All of today’s devotional thoughts from Leo Tolstoy’s book deserve to be read:
The creation of the world would have been a very bad act were it right for rich people to live off the work of the poor, and yet think that they were the benefactors.
A stone falls on a pot—woe to the pot; a pot falls on a stone—woe to the pot; in every case, it is bad for the pot.
—The TALMUD
The pleasures of the rich are often acquired by the tears of the poor.
Wealth is created by the concentration of human labor; usually one people produce labor, and others concentrate it. This is called “the division of labor” by contemporary wise people.
There is something wrong with the creation of this world, because the rich people think that they are the benefactors of the poor, but in fact those rich are fed and dressed by the work of these poor and live in luxury created for them by the poor.
— A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Selected from the World’s Sacred Texts by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Peter Sekirin)
I am not “anti-rich,” but I also would not be loving to them if I were to avoid noting the perilous condition they especially are in:
And Jesus said to His disciples, “Truly I say to you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:23-24, ESV).