The Blind Sprint to Bankruptcy Text: Proverbs 28:22
Introduction: The Get-Rich-Quick Gospel
We live in an age of frantic haste. Our entire economy, our digital life, our entertainment, and even our sins are all geared for speed. We want instant downloads, instant coffee, instant gratification, and instant sanctification. And right at the heart of this frantic impatience is a lust for instant wealth. From cryptocurrency schemes that promise to make you a millionaire by Tuesday, to the state-sponsored foolishness of the lottery, to the more respectable but no less avaricious world of high-risk day trading, our culture is saturated with the message that the good life is a life of effortless, immediate riches.
This is nothing other than a secularized, materialistic gospel. It is a gospel of mammon, and it has its own doctrine of salvation, which is escape from the drudgery of faithful, patient work. It has its own evangelists, who flash their rented Lamborghinis on social media. And it has its own disciples, millions of them, hurrying after wealth, sprinting toward a finish line they believe is made of gold. But the Word of God, in its timeless and severe wisdom, tells us what that finish line is actually made of. It is not gold. It is poverty, want, and ruin.
The book of Proverbs is God's inspired manual on practical wisdom. It does not float in the ethereal clouds of abstract principle; it gets its hands dirty with the grit of everyday life, money, work, relationships, and desire. And it consistently teaches that the way up is the way down. Diligence, faithfulness, and patience are the path to blessing. Haste, greed, and envy are the chute that leads to destruction. This proverb before us is a compact, razor-sharp diagnosis of a spiritual and economic disease that is endemic to fallen man, and has reached epidemic proportions in our time.
The Text
"A man with an evil eye hurries after wealth And does not know that want will come upon him."
(Proverbs 28:22 LSB)
The Diagnosis: An Evil Eye
The proverb begins by identifying the root of the problem, and it is a problem with the man's vision.
"A man with an evil eye..." (Proverbs 28:22a)
Now, in our modern, post-enlightenment world, we hear a phrase like "evil eye" and we might think of superstitious folklore, of old-world curses and magical hexes. But the Bible is not dealing in superstition here. This is a Hebrew idiom, a piece of spiritual shorthand for a very specific kind of moral corruption. A man with an "evil eye" is a man who is stingy, greedy, and, most centrally, envious. It is an eye that is never content with what it has because it is always glancing sideways, nervously, covetously, at what the other fellow has.
The good eye, which Jesus speaks of in the Sermon on the Mount, is an eye that is generous and content (Matt. 6:22). It sees the world as a gift from God and is ready to give accordingly. The evil eye, by contrast, sees the world as a zero-sum game. Every blessing someone else receives is a blessing stolen from me. Every success my neighbor enjoys is a personal affront. The man with the evil eye is not just a materialist; he is a comparative materialist. His desire for wealth is not driven by a simple desire for nice things, but by a bitter and malicious desire to have what others have, and perhaps, to see that they no longer have it.
This envy is the engine of his haste. He is not content to build wealth slowly, faithfully, over a lifetime of diligent labor, "little by little" (Prov. 13:11). Why? Because his neighbor just got a new truck. His old classmate just sold his company for a fortune. He sees the blessings of others not as a spur to faithful work, but as a starter pistol for a frantic, desperate race. Envy cannot stand the slow, organic process of godly wealth creation because it is fundamentally impatient. It wants what it wants, and it wants it now, because the sight of another's prosperity is a constant torment to the soul.
The Symptom: A Frantic Haste
This corrupt vision, this evil eye, manifests itself in a particular kind of action.
"...hurries after wealth..." (Proverbs 28:22b)
The man is in a rush. He "hastens to be rich" (Prov. 28:20). This is not the same thing as diligence. The diligent man works hard, but he works with a steady, patient rhythm. The hasty man scrambles. He is a short-term thinker. He is looking for the shortcut, the angle, the scheme. He is trying to make it all happen now.
This haste is profoundly foolish because it creates the very conditions for failure. The man who is in a hurry to get rich will inevitably cut corners. He will compromise on quality. He will engage in shady business dealings. He will sacrifice his integrity for the sake of a quick return. He will burn relationships because he sees people not as fellow image-bearers to be served, but as rungs on a ladder to be stepped on. In short, his haste causes his partners in business, his customers, and his employees to back away from him, or to avoid him entirely. They see the frantic, greedy look in his eye and they know, rightly, that he cannot be trusted.
This is the central irony. The short-term gain he is chasing comes at the expense of a long-term loss. He is penny wise and pound foolish. The very thing he is so desperate to obtain, wealth, is the very thing his methods make impossible to keep. He is like a man trying to build a skyscraper on a foundation of sand, and doing it in a weekend. The speed of the construction is not impressive; it is a guarantee of its collapse.
The Prognosis: Inescapable Want
The proverb concludes with the inevitable, but unforeseen, consequence. The man is blind to his own destiny.
"And does not know that want will come upon him." (Proverbs 28:22c)
This is the tragedy. The man is spiritually blind. Because he is so busy looking sideways with envy, he does not look ahead with prudence. He is so fixated on the finish line that he does not see the gaping chasm just before it. He thinks he is sprinting toward a treasure chest, but he is actually running full tilt toward a cliff.
And the text says he "does not know." This is not an innocent ignorance. It is a culpable, self-inflicted blindness. People may have tried to warn him. His wife, his pastor, a wise friend. They may have pointed to the proverbs. They may have told him to slow down. But he was too hasty to listen. The siren song of quick riches drowned out the quiet voice of wisdom.
And so poverty will come upon him. And notice the language. It will "come upon him." It will descend on him like an armed thug (Prov. 6:11), like a predator pouncing on its prey. The very thing he was hastening to escape is the very thing that is hastening toward him. This is the boomerang effect of sin. This is the law of the harvest. God has woven certain cause-and-effect relationships into the fabric of reality. If you sow to the flesh, you will of the flesh reap corruption (Gal. 6:8). If you sow haste and envy, you will reap ruin and want. God's world operates on principles, and the get-rich-quick scheme is a rebellion against the way the world actually works.
The Gospel for the Evil Eye
This proverb is a sharp diagnosis, but it is not without a cure. The root problem is the "evil eye," a heart corrupted by envy and greed. This is not a problem that can be fixed by better financial planning or a new five-year plan. This is a problem of worship. The man with the evil eye is a worshiper of mammon, and his haste is the frantic liturgy of that false religion.
The only cure for an evil eye is a new heart, which creates a new eye. And this is precisely what the gospel of Jesus Christ provides. We are all born with an evil eye. We are born in Adam, full of envy, discontent, and a desire to be as God, to get what we want on our own terms, right now. This is the sin of the garden, the original get-wise-quick scheme.
But Jesus Christ came, and though He was rich, yet for our sakes He became poor, so that we by His poverty might become rich (2 Cor. 8:9). He did not hurry after wealth. He emptied Himself. He lived a life of perfect, patient faithfulness to His Father. He worked with His hands. And He went to the cross to purchase for us the true riches, forgiveness of sins and eternal life.
When the Holy Spirit unites us to Christ by faith, He performs a kind of spiritual eye surgery. He takes out our evil, envious, greedy eye and gives us a good eye, a generous eye. He gives us the eye of Christ. He fills our hearts with gratitude for what God has given us, which kills the envy of what He has given to others. He teaches us contentment in all circumstances (Phil. 4:11-13). He frees us from the frantic need to prove ourselves through wealth because our identity is now secure in Him. We are sons of the King, and our inheritance is guaranteed.
The Christian, therefore, is free to work diligently, but patiently. We are free to build, to create wealth, to plan for the future, but we do it without the frantic, grasping haste of the envious man. We can work hard for a lifetime and be content with the results, because we know that our true treasure is in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in and steal (Matt. 6:20). The cure for the blind sprint to bankruptcy is to have your eyes fixed on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross. He did not take the shortcut, and neither should we.