vladimirgrebenar 
Many people question how it is possible that God allows many unjust entrepreneurs and managers to succeed in business ventures and thus create greater material wealth, strengthen their power and influence on earth. Where is God who allows all this? Doesn’t the Bible say that God will bless the faithfulness of the children of Israel, or all those who listen to God? So why then do many believers fail with business ventures and many who aren’t believers succeed? Isn’t there in the Bible a promise of blessings for man’s faithfulness to God? Why is all this not simply visible to all people on earth? What does God say?
„And it shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto my commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, that I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil. And I will send grass in thy fields for thy cattle, that thou mayest eat and be full.“ (Deut. 11:13-15).
Through Moses, God promised His blessing to a community of people who at that time were engaged in a business that we would today call primitive agriculture. However, at the time, this was in some ways the most common form of work and a message of promised blessings for faithfulness to God. The message was addressed to the people of that time to understand it.
It is wise to believe that God promises the same to us today in modern times, because God is eternal and His promises and laws are for all time. Unfortunately for us, arrogance and hubris make man stupid and primitive and blind and deafen the mind and heart so that we cannot understand the simple messages of the Creator on how to succeed. God, who created the universe and the atom as well, made a simple description of what man’s success should be.
Our undisguised desire to stand in the place of the Creator makes various achievements of human work that have very little or no value in other people to be considered success today, mostly only for ourselves. First of all, it should be emphasized that science has not provided answers to only 4% of the questions we rightly ask ourselves when observing known phenomena in space.
Neither do we know the Universe, nor can we give answers to some fundamental questions about ourselves. For instance, when we only analyze the history of the development of work psychology, we realize that one scientist refutes another with his theses, and all of them are scientists who can be trusted, but also scientists whose work can be challenged. Indeed, all those in the scientific–academic community in honest and intimate reflections on their research must recognize that each new knowledge does not solve open questions, but opens a growing number of new ones.
So when we cannot thoroughly answer some fundamental questions about ourselves, we must admit that we are not even able to answer the question of what human success is. We cannot scientifically answer the question of human success, because success is necessarily linked to the values we believe in, and science does not have a single human universal value as much as scientists try to argue.
I will give an example. The issue of protecting human life from conception is unquestionable for believers because human life is the greatest value in a society that would not exist without the birth of children. On the other hand, the same question for various liberal queer theorists and activists highlights the right of women to kill for the sake of self-love. Science is sometimes so impotent that it is unable to answer such questions.
When discussing human rights and success, human selfishness and arrogance are powerful and lucid forces that completely refute all arguments for life and creation, but ultimately fall on the simple premise that success cannot be the right to murder and the value of death in a society that is going extinct. Success cannot be profit in business, and various social recognitions cannot be values when workers are miserably paid.
“The emperor is naked,” said the child (H. C. Andersen: “The Emperor’s New Clothes”), while the adults were silent in fear. Indeed, the emperor was naked and everyone saw it, but fear, hypocrisy and the human desire to flatter the authorities had to pay tribute to the emperor’s false success.
So who achieved success then? The majority who admired the emperor’s nudity, shame and misery in fear for their own misery thinking that bestiality and selfishness are truly the value of modern civilization or a child who had successfully spoken the truth and gone joyfully to its play. Lots of wise and clever lies versus childish honesty. Maybe that’s why God came down to us as a child!
The question is, was Christ the Lord Himself successful? In a conversation I witnessed on the value of following Jesus Christ, I heard the comment, “Is it a success to be shamefully crucified?” The man paused and stood at the door of faith. Indeed, is it success to be completely rejected and humiliated, to be cursed and condemned, to be ridiculed and to suffer hard, and to end the mission with the complete loss of everything eventually?
Jesus gave His all and lost everything in the cruelest way. What kind of success is that? Does God want to convince us of success beyond the common sense He has given us? Is the death of His Son a success? Where is the proof of that success? How can we believe it? There is only one answer that testifies to success for all that has happened to Jesus, and that is the resurrection. Jesus is risen and He is alive. He did not show Himself to any unbeliever, but only to believers.
The apostles, disciples, and women who followed Jesus suffered a complete defeat in themselves with Jesus’ death on the cross, but very soon the result changed to complete victory with the risen Christ. Temporary failure turned into immeasurable success for all those who followed Christ. No one who was faithful to Jesus experienced ultimate failure, all celebrated Jesus’ victory over death. Following Jesus is a guaranteed success, although we may not always know how.
No unbeliever saw the risen Jesus. Those who believed in Him saw Him. Jesus is the name for success and He elevated all by His unspeakable victory and success. For believers, Christ’s resurrection is their victory and their success, whereas for unbelievers complete misinterpretation and misunderstanding.
Therefore, the issue of success in the business world is not an issue of rewards for results from balance sheets and profit accounts that are often paid for broken family relationships, selfish lives lived for themselves, false friendships out of interest, addictions and fears towards politics, but an issue of whether those results are a consequence of work for someone else’s benefit, for the testimony of Christ, our Lord, in work and in deeds. According to Moses, God did not promise all the faithful that they would be immensely rich in material things, but that they would be satisfied with everything. God gives individuals such talents that they own business systems, but for other people, not just for themselves.
Science that does not want to fully acknowledge God, the Father, must recognize that the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs are true Christian characteristics. The scientific literature of modern entrepreneurship proves that the greatest value of successful business people has been and will be ethics. There is no business ethics, there is only ethics. Someone is either ethical or unethical (said John Maxwell, the world’s leading name for business leadership).
One cannot be ethical at work and unethical outside of work. People of true Christian values have great capacity for creation and entrepreneurship, but that also means working on yourself. Until His 30 years of age, Jesus was not only a man of prayer, but also a man practicing His craft, patiently and persistently creating wooden objects, with precise work and high professionalism.
Perseverance, a sense for justice, uncompromisingness, working for others, caring for the organization, setting values, selflessness, accepting falls and rising again, unspeakable desire to create, modesty, honesty, faithfulness to principles… That’s entrepreneurship of the 21st century. I know that many critics would now say that the list lacks a cold corporate profit orientation, but the answer is that over 90% of the working population works in small and medium-sized business systems…
David won, not Goliath. When a successful Croatian entrepreneur and believer, whose name, surname and company are known to me, once said in a lecture to graduate students that his mission had always been to be David, a manager from the audience, whose name and company I have not remembered, commented: “Maybe it’s time to be Goliath.” The wise entrepreneur of the world-famous Croatian brand said: “Once, when I start wanting to be Goliath, I will lose to David.”[1]
[1] The article was published with minor changes in: Veritas. Glasnik sv. Antuna Padovanskog. Croatian Province of St. Jerome of the Franciscan Conventuals. Zagreb. Sveti Duh 31. No. 6. June 2019. P. 24.