The Biblical purpose of government is solely to mete out just punishments on the specific sins Yahweh revealed to be crimes, not underpunishing or overpunishing as the subjective feelings of individuals or groups wish for. This and this alone is what a government operating on Mosaic Law would primarily do. Where does this leave the Biblical commands about caring for the poor? According to plenty of mainstream evangelicals, the government is supposed to do almost nothing about poverty, while the church and charities handle the issue. Aside from evangelicals trying to cite the Bible about government as they literally condemn or ignore the only obligations the Bible does prescribe governing officials--killing people like murders and kidnappers, taking money from thieves as damages for victims, and so on--there is much to the Biblical side of the topic beyond this.
Mosaic Law does still have plenty to say about caring for the poor. What it says just turns out to mostly be about how people who do not have positions of political power should and should not treat the poor. Some of the only things that those in power are told to do with respect to poverty is to refrain from ever having biases for or against the poor, especially in a context of a criminal case (Exodus 23:2-3 and 6-7). This does not mean the Bible does not prescribe measures that would actually lift people out of poverty or greatly alleviate their suffering! For example, the year of Jubilee, which was instructed to be honored every 50 years following seven Sabbath years where the land itself is allowed to rest, is a year where debts are cancelled (Leviticus 25).
Moreover, miscellaneous things like leaving the edges of the crops on a field for the poor would certainly benefit even those who have no income at all (Leviticus 19:9-10). It is not as if never prescribing the government to end poverty through forced wealth redistribution means that the Bible does not take poverty very seriously and prescribe other approaches that would dramatically reduce its scope, severity, and societal ramifications. Will these things be discovered or encouraged by evangelicals? Almost certainly not, given their hypocritical aversion to Mosaic Law, which they proclaim came from a perfect deity whose nature never changes and then disregard as almost totally irrelevant, outdated, or unjust. At least they tend to say that addressing poverty is not a major obligatory role of the government.
They then might say that tackling poverty is a role of the church. It is not even formal churches that are told to specifically handle poverty, but the people who are committed to God, whether or not they attend church at all. Without even understanding what the "church" truly is apart from the context of the unbiblical tradition of weekly Sunday church attendance, many Christians--or at least evangelicals--rightly insist the Bible does not permit governments to take wealth from one person who did not obtain it sinfully and give it to someone else. They might think this is what the Biblical position would be without having ever avoided all assumptions or even thought about it beyond popular talking points or personal preferences, but they admit this much. They just then do little to nothing to actually help the poor.
What do most Christians who advocate for the church to directly handle poverty, whether or not they have truly consistent, assumption-free beliefs? Probably nothing more than occasionally make small efforts that accomplish almost nothing but make them feel arbitrarily content with themselves for a time. To go a lifetime while having the means to help the poor, which not everyone has, but never actually using them, this kind of evangelical must forget or ignore what James 2:14-17 says: it is useless to think that comprehension alone is all that there is to commitment to Christian morality. One must act upon it. As if a Christian needs to even read James 2 to realize that it logically follows that something needs to be done about poverty when it is more than just another philosophical topic to understand!
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