{"id":36097,"date":"2022-10-26T10:05:59","date_gmt":"2022-10-26T14:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.greenmoney.com\/2025\/?p=36097"},"modified":"2022-11-24T11:45:40","modified_gmt":"2022-11-24T16:45:40","slug":"dave-ramsey-the-market-and-jesus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.greenmoney.com\/2025\/dave-ramsey-the-market-and-jesus\/","title":{"rendered":"Dave Ramsey, The Market, and Jesus"},"content":{"rendered":"
>> Back to November 2022 Issue<\/a><\/div>\n
Above photo by Jose Alonso, Unsplash<\/a><\/h5>\n

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\"RosaJesus says: If your hand offends you, cut it off!<\/p>\n

But what if the hand that offends you is the invisible hand of the market? How do we cut\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0hand off?<\/p>\n

Dave Ramsey, in a\u00a0recently shared video clip<\/a>\u00a0that\u2019s gotten more than 1 million views, says that isn\u2019t our hand. Speaking about the idea that Christians who might own rental property and raise their rents to market rates and cause someone to be displaced, he said: \u201cI own rental property… and when I raise my rent to market rate \u2026\u00a0I did not\u00a0displace the person out of that house if they can no longer afford it, the marketplace did, the economy did.\u201d<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I believe that what we do with our money, our real estate assets, is an expression of who we are, and the responsibility is ours, as Christians, to make sure that our ethics around our property and money are consistent with who we are as followers of Jesus. If the market does force us \u2013 and sometimes it can \u2013 to take action that is antithetical to Jesus, then we must \u2018cut it off!\u2019<\/p>\n

But, there\u2019s a bigger question:<\/p>\n

Why do we think we can\u2019t change the market? Why do we think the market and the economy have agency on their own, that they have the power to move us around, like pieces on their chessboard?<\/p>\n

Because the people who benefit from the system being exactly as it is\u00a0want<\/em>\u00a0us to believe that. We need to cut that hand off, too.<\/p>\n

I have always been skeptical of Dave Ramsey\u2019s prosperity gospel and his message that having more money is always the answer. But truthfully, he just said out loud what most people who aren\u2019t thinking critically about the economy actually believe.<\/p>\n

As long as we believe that the economy is a force of nature, that it is like gravity, we won\u2019t ever change it because we don\u2019t believe that we\u00a0can<\/em>\u00a0change it. But we cannot believe or behave this way if we want to be like Jesus.<\/h3>\n

Jesus flipped the tables. Jesus called out economic injustice. It\u2019s pretty clear that the reason Jesus turned over the tables in the temple, a story reported in all four of the gospels, was because of the way the financial system of the temple treated the poor. The poor would bring what they had, but it was not in the currency of the temple. So they had to exchange it with unscrupulous money changers at a considerable loss in order to get currency that was acceptable. Jesus recognized this abuse and rejected it. He did not accept the market as unchangeable<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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