The oldest story anybody tells about it is a fable. An ox-driver’s wagon has gone into a ravine, the man stands there praying to Hercules, and the god appears beside him and tells him to take hold of the wheel and goad his oxen. “God helps those who help themselves” is not in the Bible, and it has never appeared in a standard English translation of it. That puts it in a different class from money being the root of all evil, which is in the Bible and is three words short.
Older than Paul
The idea is older than the fable, and older than the New Testament. Euripides has it almost word for word in a play that survives only in fragments, written before 428 BC. A nineteenth-century translation gives it as “Try first thyself, and after call in God; for to the worker God himself lends aid.” Babrius wrote the fable down in the first century, and that is the oldest written version of the story anybody has.
The English wording shows up much later. George Herbert printed a cousin of it in 1640, addressed to one person: help thyself, and God will help thee. The sentence in the third-person shape we use comes decades later, in Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government, written before the government he argued with executed him in 1683 and printed in 1698. Benjamin Franklin then printed “God helps them that help themselves” in Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1736, and after that it belonged to America.
A wagon does need pushing, so the proverb earned its keep long before anybody went looking for it in a Bible. In 2013 the Barna Group asked American adults whether the Bible teaches it, and 52 percent of practicing Christians strongly agreed.
Romans 5 runs the other way
For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.
Romans 5:6 (KJV)
The King James takes the Greek apart to the letter. The word is asthenes, which means strengthless, so: without strength. The World English Bible gives the same word by its plain sense, “while we were yet weak, at the right time.” Either way the people in the sentence have nothing to bring, and Paul puts the clock on God’s side of it: in due time. Two verses later he reaches for a harder word.
But God commends his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:8 (WEB)
Weak, ungodly, sinners, and two verses after that, enemies. Paul picks his words from the bottom.
The fund at our church
Our church keeps a fund for people who come in needing rent money or a car repair. I sat in a meeting some years back where we were deciding on a request, and one of the men at the table asked whether the family had been trying. He asked it kindly. He wanted the money to land where it would do some good, which is a fair thing to want, and everyone in the room understood him.
We gave them the money. What I have kept from that evening is how natural the question sounded, and how long it took any of us, myself included, to notice that we had started treating the fund as a wage.
I knew where the question came from, because I had put it to myself. My wife Sarah died. For about two years after that I read my Bible every morning and felt nothing, and I read harder, the way you do when you believe you are behind on a payment.
The Bible does tell you to get up
Scripture is not soft on people who will not work.
Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.
Proverbs 6:6-8 (KJV)
Paul is blunter than that when he writes to the Thessalonians, repeating a rule he had given the church in person. “If anyone is not willing to work, don’t let him eat,” in 2 Thessalonians 3:10, World English Bible.
The proverb has the work right. It gets the order wrong. Proverbs tells you to get out of bed, and it never once suggests that God is standing at the edge of the bed to see whether you will. The ant works inside a summer she did not make.
But doesn’t James say faith without works is dead?
James always comes up here, and he should.
Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead in itself.
James 2:17 (WEB)
In verse 24 he goes further: by works a man is justified, and not only by faith. People have argued for centuries about how far that can be reconciled with Paul. The case James puts is a hypothetical one, and he addresses it to whoever is reading. If a brother or sister has no clothes and no food for the day, and one of you sends them off with go in peace, be warmed and filled, and hands them nothing, what good was that, he asks in James 2:15-16. What is plain in the paragraph itself is that James points at the works as the evidence, the way you would point at a pulse.
Paul puts the working on the other side
for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, that no one would boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before that we would walk in them.
Ephesians 2:8-10 (WEB)
Paul rules the works out in Ephesians 2:8-9 and hands them back in Ephesians 2:10 as what the rescue was for. Anyone pulled out of the water is expected to walk home, and nobody asks them to swim first to prove they were worth the trouble.
Titus 3:5 makes the same move inside one sentence: “not by works of righteousness which we did ourselves, but according to his mercy, he saved us through the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit,” in the World English Bible.
An almanac and a letter
Franklin was writing an almanac, and an almanac is a book about what you can do for yourself between now and the harvest. That is good advice and honest work. I read my Bible for two years as though I were behind on a payment, and it was never mine to make. Paul was writing to people who had come to the end of what they could do for themselves, and what he wanted them to know was what had already happened there.