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In my last post I pointed out that in Deut. 15:1-11, Moses said both that there should be no poor among the Israelites, and that there always would be poor among the Israelites. I raised the question as to how both propositions could be true. Eventually I will get to that question, but first some more background stuff.

What causes poverty? In our Sunday night discussion we had several good answers, which I will summarize here. NOTE: this is not an exhaustive list, as I am not a sociologist. But I think we did a pretty good job of at least hitting the major sources of poverty.

(1) Laziness. I hate to say this, because those on the left disregard this as a cause of poverty in any form, and those on the right think it is the only cause of poverty. I will address those on the far right at then end of this post, but for those on the left let me just say that you cannot read the book of Proverbs and deny that God equates a large part of poverty with human laziness. It can be seen in a third grader trying to get someone else to do his homework, and an adult who refuses to take care of his or her work, house, or family. Laziness all too often results in poverty.

(2) Serious illness/death. How many people have been driven into poverty as a result of a family member becoming seriously ill, suffering an accident, or losing their life. Suddenly a home that might have two incomes only has a partial income or none at all. Added to that are increased medical costs.

(3) Natural disasters. Think of how many livelihoods are destroyed when a hurricane, tornado, or fire strikes a populated area. Fishing trawlers and barber shops can not be purchased with one’s pocket change. Well, what about insurance, you say? Not everyone can afford to completely insure their livelihood, and some insurance companies refuse to pay under some circumstances and it can be as expensive to force them to pay as it is to recover the loss. Insurance is not the golden parachute that so many people think it is.

(4) The loss of a job for other reasons. Many thousands have discovered that a comfortable lifestyle on Monday can totally disappear by Friday with one simple little pink slip. With the real unemployment rate being well into double digits it is not realistic to suggest that within 3 or 6 months a person trained to do one highly specific job can find employment somewhere else.

(5) Lack of education. Our economy is becoming more technologically demanding and also more demanding of communication skills. These are fields that demand high levels of education. At the same time education costs are skyrocketing (funny how Democrats never complain about the inflation rate of higher education. Don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them??) While this may not be strictly a cause of poverty, it is a factor that makes it virtually impossible to break the cycle of poverty.

(6) Single parent families. Look at any chart of individuals and families in poverty and the largest percentage will be those in single parent families. Now, as with education, this may not strictly be considered a cause of poverty, but it cannot be ignored in the scheme of analyzing the continuation of cyclical poverty.

So, maybe you can add a reason or two. What should this communicate to the Lord’s church? I think the biggest thing we need to see from this list is that only one can be directly controlled by an individual – laziness. Every other cause listed is outside of the control of many living in poverty. Even with single parent households the one parent may have become single due to death or abandonment. If so many causes of poverty lie outside of an individual’s control, we must be extraordinarily careful about assigning guilt to those who live beneath the poverty line.

This is my main grief with those on the right wing of the church who believe that poverty is always a mark of sin and therefore should be dealt with like a spiritual problem. They have a carefully constructed syllogism in their mind: Laziness leads to poverty. John Doe is poor. Therefore, John is lazy. He might be. Or, he could have lost his wife after an 18 month battle with cancer and he suddenly has to deal with three young children by himself. Or his company could have sent his job to India. Or he could have lost everything in a flood, fire, tornado or hurricane. Or he might have become obsolete to his company because his job is now being performed by a robot. Life, and poverty, cannot be neatly summed up in one three-part syllogism.

In part one I stressed the golden rule for churches in terms of poverty: recognizing that the ability to create wealth (and very often the wealth itself!) is a gift from God. In one word, the church needs to learn humility. Now we see that the causes of poverty are many and multi-faceted. Have I changed any minds? Are we beginning to see poverty in a different light?

We now have a pretty solid foundation to move on to the big question: if we are supposed to do away with poverty, why are so many people still poor?