The Bible says,

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter (Isaiah 5:20 NIV84).

God’s goal for every human being is salvation, deliverance from sin, restoration of holiness, healthiness, happiness, and eternal life. This is achieved through the administration of God’s grace, God’s powers, which are the powers brought by the Holy Spirit, which are truth and love that work in the hearts and minds of people. And God’s mode and method of bringing people the knowledge of His truth and love is through people-to-people connections, through the actual experience of His followers living out His truth in love in their ministry to others. In this way, people are connected to Christ and to each other through the bonds of affection, value, and appreciation. This is how reality works. People get to actually know each other; they learn of each other’s struggles, wounds, obstacles, and hardships, as well as the successes, achievements, blessings, and victories—which draws people closer into ever-deepening bonds of appreciation and affection. Prejudices are broken down, biases are disabused, bigotry fades, and the love of God blossoms in hearts and communities. 

We are the lights of the world! We are the lamps filled with the oil of the Holy Spirit. We are the branches connected to Jesus the vine, and we are to receive His life of love and, in trust, bring forth fruits of loving ministry to others in order to bring them to their own saving connection with Christ, allowing them the privilege and joy of entering into loving service to others. For when Jesus returns, the only thing we take with us into heaven is ourselves and the people to whom we are connected, those who have also accepted Jesus as their Savior. One Christian writer described this work of grace in these words:

The Lord has made us His almoners [distributors of alms]. He places in our hands His gifts, in order that we shall divide with those who are needy, and it is this practical giving that will be to us a sure panacea for all selfishness. By thus expressing love to those who need help, you will cause the hearts of the needy to give thanksgiving unto God because He has bestowed the grace of benevolence upon the brethren, and has caused them to relieve the necessities of the needy.

 It is through the exercise of this practical love that the churches draw nearer together in Christian unity. Through the love of the brethren, love to God is increased, because He has not forgotten those who were in distress, and thus thank offerings ascend to God for His care. … The faith of the brethren is increased in God, and they are led to commit their souls and bodies unto God as to a faithful Creator (E.G. White, Counsels on Stewardship, pp. 343-4, emphasis mine).

Satan Sets the Snare

One of Satan’s most despicable traps is how he exploits human compassion, empathy, and the desire to help the downtrodden through programs with the stated goal of blessing the poor—but by using methods that, in reality, sever the bonds of love and trust that Jesus established for human relationships and thriving. The evil one does this by promoting as a good goal that which touches tender hearts and which no righteous person could protest against: helping the needy, the less fortunate—a true Christian duty! But then the evil one introduces his methods that, when employed, sever love and incite greater division, hostility, and conflict, cutting people off from the bonds of love and fellowship and worsening the human condition.

Two of the most destructive of these worldly methods is socialism and the equity movement, which call Jesus’ teachings evil and calls government control and redistribution of wealth good; it calls the idea that all humans are created with equal value and worth in the image of their Creator with inalienable rights given by God to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness evil; and it calls government enforced equity of outcome regardless of individual free-choice, hard work, and wise decision-making good.

In God’s design for delivering people from sin and doing what is right (justice), it is the church’s responsibility to help the poor and the needy. Why? Because God’s true goal is not simple subsistence in a world of sin; it is delivery from sin and restoration to eternal life, and these are achieved through truth, love, and trust, which are experienced in loving human connections! Thus, when Christians minister to the real-world needs of others, those real-life experiences of being valued, cared about, and cared for become evidences of reality that refute their biases, prejudices, and fears that no one cares, that they have no value, which instills gratitude and removes resentment—opening the door of hearts to healing the of souls, not just deliverance from temporal poverty.

When the church fulfills its role, the gifts of food, clothing, tuition, rent, and opportunity are given in love, voluntarily by the followers of Jesus, which causes love to grow in the hearts of the givers, strengthening their faith in God. Simultaneously, when this divine method is employed to help the needy, it inspires the recipients of the support to experience themselves as loved, valued, and worthy, and it motivates them with gratitude and love so that in response, they often align with, join, or at a minimum become friendly to the churches that are helping them.

As love and truth take root in the hearts of the impoverished souls, they experience new desires that are motivated by the love shown to them to better themselves and will often take hold of the loving hands reaching out to them and, as they are objectively able, develop themselves and become givers who share God’s blessings with others, rather than people continuing to need resources given to them. In this method, love grows on all sides, and characters mature into the image of Christ.

An Evil Masked as Good

But when the government replaces the church in caring for the poor, this entire system of healing is replaced with one that destroys. The resources used to help the poor no longer come from people with love in their hearts, but instead, the government uses its power to tax people who would not otherwise give. This method, rather than bringing joy to the donor, incites resentment, inflaming division, with them seeing the poor as a blight, a drain, and a source of depletion of their resources. It leads to social divisions with negative attitudes and the devaluing of human worth.

This evil method is worsened as the government-enforced redistribution method removes the loving human-to-human contact and inserts a faceless agency and auto-payments or checks received in the mail. This method prevents people from meeting people, from forming the bonds of affection, from experiencing the truth that all humans are of equal value, struggle with the same human passions, fears, concerns, and have the same needs. Instead of bringing communities together, the governmental method causes greater resentment between the “haves” and the “have nots,” and society divides with increasing hostility rather than increasing love, friendship, and cooperative community—exactly what Satan and his agents desire!

For anyone who reads this and thinks my opposition to socialism and the equity movement is because I have no compassion for the poor and needy, that I must have a hard heart, am selfishness, or am simply articulating elitist privilege—I say to you: I am interested in reality not fantasy, in truth not fiction, in actually helping people not posturing virtue while harming them.

Therefore, as the old saying goes, the proof is in the pudding!

Simply look past the rhetoric of socialists and equity promoters and evaluate the objective outcomes of such programs throughout human history, everywhere they have been tried. If you want to live in reality, to actually help people, then look at the outcome these programs bring. And in every case, they degrade humanity, increase poverty and homelessness, deepen divisions in society, and even undermine education—look at the school systems where these policies are implemented: socialism and equity movements require an uneducated populace, so they actively undermine education and the development of critical reasoning skills.

The Wisdom of God Regarding the Poor

Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want” (Mark 14:7 NIV84).

And these struggling people are in the land so that God’s people can love them, bless them, help them, and minister to them, and, thereby, not only manifest the love, grace, and goodness of God, but have all parties grow in godliness and experience eternal life. As God instructed:

There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land (Deuteronomy 15:11 NIV84).  

More than 100 years ago, one of the founders of the SDA Church described this reality-based danger of seeking equity:

It was not the purpose of God that poverty should ever leave the world. The ranks of society were never to be equalized, for the diversity of condition which characterizes our race is one of the means by which God has designed to prove and develop character. Many have urged with great enthusiasm that all men should have an equal share in the temporal blessings of God, but this was not the purpose of the Creator. Christ has said that we shall have the poor always with us. The poor, as well as the rich, are the purchase of His blood; and among His professed followers, in most cases, the former serve Him with singleness of purpose, while the latter are constantly fastening their affections on their earthly treasures, and Christ is forgotten. The cares of this life and the greed for riches eclipse the glory of the eternal world. It would be the greatest misfortune that has ever befallen mankind if all were to be placed upon an equality in worldly possessions (E.G. White, Testimonies to the Church vol. 4, p. 551).

This is reality—how the laws of truth, love, liberty, worship, and exertion work. These design-law realities about how life functions and people thrive are not restricted to the Bible, and the wisdom of how people are helped comes down through many sages:

Plato (c. 428–348 BC)

“Excessive equality produces tyranny.” —The Republic, Book VIII

Aristotle (384–322 BC)

“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” —Politics, Book III

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)

“In human affairs, complete equality would be impossible, since diversity of conditions is required for the preservation of society.” —Summa Theologica, II–II, Q.66, Art.2

Edmund Burke (1729–1797)

“Those who attempt to level never equalize. In all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some must be uppermost. The levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things.” —Reflections on the Revolution in France

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)

“A society that attempts to level all distinctions ends by creating the worst tyranny of all—the tyranny of mediocrity.” —Past and Present  

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)

“The passion for equality can lead men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality in freedom.” –-Democracy in America, Vol. II

Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903)

“To remedy these evils the socialists work on the poor man’s envy of the rich, and endeavor to destroy private property… but their proposals are so clearly futile and unjust that if they were carried out the working man himself would be among the first to suffer.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992)

“The pursuit of justice by means of equality will inevitably lead to inequality, because it requires coercion.” —The Constitution of Liberty

Satan is the great deceiver, and he loves to get people to advance his kingdom under the guise of doing good. But as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) wrote:

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, but through every human heart.” —The Gulag Archipelago

Jesus said that the poor will be with us always. No government program will eliminate poverty. The Christian approach is to recognize the reality of the needy and engage them with loving support through the methods of God that demonstrate they are loved as people, as children of God, in order to reach their hearts for the kingdom of God. The socialist and equity movements exploit empathy, interfere with the work of God, and seek to trap people in fear, selfishness, and hopelessness.

Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus, understand and practice His design-law methods, and don’t be tricked by empathic pleas toward good goals. Look beyond the words to the methods employed—if they are not God’s methods, then don’t support them, for we can never win God’s cause by using Satan’s methods!