029. How is it that a holy and just God allows the wicked to prosper while the good often su...
How is it that a holy and just God allows the wicked to prosper while the good often suffer poverty?
What we call prosperity is often in reality a curse. On the other hand, poverty is often a great blessing. God allows the good to suffer poverty because that is what they most need, all things taken into consideration. One of the things that I often thank God for is that the large amount of money that I expected to inherit from my father never came to me, and that at one time I was allowed to suffer extreme poverty. I have known what it means to be in a foreign land with wife and child, in a strange city where they spoke a strange tongue, and money all gone. I now thank God for it. It may have seemed hard at the time, but it brought great blessing. Poverty drives men nearer to God, makes them feel more deeply their dependence upon Him. It is not something to be dreaded, but something to thank God for. The psalmist was confronted with this same perplexity. He says in Psalms 73:3 : “I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked,” and in the 12th and 13th verses he adds: “Behold, these are the ungodly, who prosper in the world; they increase in riches. Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency.” But further down in the psalm he tells us that all his perplexity was solved when he went into the sanctuary of God, when he communed with God. The mystery was then explained to him, he understood the end of the wicked, he saw how their prosperity was but for a moment, and how God had set them in slippery places, and how they were brought to desolation in a moment. On the other hand, he discovered of himself and of the righteous in general, that even in their poverty they were continually with God, and that God upheld by His right hand; that down in this world of testing and of trial He guides us with His counsel, and that when we come out of the fire purified, He afterwards receives us into His glory (Psalms 73:24).
Much of our difficulty comes from the fact that we forget that this world is not all, that this brief world is simply a preparation for a future eternal world, and that happy is the man who has his evil things in this life but in the eternal life to come his good things, and wretched indeed is the man who has his good things in this life and his evil things in that eternal world that is to come (Luke 16:25).