The Poor

1Co 1:26-28 Consider your calling, brothers; not many of you had worldly wisdom, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world, that He might put to shame those that are wise; and God chose the weak things of the world, that He might put to shame the things that are strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.

Jas 2:5 Listen, my beloved brothers. Did not God choose those that are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he promised to those that love him? Mat 11:5 The blind receive their sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear and the dead are raised up; and the poor have the Gospel preached to them. Luk 14:21 Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in here the poor and maimed and blind and lame.

“The poor in spirit” (Mt. 5:3) “The poor… the brokenhearted… the captives… the bruised” (Lk 4:18) Good news to the poor (Is. 61:1,2 cp. Lk. 4:18- 21)

“As poor, yet making many rich” (2 Cor 6:10); Jesus made Himself poor that we might be made rich (2 Cor. 8:9) David during the time of his kingship felt “poor and needy [because] my heart is wounded within me” (Ps. 40:17; 70:5; 109:22)

The Greek word translated “poor” means literally “the crouchers”- those in desperate need. The common word for “the poor” is that also translated “beggar” (Lk. 16:22). Prov. 19:17; 28:8 Heb. speaks of those who “bow down” to the poor [AV “pity the poor”]. “He that despises his neighbour sins; but happy is he that has pity upon the poor” (Prov. 14:21). “The poor” = ‘those in need”

Israel were not to farm their land in the seventh year, “that the poor of your people may eat” (Ex. 23:11). If we stop our ears at the cry of the poor, then our cry to God will go unheard (Prov. 21:13)

Solomon’s wise judgment of the two prostitutes was surely in conscious fulfilment of how his father had prayed that Solomon would judge and save the poor (Ps. 72:4,12,13).

Opening our hand Dt. 15:7 foresaw that when confronted by the poor, there would be a tendency to “harden your heart and close your hand to your poor brother”; Israel were warned not to have “a thought in your wicked heart” and devise how not to be generous to the poor (Dt. 15:9); they were to “open your hand wide” to the poor who approached them (Dt. 15:11). These verses are applied to us in 1 Jn. 3:17: “But whoever has the world's goods, and beholds his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?”

Opening our hand [2] God opens unto us His hand, opens up “His good treasure, the heaven to give rain...” (Dt. 28:12). He is in this sense “open” and not selfish; His eyes are “open” in responding to our requests in prayer (1 Kings 8:58).

Job could say that he was not only a father to the poor, but “the cause which I knew not I searched out” (Job 29:16). Further, Job wept for him that was in trouble, and grieved for the poor (Job 30:25) “The righteous consider the cause of the poor; but the wicked don’t want to understand it” (Prov. 29:7). We are to try to understand “the poor”

Luk 14:13 But when you make a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind Luk 14:21 And the servant came and told his master these things. Then the master of the house, being angry, said to his servant: Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in here the poor and maimed and blind and lame.

If we don’t help “the poor”, we become yet more self-absorbed. It was because Sodom was arrogant, wealthy and unmoved by the poor and needy that “thus they committed abominations before Me” (Ez. 16:49).