I. Choice
There are generally two approaches to the study of human behavior: One involves the study of mental processes such as affect, cognition and motivation, while the other involves the study of people’s actions.
Although there is some utility in studying mental processes, treating them as an end in themselves provides an incomplete picture of human behavior. Your emotions, thoughts and drives are not simply hovering around in your mind. Rather, they are embodied, that is, they are contained in your body and expressed in your behavior. For instance, when a person is excited or depressed, you can usually tell how the person is feeling by observing their behavior. Even in people who are not emotionally expressive, when you spend enough time with them, their patterns of behavior provide a window into their internal mental states. This goes to say that a person’s actions can give you more behavioral information than a person’s internal state.
This same logic can be extended to people’s choice behavior.
Suppose a person has to choose between eating fish and eating chicken for lunch. In that moment, if the person goes with fish, it means that he values fish higher than meat. It doesn’t matter whether he had always eaten meat in the past, or he said he had a craving for meat, or he had told the people nearby that he was going to eat meat. As long as he chose fish, the implication is that fish occupies a higher position on his hierarchy of values than meat.
Generally speaking, if presented with the opportunity to choose between two options, “A” or “B”, according to economic thinking, whatever the decision maker chooses is what he values more.
A person who picks the $50 shoe over the $300 shoe values the former more than the latter. Similarly, regardless of what she might say or even feel, the spouse who continually chooses to work extra shifts rather than spending quality time with her significant other has made her hierarchy of values clear.
The Kingdom of God also has the same understanding implicit in its operations.
For instance, take a look at Apostle Paul’s analysis of the Esau and Jacob situation:
“(For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth;) It was said unto her, The elder shall serve the younger. As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated. What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid.” (Romans 9: 11-14)
“Love” and “hate” are powerful words with certain implications in contemporary times. We have learned to associate them with waves of liquid emotions coursing through our veins. To most people, loving someone is the feeling of butterflies fluttering in our bellies, while hatred feels like a pressure pot about to explode. That is why we look at the statement, “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated”, and cannot help but wonder why God had the urge to destroy a still unborn Esau. Students of the Bible, however, will acknowledge that the man Esau lived to be a very materially blessed man – even more blessed than Jacob his brother (Genesis 33). God blessed Esau materially – a move that does not fit within the contemporary usage of the word “hate”.
So, what does “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated” mean?
As it has been established, emotions, thoughts and drives are just a subset of behavior. Actions, in the form of choice behavior, reveals a person’s hierarchy of values. To the human, “love” and “hate” are primarily internal states that may or may not influence behavior; in the Economics of the Kingdom, however, “love” and “hate” are preferences which must be revealed in choice behavior.
Whatever is valued more is chosen; whatever is chosen is loved. When compared with Esau, Jacob occupied a higher level on God’s spiritual hierarchy of values. Hence, Jacob was chosen and by implication, loved.
As another example, consider the following words of Jesus:
‘If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.’ (Luke 14:26)
A surface understanding of Jesus’ statement could lead one to walk away with the wrong conclusions that becoming a follower of Christ is contingent upon you being antisocial.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Jesus is not asking you to keep malice with your family, friends and associates; neither is He asking you to indulge in self-immolation. Rather, what Jesus is saying, in essence, is this: Unless He’s at the pinnacle of your hierarchy of values, you are not fit to be educated or discipled in the ways of the Kingdom. Just as God has His hierarchy of values, subjects in His Kingdom must also have their hierarchy of values with God and the things of God occupying the highest rung.
In secular Economics, your choices reveal your preferences; in the Economics of the Kingdom, your choices reveal your values (that is, what you value most). In this paradigm, the act of sinning is simply choosing yourself over God, while repentance involves changing the way you think, such that your hierarchy of values align with that of the Kingdom of God. And when your hierarchy of values match that of the Kingdom, a whole new set of possibilities become available to you.
II. Substitutes and Complements
Suppose you went to a store to get new shoes, it is inevitable that after you find a shoe design you like and you pay, you would always walk out of the store with a pair of shoes – one right, one left. It is virtually impossible to buy just one shoe; you have to buy them in pairs. In secular economics, a pair of shoes – one right, one left – is what you’d call complements. To maximize the satisfaction you get from buying a pair of shoes, the bundle has to be one right and one left. A pair containing either two left shoes or two right shoes would be upsetting, rather than satisfying.
Conversely, there are certain goods that can satisfactorily take the place of another. For instance, if you happen to be on a long-distance drive, at some point, you will be low on fuel and would need to buy some. As your car’s fuel gauge approaches the “Empty” mark, it would not matter whether the next fuel station was Total, or Shell, or Mobil. As long as the filling station has fuel, and you are able to fill up your car, your happiness is guaranteed. In secular economics, the different filling stations you encounter on your long-distance drive are called substitutes because they can all satisfy your need for fuel in the same way.
The concept of substitutes and complements also exist in the Economics of the Kingdom.
As an example of complements, consider Paul’s admonishment in Galatians 5:16,
“This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.”
Here we see two phenomena of spiritual significance offered as a complementary bundle – “Walking in the Spirit” and “Not fulfilling the lust of the flesh”. In the same way you cannot go to a shoe store just to buy a single right shoe, you cannot just “Walk in the Spirit” or “Not fulfil the lust of the flesh”. Yet, much of the religious teachings propagated today go contrary to this Economic Principle of the Kingdom. What is commonly accepted as inspired doctrine is a focus on just one aspect of what was designed to be a complementary bundle. That is why a lot of Christians expend tremendous amounts of effort and willpower in not fulfilling the lusts of the flesh so as to be able to finally walk in the Spirit. Usually, this ends in burnout, a seething frustration with righteous living, and, the inevitable return to old habits and patterns of behavior.
A person operating with a paradigm inspired by the Economics of the Kingdom will see “Walking in the Spirit” and “Not fulfilling the lust of the flesh” as a single bundle. By walking in the Spirit, this individual is confident that he has also received the enablement to not fulfil the lusts of the flesh. This leads to the experience of an abundant life overflowing into one’s actions, thoughts, emotions and overall behavior – even from this side of eternity!
The idea of complements also applies when you talk about the pursuit and fulfilment of purpose.
“As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them” (Acts 13:2)
Notice how the Holy Spirit described Barnabas and Paul as a single complementary bundle, as far as their Kingdom assignments were concerned. In the same vein, as you enter different stages and phases in your life, you will begin to realize that God has assigned certain people to complement you on your journey through life fulfilling His purpose. Subjects of the Kingdom are often oblivious to the Economics of the Kingdom. They tend to underestimate the idea of complements in the Kingdom and are consequently biased towards toxic individualism. As a result, there is a lid on their lives that limits them from attaining the potential that God has embedded within them.
Moving on, 2 Corinthians 5:21 gives an excellent instance of the substitution principle in the Economics of the Kingdom,
“For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”
The idea presented here is deceptively simple; Jesus took our sins, and we took His righteousness. But why is that important?
In the analogy of the long-distance driver running low on fuel, the only thing that will bring him satisfaction is getting fuel – regardless of the filling station. In the same vein, since the very Nature of God is just and pure, the only thing that will satisfy Him is that the demands of both justice and purity are satisfied – regardless of who meets that demand. Since no man could meet God’s extremely high standards of justice and purity, the flawless embodiment of perfection Himself offered to take the form of mortal, morally-inept mankind to satisfy the demands of both God’s justice and righteousness. Christianity is founded on this very premise: Anyone who believes in the act of substitution is both relieved of the need to settle the debts owed God on account of sin, while simultaneously having righteousness credited to his account in one fell swoop.
That is the reality of the Economics of the Kingdom.
Just like the case of complementary bundles in the fulfillment of purpose, there are also substitutes.
“…Wot ye not what the scripture saith of [Elijah]? how he maketh intercession to God against Israel saying, Lord, they have killed thy prophets, and digged down thine altars; and I am left alone, and they seek my life. But what saith the answer of God unto him? I have reserved to myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the knee to the image of Baal.” (Romans 11:2-4)
Note how God did not coddle Elijah after hearing the latter’s complaint about being the only one in Israel with any semblance of passion for God. On the contrary, God made Elijah understand two things: First, that Elijah could count himself blessed and highly-favored to be chosen by God – that is, Elijah was ranked high on God’s hierarchy of values and was therefore loved; and secondly, according to the Economics of the Kingdom, God had an abundance of substitutes who could slot into Elijah’s role satisfactorily and still bring God’s agenda into fruition!
This is instructive for every person who is a subject of God’s Kingdom. In His loving kindness, God has ordained complementary bundles comprising of you and certain people you will meet on your life’s path. However, if you drag your feet out of fear, or you deliberately choose to live in disobedience, such that you are unable to play your part in the continuously unfolding story of creation, God will not hesitate to substitute you. He swapped Saul out for David and He can do the same with you. Don’t tempt Him!.
III. Price
There is a cost attached to the attainment of anything desired.
Take the simple act of going to the grocery store to get bread. For simplicity’s sake, let’s suppose you have a budget of $5.
If you decide to spend your entire budget purchasing $5 worth of bread, your preference for bread has cost you $5. However, that is just one aspect of the cost you have incurred. Your choice to buy bread means that you are not able to buy other things such as milk, cereal, cookies, fruits, and so on. In secular economics, all the other things you could have purchased with your $5 are referred to as opportunity costs.
You also incur costs in the form of the physical effort it took to leave your house for the grocery store. You could have used that physical effort in the attainment of some other goals, like doing the dishes, or doing your laundry. In addition, there is the cost in the form of time. As with effort costs, there are numerous other things you sacrificed in order to spend your time at the grocery store. You could have used that time to call your loved ones, or to start working on that project you had been procrastinating for a long time.
The point is that there is a price that you must pay to get the things you have a preference for.
The same thing plays out in the Economics of the Kingdom.
Consider the following analogy given by Jesus in Luke 14:28-33,
“For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish. Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is yet a great way off, he sendeth an ambassage, and desireth conditions of peace. So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.”
Let’s pick apart the tower analogy.
A tower is not the only kind of building a landowner can construct. On the same piece of land, among the other options available to him, the landowner could also have chosen to build a tent or a bungalow. The fact that the landowner has settled with the idea of erecting a tower implies that on his hierarchy of values, the tower occupies the highest rung. That is, the landowner loves the tower and hates the other uses of the land.
As we have already established, preference expressed in words, emotions or thoughts and not in choice behavior is incomplete. Merely liking the idea of building a tower literally doesn’t mean a thing in the world if that idea does not translate into the act of building and finishing that tower. And here’s where costs come in. For instance, a regular house has a low center of gravity, which means that the highest point on its structure is closer to the ground and is therefore more stable. On the other hand, towers are built to be tall, which means that they have a higher center of gravity and are therefore likely to be more unstable than low-rising buildings. To counter this, the foundations of a tower are built to be both deeper and stronger than that of a regular-sized house. All these translate into costs. There are costs incurred first in constructing a foundation with enough depth, even as the landowner starts bracing himself for the costs necessary for erecting a building that is taller than others in the vicinity – more effort, more time, more money, more labor and more resources.
So, what does this first analogy mean to the subject of the Kingdom?
In addition to aesthetics and beauty, a completed tower provides at least two other things: Security (Proverbs 18:10, for example) and an elevated perception (Habakkuk 2:1, for example). Not every kind of building can adequately serve these additional purposes. But at the same time, not every building will suck up the same costs.
This is instructive: There are subjects in the Kingdom whose lives are like towers. They are the real-world exemplars of ‘a city set on the hill that cannot be hidden.’ Outsiders look at the lives of these models and covet the operations of God’s grace that are expressed through their lives. However, what we fail to consider are the costs these exemplars had to pay.
We overlook the effort and time costs involved in engaging in spiritual exercises such as prayer, fasting and meditations on the Word.
We ignore the intellectual costs involved in searching, researching and synthesizing classic compendiums of transgenerational wisdom and insight.
We commonize the costs these trailblazers had to pay in order to move from merely talking about their preferences to expressing them in their actions and choice behavior.
That’s why there is so much wisdom in the aphorism: Never criticize the size of a hunter’s bounty until you know how many traps he had set.
The second analogy in Jesus’ parable is similar to the first.
Historically speaking, a king who wages war against another kingdom does not do so merely because of the thrills. He has jesters and court entertainers for that.
Rather, wars are typically the result of one kingdom desiring to expand its territory into the jurisdiction of another for strategic, political or economical reasons. And as Jesus pointed out, a wise king on the offensive will only proceed to battle if he’s confident of his capabilities to bear the costs of fighting. If not, he must look for alternative ways to attain his goal.
In the same vein, subjects in the Kingdom can expand their territories and spheres of influence spiritually, intellectually, financially, and so on. Just like the landowner, a subject of the Kingdom who wants to expand his territory must be willing to pay the price for that expansion – otherwise, his preference for an expanded territory will merely remain in the domain of good ideas.
It’s not personal; it’s the operations of the Economics of the Kingdom.
IV. Efficiency
In theory, if not in practice, secular economics is set up to avoid waste by ensuring that resources are used maximally. By using logic and mathematical dexterity, secular economists are able to deduce the exact quantity of goods an economic decision-maker should produce (in the case of a firm) or consume (in the case of a consumer) to maximize profits (in the case of the firm) or satisfaction (in the case of a consumer) while minimizing costs. Production or consumption above or below this exact quantity of goods leads to inefficiencies and wastages which economists actively try to avoid.
In the real, practical world, however, economic decision-makers do not always act with the intention to minimize wastages and inefficiencies. For instance, a firm might have the resources to produce 1000 units of a good everyday. However, if the firm is the only one producing the goods in its region, it might choose to only produce 10 goods per day while increasing the unit price of each good. Economically speaking, this is an inefficiency, as the firm is “wasting” the resources it could have used to produce the remaining 990 units of goods. Yet, this is exactly what plays out in a monopoly.
Just like in secular economics, there is a bias against wastage in the Economics of the Kingdom. However, unlike secular economics where efficiencies are usually a theoretical ideal to aspire for, efficiencies are, for all intents and purposes, wired into the operations of the Kingdom.
Consider Jesus’ miracle involving the feeding of the five thousand,
“And when he had taken the five loaves and the two fishes, he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and brake the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before them; and the two fishes divided he among them all. And they did all eat, and were filled. And they took up twelve baskets full of the fragments, and of the fishes.” (Mark 6:41-43)
After the miraculous multiplication of food to feed the multitude, we find the disciples picking up the leftovers to ensure that nothing got wasted. There is no record of Jesus preventing them from doing so. Rather, although the Bible is silent about it, we can assume that the disciples gathered the food fragments because of Jesus’ instruction. To my human mind, anyone who can multiply food at the snap of the finger should not have to worry about preserving leftovers. Yet, in His position as the visible expression of the Unseen God, Jesus aligned the operations of His Ministry with the economics of the Kingdom and would not waste anything.
Another example that comes to mind is God’s approach to the creation process as described in Genesis 1:11-12,
‘And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.’
If Jesus had the capacity to multiply food whenever the need arose during His earthly Ministry, we can also believe that the Almighty God could have spent time and expended effort creating every new plant or herb on earth. Yet, God did not do that because that would be an inefficient use of His creative energies which would be a violation of the Economics of the Kingdom. Instead, He instituted the system of reproduction which would ensure the continued propagation of plant life on earth.
The same thing plays out in Genesis 1:28,
“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
If He wanted to, God could have individually molded each and every human being on earth today – just like He did with Adam. And as with the creation of plants, doing so would have been an inefficient use of God’s resources. Consequently, God created a system that gave mankind the capabilities to reproduce.
The records of God’s creative process serves at least two functions: First, to initiate us to the Economics of the Kingdom; second, to serve as a model for us to imitate even as we serve as stewards of God-given resources in the form of time, effort, finances, and so on.