Unprofitable Servants
So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do (Luke 17:10).
The words of Jesus are not palatable to the self-proclaimed autonomous man. Jesus, to use the vernacular, never gave man a lot of slack. Man is put in his proper place by the teachings of the gospel. Until man knows what he is in the eyes of God, he can never understand who he is. What the best of autonomous men are, Jesus said, are unprofitable servants.
He introduced this message with an example. Assume that you have hired a full-time servant to work for you. One of his tasks is to plow the field. Another is to serve you your evening meal. He knows he is to do both. Which of you, Jesus asks, allows the servant to go eat dinner as soon as he comes in from the field? Will you not rather say to him, "Make ready wherewith I may sup, and gird thyself, and serve me, till I have eaten and drunken; and afterward thou shall eat and drink" (v. 8)?
What is His point? Simple: God is the Master; we are His servants. Does the master "thank that servant because he did the things that were commanded him?" Jesus asks. Obviously not, He summarizes (v. 9). He has done well only when his work is completed, and his reward is food and drink. But he must finish his work before he gets his reward. The master is not required to delay his feast until the servant has satisfied his desires. He was hired to do a job; the mere completion of the assigned task is not some great achievement which automatically calls forth the master's rejoicing. How much less cause for the master's rejoicing and congratulations is the completion of half the assigned task.
Paul used similar language in describing the ethical rebellion of both Jews and Gentiles: "As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one" (Rom. 3:10-12). What man faces is condemnation: "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3:23).
Both Jesus and Paul were reminding their listeners and readers that man is not washed clean by the good works he performs. There is nothing wrong with good works, just as there is nothing wrong with the servant's completing the first part of his assigned task. God does not rejoice at our good works, however, just because we have done them. We have already come so far short that our half-completed works do not impress Him. Where is the master's meal? What are we doing, sitting down and eating our meal when the master goes hungry? Who do we think we are? More to the point, who do we think the master is? Who do we imagine that we are dealing with? A person like ourselves? Another slave who also has not completed his tasks and is equally under condemnation?
The typical response of the man who hears of his own shortcomings before God, and of his need for repentance, is this one: "Well, I'm no worse than most everyone else." This may well be true. He is no Hitler, no Stalin. But in this case, there is no safety in numbers. He is not going to get lost in the crowd because of his average performance. The whole crowd is headed for disaster.
God's Bottom Line
It is not so strange that so many of the parables are economic in their format. Men respond to what they understand, and most men understand something about economics. They understand the difference between profit and loss. "More" is preferable to them than "less."
Had Adam performed his task of dominion satisfactorily, he would have "broken even." God gave him life and a world to conquer; then He gave him a wife to assist him--his own servant. Children were also expected: additional servants, who would eventually become independent servants under God (Gen. 2:24). God would have received the rate of return on His "investment" that He had planned. Adam, in this sense, would have become a profitable servant. Anything short of Adam's complete performance had to be classified as unprofitable. The day Adam rebelled was the day that God's "rate of return" on Adam fell into the loss column. Adam did not possess any resources independently; he could not "make it up" to God, even if he had chosen to do so.
What is the rational economic response to an asset that is losing money? Sell it, if possible; scrap it, if there is no secondary market. Just melt it down for scrap. Junk it. The longer you use an asset that is producing losses, the more you lose from your capital base. You cannot "make it up on volume" if it costs you three ounces of gold per transaction to bring in two ounces. The more transactions, the greater your losses. Six thousand years of Adam's heirs, all of them performing at varying rates of loss, would not only not "make up the original loss", such a continued operation of the "business" would multiply the losses. This is why God told Adam that on the day of rebellion, Adam would surely die. The old investing rule must be honored: cut your losses, and let your profits run!
Did God fail to honor this principle? No, He honored it completely. But why did He allow Adam and Adam's race to multiply His losses? Because God had a way of getting Adam's race back into the "expected rate of return" category. He had a way to compensate Himself for the losses incurred as a result of Adam's poor performance, and once this payment was made, to return the servants to the profit column. The compensating balance was paid by Jesus Christ.
"And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matt. 3:17). In other words, Jesus was a profitable servant in the eyes of God. Thus, through a substitution of Christ's death for the death of Adam's heirs, God allows a transfer of capital to the heirs. They are placed, as Adam was before his rebellion, in positions of servitude, but profitable servitude. They become servants who are still at work in the fields, or feeding the cattle, and who have not yet come in to fix the master's meal at the end of the day. Their work is still before them, but it has not yet become unprofitable by their failure to perform a particular assignment. God is still earning a positive rate of return on His investment.
The multiplication of the Second Adam's race is now positive. Not to use the entrepreneur's terminology, "God can make it through volume." However, we must not forget that God is self-contained, self-sufficient, and in need of nothing from us; His own glory is self-sufficient. God possesses, as Cornelius Van Til says, a full bucket. He does not need man to fill it higher. Yet man is to glorify God, and history does have meaning. If it didn't, God would not have bothered to send Christ to redeem history and restore redeemed mankind to profitability. He would not have bothered to call Noah to build an ark; He would simply have wiped the slate clean, acknowledging that all of mankind was a waste, a source of endless losses. So there is a dilemma here, which Van Til calls the full-bucket dilemma. God does not really need mankind to make Him wealthy; He does not really have to "get a rate of return" on His "investment" in mankind. God is not going to the poorhouse if His investment goes sour. Yet He did not want this investment to go sour; He sacrificed His Son in order to keep it from going sour.
God Loves His Servants
Men love their wives and children, even though wives and children are functionally subordinate as helpers to the male heads of households. The people of God are described as the bride of God in both the Old and New Testaments, and also as God's son (Ex. 4:22). So the relationship between God and His people is a master-servant relationship, but also a husband--wife relationship and a father-son relationship. There is a deeply personal bond between God and mankind. All men are God's children, for all men are of one blood (Acts 1 7:26), but some of the sons are disinherited, while the others are adopted (John 1:12). But this deep personal bond does not deny the master-servant relationship, which Jesus specifically described as an investor-capital asset relationship.
God was well pleased with His Son. Because of this deep personal bond between them, the sacrifice had real meaning. God was not simply punishing a profitable servant; He was punishing His own Son. The Son's love for the other servants, who were deserving of destruction in the scrap heap, led to His settling the accounts of those servants.
We dare not pass over the investment aspects of the history of salvation. God does want a return on His investment. He wants the world subdued to His glory by His servants. This was His plan from the beginning. Satan's efforts did involve economics: turning potentially profitable servants into a loss-producing asset in God's portfolio. Satan realized that God was determined to see the earth subdued by man, and as a rebel, Satan sought to thwart the plans of his Enemy. Satan is a destroyer, the one who sows tares in the field of God, in an attempt to destroy the harvest (Matt. 13:24-30; 36-43). He seeks to reduce the value of God's portfolio to zero, if possible, or better yet, into a debt position. Satan would be delighted to be able to haul God into bankruptcy court--with Satan as the judge, jury, and enforcer.
But God is not in debt. He does not need "leverage" in order to produce a profit. He is not using OPM (other people's money). And because of the death of His Son, God is earning a positive return on His investment. What has happened is this: Satan has put himself in the position as administrator or trustee of a portion of God's portfolio. Specifically, God has transferred to Satan the loss-producing portion, namely, all those unprofitable servants, those disinherited sons. These are Satan's troops (to switch to a military analogy). These are Satan's borrowed assets, which he is allowed to invest during his period of borrowed time. They produce losses. Satan is the debtor who will be hauled, on judgment day, into bankruptcy court. He is the ultimate unprofitable servant, the archetype of all indebted servants who cannot pay their masters when the accounts fall due (Matt. 18:23-35).
There is a very clever scene in a comedy film, "Bedazzled," in which the Satan figure brings a Faust figure into his establishment. The man (Dudley Moore) has sold his soul to the Devil (Peter Cook). Cook escorts Moore down the stairs into a shabby-looking place that is a kind of cheap restaurant, bar, and bordello. Cook introduces Moore to all of Cook's employees. The main ones turn out to be the "seven deadly sins." Anger is some loudmouth who is trying to start a fight. Sloth is asleep. Cook, as the Devil figure, remarks to Moore: "I just can't get decent help. It must have something to do with the wages I pay." Sadly, contemporary theologians lack the theological insight of a pair of British comedians.
Are We Profitable Servants?
We have to take the words of Jesus seriously. He was criticizing the Pharisees and self-righteous people who thought that all their holy works would save them from the wrath of the Master. He called them unprofitable servants because they did not understand how much was really expected of them, how far short the best of them came, and how much in need of "an injection of new capital" their accounts as servants really were.
Was Jesus criticizing the performance of His own servants? No. He was showing them that if they trusted in the spiritual capital delivered to them by their father Adam, then they were nothing short of bankrupt, and nothing they could earn would ever settle the account. They were too far in debt. On the other hand, they can get their personal accounts into a positive position if they operate in terms of the balance sheet delivered to the by the Second Adam. They are no longer "in the hole" financially when they can present Christ's balance sheet to God. Their own efforts now become positive. Without this transfer of capital, they cannot even meet the interest payments on the debt they owe to God. The debt will simply get larger, no matter what they do, just as Satan's debt is building up relentlessly. Satan has no intention of paying off the debt, of course; but good intentions of rebellious men, in time and on earth, still are not enough. They may not be "in the hole" financially to God as much as Satan will be, but they will be in the eternal hole with Satan because none of them has a penny to his name.
So we are profitable servants today, if we operate with the balance sheet given in grace by Christ to His people. Despite our losses from time to time, despite our own mismanagement of funds, through His grace, the losses will not be counted against us. At worst, we will come into heaven with a "zero balance" in our account (1Cor. 3:15). No servant wants a zero balance, and all should strive to build up spiritual capital, but there is no way that we can get into the debt column again. Christ has paid that debt forever.
This should reduce our fear of failure. We need not bury our talents in the ground in fear of the Master. We can speculate--not speculate wildly, but do our best to predict the future, and invest in terms of our convictions. We can take risks and bear uncertainty in order to make a better world. The Satanists can gamble, creating statistically guaranteed long-term losses for the sake of "an exciting game." They gamble their substance on the turn of a card or the throw of the dice, in games rigged against them. We overcome uncertainty and earn profits by forthrightly dealing with the world in terms of God's law. The world is "rigged" in favor of God's law and those who operate in terms of His law. The universe is rigged against Satan and his followers, and they know it, but they play on, as gamblers play on, knowing they will eventually go bankrupt if they play the game long enough. Their end is sure, and so is ours. They do not know how far "in the hole" they will be when their time is up, and we do not know how many talents we will have remaining, but we know this much: we will not be in the hole. We are therefore not to dig holes for out talents (Matt. 25:24-30). Exercising dominion is not gambling, and gambling is not exercising dominion.
Biblical Economics Today Vol. 6, No. 2 (February/March 1983)
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