God taught his people after delivering them from slavery in Egypt how to treat the most vulnerable in society. That group, especially in those times and still today in many parts of the world, included widows and orphans. You may have heard the saying, “The measure of civilization is how it treats its weakest members.” You can tell as you read the book of Exodus that God is very serious about how his people are to care for widows and orphans. If you haven’t stumbled across that in the Bible yet, let me make it plain. They are not to be mistreated. And when they are, you can be sure, God hears their cries. He acts on their behalf and punishes those who make their life miserable. The way of the world is to climb to the top and to climb over people while doing that, and who is easier to climb over or plow under than a widow or an orphan? But God calls his people to live differently. He did then and he does now. In fact, this love for the least and the lowest was a mark of the church in the New Testament, even from the earliest days. People marveled at how much the covenant community of God’s people loved each other and took care of each other, including the most vulnerable among them.
Also among the most vulnerable are the poor. God cares about the poor and made it clear to his people who had come out of Egypt that they were not to take advantage of anyone who had less than they did. Specifically, God said to his people that if they loaned money to the poor among them, they were not allowed to charge interest. Alan Cole wrote, “The reason for the prohibition is presumably that the poor man borrows in his need. The loan is seen as assistance to a neighbor, and to make money from his need would be immoral.” God wanted to protect his people from the burden of debt.
Often when someone borrowed money, even if it was without interest, he gave something to the lender as collateral. That still happens today. If you borrow money from the bank for home improvement, your house is collateral that you will pay back the loan. A man who owned livestock in in ancient times might give some goats or sheep to his lender until he was able to pay back what he owed. But what if the man had nothing but the clothes he was wearing? God said that if the poor man gave his cloak as collateral on the loan, you had to give it back to him before the sun went down. This man was so poor he was literally giving you the shirt off his back, which doubled as his bed clothing. God’s instructions insured that if someone had to give up an item necessary for his own survival as collateral, at the very least it was returned to him before the sun goes down. That cloak helped keep him from freezing on cold winter nights.
Do you need another incentive to show this common decency to the poor? Here it is. God says, as he did with regard to widows and orphans, “If he cries to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.” What God does not tell us here is how to discern when a person is poor because he will not work. Paul wrote about that in the New Testament, “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.” There are those who cannot, but there are many who simply will not work. And we know that in those cases, helping sometimes hurts. For example, to give money to someone who has proven that he will use it to feed a self-destructive addiction is not wise. He needs deeper help, if he is willing to receive it.
J. Mark Fox 