When it comes to wealth, God clearly favors equality.

I find it interesting how much attention the Bible gives to the issue of equity and justice with regard to how wealth is to be distributed. In the first five books of the Bible, the Torah (or Law, which means it contains more than mere suggestions), Israelite citizens are commanded to redistribute their land every 50 years (Leviticus 25), and to cancel all debts every seven years (Deuteronomy 15). The purpose of this is so there will be “no poor among you.”

This same phrase is used to describe the sharing of goods in Acts 2, associated with the founding of a new community of a Jewish Jubilee in which there were “no poor among them.”

Then’s there’s the forever “new heaven and new earth” where God finally rules supreme, and where all hunger, thirst and poverty are wiped away and all are blessed alike. To me that looks like an ultimate form of God-ordered socialism.

And here on earth, families are God-ordained units that, as representations of heaven on earth, have everyone producing according to their ability and everyone receiving according to their need.

Shouldn’t the church seek to be that kind of God-governed outpost, demonstrating what it looks like when God’s will is being done here on earth as it is in heaven?

See 2 Cor. 8:13-15.