Why is there so much poverty and inequality in the world?

That’s a great question isn’t it? Why do the richest 10% of the world’s population hold 75% of its income whilst the poorest 10% hold only 5%? Why tonight will 1 in 7 people go to sleep hungry? Why do over 300 million children go hungry every day? Why does a child die every 5 seconds of every day of hunger related causes? Why in our world do 1.2 billion people have to exist on less than 85 pence a day? And over 3 billion strive to live on less than £1.70 a day?

Today more people will die from hunger than from AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis put together, why? And it’s not just the poverty is it but the way it isolates, marginalises, exhausts and makes powerless.

As we explore what the Bible says about why there is poverty and inequality, we’re going to do so by asking three questions: Is God indifferent? Why does it exist? Why doesn’t God act?

1. Is God indifferent?

We have to start with that question don’t we? Poverty and inequality is a reality in our world. God is all seeing and all knowing so why doesn’t he do something about it?

Leviticus 19v9-18. Here’s God speaking to his people calling them to live life at it’s best. This is society as God envisages it, society with no poverty and inequality. (9-10)Landowners would be generous and provide for those in need to be fed. (11)There’d be no stealing, lying, or deceiving; everyone would be dealt with fairly and honestly. (13)There’d be no delaying of payment or looking for ways to wriggle out of paying people they’re wages, no need for a minimum wage or employment tribunals. (14)The disabled would be cared for. (15)There’d be access to justice in law for everyone. (16-18)And community would be marked by care, concern, forgiveness and love for one another.

If that’s the community God longs to see his people become, clearly God cares for the poor and the needy. If you glance back to v1-2 we see the motivation for Israel to live life like this. “Be holy, because I, the LORD your God, am Holy.” God wants his people to be like him.

Sometimes people say a child is just like their dad or mum. What do they mean? That they have the same characteristics or looks. What is God saying here to his people? Be like me. Love others just as I do.

God is gracious and good and cares about the poor and seeing inequality and injustice overturned. His people are to mirror God’s love for others. God isn’t indifferent to poverty and inequality and the powerlessness and suffering that comes with it. As you follow the Bible’s story you see that Israel frequently fails to be like in God in its love for others and care for the poor. And God acts, God intervenes, God sends prophets.

You know the signs you see that say beware of the dog. The dogs are there to ensure you stay off property that isn’t yours. The prophets function a bit like that; they are covenant watchdogs. They are there to ensure Israel live as God’s people, to keep them away from places they shouldn’t go and things it is unwise to do. But tragically Israel don’t listen and here’s the message God sends them. Amos 8v4-6 p.874 God charges Israel with abuse of the needy and the poor, with injustice and dishonesty that impoverishes others. He calls them to repent or he’ll turn their singing into weeping. Or Isaiah 10v1-5 where God charges Israel with making oppressive laws, perverting justice, robbing widows and orphans. And promises that a day of judgment is coming when he’ll judge their oppression of the poor. We could replicate those calls over and over again. God is passionately concerned for the poor and hates oppression and injustice. God isn’t indifferent to poverty and inequality.

That leads us to another question

Why does it exist?
Reaching conclusions just off what you can see can be dangerous can’t it. A magazine photographer was told to get photos of a great forest fire. Smoke at the scene stopped him so he asked his office to hire a plane. Arrangements were made and he was told to go quickly to a nearby airport, where the plane would be waiting. When he arrived, a plane was warming up on the runway. He grabbed his equipment jumped in and yelled, “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

The pilot swung the plane into the wind and soon they were airborne.

“Fly over the north side of the fire,” yelled the photographer, “and make three or four low level passes.”

“Why?” asked the pilot.

“Because I’m going to take pictures,” cried the photographer. “I’m a photographer and photographers take pictures!”

After a pause the pilot said, “You mean you’re not the instructor?”

There’s a similar danger if we just look at the world and from it draw conclusions about God that we will get God wrong because our assumptions are wrong. So God, graciously, gives us the Bible so we can know who he is, why the world is like it is and who we’re made to be.

The Bible starts off by explaining how the world became like it is. God created a world full of rich lavish overflowing provision. He gives it to humanity to enjoy and calls on them to steward it wisely. To care for it as he would, to love him and one another in the way they use the plentiful resources of the world he created.

And everything in the world was perfect until humanity listened to a lie and began questioning God’s love and goodness and decided we didn’t want to live according to God the creator’s instruction. Until we decided we’d be better of deciding right and wrong for themselves. The result of that one decision to de-god God, to take what he’d given but rule it our own way fractured everything. The world is dislocated as God’s good instructions are ignored, relationships fracture as man selfishly determines not to care and love others but to get what he wants. And most importantly relationship with God is lost and with it all the wisdom God gives on how to live life skilfully, at its best, in his world.

Sometimes we learn the hard way that we need to follow instructions. Just think about flat pack furniture, the person who created the furniture tells you how to build and use it. When you don’t listen to their wisdom things go wrong, as sometimes has to be pointed out to us. Flat pack is simple. Now imagine brain surgery, brains are phenomenally complex. But I’ve just read a book by a brain surgeon, does that mean you’d be happy to let me operate on you? No, why not? Because it takes phenomenal wisdom and skill to be able to perform such delicate and skilled operations. Yet we, living in an infinitely more complex world decide to go it alone and ignore our creator’s instructions on living skilfully in his world.

The Bible honestly records the consequences of that; murder, oppression, a selfish desire to assert oneself, hatred, hoarding, and as a result pain, suffering, loss, poverty and injustice. And God isn’t indifferent; in love he warns and in love he acts in judgement on the pain and suffering he sees all caused by the sin of rejecting him. But always man drifts back to sin, to living life for self, rejecting God not loving him, oppressing others not loving them.

Poverty, injustice and inequality aren’t God’s creation they’re ours. Just think about our world right now; God has given us enough, the problem is how we use it. What percentage of the world’s global income do you think it would take to eradicate poverty? It’s estimated it would take $175billion, that sounds huge. But it’s only 1% of global income. Isn’t that staggering. What stops that happening? It’s not that God hasn’t given us enough but we need to learn to love God and love others and live by his wisdom.

Or take hunger. 16,000 children will die today of hunger, 16,000 died yesterday and 16,000 will die tomorrow. Yet what’s the biggest health challenge facing the UK? Obesity. Over eating. The UK’s average calorie intake a day is 3440. We typically need 2000 for a lady and 2500 for a man. We eat 50% more calories than we need on average. Yet in the Democratic Republic of Congo the average calorific intake is only 1590, in parts it is much, much, lower. There is enough to go round it’s just that we hoard it. Why? Because of sin, because we rule by our rules we don’t listen to God’s wisdom on living life well.

Someone has said “Sometimes I’d like to ask God why he allows poverty, famine and injustice in his world. But I’m afraid he might ask me the same question.”

Sin has turned us away from God and away from others and curved us in on ourselves. That’s why no government or system has solved the problem of poverty. It’s not an organisational problem it’s a heart problem. The problem lies not with God but with us and our selfishness and greed.

But that poses the question:

Why doesn’t God do something about it?

God isn’t indifferent, he’s loving and generous and cares passionately about justice and the poor. But we ignore him and so lose his wisdom on how to live in a way that would eradicate poverty and inequality. So why doesn’t God do something is the question people often ask. But as that quote alluded to the problem isn’t with God it’s with us, so in asking that we’re inviting God to judge. And not just the big faceless them but actually injustice, oppression, greed lurks in our hearts not just out there. It’s my problem as much as anyone’s problem. And we don’t want to face God as judge.

One day God will judge. But God is gracious and so he doesn’t judge instantly. Instead he does something unique and amazing; in Jesus God the Son enters into the world and experiences poverty and injustice, he lives a life alienated and marginalised, misunderstood, lacking power, and experiencing rejection and injustice. He enters into not just humanity but poverty and inequality.

Born to an unmarried mother with the scent of scandal and illegitimacy following him everywhere he goes. Born in poverty not a palace. Without a house or a home. Frequently misunderstood and marginalised by those who had power and influence. Thought mad even by his family. Persecuted, falsely accused, rejected, isolated, friendless, powerless and condemned to death as a result of the greatest miscarriage of justice the world has ever seen. Why? Not just so God can say well I know what you went through. Sympathy, even empathy doesn’t help us. But so that he could take the punishment for every injustice that you and I have ever committed. To bear God’s just anger for our rejection of God and his wisdom for life in his world and all the consequences that follow.

Jesus comes to rescue us from the cause of poverty; sin. He comes to create a people who will overcome poverty giving a glimpse of what life will be like when he returns when there will be no hunger, poverty, inequality, or injustice. A people bear the family likeness, who live looking just like their heavenly Father because they love as they have been loved by the God who held nothing back from them. A people who therefore think differently about life and stuff.

Acts 4v32-37 p.1035. Shows us the transformation that experiencing God’s love and grace in Jesus brings. Do you see how it echoes that passage we started off with? This is a community who know God’s rescuing love. Which they don’t deserve but experience by grace and who, because of that, overflow with love to others. “So that there was no needy person among them.” Why? Because when there’s a need others sell their possessions and meet that need, because they’re loved by God and overflowing from that love is a love for others.

Why is there so much poverty and inequality in the world? Because of sin, because we reject God’s way of living, loving him and loving others. Because we’ve become turned in on ourselves and unlike God who is generous and giving. God isn’t indifferent to it; he will one day judge all the sin that is the cause of poverty and inequality. And by grace he provides a way for us to escape that judgement, because Jesus in love bears our punishment.

And having experienced that love we love others. We become God’s children living by the family values, a new community in God’s church where people glimpse what life lived in God’s kingdom is like. Not immune to need but meeting it, not curved in by selfish greed but loving others, not grasping but generous, not pitying but giving, not full of inequality but welcoming and graciously loving as we have been loved.

God, is there life after death and if so what's it like?

In the New York Times Magazine during the beltway sniper attacks Ann Patchett wrote:  “The fact is, staving off death is one of our favourite national pastimes. Whether it’s exercise, checking our cholesterol or having a mammogram, we are always hedging against mortality. Find out what the profile is, and identify the ways in which you do not fit it. But a sniper taking a single clean shot, not into a crowd but through the sight, reminds us horribly of death itself. Despite our best intentions, it is still for the most part, random. And it is absolutely coming.”

We have a fascinating relationship with death don’t we? We know it’s coming, we know 1:1 die, yet we live as if it’ll never happen to us. We don’t talk about it, or if we do are never sure we’re saying the right thing. But it’s still there. A friend’s church did a survey and asked ‘What hurts the most?’ The number 1 answer was death. J K Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books wrote this: “My books are largely about death… we are all frightened of it.”

Part of our fear about death is; not knowing. Is there life after death and if so what does it look like, or is there nothingness?

When the early explorers set out to discover the world, to see what was beyond the horizon, they had all sorts of ideas; the world was flat, there were no other people like them, there were lands totally different from any yet discovered and so on. They only had speculation and guesswork. But as explorers came back from their voyages further and further afield a clear idea of what was out there took shape, because someone had been there and come back people could know what the world was like.

In order to know that there is life after death and what it’s like we need to hear from someone who has been there and come back. Not in a vague I saw a light, near death experience, but from someone who actually died and came back to tell us what it’s like. The bible uniquely claims it gives us that. That Jesus lived, died and rose again and therefore can help us as we confront our fear of death.

Jesus proves there is life after death
Some words matter because they change everything. When you ask the question ‘will you marry me?’ the question and the answer changes your world. Whether the answer is ‘get lost’ or ‘yes’ matters, it changes your reality. Or the words “I’m pregnant” and then “It’s a boy”. Other words change life detrimentally, but they still change life.

We had read to us Luke’s account of Jesus’ resurrection, and it contains in it three words that you might have missed but which change everything forever, not just for one couple, not just for an extended family, community or nation but for the whole of the universe for the whole of time. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say these are the most important three words ever uttered in the whole of human history. (6)“he has risen”. Don’t rush past those words, let’s just think for a minute about what they’re saying. Life has always ended in death. Even those people that Jesus miraculously raised to life, were only temporarily raised, they each died again. But the words “he has risen” change everything because Jesus was really dead, rose again and didn’t die again. Jesus ascended into heaven, there’s no tomb Christians visit because he never died again.

And those three words change more than that. Death is the result of man’s rebellion against God. It’s described elsewhere as the wages of sin. But not for Jesus. Something amazing has happened which means death can’t hold him. And in those three words is the promise that everything is now different. The rule of sin and death is finished, Jesus has won. Because Jesus is risen there is hope for us, death is not the end.

But, let’s be honest it is an impossible claim isn’t it? That Jesus died and rose again. Resurrection just doesn’t happen does it? I’ve spoken at a few funerals and been to even more and no-one has risen again, in fact no-one there has even expected that to happen a few days later. So how can we believe this?

Luke the writer of this gospel was a doctor. He knows that dead people don’t come to life again. He writes a carefully studied and pieced together account because he is convinced having looked at the evidence that Jesus rose again. That, amazing as it is, it is the most likely explanation of the facts.

Just look at the details he includes. Jesus is definitely dead the Romans were expert torturers, Pilate is asked for the body, it is buried in a tomb. The soldier a the cross, Joseph, Pilate, those who handled the body all witnesses to Jesus death. The women go to the tomb expecting a dead body not a resurrection, they go with spices to anoint a dead body, not streamers and balloons to celebrate life. And the first witnesses are women, in the 1st century a woman’s evidence wasn’t admissible, so if this was all planned or even fabricated you wouldn’t have women as the first witnesses. And notice too the reactions of the women and the disciples, they are filled with wonder and (11)the disciples don’t believe them. They’re as incredulous about this as we are. But after they see Jesus they too testify that he has risen, in fact even people who didn’t believe Jesus was the Messiah before he died testify that he is after they see him resurrected.

Luke writes for someone struggling with faith and includes facts, details, evidence that means he reaches the conclusion Jesus rose from the dead. But that’s just impossible to believe you might think. Ok, if we don’t believe Jesus came back to life again what are the alternatives?

a. He didn’t die, just swooned, then walked out of the tomb and fooled the disciples. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a major operation, but afterwards even getting out of bed and walking is an effort, let alone appearing well enough to convince everyone you’re back from the dead. We tend to look more like death warmed up than risen to new life. Jesus is flogged to within an inch of his life, he’s so drained physically he can’t carry his cross up the hill where he’s to be crucified. Then he’s crucified – John tells us they check he’s dead by shoving a spear in his side and out flows blood and serum because his heart has stopped. Then he’s taken down, wrapped in burial clothes and put in a tomb, behind a sealed stone which the ladies know they have no hope of moving.

Is it possible that Roman expert executioners mistake serious illness for death? No. Is it possible that despite the blood loss, broken bones from flogging, excruciating agony on the cross, asphyxiation, the spear thrust, that he then revives without any medical treatment, takes off the clothes, rolls back the heavy stone, eludes the guards, and is then well enough to convince his disciples he isn’t just recovering, but resurrected having conquered death? No.

b. The disciples went to the wrong tomb. Luke tells us the ladies saw where they laid him, it wasn’t any old grave it was Joseph of Arimathea’s grave, they knew where it was. I don’t know about you but I remember where the graves are of those I’ve buried, I don’t forget. And if they had gone to the wrong tomb the Roman and Jewish authorities would just produce the body proving the lie of resurrection. But that never happens because they didn’t go to the wrong tomb.

c. The disciples stole the body. Do con men die for the lies they pedal? No. The disciples all fled when Jesus was arrested. So it would take something miraculous to make them stand before the same accusers and testify to Jesus not just as Messiah, but as risen Messiah. Paul tells us Jesus appears to over 500 people, some who hadn’t believed before but do after the resurrection. Those disciples die for their belief in Jesus’ resurrection because it’s true, you don’t die for a lie you know is a lie.

What best fits the evidence? That Jesus died and rose again. Sir Edward Clarke was a great barrister, here’s what he wrote having looked at Jesus resurrection:  "As a lawyer I have made a prolonged study of the evidences for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. To me the evidence is conclusive, and over and over again in the High Court I have secured the verdict on evidence not nearly so compelling...The Gospel evidence for the resurrection...I accept unreservedly as the testimony of truthful people to facts they were able to substantiate."

Who do you say Jesus is? Jesus rose again therefore we can know that there is life after death.

What will it be like?
I wonder how you think of life after death? It’s often portrayed as ghostly, a bit dull, all harps, clouds and choirs. But not in the Bible, in the Bible the stress is on the joy and relationships that mark life after death.

Jesus is the first fruit of the resurrection. It’s spring, soon the first fruit will appear on the trees. What does the first apple promise? That there’ll be more apples just like it. It shows what the rest will be like. You don’t see the first apple, then expect an orange, a kiwi and a mango to follow. The first fruit shows what’s following.

Jesus is the first fruit, a prototype of life after death. Firstly he tells us there’s definitely life after death. Secondly that it is physical. The promise Jesus makes is that he will raise the dead to new life and when he comes again give us physical bodied just like his. Here’s how one early Christian described it:

“The body that is sown [buried] is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.”

When Jesus returns those who trust him will be given a real, physical body, life will be physical. There will be a new heaven and earth that is physical, like this but where there’s no death, insecurity, illness, poverty, crying or pain.

And the greatest thing about life after death is that we’ll be with God, that’s the biggest promise Jesus makes. In the new creation Father, Son and Spirit will be there with us. And God’s presence guarantees its goodness, and its permanence. In the new creation we’ll be what we were made to be, what we long to be, with no discontent or searching. But enjoying the relationship with God we were made to know.

That’s the promise Jesus resurrection gives us.

What does that mean for now?
Have you ever looked at a holiday brochure and seen a sky so blue, a beach so perfect and a sea so inviting that you have to get there? I’ll save and save until I can go.

That’s the big question we’re left with as we think about life after death. A world with God, perfect relationship is the world we long for, how can I get there?

Jesus once visits the grieving sister of a dear, dear friend and promises: “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.”

Jesus proves it by raising Lazarus from the dead, then some weeks later rising himself from the dead. If we want eternal life we have to trust in Jesus. That he dies for us in our place paying a price we never could, and wins for us eternal life with God and he gives it to us when we put our faith in him. Have you? Will you trust in him?

It also transforms life for us when we’ve trusted him. It means what I do now matters. It affects the way we view the physical. If eternity is physical then life now matters. It isn’t that the spiritual is good and the physical is bad, but God is concerned with the physical. It transforms us so that we live now in light of eternity.

It also means that we can be content in our circumstances now. Just think about it for a minute; if this life is all there is then I’d better spend it collecting as much as possible – as many tastes and smells as possible, seeing as many of the worlds wonders as possible, learning as much as I can about everything, because the clock is ticking. If I’ve only got this lifetime I better make it count.

But do you see how faith in Jesus brings rest and contentment. I don’t need to see everything now because one day I’ll enjoy an even better version. I don’t need to cram as many tastes, textures, experiences and so on in now because in eternity we’ll enjoy all the best God can give us without end.

Think of it like this. When you go on holiday and stay in a hotel you don’t redecorate the hotel room do you? You don’t go buy new curtains, strip the wallpaper, redecorate and buy new furniture for your week do you? But you do do that for your home. The hotel is a temporary dwelling, home is permanent. Knowing that through Jesus we have eternal life makes this life the hotel room and eternity with God our home, it changes what we are living for and therefore how we live.

Is there life after death? Yes. What’s it like? Physical, relational, joyful and secure, because we will be what we were made to be and be in the relationship with God we were made to live in. It’s ours for trusting in Jesus who can give us eternal life, and it transforms life now.