Exodus 36:1–7
The Bible4Jesus.com Podcast
About this episode
We live in a world that is governed by the iron law of scarcity. The central problem of modern economics, we are told, is how to allocate limited resources to meet unlimited wants. This assumption is the engine of all our striving, our anxieties, our marketing, and our politics. It creates a world of zero-sum games, where your gain must be my loss. And so we must worry, and hoard, and tax, and regulate, and fight. But the kingdom of God operates on a completely different economic principle. It is not an economy of scarcity, but an economy of glorious, overflowing, superfluous abundance. This passage in Exodus is a stunning, practical demonstration of this divine economy. It is a direct polemic against the scarcity mindset of Egypt, from which Israel had just been delivered. In Egypt, building projects were accomplished through the whip, through slave labor, through coerced extraction.