Gold Nugget 219 - The Real Cost of Cruel Greed

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      “Just dealing and fairness” must rule in the relations of master and man, if they are to be on a moral and righteous footing.  He will not take a hard advantage of his servant’s necessity; or allow, if he can help it, his dealings with him to degenerate into a mere struggle between capital and labour for every inch of vantage.

      The cruel greed that grasps at immediate gain at whatever cost of toil and poverty to others, and that “grinds the faces of the poor”, may enrich the individual, but in the long run is fatal to the class or the trade which practices it.  And the rich oppressor will have to appear at a tribunal where “there is no respect of persons”.  Political economy itself teaches that ill-paid lobour is the most expensive and wasteful.  The man who has want and fear gnawing at his heart cannot be a good workman, even if, in spite of extreme temptation, he be an honest one.

      Injustice and over-reaching on the part of the rich and governing classes, political and social institutions that favour “the fat and the strong” at the expense of the weak and poor, are sure of God’s heavy judgment.  They generate in the hatred excited in those subject to them an explosive force which, with a suitable train of circumstances, will burst forth, as in the French Revolution, in some volcanic upheaval that the strongest social fabric will be unable to resist.

      Christ’s golden rule of equity is the only safe, as it is the only righteous, basis for the dealings of man with man, of class with class, or of nation with nation in the world’s great polity.

 

The Pulpit Commentary, Colossians p. 168-169, Colossians 3:24-25, (G. G. Findlay)

See also Colossians 4:1; Isaiah 3:15; Ezekiel 34:16-27; Luke 6:31)

 

Gold Nugget 219

The Real Cost of Cruel Greed

 

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