straight up bad, like human trafficking for example. Getting back to the point I am wanting to make, I have realised through God’s word that there are huge impacts in the way we make money, and if you earn through immoral practices then there are both physical and deeper consequences.
- Proverbs 21:6 – Wealth created by a lying tongue is a vanishing mist and deadly trap.
- Proverbs 11:18 – A wicked person earns deceptive wages, but the one who sows righteousness reaps a sure reward.
In my mind what that means is that $10 earnt through hard work is worth more than $10 earnt through deception. Another way to look at it is that there is a negative impact attached to deceptive income even if the dollar amount looks the same. Just like tax is automatically netted off from earnings, there is another form of deduction that will net off deceptive income, and will most likely cost you beyond finances. What if everyone understood and saw this impact? When weighing up the ‘bottom line’, business practices would look far less ‘profitable’ when weighing up the cost of making money in the wrong ways and people would be making business decisions that include more than just the physical numbers.
I don’t know too much about regulation, but I feel like a lot of business regulation is created to try and physically represent the cost of bad business, and so they put additional taxes or large fees in place to deter corporations from certain money making practices. I find it quite funny considering the word already teaches us these things and it was written way before we ‘came up with these ideas’. We shouldn’t need regulators to explain and outline how to treat customers properly, the word already tells us! I’m glad that I can personally understand the laws behind income, and so it will be a lot easier for me to make the right business decisions in the future, rather than just trying to make bank until regulators penalize me.
One final bible passage to contribute to this lesson. Micah 6:9-16 talks about people making money with dishonest scales (due to them trading through resources such as gold and silver where weight determines value), lying tongues or violence. As a result of all this, God says that they will not be satisfied, their stomachs will be empty, their savings will not last, even the things they plant will not grow into a harvest. It sounds like a pursuit of money with the wrong heart will only lead to greater pain and struggle than you started with. This links back to one of my first lessons around money multiplying whoever we are now, and so it’s clear that I should never go and attempt to make money with the wrong heart because that will only multiply my issues and by the sounds of it leave me even more desperate and empty.
In conclusion, the second lesson I have learnt when consulting the bible for financial literacy is how to earn money the right way. Firstly, it’s very obvious that God wants us to be hard workers and diligent with what we have, and from that place He enjoys blessing us with earnings. On the other hand, it has made it very clear to me that if we attempt to make money through immoral business practises, there are a lot of issues that will come into the equation that will destroy the bottom line profits but also steal from other areas in our lives. For me personally, I really want to bake all this understanding into my character, which will hopefully guide me to be hard working and stay clear from dangerous business in the future.
Key Points:
- The word teaches us to work hard and guarantees solid returns.
- $10 from hard work is worth more than $10 from deception.
