The poor little rich man

“There is that maketh himself rich, yet hath nothing: there is that maketh himself poor, yet hath great riches.” - Proverbs 13v7


This passage is an enigma. How can a rich man be poor and how can a poor man be rich? Like many teachings in the word of God this one seems to be “upside down” or “inside out.”

Obviously there is more to this than meets the eye. There are clearly two kinds of wealth and two kinds of poverty. There is a physical wealth and a physical poverty and there is a spiritual wealth and a spiritual poverty.

It is common enough to have both physical and spiritual poverty. It happens, but it is rare that a man would have both physical and spiritual wealth. Too often men will rush off to make themselves rich physically while they ignore their spiritual needs. On the other hand there are many men who have nothing in this world, yet are rich spiritually.

This same truth is played out in Revelation. The church in Smyrna is poor in the eyes of the world, but rich in God’s eyes. The church in Laodicea thinks they are rich and need nothing, but they are “wretched, and poor, and blind, and miserable.”

What happens here? How does this some about? The problem is the same thing that we see over and over again. When we look at the things of the world, the things we can see, we focus on them and that is what we go after. While we may very well become rich in the eyes of the world we would have nothing. When we look at the things to come, the things that are not seen, we may never get rich in the eyes of the world, but we will have great wealth in God’s sight.

It is a battle, but may God always give us the wisdom to seek after the unseen things and not the things that we can see.