God Loves Profit
Excerpt from their book Stewards, Not Owners: The Joy of Aligning Your Money with Your Faith (Forefront Books, 2025)
In the Genesis account of creation, God commands Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis 1:28).
This means more than just having babies. Implicit in the command is the notion of multiplication of people and resources. In other words, use the gifts God’s given you to create something useful.
Investopedia defines profit as “the financial benefit realized when revenue generated from a business activity exceeds the expenses, costs, and taxes involved in sustaining the activity in question.”
If it costs you one dollar to run a business so you can earn one dollar, it wouldn’t make financial sense to do it. Outputs need to exceed inputs to “be fruitful and increase.” That’s profit.
We know many believers are uncomfortable with the idea that profit is part of God’s plan. It’s understandable, given how often profit is castigated in academic and popular media.
Many people assume that to earn profit inherently means to take advantage of someone else. The ideal, some argue, is to charge no more than something costs to produce plus a very small margin for the business to keep its lights on.
Consider a world in which businesses just barely scrape by.
How could new inventions ever come about without the possibility of profit? How would a growing population be sustained? How would we get groundbreaking medical advancements that save millions of lives?
Profit isn’t optional for a flourishing society; it’s absolutely necessary.
Profit empowers us to “subdue” the earth and “rule over” every living creature. It’s why few of us in the West know many mothers who have died in childbirth—something commonplace in poor countries and in our own history. It’s why we can go on vacations or have automobiles or go camping in dry tents.
There is no evidence that God wanted us to lead a subsistence life—which is a life almost wholly devoid of profit. To the contrary, the biblical ideal is prospering cities and farms with feast times and bountiful harvests. None of this can happen without profit.
Of course, exploitation—which is a form of excessive profit that takes advantage of other people—is unbiblical. That’s one reason the West has antitrust laws to prevent businesses from colluding to fix prices at the expense of consumers.
But working hard, taking risks, innovating, and reaping a bountiful financial harvest is a blessing from God that blesses far more people than just the entrepreneur.
That entrepreneur can then turn and be a blessing to others, provide employment to people who need jobs, and develop new products that bring flourishing to an entire society.
