Verse of the day · August 30
Why does Proverbs promise full barns for honouring God with your money?
The promise fills a wine press to bursting and leaves the wardrobe out of it.
Honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase: So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine.
Proverbs 3:9-10
The increase in this verse is the increase of the earth. People live on annual products, which is how they are kept in constant dependence on God. What is asked when the crop arrives is the first of it, and the best of it. What is promised back is a full barn and a press bursting out with new wine. And where riches increase, so does the temptation to set our hearts on the world.
Honouring God is the end of our creation and redemption, Matthew Henry writes; we are no other way capable of serving him than in his honour. It reaches money as well: we must honour him not only with our bodies and spirits, which are his, but with our estates too, for they also are his. Worldly wealth is but poor substance, he writes; yet such as it is, we must honour God with it, and then, if ever, it becomes substantial.
It has to be a man's own that he gives and not another's, which is why the verse says thy substance; the Septuagint version, John Gill notes, has it out of thy just labours, and he reads that as what is righteously and lawfully gotten, and not by fraud and oppression. Nor is it all of it, but a part: what in proportion to a man's substance can be prudently spared and is suitable to the call in Providence. Set beside heavenly things it has no substance in it at all, though it is worldly substance and of account; God honoured men with it first, Gill says, and honouring him with it again is what is being asked.
Gill itemises where it is meant to go: to the poor, and especially to poor saints, since oppressing them reproaches God and having mercy on them honours him. He sends it next to the support of worship, and chiefly to the ministers of the gospel, who he says are due a double honour.
Under the law, firstfruits of every kind were offered to the Lord, and a feast was kept sacred to him at the ingathering. God, who is the first and best, must have the first and best of every thing; his right is prior to all other, and therefore he must be served first, Henry writes. His instance of it is Abel, who brought the firstlings of his flock; and the same rule was written into the law afterwards and repeated by the prophets. The Geneva Notes say what the practice was for: by it they acknowledged that God was the giver of all things, and that they were ready to bestow all at his commandment. And it is all thine increase, not only the first of the crop: as God has prospered a man in every thing, in every thing he is to honour God.
These verses run as three exhortations, Henry says, each of them enforced with a good reason, and the reason behind this one is the promise. The precept makes it our duty to serve God with our estates; the promise makes it our interest. It is the way to make a little much, and much more, the surest and safest method of thriving. Giving will not undo us. What we gave we have. But the promise is particular about what it fills. It does not say thy bags, but thy barns; not thy wardrobe replenished, but thy presses. The blessing is an increase of that which is for use, not for show or ornament, for spending and laying out, not for hoarding and laying up.
On the second verse Gill reads the bursting closely: not that the presses should really burst, for then the wine would be spilled, which would be a loss, but that they should be so full as to be ready to burst, or to run over. The barn holds a plenty of eatables and the press of drinkables, a fulness of all sorts of provisions, and he names the man they are promised to: the liberal man.
A barn is filled at harvest to be drawn down, and a press to be drawn off. What the promise stocks is a house with something to give out of. Those that do good with what they have shall have more to do more good with. A man honours God with his own money, and it was God's honour to him first.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill and the Geneva Bible notes.
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