NOTES for Pro 10:3
The words about God, who will not allow the righteous to hunger and will take away from the wicked what he has stored up, can be understood in different ways. It was precisely aphorisms of this kind that more than once led thoughtful Christians not only to the question of social justice, but also to assumptions about the need for radical redistribution of property, and by violent means.
Reading the rebukes of the prophets, it is not hard to see that they too stood for social justice, though they trusted not in revolution, but in society's return to the Torah, to its norms and values. Yet the aphorism quoted here is not limited to one social issue, for the problem of wealth and poverty has two sides.
On one side, it really must be discussed as a social problem, the problem of just distribution of social income, and the Torah offers quite definite mechanisms for redistributing this income in favor of the poor. In modern language, a state founded on the Torah would be a welfare state.
But there is also another side to this question, connected with one's attitude toward property, toward wealth or poverty, and toward one's own life in general. It is enough to recall the story once mentioned in the press about the suicide of a millionaire who wrote in his farewell note that he could not live decently on the two million of annual income left to him.
The main problems begin when a person himself starts to determine how much will be enough for him "for happiness." The usual main problem is that the amount determined and thought sufficient sooner or later, and more often sooner, always turns out to be too little. The root of all these problems is connected with the fact that fallen man is accustomed to determine for himself the meaning, goals, form, and content of his own life.
The path of righteousness excludes such self-determination: in this case a person no longer belongs to himself; God determines how and for what he should live, and the main meaning of life becomes a person's acceptance of God's determination. The level of annual income is only one such determination, and not the most important, though still significant; otherwise the Torah would not give so much attention to issues of social justice and redistribution of public wealth in favor of the needy.
In the end, everything comes down to the Savior's words, "seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you"; judging by the context of the saying, "all these things" means everything the pagans seek in earthly life. The system of priorities decides everything: if it is right, the righteous person will not be left without food, unless of course persecutors deliberately deprive him of it, but that is another story.
The wicked person loses everything, not because people will take everything from him, though such a turn of events cannot be excluded, but because he will receive neither the Kingdom nor salvation, so that with all his wealth he will share, in biblical language, "the way of all the earth." It is the way that leads nowhere, as the authors of the biblical books say of it.