There is a difference between understanding the imperative and denying the indicative.
"God helps those who help themselves" is a particular bit of nonsense that presupposes one can help themselves without first having God's help. It assumes a possibility that does not exist.
Romans 3:10-12
None is righteous,
no, not one;
no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside;
together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.
Without God's help, no one seeks God or His help and without His continued help no one would continue to seek Him. Yet, there is a responsibility assumed in the assistance. Those God helps, He expects to help themselves in that He demands that they help themselves to more of His help; He lays on them the duty of destitution, which is to say, the obligation of asking. He has provision, guidance, grace and mercy in abundance and compels His people to take initiative by taking responsibility rather than by making excuses and blaming their fates.
Our actions are not a matter of indifference. God has designed the world in such a way as that the future is not inevitable outside of our actions, but that our actions are absorbed into the inevitable. God has given us agency without compromising His sovereignty. There are consequences to inactivity. God has implemented the law of sowing and reaping and it cannot be hacked or troubleshot. Inactivity is still sowing and will still reap it.
So, there is a fate that falls on those who refuse to get out of the way and yet another that falls by the hands of those who refuse to concede to its inevitability. There is a way God made the world and a way He has instructed us to act in light of it. So much so, that those who go against His grain will never gain and those who move in His way never lose.
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