The Open Hand and the Shut Eye Text: Proverbs 28:27
Introduction: The World's Operating System
The book of Proverbs is not a collection of inspirational quotes for coffee mugs. It is not a series of helpful hints for a slightly better life. It is a description of the grain of the universe. It is the divine operating system for reality. When God created the world, He did not just make stuff; He made the stuff to work in a particular way. Water runs downhill, fire burns up, and sin destroys. These are not arbitrary rules; they are the laws of spiritual physics. To ignore them is like ignoring the law of gravity while standing on the edge of a cliff. The results are not negotiable.
Our modern world, steeped in a sentimental humanism, wants to rewrite this operating system. It wants a world where consequences are detached from actions, where every lifestyle is equally valid, and where personal choices have no ripple effects. In this worldview, poverty is always and only the result of systemic oppression, and wealth is always and only the result of systemic exploitation. The individual is a passive victim or a faceless oppressor, a cog in a machine he cannot control. The idea that personal righteousness or unrighteousness has a direct, causal relationship with personal prosperity or poverty is dismissed as simplistic, cruel, or even bigoted.
But Scripture will not have it. The Bible teaches, from Genesis to Revelation, that we live in a covenantal world. A covenant is a solemn bond, sovereignly administered by God, with attendant blessings and curses. This is not just an Old Testament thing that was retired with the coming of Christ. The New Covenant has blessings and curses also, and they are sharper and more severe than those of the Old. To whom much is given, much is required. We live and move and have our being within this framework. Obedience brings blessing. Disobedience brings cursing. This is not a vending machine where we insert a good deed and get a blessing. It is an organic reality, like planting a seed. You plant an apple seed, you get an apple tree. You plant a thistle, you get thistles. This proverb before us today is a stark and simple statement of this spiritual law. It presents us with two men, two postures, and two destinies.
The Text
He who gives to the poor will never want,
But he who shuts his eyes will have many curses.
(Proverbs 28:27 LSB)
The Open Hand of Faith
We begin with the first half of the verse, the principle of godly generosity.
"He who gives to the poor will never want..." (Proverbs 28:27a)
This is a description of the man with an open hand. This is not simply about writing a check to a charity organization, though it might include that. This is about a settled disposition of heart that sees need and responds. The word "gives" assumes a proximity, an awareness. The truly generous man does not just give his money; he gives his attention. He sees the poor.
And what is the result? He "will never want." Or, as other translations put it, he "shall not lack." Now, we must read this as a proverb, not as a mathematical formula. A proverb describes how the world generally works because God made it to work that way. It is not a promise that if you give a poor man ten dollars, you will never have a lean month. But it is a promise that the man whose life is characterized by open-handed, God-honoring generosity will be cared for by God. God will see to it that he is resupplied.
Why is this? Because, as another proverb tells us, "He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord; and that which he hath given will he pay him again" (Proverbs 19:17). When you give to the poor in a way that honors God, you are not throwing your money away. You are making a direct, personal loan to the sovereign Lord of the universe. And God is a meticulous bookkeeper. He always repays, and He repays with interest. This is the logic of the farmer. He doesn't hoard his seed; he scatters it. He throws it away into the dirt. To the uninitiated, this looks like madness. But the farmer knows he is not losing the seed; he is investing it. Money given wisely to the poor is seed capital in the kingdom of God.
This requires "intelligent faith." It is faith because you are trusting God's promise over what your bank statement says. It is intelligent because it must be done with wisdom. You do not give a drunk money for another bottle. You do not give to the lazy man in a way that enables his laziness. True charity seeks the good of the recipient, which may mean a meal, or it may mean a job, or it may mean a sharp rebuke. But the principle stands: the man who makes it his business to be a conduit of God's blessing to others will find that God makes it His business to keep that conduit flowing.
The Shut Eye of Unbelief
The second half of the verse gives us the stark contrast. It is the negative image of the first.
"But he who shuts his eyes will have many curses." (Proverbs 28:27b LSB)
Notice the language. It does not say, "he who does not see the poor." It says, "he who shuts his eyes." This is not a man who is ignorant of the need. This is a man who deliberately chooses to ignore it. He sees the poor man on the side of the road, and he looks the other way. He hears of a need in the church, and he quickly changes the subject. He knows his duty, and he actively suppresses that knowledge. He is the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan. He is willfully blind.
This is an act of profound unbelief. The man who shuts his eyes to the poor is functionally saying, "What I have is mine. I earned it, and I must protect it. If I give some away, I will have less. My security is in my stockpile, not in God." He is a hoarder, and the spiritual logic of hoarding is poverty. "There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty" (Proverbs 11:24). The man who clutches his assets tightly finds that they wither in his hand.
And the result is not simply a lack of blessing. The result is "many curses." The covenantal world does not have a neutral gear. If you are not going forward into blessing, you are rolling backward into cursing. The curses here are manifold. It could be financial ruin, as his hoarded wealth is devoured by rust or inflation or a bad investment. It could be relational poverty, where he has wealth but no true friends. It could be spiritual desolation, a shriveled soul, a life devoid of joy. He shuts his eyes to the needs of others, and so God shuts His ears to his prayers and His hand to his needs. He has sown selfishness, and he reaps a harvest of desolation. The world he has created for himself is one where need is not met, and so he finds himself in need with no one to help.
Seeing Christ in the Poor
So what is the central issue here? What is the "spiritual trick" that distinguishes the open hand from the shut eye? It is whether or not we see Christ.
In the final judgment, Jesus says that He will separate the sheep from the goats. And the standard He uses is this very thing. To the sheep, He will say, "I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink... I was naked and you clothed me" (Matthew 25:35-36). And the righteous will be baffled. "Lord, when did we see you hungry...?" They were not trying to work a system. They were not trying to rack up points. They were simply responding in faith to the need in front of them, and in doing so, they were ministering to Christ Himself.
To the goats, He says the opposite. "I was hungry and you gave me no food..." And they too are baffled. "Lord, when did we see you hungry...?" They shut their eyes. They did not see Christ in the "least of these," and so they ignored Him. Their problem was not a lack of resources; it was a lack of faith. They did not believe that the poor man on the corner was an ambassador of the King.
This is why our generosity must be thoughtful. We are not just trying to alleviate a temporary physical need. We are ministering to an image-bearer of God, and we are doing it as unto Christ. This means we care about their whole person, spiritual and physical. We want to see them freed not just from poverty, but from the sins that often lead to it. We want to see them reconciled to God. True Christian charity is never separated from the gospel.
Conclusion: The Ultimate Generosity
This proverb, like all of Scripture, ultimately points us to Jesus Christ. He is the ultimate fulfillment of this principle. He is the one who, "though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich" (2 Corinthians 8:9).
Christ did not shut His eyes to our desperate poverty. We were utterly bankrupt, slaves to sin, cursed by the law. He saw our need, and He gave. He did not just give from His resources; He gave Himself. He poured out His own life on the cross. He took our "many curses" upon Himself so that we might receive the blessing of "never want," the blessing of eternal life and fellowship with God.
Therefore, our generosity is never the ground of our salvation. It is the fruit of it. We do not give in order to be saved. We give because we have been saved. We have been the recipients of the greatest act of charity in the history of the cosmos. God saw us in our wretched poverty and gave His only Son.
Because of this, we are now free to be generous. We are free from the fear that drives the man with the shut eye. Our security is not in our 401k; it is in the finished work of Christ. We can afford to be open-handed because our Father owns the cattle on a thousand hills. He who did not spare His own Son, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things? The gospel frees us from the tight-fisted anxiety of unbelief and makes us conduits of the divine generosity we ourselves have received. So let us open our eyes, see the need around us, and open our hands, knowing that we are lending to the Lord, and He will not be in any man's debt.