DOGE - God’s Efficiency
“If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing right.”
Efficiency is a good thing, it helps prevent fraud and waste. It ensures that we make the best use of resources to achieve the desired results. Of course, as a Christian, I’m speaking of efficiency in terms of God’s plans for the world and not that supported by Elon Musk. DOGE, Department of God’s Efficiency, would be fundamentally different from the one Musk is running.
I decided to look up the dictionary definition of efficient and Webster tells me that efficient means being, “productive of desired effects, especially: capable of producing desired results with little or no waste.”
One of the problems we face is that almost all of us have come to define and think of efficiency almost exclusively in economic terms. Efficiency is about maximising profits, limiting economic costs and increasing shareholder value and this often comes at the expense of a resource we call human. Even the church has largely accepted this model of efficiency with some people pushing back on it by saying that God’s ways are inefficient. That’s how deeply ingrained the narrative is in our culture, but Christians are called to live from a different narrative, a unique story that upends the systems and powers of the world.
What if we have the defining parameters of efficiency wrong? What if we looked at the efficient use of kindness, generosity, compassion, empathy, and love to measure our success or failure? The thing about efficiency is that we can set the parameters for it around any facet of our choosing.
I believe the desired effects of efficiency should be a world in which everyone gets to experience life and life to the fullest, the thing Jesus came to offer us. A place where no one has too much and no one has too little, a time when, “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree” (Micah 4:4). A world in which everyone’s humanity is valued and all people are treated with dignity, for everyone is created in the image of God.
Efficiency can be the millions of years it takes for the elements to shape the shoreline into a place of beauty; sitting in silence with a friend who simply needs someone to be present; laughing with a friend over a something silly that happened over the course of a day; the hours spent daydreaming that finally provide the inspiration for your next creative project; sitting quietly listening to the wind and waves allowing them to bring you peace. Who’s to say these aren’t efficient, effective, productive, and valuable moments?
For people driven primarily by monetary concerns this sort of vision of efficiency might well appear to be very inefficient and certainly won’t provide the desired results of saving money. Yet, of all the idols that Jesus could have pointed to, the one he chose was money. “You cannot serve both God and money.” Even in the church we rarely adequately challenge devotion to this idol.
When I pick up the Scriptures and read through them, I find myself struck by what seems to be financial inefficiency in order to efficiently care and provide for some of the people who are struggling to get by. I am also struck by the list of people who are provided for in this moment,
“When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back and get it. Leave it for the fatherless and the widow … When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what remains for the alien, the fatherless, and the widow. When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the alien, the fatherless, and the widow. Remember you were slaves in Egypt. That is why I command you to do this” (Deut. 24:19-22).
This command allowed Ruth, as an immigrant and a widow, to provide food for both her and her mother-in-law, Naomi. We also find Boaz, the owner of the field, instructing his hired help to leave some sheafs for Ruth to pick up (Ruth 2). This is God’s efficiency, a way to make sure that everyone has food on the table.
There’s no drive here to maximise profits or minimize loss. The sheafs that are left behind are not a sign of inefficiency, rather they are focused on an efficiency of kindness, empathy, and concern for the wellbeing of others. It’s an efficiency grounded in a different story, the story of God and the healing and redemption of creation.
The desired effects of human productivity as described for us in the Bible can be found in the words of Isaiah as he reminds the people to, “Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow” (Isa. 1:17). Which is accompanied with the warning in 10:1,2 “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.”
Efficiency, through the lens of Scripture, makes taking care of the most vulnerable in society its top priority. It seeks to correct the imbalances created through human sin and the desire “to be like God” that we are told was the temptation faced in the garden and one that still impacts us today.
While we can debate the best way to care for the most vulnerable people in our world. What is off the table for the Christian is the question as to whether we have a responsibility to care for the most vulnerable people of the world. What is also off the table for Christians is the question of whether it is the best outcome for me personally. We are, as God pointed out to Cain, our brother’s keeper.
I’ll be the first to admit that I struggle to live what I believe to be true. My life is inefficient in so many ways. When I read 1 John and hear the command, “If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.” I recognise how far short I still fall.
When Paul tells me not to look, “To your own interests but each of you to the interest of others” (Phil. 2:3), I frequently come up short. Or when James writes, “Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food (“Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same” Luke 3:11). If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ (thoughts and prayers) but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?” I’m deeply aware of how far off I am from walking the most efficient path with God.
I think James sums it up nicely for us, “If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing right. But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers” (James 2:8,9). Sadly, we all tend to show favoritism and don’t love as efficiently as we should and the result is people suffer and die as we fail to take care of “the least of these.”
It’s a challenge to reject the narrative of our culture and its definition of efficiency and to step into a new narrative, driven by Jesus, where the focus is fundamentally different.
“If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing right.”
