The Firstfruits Confession: Humility, Hardship, and the Righteous Ways of God

Nothing That We Have, We Have Earned

There is a particular kind of wealthy person I have met a few times in my travels around God's earth. Most rich people I have known were humble and simple and generous. But every so often I've met people who are very wealthy and generous in one sense, yet mentally and emotionally are "slaves who have become kings." They are so full of themselves, and they want you to know it. They want the credit for their generosity here and now, from you, before they even hand over the check.

The worshipper's confession in Deuteronomy 26 is the exact opposite spirit. No matter where you live on God's earth — a mansion or a small room in the woods — you are walking on God's real estate. None of us owns anything, not even the six-foot grave our bones will eventually rest in. Everything we have is given to us to use for a season. When you actually absorb that truth, it makes you humbler almost automatically.

King David understood this perfectly. In his last recorded prayer, after donating enormous wealth toward building the Temple, he said:

That is precisely the spirit of the farmer bringing his basket of first fruits to the priest on Pentecost.

Humility Is Something You Have to Buy

Humility is one of the most needed ingredients that leaders, rabbis, pastors, politicians, and rich people need — and ought to be actively seeking to acquire, like something valuable in a marketplace. We all need to spend much more of who we are to buy humility and simplicity, because at the end of the day, everything we give will be useless if we don't give it with simplicity, humility, generosity — and secrecy. Secrecy itself is a required ingredient for our spiritual wellbeing, and for how our giving is judged.

There's a reason persecution and difficulty tend to forge stronger faith than comfort does. What made a collection of hostile, contrary cousins in Egypt into an actual nation was not prosperity — it was the persecution and suffering of bondage. For the church today, this is medicine worth taking seriously. The constant effort to make Christians more comfortable, to avoid offending people in the padded pews, to make church services more politically palatable, has not produced stronger Christians or healthier growth. Strength comes from pain, from dedication to a cause, from exercising spiritual muscles against real resistance. A church that demands nothing — no sacrifice, no self-discipline — tends to become despondent, selfish, and prone to seeking out internal conflicts instead.

Even God Is Not Always the Cause of Our Hardship

It's worth being honest about something the prosperity gospel gets wrong in both directions: the worshipper is instructed to thank God specifically for the good things in his life — not indiscriminately for everything that happens to him. The not-so-good things in our lives have other sources entirely. Our own stupidity and mistakes are probably the most common one — if you drive too fast around a curve and crash, it isn't a demon causing the accident; it's your own lack of foresight. Sin has its own painful consequences. The simple decay and aging of the flesh accounts for a great deal of suffering that has nothing to do with punishment. And sometimes — this is the hardest one to accept — God takes us through a kind of boot camp, an obstacle course meant to build our capacity for something bigger ahead.

The key to understanding all of this together is Psalm 145:17 —

If you isolate any single event in the Bible, in history, or in your own life, you might conclude God is being unrighteous. But step back and look at the whole picture, and His ways prove righteous after all. Paul's statement that "all things work together for good" in Romans 8 is built directly on this psalm — not on the idea that everything that happens to us is automatically good, but on the confidence that God's overall pattern of dealing with us is righteous from beginning to end.