"God Helps Those Who Help Themselves"

Have you ever found yourself looking at a well-known and familiar phrase and suddenly having it presented in a new light? That is exactly what happened to me not long ago. The phrase in question is ‘God helps those who help themselves’, a phrase I have long been familiar with. Hadn't I heard it quoted frequently to uphold the Protestant work ethic which stressed the value of hard work, thrift and self-discipline? It was used to uphold the belief that while you should help those less fortunate, that ‘God’ preferred you to help only those who were also helping themselves, and this didn't include the unemployed or those on welfare. Not being overly familiar with the bible, I had always assumed that even if it wasn't an exact quote from there, it was at least a modern paraphrase. So when I heard it said that the phrase was not biblical, my ears perked up and I became intrigued.

In looking up ‘God helps those who help themselves’ in Wikipedia, I found that it said [in part] "...it was the English political theorist Algernon Sidney who originated the now familiar wording, 'God helps those who help themselves', apparently the first exact rendering of the phrase. Benjamin Franklin later used it in his Poor Richard's Almanack (1736) and has been widely quoted." The results of several polls are quoted there with results showing that over 80% of the people polled think it is from the Bible, including 68% of the 'born-again' Christians and 81% of the 'non born-again' Christians. 'Despite being of non-biblical origin, the phrase topped a poll of the most widely known Bible verses.'

To put it quite simply, I was relieved: relieved because that phrase ’God helps those who help themselves’ had always seemed to me to exclude those in society that needed help the most: those who are weak, vulnerable, or disenfranchised for any reason.

So why is it then that this has become such an oft-quoted phrase unlike 'sell all that you have and give to the poor', for example, that appears once each in Matthew and Mark and twice in Luke? I would wager that other than inside a church you can't remember the last time you heard those words quoted even if you typically hang-out with the 'church-going' crowd.

Today's society encourages us all to believe that 'we deserve a good life' because we have worked hard for it. Therefore it stands to reason that if you haven't worked hard [by our individual standards] then you are undeserving of help even by 'God'. Why would you give away what you have accumulated to someone who has done nothing to deserve it, especially without any expectation of getting anything in return...perhaps not even a tax receipt .?

Which version of the Bible influences how you live; the one that includes the verse 'God helps those who help themselves' or the one that has existed for almost 2000 years, that doesn't, but does include the verse 'sell all that you have and give to the poor' ?

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