By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Genesis 3:19 (ESV)

We sometimes assume that the Bible says very little about “non-religious” topics such as economics and politics. Of course, there are many who assume that the Bible says more than it does about these topics, but it is a bit of an overstatement that the truths of scripture have nothing to say about the economics we follow, and more importantly about the economic decisions we need to be making. 

Genesis 3, and especially 3:19 tells us a truth about the world after the coming of sin into the world through Adam’s rebellion to God, namely that in the world we now live, scarcity is a real thing. This is said as God tells Adam that an economic good (food) will have to come about as the result of “the sweat of your face”. Where once the only necessity for finding food was simply reaching out and taking, now in order to produce those economic goods, there was going to need to be work, and as a result, there would be scarcity based on the amount of sweat that was willing to be put into the production of the economic good.

Thomas Sowell, as far as I know not a Christian, but a noted economist puts it this way when he defines the concept of economics itself:

Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses

Thomas Sowell Basic Economics p.2

He also expands this into a necessary corollary, that when it comes to economic problems, there aren’t solutions, only trade-offs. If I want bread, I will need to put in work, if I want to be lazy, I can get excessive rest, but I will have the trade off of being hungry. The result is that I will need to balance the level of tiredness I am willing to put up with and the level of hunger I’m willing to deal with. In a land outside of the garden of Eden, we as humans are left making decisions as to how to use our resources to get to the conclusions we want.

This means that as Christians face the world around us, we will have to accept that until Christ returns, there will always be poor around us, there will always be illness, and there will always be death. When we work to love our neighbours (and even our enemies) we will have to accept that our love for them cannot solve all of the problems, because there are simply more needs and wants than there are resources to deal with those needs and wants. Our faithfulness will not save people in the ultimate sense, but only alleviate suffering. It also means that since the resources are limited, we will have to learn how to be faithful with the resources God gives us so as to best provide for the needs of those around us. 

Utopia is not something Christians build, but something that God gives. In the meantime, in the world where we eat beead by the sweat of our brow, we need to be faithful to God’s goodness with what we are given.