No Poor Men Here
Deuteronomy 24:14-15
“You shall not oppress a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether he is one of your brothers or one of the sojourners who are in the land within your towns. You shall give him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets (for he is poor and counts on it), lest he cry against you to the LORD, and you be guilty of sin.”
An unsettling paradox of human progress through history is that so many great achievements are also great oppressions, as if the terms ‘enterprise’ and ‘enslavement’ have always gone hand in hand.
Think of the diamond industry over the past century or so. Journalists have written tragic accounts of the poor, invisible children in places like Sierra Leon who are forced to harvest diamonds for gun-toting thugs and diamond dealers. Think of the infamous ‘sweat shops’ in communist countries like China, where women and children work from sun-up to sun-down to manufacture name-brand clothing, toys, and textiles that have turned Western entrepreneurs into moguls. Think of the greedy politicians and contractors and industry leaders who exploit the failures of a migration system and offer illegal immigrants dirt cheap wages they can barely survive on. Open up almost any chapter in the chronicles of empire and you’ll find this fact to be consistently true: the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.
But that’s just survival of the fittest, right? That’s what the Darwinian antihero does by nature. That’s the ideal of Nietzsche’s superman. If a thousand poor men have to suffer and die to build a pyramid for a Pharaoh, so be it. If Mary Antoinette can eat her cake while the peasants starve, so be it—it’s a dog- eat-dog world after all. That’s just part of climbing the ladder. Where kings tread, the poor are trampled. Every thundering step forward of so-called human industry is a dance on the backs of those with no voice.
But not in God’s commonwealth! Even where bond-servitude still persists, even where forced labor from conquered foes perpetuates, there’s still a mercy-rule undergirding the law, because there’s a God of mercy behind it. Awestriking, isn’t it? In this commonwealth, a living wage is demanded for day-laborers. In this commonwealth, even the poorest of the poor can pillow their heads at night in security.