The Blessing That Asks Something of You

A Billboard on the Ibadan Expressway

Picture the billboard. It stands on the expressway out of Ibadan, a little past the point where the traffic thins and drivers start to relax. A smiling man in an excellent suit, the date of a programme called the Year of Open Doors, and in the corner, in smaller letters, The blessing of the LORD makes rich. Proverbs 10:22. (This is a scene, not a particular billboard, but anyone who has driven that road will recognise the species.)

Then picture the same verse arriving on your phone as a WhatsApp broadcast that has already been forwarded seventeen times, and again on Sunday, when a hand is stretched toward a financial breakthrough and the offering basket makes its third and increasingly insistent round. On this reading the verse is God’s signature on a blank cheque, and the congregation’s job is to find where to deposit it.

It would be easy to mock all that, and it would be unfair. The people who put verses on billboards are not all fools or crooks, and the teaching behind them has real roots. The Bible is not embarrassed by wealth. God told Abraham he would make him a great nation and make his name great (Genesis 12:2). Proverbs 22:4 says that the reward for humility and the fear of the LORD is riches and honour and life. A pastor in a country where money is short can fairly say that God is no admirer of poverty and does not hand out suffering as a spiritual credential.

And the money is short. The World Bank’s Nigeria Development Update of April 2026, as the Nigerian press reported it, put poverty at 56 per cent in 2023 and 63 per cent in 2025, with a slow easing expected towards 59 per cent by 2028. The October 2026 update says the rate has stabilised for the first time since 2019, which is the kind of good news that sounds better in Abuja than in a market in Mushin, because stable here means about six in ten. A different yardstick, the UNDP’s 2026 Multidimensional Poverty Index, counts 48.7 per cent of Nigerians, about 113.3 million people, as poor in 2024. The UNDP itself notes that this measure and the dollar a day kind capture different things, so the two should not be treated as interchangeable.

The measures differ and the picture isn’t tidy, but the scale isn’t in doubt. On every one of these yardsticks, tens of millions of Nigerians are poor, and the person reading that billboard may well be one of them. A hungry reader hears a verse about riches differently from a comfortable one, and she may plan a household budget around it. The preacher on the billboard may mean every word and want her to have hope. Hope built on a misreading is still a loan, though, and someone ends up repaying it. So it matters what the verse says.

What the Hebrew Actually Says

Here is the verse in the English Standard Version, with its footnote.

“The blessing of the LORD makes rich, and he adds no sorrow with it.”

— Proverbs 10:22 (ESV)

The ESV adds a note on the last clause: Or and toil adds nothing to it. That note is the key to the verse, and most billboards leave it out.

The verb “makes rich” is the same one we meet eighteen verses earlier in the same chapter, in verse 4. And the word translated sorrow, etsev, is glossed in the standard lexicons as toil or a pang, so it can lean towards labour as easily as towards grief. Translators divide. Read one way, the LORD adds no sorrow to his gift. Read the other way, toil adds nothing to it. The United Bible Societies handbook written for translators prefers the second reading and points to the Good News Translation, which has it as hard work making you no richer, and the older commentators Ellicott and Pulpit offer the same alternative.

Take either reading and notice what happens to the formula. If the LORD’s gift comes with no sorrow, then it is clean, and it cannot be had by exploitation or by leaving your conscience at the door. If instead toil adds nothing to it, then it cannot be manufactured, and that includes manufacturing it by planting the right seed in the right account at the right hour. A thirteen step seed formula printed in the church bulletin is toil by another name. Both readings put the source of wealth in God and the source of the formula in nobody.

That’s the first and best thing the verse has to say, and it’s worth having without any of the extras. What God gives, he gives all the way down. If what you are calling a blessing is making you anxious, or cruel, or someone your own mother would not recognise, it is worth asking whose name is on the cheque.

Picture a contractor in Abuja who wins a road contract by paying a fee to the right clerk, and who then pays the clerk again every quarter to keep quiet about it. The money is real. The new car is real. So is the habit of checking his phone before he answers any unknown number, and the way he now chooses his seat in a restaurant. Nothing in his life resembles the verse, because the verse describes a gift that arrives without that second invoice, and he is paying one every month. A pastor who tells him that the contract is his seed harvest has handed him a sedative, and a sedative is not a blessing.

Anyone who has watched a gifted public man fall knows how long a platform can run ahead of a person’s character. The gift can go on working for years after the man has stopped being clean. That is a warning to anyone who measures blessing by how well things appear to be going. Whatever arrives with fear attached, a promotion bought with someone else’s dignity or a contract that needs your silence, was never his gift to begin with.

The other side needs saying too, because honest people read this verse and feel accused. A trader who plays fair and still has a lean month has not been shown to be unblessed. Proverbs 10:22 says where clean wealth comes from. It doesn’t promise that every honest ledger will be fat.

Where Proverbs Stops Short of a Promise

Eighteen verses back, the same chapter says something that sounds almost like a rival.

“A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.”

— Proverbs 10:4 (ESV)

The Hebrew verb is the same in both verses, so the book doesn’t think of them as rivals. The diligent hand makes rich, and the LORD’s blessing makes rich. The book never imagined a person receiving blessing in a chair with folded arms. God is the source and the working hand is the channel, and the farmer who prays for rain still ploughs.

Yet Proverbs does not offer a guarantee, and the billboard needs one. The book is a collection of sayings about how life in God’s world usually goes, and it is honest enough to say where the usual breaks down. Look at the prayer of Agur, near the end of the book.

“Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, ‘Who is the LORD?’ or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.”

— Proverbs 30:8 and 9 (ESV)

Agur fears being full as much as being empty. He knows that abundance can make a man forget God, and that destitution can make him a thief. Neither condition is a verdict on his standing with heaven. The poor believer is not cursed, and the rich man is not thereby blessed.

That distinction has a pastoral edge. Turn a proverb into a promise, and the promise is something that can be collected, and when it is not collected the explanation is waiting. She lacked faith. She gave too little. She sowed in the wrong season. Picture a widow who gave all she had and is still behind on her rent. She is told the fault is hers. I think that teaching, whatever its intentions, does real harm.

Paul puts the other side of the same warning in a single stern line.

“But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.”

— 1 Timothy 6:9 (ESV)

Notice that Paul says desire. He is not talking about a particular salary. A man can have a great deal of money and be free of the craving, and a man with almost none can be eaten alive by it. The Bible’s concern is where the heart is pointed.

What Receiving the Gift Requires

The verse also does something that no billboard has room to print. It describes a gift, and a gift has a giver and a purpose. When the Israelites stood at the edge of the land they were warned about exactly the thought that comes with sudden plenty.

“Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day.”

— Deuteronomy 8:17 and 18 (ESV)

Even in the most plainly material passage in the Law, the first requirement is memory. Remember who gave it. A blessing that is received as a personal achievement has already turned into something else.

The second requirement is direction. God’s first promise to Abraham was lavish, and it was not private.

“And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.”

— Genesis 12:2 (ESV)

The blessing is given so that it can be passed on. Paul tells Timothy what that looks like for people who are rich in this age: do not be haughty, do not stake your hopes on riches, and instead “to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share” (1 Timothy 6:17 and 18, ESV, quoted in part). Wealth that stops at the owner has missed its purpose.

Luke records what it looked like in the early church in Jerusalem.

“There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.”

— Acts 4:34 and 35 (ESV)

I wouldn’t read that as a command to sell every house. What it shows is what a community looks like when the blessing of God circulates, and the measure is plain enough. Nobody who belonged was needy. Put that beside six in ten and a church could ask itself a plain question, without any scolding in it. If the LORD’s blessing really were landing among us, how many people in our own pews would still be going without?

There’s an odd detail in what comes after. The first quarrel Luke reports inside that church is about food, with widows overlooked in the daily distribution, and the apostles do not wave it away as a distraction from prayer. They appoint seven men to see to it (Acts 6:1 to 6). The Word and the widows’ bread are both treated as the church’s business, and Luke says the word of God went on spreading. A congregation that guards the pulpit and ignores the kitchen has read only half of Acts 6.

So the blessing does ask something of you. It isn’t a price. It comes with the gift the way a key comes with a house, and anyone who takes the house and throws away the key hasn’t understood what was given.

Reading the Verse Before Sowing Into It

There is one more request, and it sounds duller than the others, though I think it is the one most Nigerian churches need. Read the verse.

Nobody could accuse us of lacking zeal, and nobody should want to. We have the vigils and the forty day fasts and the mountain prayer meetings, the stadium revivals and the prayer chains that run across WhatsApp groups and time zones. The fervour is real, and so, often, is the presence of God in those rooms. Paul had something to say to a people in exactly that position.

“For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.”

— Romans 10:2 (ESV)

He was writing about his own Jewish kinsmen, and it would be cheap to treat his words as a slap at someone else’s church. They apply to anyone whose passion has outrun their reading. Hosea says something similar to a nation whose teachers had let the knowledge of God lapse. And it isn’t a charge confined to preachers; the congregation that never opens the book is just as exposed.

“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me.”

— Hosea 4:6 (ESV)

Knowledge here means more than facts about the Bible, and I’d say it can’t be handed over from the pulpit alone. The next lines speak of forgetting the law of God. But it certainly includes the plain labour of finding out what a verse says before building a ministry or a household budget on it. Most of us were trained, one way or another, to use Scripture like a vending machine. Insert the right verse, in the right posture, with enough fervour, and out comes the result. The technical word for reading into a text what you carried in with you is eisegesis, and it is like diagnosing yourself before the appointment and then hearing everything the doctor says as agreement. You leave satisfied, and quite often wrong. The patient alternative is to let the text say something you did not already think. A verse treated as a coin for a vending machine will occasionally drop something, and then the habit hardens. A verse read slowly, with its footnote and its neighbours, may disappoint the billboard and still feed the reader.

So here is a small task for anyone willing. The next time you pass that billboard, read Proverbs 10 through to the end, with a pen. Mark every verse about the diligent hand, the honest word and the open hand, and see how many it takes before you notice that the blessing of the LORD has company. Then ask yourself a question the billboard will never print. If that blessing arrived in your account on Monday morning, and it came clean, with no sorrow attached and no hidden invoice, who would you ring first?

References

Biblical References

Proverbs 10:22 (KJV; ESV). The anchor verse, quoted in the KJV in the epigraph and in the ESV, with its footnote, in the body.
Proverbs 10:4 (ESV). The diligent hand “makes rich”, with the same Hebrew verb as 10:22.
Proverbs 22:4 (ESV). The strongest text in the prosperity teaching’s favour, stated fairly.
Proverbs 30:8 and 9 (ESV). Agur’s prayer, showing that neither poverty nor riches is a verdict on a person.
1 Timothy 6:9 (ESV). Paul on the desire to be rich.
1 Timothy 6:17 and 18 (ESV). Paul’s charge to the rich to do good and to share.
Acts 6:1 to 6 (ESV). The first dispute in the Jerusalem church, over food for widows, summarised and not quoted.
Genesis 12:2 (ESV). The blessing of Abraham, given so that he would be a blessing.
Deuteronomy 8:17 and 18 (ESV). The warning to remember the LORD as the source of wealth.
Acts 4:34 and 35 (ESV). The early church, where no member was needy.
Romans 10:2 (ESV). Zeal without knowledge.
Hosea 4:6 (ESV). A people destroyed for lack of knowledge.

Other Sources

BibleHub. (n.d.). Proverbs 10:22 [Interlinear and commentary]. https://mail.biblehub.com/proverbs/10-22.htm. Source for the Hebrew words (Strong’s 6238 and 6089), their glosses, and the Ellicott and Pulpit alternatives.
Brand Spur NG. (2026, August 26). Nigeria’s poverty rate hits 63% despite lower inflation: World Bank. https://brandspurng.com/2026/08/26/nigerias-poverty-rate-hits-63-despite-lower-inflation-world-bank/. Secondary report of the World Bank’s April 2026 Nigeria Development Update (56 per cent in 2023, 63 per cent in 2025, about 59 per cent by 2028).
Daily Trust. (2026, October 11). Tinubu: World Bank report shows our reform on track. AllAfrica. https://allafrica.com/stories/202610120024.html. Report of the State House statement on the October 2026 Nigeria Development Update; the poverty rate “stabilised for the first time since 2019” is the government’s characterisation of the report.
Reyburn, W. D., & Fry, E. M. (2000). A handbook on Proverbs. United Bible Societies. https://tips.translation.bible/?p=20516. Source for the preference for the reading in which toil adds nothing, and for the Good News Translation wording.
United Nations Development Programme. (2026). Nigeria: Global multidimensional poverty index 2026 country profile. https://www.hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/Country-Profiles/MPI2026/NGA.pdf. Source for 48.7 per cent, about 113.3 million people, 2024 survey data, and the comparability note.

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.