The Blessing of the Lord Maketh Rich

The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich, and he addeth no sorrow with it” — x. 22.

THE truth here is twofold. The cord, as it lies, seem a single, but when you begin to handle it, you find it divides easily into two. It means that God’s blessing gives material wealth; and also, that they are rich who have that blessing, although they get nothing more.

1. The silver and the gold are his, and he gives them to whom soever he will. A business may prosper at one time, and decay at another, while no one is able to detect the cause. It is not by accident: He who rules in the highest, reaches down to the minutest concerns of this world, and controls them all. Long ago, a certain people diligently plied their agricultural labours, and carefully watched over their household affairs; and yet misfortune succeeded misfortune, and general poverty was closing round the commonwealth. They could not read on earth the causes of their failure, but a voice from on high proclaimed it: — “Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have riot enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages, earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes. Thus saith the Lord of hosts, Consider your ways” (Hag. i, 6, 7). They had forgotten God, and he had withheld his blessing; — there is the religion of the case, and the philosophy of it too. Will a poor, short-sighted creature prate about the causes of things, to the exclusion of God’s displeasure against sin, as if there were no causes of things which lie beyond our view? There are causes of things, which we have never seen yet. He is a sounder philosopher, as well as a better Christian, who owns that the blessing of the Lord has something to do with the prosperity of his business.

2. But his blessing makes rich — His blessing is riches, although the wealth of the world should all flee away. “Godliness, with contentment, is great gain;” here is a mixture prescribed by the All-wise, for satisfying a soul, and attaining success in life.

“He addeth no sorrow with it.” The word seems to imply that there are two ways of acquiring wealth; some people grow rich without God’s blessing, and some grow rich by it. It would appear that the god of this world gives riches to his subjects sometimes, when neither giver nor getter owns the supremacy of the Almighty, and that God himself gives riches to some who are his children. Wherein lies the difference, since both the godless and the godly have gotten wealth1? It lies here: He does not add sorrow to the riches which he gives, but that other lord does.

When you are permitted to obtain wealth on which you do not seek and do not get God’s blessing, that wealth becomes a sorrow. There is no more manifest mark of a righteous providence now seen protruding through into time, than the sorrow that comes with ill-gotten wealth. It lies like a burning spark on the conscience, which will not out all the rich man’s days. Sometimes the wealth is scattered by means that the public, with one voice, pronounce to be retribution; sometimes it becomes waters of strife, to desolate his family after the winner has been laid in the dust: there are many arrows of judgment in the Almighty’s quiver. Men may well tremble, when they find themselves growing rich on a trade whose secrets they are obliged to hide in their own hearts, and dare not pour out before the All-seeing day by day: to heap up these treasures, is to treasure up wrath over their own heads.

If you take God into your counsels, and so grow rich, no bitterness will be infused into your gains. It is a common practice to constitute firms for trade, and exhibit their titles to the public with a single name, “and company.” Most partnerships, indeed, appear to the world in that form: such a man, and company, — this is all about the business that the passing stranger learns from the sign-board; but, under that indefinite and comprehensive addition, who are included 1 What deeds and what doers does that mercantile formula conceal? Ah! what some do in the dark beneath that veil! Now and then the world is startled by its accidental rending, and the exposure of a nest of night-birds in the light of day; but the full disclosure awaits another rending and another light. Reverently take the All- seeing into your commercial company and counsels: if you cast Him out, there is no security that the worst will not some day be taken in. When these counsels cease to be godly, they are “earthly and sensual;” and a terrible experience tells that no effectual barrier lies between these and the next step — “devilish.” More especially those who have once made a Christian profession, if they allow themselves to engage in transactions on which they dare not ask God to look — if they glide into a business, for its gain, which is incongruous with prayer for a blessing, will probably be left to go greater lengths in shame than other men.

One peculiar excellence of the riches made in a company from whose councils God is not banished is, that the wealth will not hurt its possessors, whether it abide with them or take wings and fly away. Riches cannot with safety be laid next a human soul. Admitted into direct contact, they will clasp it too closely. If they remain, they wither the soul’s life away; if they are violently wrenched off, they tear the soul’s life asunder. Whether, therefore, you keep them or lose them, if you clasp them to your soul with nothing more spiritual between, they will become its destroyer. Certain tortures that savages have invented and applied to human bodies, bear an analogy to the process by which his money makes the miser miserable, alike when it abides with him and when it departs. They wrap the body of the living victim all round in a thick impermeable plaster, and then set him free. If the covering remains, all the pores of the body are clogged, the processes of nature are impeded, and the life pines away; if it is torn off, it tears the skin with it — the pain is sooner over, but it is more severe. Thus the soul of a thorough worldling is either choked by wealth possessed, or torn by wealth taken away. Out of that dread dilemma he cannot wriggle; the laws of God have shut him in.

Those who get riches should beware lest a sorrow be added to them, more weighty than all their worth. The Maker of the soul is its Portion; He made it for Himself. When riches are clasped closest to the heart, He is slighted and dishonoured: an idol has usurped his throne. “Covetousness is idolatry.” For this very end Christ has come that a man might take the Holiest into hia bosom, and yet not be consumed. Put on Christ; seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and these other things may be safely added outside. If riches be added outside, while Christ is taken closest in, the riches there will not hurt their owner while they remain, nor tear him asunder when they depart. When your “life is hid with Christ in God,” you will live there, whatever amount of the world’s possessions may be attached outside; and though, in some social concussion, all the world’s thick clay should drop off, you will scarcely be sensible of a change. If you be Christians, — if you have put on Christ, great riches may come and go; you will not be clogged while you have them; you will not be naked when they leave: but if the wealth be the first and inner wrapping of the soul, how shall that soul ever get into contact with the Saviour, that life from its fountain may flow into the dead? Many disciples of Jesus prosper in the world: few who have courted and won the world in their youth, become disciples in their old age. It is easy for a Christian to be rich, but hard for a rich man to become a Christian.