God Is A Capitalist

I have engaged in a number of discussions before with people who have insisted that God is an authoritarian. They believe that if God really does exist, He is an authoritarian because He commands you to follow His rules or He will force you to suffer. This is an extraordinarily dishonest purview of Scripture and makes a liar out of God. An honest discernment of Scripture will reveal that God is a capitalist. Let me tell you why.

To insist that God wants us to follow Him just because He will punish us if we don’t is a great distortion of the truth. This assumes that God offers us nothing of value and simply wants us to fear Him. However, God doesn’t want us to fear Him. In fact, God loves us so much that He came into the world and sacrificed His life so that we may be redeemed from our sins. God’s endless love and gift of salvation is a testament of His capitalist tendencies, as well as His understanding of our human nature.

There are four main principles in microeconomics. They are:

1. People face tradeoffs: to obtain one thing, you must give up something else
2. The cost of something is what you give up to get it: opportunity cost
3. Rational people think at the margin and will act if the marginal benefit exceeds the marginal cost
4. People respond to incentives

God understands that we are self-interested and that we naturally seek to improve our quality of life in the most expedient way possible. God also understands that we are rational beings and respond to incentives. It is for this reason that He provides us with a great incentive to voluntarily follow Christ, for in accepting Him as our savior, we may be absolved of our sins and offered eternal salvation.

As aforementioned, God understands that we want to improve the quality of our lives in the most expedient way possible. This is why God sells us the gift of Heaven for free. The laws of supply and demand show us that as the price of a good goes down, our demand for it goes up. By offering us this magnificent good at such an incredible price, God knows that we will be much more apt to crave it.

Luckily for us, we don’t have to offer any sacrifices in return, since Christ already offered His life for us. It is for this reason that all we must do to be saved is accept Christ into our lives and let ourselves be consumed with the Holy Spirit. Since the marginal benefits drastically outweigh the marginal cost, accepting Christ into our lives is the most economically feasible and rational course of action to take.

The opportunity cost that we give up to follow Christ is a life of sin. By humbling ourselves to Christ, we give up our impure desires so that they may be replaced by Holy ones. And in doing so, we will continue to be incentivized by Christ’s love, so that we may enter into the Kingdom of God.

If God were just a mere authoritarian ruler, He would not offer us this great gift. God loves us so much that he sympathizes with our humanly plight and wants to help us improve our lives, and our souls, in the most expedient way possible. God understands our human nature better than anyone, for He is our creator and tells us in Jeremiah 1:5, “Before I made you in the womb, I knew you.”

Capitalism is the spontaneous order that arises out of our human nature, and God is the greatest capitalist of all. Are you willing to accept God’s gift of eternal salvation? I pray you will choose the most economically sound course of action. It isn’t too late to start walking with Christ.