February 8, 2016 Bible Study — Making Sure That the Poor and the Foreigner Has the Opportunity to Provide for Their Own Needs

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading. I had been using One Year Bible Online, but it was time for a change.

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Today, I am reading and commenting on Leviticus 19-21.

    Today’s passage contains more details on how the children of Israel should apply some of the rules God had given them previously. Among the instructions given here were instructions about how they were supposed to care for the poor among them. They were told not to harvest the grain along the edges of their fields, leaving it there for the poor. There were a couple of other things in this instruction. The point is that they were to leave the poor the opportunity to work to provide for themselves. Actually, as I read it, it was intended that they were to create opportunities for the poor to work to provide for themselves. A little later they are instructed not to favor the poor in legal matters, but neither are they to be partial to the rich and powerful. Overall, I think the passage makes it clear that God wishes us to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to provide for their, and their family’s, needs.

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    There are two ways this applies. First, we should run our businesses in such a way as to leave opportunities for the poor to make a living “around the edges”. We should not run our business so as to capture every little efficiency and every dollar possible. We should strive for the “high margin” aspects of the business, allowing those less fortunate to capture the “low margin” productivity around the edges. I will note that this allows the more industrious among the poor to perhaps find a way to turn those “low margin” things into “high margin” things and thus move themselves out of poverty. The second way this applies is that the government should not establish laws and rules which freeze the poor out of finding ways to provide for themselves.