When I recently read a comment made by a global financial icon it reminded me of when Jan and I worked in Eastern Europe and heard stories from people about what it was like to live under Communism.
In 2016, a man named Klaus Schwab, the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF) gave a speech at a WEF gathering. He addressed eight topics revealing what the future will look like by the year 2030. Of the eight topics Schwab addressed, one topic had to do with the ownership of personal property. In his speech, Schwab said the following as point number one on his list of coming changes, “You’ll own nothing, and you will be happy about it.”
Within the Church, some feel the mention of such a comment is alarmist or something that creates unnecessary fear and suspicion. I would suggest the opposite is true. Knowing what is taking place in our world gives us the needed intel to inform us on how to pray and understand what is transpiring in our world.
Believers who suffered under that hard fist of Communism realized it was not first and foremost a form of government. It was the earthly expression of the spirit of death that used Communism to fulfill its goals. Today, any form of government can express evil. Political and social titles mean nothing. Follow the money to its source and you will discover the seat of its power.
At some point in the future, those who have never heard a warning or were not offered insight about how to connect our faith with the context in which we live will ask why so many remained silent. Noah warned of a coming flood. Jesus spoke of the end of time. John wrote the book of Revelation. Leadership must be informed about the context of our emerging reality or the followers of Jesus will be just as surprised as an unredeemed culture when we are caught flat-footed and uninformed.
Whatever we do not own, either by choice or force, will be owned by someone else, whether a dominant global corporation or a wayward government. What takes place when the forceful transfer of ownership happens is the loss of our ability to steward our possessions toward godly goals. This freedom of choice is how churches and missions have been funded for centuries.
The problem with dismissing the comment “You’ll own nothing, and you will be happy about it” as some conspiracy nut worldview is the abundance of Scripture teaching us how to righteously own and steward personal property. We are not called to relinquish the control of our personal property and hand it over to some central collective and expect a godly use of those resources.
Some say Jesus was a socialist. A few, and thankfully, very few believers think Communism best expresses a life of faith owning nothing and sharing everything without question or inquiry. The supporters of these forms of spiritual Socialism/Communism have used Acts 2 as an example of people coming to the temple and giving their money, products, and personal property to the apostles to dispense to those in need. It sounds great until you realize the dispensing of those goods was not by force, but by the exercise of the free will of the donor. While the experience of Acts 2 was a noble experience, it did not last long. Persecution soon came and dispersed the Church across the globe enabling her to fulfill the Great Commission.
Jesus and His father, Joseph, operated a carpenter business. They made a product, sold it, and received a profit from their labor enabling them to feed their family and save for the future. Jesus and His father lived neither as Socialists nor Communists. Re-forming Jesus into a version of Che Guevara, Mao or Stalin sounds hip to the historically uninformed, but it does not represent the biblical Jesus of Scripture or offer people anything close to freedom as they look into the future.
Our choices have consequences. So does living uninformed about the reality in which our faith is expressed. If everything we owned was someday taken from us, we would still be left wealthy beyond imagination. We will always have the Lord and His presence with us. That is our treasure. It is what my Eastern European friends taught me. While they endured great suffering at the hands of those who told them they would own nothing and be happy, they knew it was a lie, a lie that continues to surface throughout history.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on Garris Elkins
Featured Image by Susanne Jutzeler, Schweiz, from Pixabay
