Jesus is preparing His disciples to go into the harvest field. Having told His disciples the spiritual principle of ripples, Jesus tells them the spiritual principle of compensation; “Anyone who receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and anyone who receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man will receive a righteous man’s reward.”
In the upside down and twisted way of life we have since the Fall of humankind, a person earns their reward for effort toward a task. It might be called a wage or a salary or cash-for-service or piecework or by some other term, but it is very clearly compensation. You earn what you get for doing something.
Of course, that compensation is not always in direct proportion to what you’ve done. There are inequalities. While for the most part, those who do much get much, it is also true in our world that sometimes those who do hardly anything get most, and those who do most everything get almost nothing.
We see those inequalities in every field of work. Some sports players give the very best of their bodies and youth to the game and get basically nothing. Others find their way to the spotlight and earn hundreds of millions of dollars. Some who enter the world of finance labor all their lives for a meager income. Others find their way to the top of the salary chain. The same is true in the fields of arts, medicine, science, education, etc. This is part of God’s judgment on fallen society, where inequality is seemingly a function of chance much more than effort.
As a result the human system of compensation results in poverty alongside excessive wealth. This itself mandates another inequality – the need for some to give a far greater proportion of their wealth than most to benefit those who lack.
In God’s Kingdom there are no real inequalities because our compensation is related only to our faithfulness in honoring Him. Jesus tells us that any who receive a prophet on account of who they are receive the prophet’s reward, and likewise those who receive the righteous man on account of their rightousness. The prophet and the righteous are about Christ’s cause. So, just as receiving the one who Christ sends results in receiving Christ and therefore the one who sent Christ – so also receiving the one about Christ’s cause results in a receiving the same reward as the one who was commissioned in Christ’s cause. That is, they receive Christ. They earn the right to know His presence, His peace and His power, and one day to look upon His face. This is the true genius of God’s system of compensation. That those who purpose to honor Him will be blessed with Him, and along with Him, all that He represents and does. Those who do not honor Him simply will not.
What we ‘get’ is only what God speaks over us. He alone is the creator and our creator, and He alone assigns skills and ability, and He alone rules over circumstance. So the stuff we typically think of when our fallen minds think about wages and compensation is but the smallest of blessings God provides. The real blessing is Himself, which He gives to all who faithfully honor Him.
Every temporal hardship will earn a more than adequate eternal compensation.
M.S. Mills
APPLICATION: Thankfulness
The God who numbers the hairs on your head also watches over you. A cup of cold water given in His Name cannot go unrewarded. In what manner then will He reward a life of faithfulness? Let us thank God for the daily opportunity to demonstrate faithfulness to Him.