It is said that 90% of the wealth of the world is in the hands of 10% of the population. The result of such inequality is easy to see. Millions live in abject poverty with little opportunity to improve their lot. And the impact of poverty on the human spirit is appalling. It makes people forget why God gave them the gift of life in the first place. They forget God’s promise that they will be taken cared of if only they bother to knock.
Poverty is mainly the product of greed, of people exploiting others for personal gain and taking more than what they need to live decently, depriving others their share of the resources God has made available for all to enjoy. Greed has two victims – the greedy and the exploited. For money and power, the greedy destroys his soul and corrupts others as well, while the exploited is deprive of the means to develop his God given potentials and often forced to resort to things God disapproves of. Greed is the reason why there is so much misery in the world.
Greed is the most corrupting trait humans acquire when they forget Christ was born in a stable, attended to only by his poor parents and some shepherds. He could have come as a high government official if He liked. He is God after all and nothing is impossible to Him. But He chose to come as a simple man without the trappings of power and wealth to show people that those things were unimportant to living a useful and satisfying life.
When Christ came, He came with the powers of God and He used them to help others He healed the sick and disabled, drove out evil spirits, even raised people from the dead. Although, we are mere mortals, he wants us to follow His example. He wants to use the talents God gave us to help others and think of ourselves last, like He did when he allowed Himself to be crucified in order to save us from our inherent selfishness.
From the very start humans have not been very good to their neighbors, so to speak, when God explicitly commanded that they love their neighbors as they love themselves. Wars which have killed millions have been going on for centuries and the end is nowhere in sight. Most of the economic progress that we see today is the product of men exploiting others. It’s only decades ago that slavery fueled the economies of countries. Thousands of Africans, for example, were forcibly taken from their homes to work as slaves in American plantations. Child labor was often used in European mines. The hours were long and the pay hardly enough to keep body and soul together. Greed reduced people into commodities and many of their neighbors profited from it.
The 1900’s is good example of how barbaric man can be. In the two great wars, less than fifty years apart, man killed more than 50 million of his kind. Remember the holocaust, where man did everything inhuman? And he did this for power and economic wealth.
Man can profess love of God and still commit horrendous crimes. This happens when he forgets the message of Jesus Christ. Remember the crusades, purportedly to free the Holy Land of the infidel, which killed both Christian and non-Christian alike in great numbers? Did Christ ever say man should kill in His name?
Jesus Christ came to serve, to forgive, and not to exploit. Man becomes greedy and encourages misery when he forgets that.
