The 8th Commandment

In the book of Genesis, we find the story of how there were a coalition of armies that attacked Sodom. And Abram pulled together his servants and his tribe and formed an army and went out and defeated the army because part of the captives were Lot and his family. And so he defeated the army and drove it off. And the king of Sodom, he told Abraham, well, you can have the spoils of the battle. You can be incredibly wealthy here and have the spoils because you saved my city. And his response is very interesting and it informs the basis of what we're going to talk about today.

Let's go to Genesis 14. Genesis 14. And verse 22. So he says, no, I refuse to take anything. Just the men that were with me, the soldiers, they should get what they, you know, the food that they took to eat after the battle. But other than that, I'm going to take nothing from him. But it's interesting, he said, because he had raised his hand.

In other words, he had made a vow to God. God Most High, the possessor of heaven and earth, the name for God he uses there is Elion. It's not the most common of all the Hebrew names for God. It literally is the God Most High. It has to do with God's absolute power. He also said he is the possessor of heaven and earth.

Another term that's not used a lot during the Old Testament, but it is used occasionally. It is sometimes translated the baker of heaven and earth, but actually, possessor is more exact. He possesses, he owns everything. He created everything, and he owns everything. That is actually the basis of what we're going to talk about today. That God is the possessor of everything. Because it is the basis of the commandment, you shall not steal.

You shall not steal is a remarkable, simple statement that contains a huge concept. And that is the creator of the universe. The possessor of everything inhabited earth gives each of us the right to own property. And that we're not to take each other's things. You know, it's like little kids, don't touch your brother's things, right? Take your sister's things. That we have the right to own property. That God gives us that right. He is the possessor of it. He could have said, you don't have the right to have anything. But as the possessor of all that inhabit earth, he said, you have the right to own property, and you cannot take each other's property.

We've been going through the Ten Commandments. Today we're going to look at the commandment that you shall not steal. Now, when we look at the right to own property, you have to start in the law itself. You have to start in the Torah. There are a lot of laws concerning property ownership. And it's not just land. Now, there's a lot of laws concerning land, but it's not just land.

People have the right to have personal belongings, if you will, their clothes, their furniture. They even have the right to own animals. So each person has a right to own animals. And there were very specific and various different penalties for stealing. And when you go through the Torah, you will find different penalties for stealing, depending on what they were stealing and why they were stealing.

And we'll go through that a little bit. Let's start with Exodus 22. So I'm going to just look at how thou shalt not steal, or you shalt not steal, was explained in the law. Then we're going to look at ways that you and I can break this law and not even know it. We need to be aware of it and be sensitive to it. Because I don't think too many of us here are shoplifting. Right? I don't think too many of us here are going to go out tomorrow and rob publics or Walmart.

Right? So we can look at you shalt not steal. And, well, yeah, that's a command, but I'm glad I don't break that one. But we're going to have to look at the spirit of the law here in a minute. But look at Exodus 22, verse 1. And you'll see that stealing of itself did not carry the death penalty.

It did carry the extreme penalty. If a man steals an ox or a sheep, and he's talking specifically about stealing an animal here, and slaughters it or sells it, he shall restore five oxen for an ox and four sheep for a sheep.

So if you stole an ox and you destroyed it, you had to give back five times. For a sheep, you had to give back four times. Now, the point being made here is that the punishment for stealing was a direct relationship to the motive, but also the value of what was stolen. People think, well, in the Bible it says, if someone steals, you should cut off their hand. That's not in the Bible at all.

Now, you might become the indentured servant of the person you stole from. Now, the whole point is you had to do restitution. If you got off someone's hand, they can't do restitution. Stealing required restitution. That you restored and then paid more for the damage that you had done. Leviticus 6 is very interesting in this context. Let's look at Leviticus 6.

Here we have a whole lot of other concepts attached to the concept of stealing. Even in the Torah, stealing wasn't just, oh, picking up somebody else's things. I'm going to go steal my neighbor's plow, or I'm going to go take my neighbor's goat or whatever.

It was a broader concept to what stealing actually is. Verse 1. The Lord said to Moses, saying, if a person sins and commits a trespass against the Lord by lying to his neighbor about what was delivered to him for safekeeping. Let's look at the first thing in this list, because there's a whole list here. In other words, someone says, hey, I'm going to be gone. Would you watch the house for me? You say, sure. And then while he's gone, you go over and you get in his house and, you know, you find some beer in the refrigerator in the garage and you drink his beer and you use his lawnmower and you find some money laying around and you steal his money, you know. And he goes back and you say, yeah, I took everything for you.

Well, did you really? You know, it was in your, it was given to you for safekeeping. So even if you didn't steal anything, let's say he left the money, the fact that you used his property in a way that he did not give you permission to do, when it was, you were supposed to take care of it. So this is a sin. He's listing trespasses here. He says, we're about a robbery, so this is directly connected to Thou shalt not steal. Or if he's extorted from his neighbor, if you cheat somebody, this gets into business practices. If you cheat somebody so that you get the gain and they have a loss, that's all part of this concept of stealing. Or if he has found what was lost and lies concerning it and swears falsely, oh, you know, what's the old saying? Finders, keepers, losers, weepers. Right? I've never seen that as a kid. Sorry, it's my dollar. Finders, keepers, losers, weepers. You know, and one of my sisters say, but it's mine. Nope, you lost it. I know I lost it. I've been looking for a pro-pilot. I know it's mine now. I found it, right? That is not acceptable. That is called stealing. We're even going to expound on that a little bit later. He says, if any one of these things that a man may do in which he sins, that it shall be because he has sinned and is guilty, that he shall restore what he has stolen, or to think which is a good thing, that he shall restore what he has stolen, or to think which is extorted, or what is delivered to him for safekeeping, for the lost thing which he found, for all about which he has sworn falsely, he shall restore its full value and add one-fifth more to it. So here, okay, if you happen to break one of these, or break the law about stealing it this way, it was a little different than you just went and you stole a neighbor's sheep. You were tricking him. Okay. You still had to pay a penalty. You see, but I found it. He lost it.

Yeah, but you didn't try to find who lost it.

You got to give the whole value back plus 20% more.

Then you had to do something else. He shall restore its full value and one-fifth give it to whom it belongs, on the day of his trespass offering, on the day of his trespass offering. Now it cost him even a whole lot more than that, because he had to take an animal, and he had to take a very valuable animal into the temple, and he had to sacrifice it to God. So not only did he have to pay back the person that he extorted, because this all has to do with extortion, he had to go pay even maybe greater amount to God.

Verse 6 says, And he shall bring his trespass offering to the Lord, a ram without a blemish from his flock, with your valuation as a trespass offering to the priest.

So he actually had to go repent to God. What we have in Leviticus 6 is what happens if someone gets caught and they repent. So repentance was part of the consideration, too. Okay, you repented, so you have to pay back the full value, 20%, plus now you have to go give to God an offering, which is very important in understanding the breaking of the Ten Commandments, or any law of God.

When we deal with many of these, right, six of these commandments, we're dealing with how we treat another human being.

So we're, you know, how we treat others. But even those commands, when we break them, is the front to God.

You can say, well, I'm only, you know, okay, I stole something from my neighbor. That's between me and my neighbor. No, it's not. It's between you and your neighbor and God. All sin is against God.

That's what made David so amazing when he was caught and or confronted with the sin he had committed of adultery, because his response was, I've sinned against God.

God takes us very personal. God took this very personal, when we steal, when a person steals, it's personal between us and God. So not only did there's this concept of retribution, but there is a concept, and I must go deal with this between me and God. Now, there is a depth penalty for one kind of stealing, and it's listed under the, if you look at it, sort of in the stealing category, and that is kidnapping. The taking of a human being required a death penalty, because we're back to the value of a human being. How do you pay back the value of a human being? It was your life. So kidnapping did have the full death penalty. Now, proverbs, when we get to proverbs, because this is written long after the law, but we see how the law would be applied. That's one of the things the proverbs tells us. It tells us how Solomon looked at the law of God and applied it, and God said, this is wise, this is how it should be applied. Let's go to proverbs 6.

Proverbs chapter 6.

1. 30 Solomon says, People do not despise a thief if he steals to satisfy himself when he is starving.

Yet, when he is found, he must restore sevenfold. He may have to give up all the substance of his house. Now, what is he saying? He said, People, we will show mercy to someone who steals because they're starving. It doesn't erase the stance of the person before the law.

Now, a person who steals because they're greedy, there's no mercy at all, is there?

So, what he's saying here is, you can't use personal circumstances as an excuse to break the law.

But, we all have some kind of mercy or understanding of somebody. Let me give you a perfect example of this. I... This is one of the stories, you know, there's things that get passed out through history, and you're never quite sure if it's true or not. This was recorded in a newspaper back in 1935 in New York. LaGuardia, the mayor of New York, is famous for helping New Yorkers get through the Great Depression. And he was considered, at the time, to be a great leader. And one of the things he would do at night, he would go to the small claims courts, you know, the things that... the court that dealt with, not capital issues. And he had the right, under the New York law, to sit as a judge in these courts. So, he would go at night and sit at some of the... as a judge in some of the court. And one time, it was brought to him a woman... This is 1935. This is in the middle of the Great Depression. A woman who had got caught stealing food. And her only defense was, I have children and they were starving. And, you know, when I look at what he said, and I look at what Solomon said here, he took the same principle. He said, well, before the law, you're guilty. I cannot erase the law. And because you stole...

food, you have to be fined. The law requires it. So, the minimum requirement was a $10 fine. So, he gave her a $10 fine. She says, I can't pay it. I have nothing. That's why I was stealing food. He said, well, he said, I am appalled to live in a...

a city where a woman would be so destitute, she'd have to steal food. So, therefore, I fined everybody in the room $10 for... for living in such a city that we treat people that poorly. Now, the place was packed, because everybody would come to hear what the Guardis would say and what he would hand out as his sentencing on these issues. So, he fined everybody. So, they collected hundreds of dollars. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Everybody had to pay their $10 fine. They couldn't get out of the room. He then took the money, paid her fine, and gave the rest to her.

He said, well, the law is not fair. The law has now been satisfied, but we should not limit a city that allows this to happen. Yeah, it's justice. That's interesting. He did not say, oh, you're not guilty. See? But he also... Everybody in the room... As some of us say, we don't despise somebody who steals food. They're hungry. Everybody in the room gladly gave up $10. I mean, nobody grumbled. Nobody complained. Everybody laughed and got out their money, and everybody gave money. And they... They, you know, paid her fine and gave her money.

The law must be satisfied. We can't ignore the law. But there's also mercy in the law at times, and this is what Solomon's talking about here.

So when you have this concept of stealing, it's very, very important in the law of God, because it's a right. A right to have... to own property, whether it's land or things or a house or whatever. We have the right to own that. So how do we break that law?

I mean, the first way that we break the law is one that's so obvious, right? Is you go steal somebody else's property. You simply know the cash register's open, and you reach in and take out money. That doesn't belong to you. Now, you know, that's not something that we're... most of us are tempted to do. We just... we know stealing's wrong and we don't do it. But stealing other people's property can break down in other ways that we don't think about. How about plagiarism?

This is why plagiarism is considered such a serious offense in college. You know, plagiarism is when you don't have time to do your term paper, so you just take some old book that you think no one has read, and you photocopy about three pages and merge that into a document file and turn that in as your own work. And you take credit for somebody else's work.

It is stealing to take credit for somebody else's work. You know, not only can we steal physical objects, we can steal ideas that other people legitimately own. This is why there's a patent office. And you know, how many times have you seen in history where someone will discover something or create something amazing and not get it patented, and some company will come along and grab it and make billions of dollars off of it, and the person who actually did the original work, the author of the work, it's nothing. That happens all the time.

That's why there are patent laws. That's why there are... There's plagiarism laws. It's copyright laws. That there is a right to copy.

Which brings up an interesting problem we face sometimes.

You know, if you have the right, if you buy a CD of music and you... or you download a song from the Internet, you can share that with someone. How many people can you share it with before you've broken copyright laws?

It just depends on the artist. Theoretically, we can't give any of it away. We sure can't sell it.

How about games? People take electronic games all the time, make copies and give it to other people. Look at the copyright law on that to see whether you can do it or not. Sometimes, permission is given.

You know, I do handouts at Bible studies all the time. Those handouts are from books that I bought because the copyright in there says you have permission to make copies of these handouts and give them to classroom or Bible study groups. Others say you cannot do this. You cannot reproduce any page and give it to anybody under any circumstance. And those I don't... I don't make... I mean, I have some at home. I'd love to hand out pages, everybody, but I don't do it.

Because it is stealing somebody else's work.

A few years ago, I published a book.

Since then, I have found numerous websites that have downloaded my entire book onto their website and let people download it for free. They scan my book, and you can go on those websites and download it for free. Now, I don't take action against them because I just want the information out there. But think of something. What if I was a professional writer and that was my income?

That means every time that site allows somebody to come on and download my book, they're stealing my income.

Obviously, copyright laws became... You know, we always get frustrated about copyright laws and we sing a song at church. You know, our book, we pay for this songbook, we pay for the copyright to those songs so we can sing them. Sometimes when we do special music, we have to go buy the music, right? So we have the copyright. But sometimes we don't have the right to sing that song on the Internet. So there are times where, like in Nashville, where we do the services live, when it comes to special music, all of a sudden the music's cut off. You just see the choir singing. Why do we do that? Because we don't own the right to do that. That music is owned by somebody. We say, well, isn't that silly? Not if you're the person who wrote the song.

Because they get paid for everyone that buys the copyright and is given permission to use the song. Because it's their intellectual property. And that's the term, the legal term. It is their intellectual property. So there's ways we can... I'm not saying every time you take a song you've paid for and you give to your wife or your husband or something to put on their phone. There are some gray areas in copyright laws. But you just can't mass produce everything and hand it out to everybody. You have to be very careful on that. We at least have to think about it. A second way we can break this law and not even think about it. Let's go to Psalm 37. Psalm 37.

So, you know, the obvious stealing of property we don't think about, but the taking of intellectual property, sometimes we don't even think about that. Psalm 37. I know, many, many times I've had a CD and made a copy for a member of the family. Usually that's considered okay. But you know, when you start just hand-and-mouth to all your neighbors, you know, a man many years ago showed up at church and he said, I made a list of all my favorite sacred music and made copies for everybody in the church. And he was handing it out. And his heart was right. I'm not sure what he was doing was legal.

You know, he created his own CD from about 10 or 15 different artists, and he's handing it out to 100 people.

That may be considered stealing intellectual property. So we have to think about it. Like I said, some of it's sort of gray, but we at least have to think about it. Psalm 37.

And let's go to 1st, 21.

The wicked borrows and does not repay, but the righteous shows mercy and gives. The wicked borrows and does not repay. A second way we can steal is we can owe people money and not pay them back.

Now, obviously, if you're to the point where you can't pay your bills, that's why sometimes people have to claim bank loans. There's things you have to do. And those people that you owe money to, they lose it. Or maybe they get a small percentage of it.

But that our intent, our intent should always be to pay back. Now, how easy it is to borrow money from a friend or from a family member and then spend years and not pay it back. Oh, they'll understand.

And then you can't figure out why that family member hasn't had you over for dinner for two years.

Ask them. Ask them. Well, you stole from me. That's the first thing they'll say. Well, you stole from me. I gave you the $1,000. You said you'd pay me back. You gave me $10 two years ago and by the end, you talked to me about it.

Not paying back. Borrowed money is stealing because it wasn't your money.

See, once we get it, it's all my money. But it doesn't originate as your money. It was given to you to pay back. So there's a way that we can steal. A third way we can steal is we can get into this mindset of business is business, and we can literally cheat people. We can oppress people. In other words, we get a gain by somebody else getting a loss. You know, most successful business is what? Win-win.

You feel good when you go in and you buy a new piece of furniture or a new car or a new lawnmower, and you got your money's worth. Right? Oh, man, I got my money's worth all that. It was a win-win situation. I gave resource. I got whatever that I wanted. That's what good business is. But it's so easy for it to get into a mindset that this is a win-lose situation.

In fact, some rich people will get to the place. It's interesting that it's not about money anymore. They have all the money they want. It's about winning.

It's always win-lose. Everything is a competition in which they must win, in which case, then, they lose. You know, people get cheated. And James talks about that in the book of James. Let's go to James, chapter 5. So here's a way that we can steal by conducting business in a way that it's always a win-lose situation. James is an interesting book. I've thought about just giving a whole— I've given a Bible study on the book of James, a series of Bible studies. I've thought about giving a series of sermons on the book of James. Because there's like five different major subjects he deals with in the book of James, or the letter that he wrote. But what of him is the relationship between rich and poor people in the church?

In verse 1 of chapter 5, he says, "...come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you." Wow! That's a strong statement to make to the church, because James is writing to the church.

Now, he's not saying it's evil to be rich. But he was saying that there were rich people in the church that were taking advantage of poor people in the church in order to have more money. They were in this win-lose mindset. They could afford to even lose sometimes. It didn't matter. They had to win. It was all competition. He says, "...your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver are corroded, and the corrosion will be a witness that gets you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have heaped up treasure in the last days. Indeed, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields which you kept back by fraud cry out, and the cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord of Savioth." Lord of Savioth.

That isn't the Lord of the Sabbath.

It is the Lord of hosts. The Lord of armies. You know, whenever God is called the Lord of hosts, it is a statement of power.

You know, the angelic hosts are with Him. He has His armies with Him. He says here, "...when you oppress your own employees to get from them, you are now dealing with God, not His Father, but as the Lord of armies." Now, that's a little frightening of a statement, isn't it? Dealing with God is the Lord of armies.

I was having a recent discussion with an individual, and he said, well, he says, I own a business. He said, since it's my business, I can treat my employees however I want. They don't like it. They can go someplace else. I wanted to say, I saw what the Bible says, but I didn't. In another occasion, maybe I will.

But no, that's not what the Bible says. If you go back to the Torah, it's amazing. There's laws in there that says you couldn't even keep the wages of a person overnight. Now, we live in a different culture, so it's not the same. But it was basically saying, you had to pay your employees every day. Every day.

At the end of the day, they got their wage.

Now, we usually do it now weekly, or every other week, or whatever. But it's the same principle. I mean, hey, would you want to work for a company that it comes to... Friday, you're supposed to get your check, and they say, eh, we're going to give it to you Monday.

Wait a minute. I worked! Yes, that's called fraud. That's called theft.

I can put my money in the stock market. I can put my wages. I pay everybody in the stock market for an extra three days, because they know there's going to be a boom, and I can make so much money. They still get their wages. No. Their wages are due to them when they are due to them. Otherwise, you're stealing from them.

So, in this concept of thou shalt not steal is even protection of laborers. It's a huge concept. It's not only the protection of property, it's the protection of laborers.

So, lest you think I'm a socialist, we'll go on to number four here.

Because another way that you steal is when you cheat your employer. When you cheat your employer.

Titus 2.

Titus 2.

Verse 9 says, here Paul is telling Titus, giving him instructions on how to be a minister, and he says, sermons to be obedient to their own masters, to be well pleasing in all things, not answering back, not pilfering, I love that word, to pilfer, not pilfering, but showing all good fidelity that they may adore the doctrine of God, our Savior in all things. I'm going to read this from the New International version because it is the wording of it. It says the same thing, but makes it interesting. Teach slaves to be subject to their masters and everything, to try to please them. Now, you know, this is bond servants, slaves, this applies to any employee. Our approach to the, our employer should be, we're trying to please them. Why? Because they are paying us.

They are giving us, might not please them if it's against God or breaking the law. We understand that. They didn't how they want their work done, that they're paying us to do.

Not to talk back to them, and not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted.

In other words, your employer should be able to say about you, one thing about so-and-so, I can trust them. I can trust them.

Think about that. Can your employer say, I trust this person.

So that in every way, they will make the teaching about God, our Savior attractive. Why are you doing this? To be an example of God's way to your employer. It's such, it is so sad that in, I've seen in the church so many times that, and I've seen it in my families, too, that if the employers in the church, the police in the church, there's problems, because they all expect more out of each other than they would anybody else. Well, you're in the church. You'll understand I need to take the day off. No, I don't.

Well, you're in the church. You'll understand that, you know, I'm not going to be able to give you your wages this week, because we're going to the feast, I'll often give it to you after we get back to the feast tabernacles. Well, no, I don't.

It's amazing. You know, we should be able to trust each other to do absolutely what is right and fair, whether we're the employer or the employee. I tell you, I found out one time how important trust is. Worked for radio station, and the program director was called into the president's office. I had no idea what was going on. I just know when the door got shut, it wasn't good. And then the door opens after about a half hour. The president comes out to my office and says, would you come in here? I stepped in, and he said, I want to know, did you tell him such and such?

And it had a major impact on the station. It had to do with on-air people when they were working, when they weren't working, which I was the advertising director. I had nothing to do with on-air personality or people. And I said, well, no, that's not my area of responsibility. I wouldn't do that.

And I had no idea what the two were talking about. All I know is he turned to the program director and said, I know this man will not lie. You're fired. Get out of my office.

They looked at me and said, and the guy was on the air at the time. He just had to be a news break. He said, go take his shift so I can hire somebody else.

Okay. I went in and took his shift. So he was, you know, next day somebody else was there to take his shift because that wasn't my job.

And I mean, it really hit home. Wow. Being able to be trusted is really important here. Because one of us was going to lose a job over this. And I was just blindsided by the, you know, the whole thing. I didn't know what was going on.

One way you can steal from your employer and not even think about it is when you go to work and you spend your time talking to everybody else, when you spend your time playing video games, answering personal emails, what are they paying you for? Your time to produce what they need you to produce. When you spend their time doing your things, you are stealing their money.

See, we don't think about stealing in these terms, do we?

So just like the people in business sometimes can get in these win-lose situations where everybody has to lose so I can win, they end up taking advantage of people. That's stealing. But the employee, we don't give them a full day's work. When they pay us, we're stealing from them.

It's a very serious issue.

A fifth way that we can steal is something we read in Leviticus. But I want to go to Deuteronomy 22 to look at the law specifically dealing with this.

Deuteronomy 22. Because this is the way that, you know, we just normally wouldn't think of stealing.

And this is important to teach children this.

Verse 1.

You shall not see your brother's ox or his sheep going astray and hide yourself from them. You shall certainly bring them back to your brother. My man. My brother's sheep are out again. My neighbor's sheep. So what? You know, I'm busy. They're all scattered all over the place. There they go. A bunch of coyotes are going to get them. He said, you know what? No.

We have to actually remember property is a right from God. I must take care of my property and I must help others take care of their property. It's a right.

So he says, if you see, you know, your neighbor's sheep running off, please go tell him.

He says that if your brother is not near you, or if you do not know him, then you shall bring it to your own house and you shall remain with you until your brother seeks it. And then you shall restore it to him. You shall do the same with his donkey. You shall do the same with his garment. And with any lost thing of your brother's, which he has lost and you have found, you shall do likewise. You must not hide yourself.

Same thing in verse 4. It says, if you see, you know, an animal in distress, here to go, tell him.

So remember, Leviticus, it said that if you, you know, just find something, you say, oh, look at that! Must be mine without at least seeking who it belonged to. Now, sometimes you can't, you know, you can't find the person. On the best hammers I ever had, I found on the side of the road one time years ago, I had that hammer for like 20 years. It was a really good hammer. It must have flown out of somebody's truck, you know.

I couldn't find who lost their hammer. But if I did know who the hammer belonged to, I had a responsibility to take the hammer back. Or I was stealing his hammer just because he lost it didn't mean it wasn't his anymore. In the same way, even if your neighbors having trouble with their property, if you can help, we are required to help.

So, there's another way that we can steal and not even know about it, or not think about it. Now, the next way we can steal, I get two more. As soon as I say this, some people are going to say, ah, you stopped preaching, now you're into politics.

We steal when we do not pay our taxes.

I see lots of Christians over the years say, wait a minute, I have to pay taxes to a corrupt government? God does not require me to pay taxes. In fact, I've got people who think it's morally wrong. I have to pay taxes. That is not what the Scripture says. Remember Jesus? They asked him if he should pay taxes. He said, show me a coin. I showed him a coin. He said, whose picture is on there? Well, Caesar's. Well, give the Caesars what belongs to him, and give God what belongs to him.

Now, I tell you, we live in a corrupt government in the United States, but we've never lived in a government as corrupt as Nero's.

Ever.

And he said, pay the taxes. Look what Paul said about this, Romans 13.

Because Paul puts this once again in a bigger context. In fact, Romans 13 is about, the first part of the chapter, is about showing respect to government officials. He's non-Christian, in this case, absolute pagan government officials. And he says that you have to pay taxes to them. So he says, we have to respect their office. We even have to pay taxes to them.

And in verse 7, he's continuing on now, talking about taxes. Render therefore to all their due, taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs fear, to whom fear, honor, to whom honor. Oh, no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another is fulfilled the law. So this idea of paying taxes is in this, as he goes on, he gets into the law of God and knows what he says. For the commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not bear fault witness, you shall not covet. So suddenly five of the Ten Commandments are here to prove his point. And if there's any other commandment, they're all summed up in the saying, namely, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. You shall love your neighbor as yourself is from the Torah. It's from the law. So this wasn't a new concept. You know, Jesus didn't, when Jesus first said this, that this is the basis of the law, love God and love neighbor, that came right out of the law itself. First hand is very interesting. Love does no harm to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. In other words, if you want to do the law, you have to be motivated by love. And he quotes five of the Ten Commandments to make his point. He can't be doing away with the law, or his point makes no sense now.

That was when you do these things properly, and in the right motivation, you are loving your neighbor, which is the purpose, the fulfillment of the law. It's what the law is all about.

So when we look at don't steal, we're looking at loving our neighbor.

These are the foundational concepts of morality. And so here we have paying taxes. To not pay taxes is to steal from the government. I didn't say it's fair, by the way. That has nothing to do with it. It has to do with submission to the authority we're under in the land, and as long as it doesn't go against God. And of course, this whole chapter is about that subject. And then our last way that we can steal is in Malachi 3.

Malachi chapter 3. Here Malachi is writing to the Jews who had come out of captivity, and they were slipping right back into the very conduct and behaviors that had caused them to go into captivity. Now God was not going to put them into total captivity because they were going to have to be there as a people for the Messiah to come 400 years later.

But they would eventually come under the Roman rule.

Verse 8. Will a man rob God? Yet you don't rob me. God told those people, you have stolen from me. But you say, well, wait, we robbed you. He says in times and offerings.

Remember, the premise is God is possessor of heaven and earth. He actually owns everything we have, but he gives us the right to have personal private ownership. That's an amazing thing. You have the right to have private ownership.

You know, you can fix up your yard, you can fix up your house, you can, you know, have an apple tree, you can have a, you know, you can actually own that and have it.

And all he asks back is that you show, that we show him gratitude by giving him our tithes and offers.

I guess he could have said, I'm going to keep 90 percent and you get 10 percent. But that's not what he did. And you know what? Who could argue with him if he did that? He says he owns it all to begin with. Okay, folks, I'm going to keep 90 percent of everything you get, and you get to keep 10 percent. That's not what he did. You know, God doesn't need our money. He wasn't a world can we give God. But God sets up a way in which he says, do this to show me that you are thankful. Do this in worship, that you are submitting to me as possessor of heaven and earth. And he goes on and he tells the people of Judah, when you don't do this, you get cursed, and when you do this, you get blessed. Tithing and offerings are still part of how we worship God today. It's very personal between each one of us and God. But we still can go back here and see and ask, are we committing theft against God? Well, we don't do what he asked us to do. So you can see that you shall not steal is a simple enough concept. But the spiritual law is pretty big. It expands out just like every other of the commandments we've gone through. It expands out to all kinds of aspects of life. How we treat each other, how we think about things, what we do. When we steal, or we can steal, not just by taking somebody's property, but when we refuse to pay a debt, when we oppress others by cheating them for a gain, when we cheat our employers, when we don't try to find the owner of something that you have found, when you refuse to pay taxes, and when we refuse to give God tithes and offerings, understanding the right to own property should motivate us not only to respect other people's property, but to respect our own property. That is, it is given to us, and we have a right to it by the power of God. And you know, when you and I are gone, somebody else will own that land, won't they? We've got to give somebody else the right to own it. See, you don't own your land forever. We own our land, or we own whatever we own while we are alive. The possessor of heaven and earth will simply give it to somebody else while we're gone and say, this is yours now. You take care of it. You own it. You enjoy it. You now have a right. You and I live on property that used to belong to somebody else, didn't it? Before that, it belonged to somebody else. Before that, it belonged to one. It belonged to the one who gives us the right to have property, the possessor of heaven and earth.