The Curse of Ham (Genesis 9:18-28)

After the Flood, Noah plants a vineyard and then makes some wine, gets drunk, and falls asleep naked. This is the way his youngest son Ham finds him. The next morning Noah curses Ham for seeing him naked: “Cursed be Canaan [son of Ham]; a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers” (Genesis 9:25, English Standard Version).

 

Two responses to being cursed are possible. First, one may seek reconciliation with the one who pronounced the curse and be blessed instead. Two, one may seek enough power to keep the curse from having its intended effect (Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City, pp. 9-20).

Healing (Matthew 12:15)

…many followed him, and he healed them all (Matthew 12:15b, English Standard Version). 

Jesus healed them all. Should we be expecting that kind of healing to be happening today? 

Apparently not. Aside from a few exceptions, Jesus is not healing that way today. 

Why is that? Easy if incorrect answers start with we did not pray long enough, hard enough, or with enough “faith.” Or illness is a punishment for sin sent by God. Or illness is evil but sent by God to teach a greater good to the victim or to the victim’s family or friends.

A harder yet truer answer comes from inquiring about God’s relationship to us. In the Old Testament, there are long periods when God is silent: the times of the Judges, the exile in Babylon, the four centuries before the birth of Jesus. We are in such a period now. This point was developed at length by Jacques Ellul in his book, Hope in Time of Abandonment (1972).

Our Response to God's Question

“Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40, English Standard Version, here and following). How we respond to poor people is how we respond to Jesus himself. In this way the poor serve as God’s constant question to us.

Rich people don’t like the question or God’s insistence in asking it. So the rich hate the poor. The poor use entreaties, but the rich answer roughly (Proverbs 18:23). The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender (Proverbs 22:7). The rich become wealthy at the expense of the poor (James 2:5-7). The poor is disliked even by his neighbor, but the rich has many friends (Proverbs 14:20).

Dream of Constantine: Miracle or Mirage?

Rome, 312 AD: Constantine is about to lead his army against that of Maxentius. The result will determine who rules the western Roman empire.

The night before the battle, Constantine has a dream. In it he is shown a cross. He is then told that, under the sign of the cross, he will win the battle. Upon awakening, Constantine commits his cause to the one who spoke to him in his dream. He has his troops paint a cross on their shields.

The opposing armies collide on the Milvian Bridge in Rome. Maxentius dies and Constantine’s army emerges triumphant. Thereafter Constantine regards Christ as the patron god of the Roman empire and his personal sponsor.

The Poor

Know both material and spiritual poverty

From the point of view of Pluto, the world, and our little heart of darkness, money measures the importance of each person. The rich are very important persons. Those with little money are insignificant. Those with none exist only as statistics.

From a biblical point of view, being poor certainly involves having little or no money. But there is more to it than that. Being poor primarily involves a spirit of humility. The two go together but the spiritual question remains primary.

Woe to the Rich

The Bible doesn’t simply condemn the rich for immoral actions. It condemns the rich for being rich. Surprisingly enough, the biblical witnesses regard being rich as living in rebellion against God. Apart from notable exceptions like Abraham, Solomon, and Job, few people in the Bible are described as both rich and righteous. 

Take God’s word to the prince of Tyre: “‘by your wisdom and your understanding you have made wealth for yourself, and have gathered gold and silver into your treasuries; by your great wisdom in your trade you have increased in wealth’” (Ezekiel 28:4-5a, English Standard Version, here and following). The prince of Tyre acquires wealth through wisdom, understanding, and hard work. No mention is made of dishonesty.

Escaping Pluto through Equanimity

Seeking neither riches nor poverty

“Two things I ask of you [God]; deny them not to me before I die: Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, ‘Who is [Yahweh]?’ or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God” (Proverbs 30:7-9, English Standard Version [ESV]).

The Book of Proverbs contains many passages offering advice on right living. In contrast, this passage is a prayer. In this prayer Agur, son of Jakeh (30:1), recognizes that money is not a moral problem he can master. It is a spiritual problem which God must master for him.

Teaching Our Children about Pluto (3)

Freedom from bondage to Pluto

Our goal in educating our children about money is to save them from being enslaved by Pluto. It is to enable them to draw a clear distinction between loyalty to Jesus and devotion to Pluto.

Symptoms of devotion to Pluto include envying the rich, mocking the poor, being preoccupied with making money, being thrilled to buy things, admiring expensive things and wanting to have them, attributing significance to the clothes, manner, or connections of others, and feeling superior or inferior on the basis of money. Our Olympian culture further lures us into bondage to Pluto with advertising, lotteries, legalized gambling, and sweepstakes.

Teaching Our Children about Pluto (2)

Avoiding a moral-code approach

To best teach our children the ways Pluto uses money to corrupt us, we want to avoid two mistakes. First, we do not want our children to think as we think, and do as we do, simply out of a desire to please us and avoid punishment. Rather than making decisions for them, we need to enable them to make their own increasingly responsible decisions about money. Afterward we may reflect with them about their decision, but not before. Otherwise they might well learn how to conform to a moral code but still have no idea how to relate to the beast (Pluto) without getting bitten.

Teaching Our Children about Pluto (1)

Teaching with increasing depth

As part of their training to be in but not of the world, we want our children to understand Pluto’s corruption of us through money. To achieve this goal, our teaching method will be one of increasing range and depth as our children grow in faith, hope, and love.

To do this, we as parents will include our children in our discussions of money as their maturity allows. We will gradually explain to them who handles the family’s money, whether we have credit cards, how much we owe on the house or car, and why. We will tell our children how much money we make, what we spend it on, how much money each person in the family gets, and why.

Jesus: Our Liberator from Pluto

1. Jesus defeats Pluto

Judas betrayed Jesus to death for thirty pieces of silver. In doing so, Judas showed that Pluto reigned in his little heart of darkness.

But Jesus allowed himself to be sold. He voluntary submitted himself to the law of money, to the rule of Pluto, through Judas. Jesus did so because he identified himself with us so much that he took our place for our sake. Jesus thereby showed that he had no heart of darkness and was animated by a spirit quite different in nature.

Pluto's Marketplace Mentality and Ours

Pluto likes human relationships to be primarily about making money. He seeks to create a marketplace mentality between buyer and seller, employer and employee, landlord and tenant, creditor and debtor, and other economic competitors.

1. Everything may be bought and sold

When we have a marketplace mentality, we look at everything in terms of making a profit for ourselves. We even think of people as objects to be bought and sold. 

Buying and selling people obviously means slavery. Less obviously it means impoverishment. Being impoverished means suffering an alienation akin to slavery. It involves involuntary subjection to the beliefs, values, norms, and whims of those who are wealthier. This alienation not only afflicts the poor while at work or at the welfare office. It worms its way into their Olympian souls, haunts them in the night, and alters their relationships with family and friends.

Symptoms of Devotion to Pluto

Jesus “sat down opposite the treasury and watched the people putting money into the offering box” (Mark 12:41, English Standard Version). Jesus watched carefully to observe the relationship between people and money. Doing the same might enable us, by God’s grace, to discern the particular symptoms of slavery to Pluto from which we suffer. Seeing those symptoms may enable us, by that same grace, to start setting them gently to one side.

1. Attributing undue importance to money

Jesus thinks of money as a very little thing. To Pluto, and to us when we follow him, money is what really matters.

Pluto's Impact on Our Relationship with God

Jesus Christ is the truth who sets us free to glorify Abba by the power of the Holy Spirit burning brightly in our radiant hearts.

Pluto—false, defeated, now desperate god of money—still has other ideas. Pluto wants us to think of him as God Almighty or at least as a real god. He insists on the loyalty due a divine being. And he expects us to demonstrate that loyalty by living as servants enthusiastically fulfilling his will.

Sadly enough Pluto, for a little while longer, is still capable of getting us to devote ourselves to him. He does this in two ways. First, he attacks us externally through destructive relationships involving money. We all need money to pay bills. That’s not wrong but it does leave us vulnerable. Sometimes Pluto seeks to compel us, through necessity, to earn money in ways which serve him rather than God. Sometimes he seeks to compel us to lie, cheat, steal, hurt, or even kill another human being to protect ourselves or those we love.

Western Technological Development to 1648

In his book, The Betrayal of the West (1978), historian and cultural critic Jacques Ellul wrote that Western Civilization is unique in its affirmation of three values: freedom, reason, and the dignity of the individual.

Western tradition, beginning with Aristotle, identifies Thales of Miletus as the first philosopher and dates the beginning of Western philosophy from 585 BC. In that year, Thales was the first to predict an eclipse of the sun. Thales used reason to understand creational effects and their causes. By doing so, he was able to establish freedom, in this case some critical distance, between human beings and these effects.

In An Historian’s Approach to Religion (1956), English historian Arnold Toynbee highlights the invention or intentional spread of major technological innovations in the West before 1648:

Turns out Current Equality Is Obedience to Vulcan Not Jesus

In The Technological System (trans. Joachim Neugroschel, 1980), Jacques Ellul demonstrates how technology is the key factor determining the structures, processes, and goals of today’s societies, cultures, and personalities (pp. 51-75).

One example he gives is “the transformation of a hierarchical society into an egalitarian one” (70). To help us understand the significance of this transformation, he gives us a little history lesson. “Traditional society, all traditional societies, are hierarchical…There have [70] never been any egalitarian societies, and hierarchy was part of the general-cultural universe” (70-71). All individuals within an organized social group, and all organized social groups within a society, have always been hierarchically organized.

Freedom through Reading Good Books Well

The Global Technological System (GTS) is parasitic, collapsing, and meaningless. As the counter-creation of the Olympian gods and our most arrogant monument to them, the GTS embodies their path of power which is based on falsehood, expresses itself through indifference, and ends in death.

As prophetic Christian witnesses, Jesus Christ frees us, each day, to challenge the GTS. These challenges, for now, will be small but not insignificant.

One important way of witnessing to the freedom of Christ is by acknowledging how the norms of the GTS shape our thoughts, actions, and objects. A second way is then by being meaningfully different.

Ways Pluto Tempts Us to Ignore Then Deny Jesus

A common understanding of money and wealth, of cash and material objects (like smartphones, TVs, and cars), is that they are all ethically neutral. They are neither good nor evil in themselves. Each one of us decides, according to our own free will, how we shall use these neutral tools. We ourselves freely decide whether we shall use these neutral tools for good or evil purposes.

     
Sadly, this is a false Olympian understanding. It comes from Satan, the source of all lies, through Pluto, false god of money, as embodied by our intensely Olympian society and culture, and finally as embraced by our own Olympian personality.

Righteousness and Riches as Gifts of God

Both righteousness and riches are gifts. Old Testament writers speak about the challenge of money. They tell us, for example, about Abraham, Job, and Solomon. These three men were unusual: they enjoyed a right relationship with Yahweh and they were rich. Both the relationship and the riches, however, were gifts of Yahweh. These three men did not earn either gift by being good or working hard.

     
Righteousness and riches are not tied together. Yahweh maintained Job’s right relationship with him even during a painful period of time following Job’s sudden loss of all his wealth.

The Challenge of Money in the Old Testament: Solomon

When Solomon was a young man, his father David died and Solomon succeeded him as king of Israel in 1015 BC. Shortly after Solomon became king, Yahweh appeared to him in a dream and asked him what he wanted most (1 Kings 3:5). Solomon said he most wanted wisdom so that he could justly rule the people of Yahweh by being able to discern the difference between good and evil (v. 9).