Читать книгу Wealth: It's In Your Worship Not Your Works - Roland J. Hill - Страница 10

Ellen G. White, a nineteenth century prolific writer and American Christian pioneer states, “Upon all created things is seen the impress of the Deity. Nature testifies of God. The susceptible mind, brought in contact with the miracle and mystery of the universe, cannot but recognize the working of infinite power. Not by its own inherent energy does the earth produce its bounties, and year by year continue its motion around the sun. An unseen hand guides the planets in their circuit of the heavens. A mysterious life pervades all nature –a life that sustains the unnumbered worlds throughout immensity, that lives in the insect atom which floats in the summer breeze, that wings the flight of the swallow and feeds the young ravens which cry, that brings the bud to blossom and the flower to fruit.”³ As valuable as the world is, its value is subordinate to man’s value. The earth was made for man, not man for the earth. God’s inaugural speech to our first parents was a statement of value. “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:28). Animate and inanimate objects were spoken into existence; man on the other hand came from the hand of God (Genesis 2:7). Man’s value is determined from the order used for creating him and appraised by the method of making him; God the Model, God the Maker. God’s value statement is unmistakably clear: “You are valuable. You were created in My image. You were created to be like Me.” Can we think less of ourselves than God thinks about us? God’s inaugural speech continued, “Rule over the fish and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (see Genesis 1:28). This was God’s positional statement, “You were given dominion, rulership over creation.” This godlike quality, was only given to man. In God’s final inaugural statement, He was proclaiming: “You are of higher value than the material world. You don’t derive your value from created things, but Me.”

Digging deep in the Sabbath mine you come to understand, as I have, that God is the source of all value and that there is no value without God. In a real sense then, God alone assigns value, He is the quintessence of all wealth. Therefore in God, not in the created world, we find worth, the essence of true wealth. Evidenced in the order of the creation and His personal involvement in the creation of man is God’s statement of value for the human family. God created the world, then man–not man, then the world.

Standing in the entrance of the Sabbath mine, God had our first parents ponder this fact that wealth was not based on man’s work but on God’s grace. Adam and Eve’s first full day of life was a rest day–not a workday. It was a day of worship­-not a day of work. Wealth was a gift from God. The order of true wealth creation, as stated by God’s resting on the Sabbath, is always worship first–then wealth creation. “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33).

Wealth from God’s perspective was never about the accumulation of material possessions. In its truest sense, wealth is and always has been about value that comes out of relationship. “You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which He swore to your fathers, as it is this day” (Deuteronomy 8:18). God stated his covenant relationship with Adam and Eve by creating them with wealth and confirmed it with Israel by giving them the power to produce wealth. True wealth is a sign of the covenant between God and man.