In the book of Genesis, we find the story of how a coalition of armies attacked Sodom and took the people of the town prisoner, including Wot and his family.
Abram pulled together his servants and his tribe. They were all trained to fight, being a nomadic tribe. Off they went and they tracked down the army that had come down and taken Sodom and they defeated the army and they freed all the inhabitants of Sodom. Lot and his family were free. The king of Sodom then offered Abram the spoils of the battle, the spoils of the victor. He was already a wealthy man, but he would just be unbelievably wealthy. And it's Abram's response I want to look at because this supplies the basis for what we're going to talk about today. Genesis 14.
Genesis 14. And let's start at verse 22 because this is Abram's response to the king of Sodom. But Abram said to the king of Sodom, I have raised my hand to the Lord God knows Ty, the possessor of heaven and earth, that I will take nothing from a thread to a sandal strap, that I will not take anything that is yours lest you should say I have made Abram rich, except only with the young man of Eden. So he actually told him, no, I'm not going to take anything. I'm not going to be beholding to you. And I have raised my hand. In other words, I have made a covenant with God over this. The most high El Elyon, the possessor of heaven and earth. The most high God, the possessor of heaven and earth. There's not too many places in the scripture where those two things are combined, but they are combined here to make a point that Abram wanted to make. The most high God refers to God as the sovereign over everything, the ruler over everything. But the possessor of heaven and earth. This is actually, this concept is the basis of the eighth commandment. Now we've been going through the Ten Commandments, and two weeks ago we went through the seventh commandment about adultery and how that commandment is designed to protect marriage. Marriage is holy. It's designed to and it's designed to protect marriage. You Shall Not Steal is a proclamation of the possessor of heaven and earth. It's interesting, sometimes that word possessor is translated maker, but possessor is actually a more accurate interpretation of the word, translation of the word. He possesses everything, and the possessor of everything, and this one gives him the right, by the way, to make this law. He owns everything, and the owner of everything says, I give you the right to own things.
Remember, he's the owner of everything, and he says, you have the right to own things, to own property, and you can't take each other's property. You have rights, and your property ownership is protected.
You Shall Not Steal is a declaration of ownership rights.
It's not just given to a few. That's what makes it so different than other laws in the ancient world. Everybody has the right to own. Now, it's not just land. They say, oh, well, people have the right to own land. Not everybody owns land. But if you don't own any land, well, I don't either. The bank owns my land. I pretend I own it. They own my land.
But this goes beyond that. It has to do with the right to own personal belongings, to own your clothes, to own your furniture, to even own animals.
And when we look through the Torah, when we look through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, we find all kinds of laws about stealing and that you shall not steal is actually expanded into a huge set of concepts. You know, you say, well, how's he going to give a whole sermon on you shall not, thou shalt not steal? I mean, okay, I'm not shoplifting. I doubt if any of you have committed armed robbery this week, right? So I was like, how's he going to talk about that for 55 minutes? Well, the concept of you shall not steal is actually a huge concept because it has to do with the right to ownership and responsibility. Now, when we go into the law of God, when we go into the Torah, we begin to see the laws that were given to ancient Israel. There's all kinds of laws and all kinds of punishments. They have to do with stealing. Now, we're not going to go through all of them because we take the whole hour and just go through all the various laws about stealing in the Old Testament. But let's look at a few. Let's go to Exodus 22. Exodus 22.
By the way, you know, the idea that if you steal, you cut off your hand is not in the Bible. It's not in the Bible at all. It never was part of the Bible. And the reason why is stealing, part of the price for stealing is restitution. To steal something, according to the law of God, requires restitution from what you've stolen except in one case. I'll talk about that in a minute. Verse 1 of chapter 22 of Exodus, if a man steals an ox or a sheep and slaughters it or sells it, he shall restore five oxen for an ox and four sheep for a sheep.
In other words, if you stole something and it was destroyed, you ate it or you sold it, you were required to restore not just the item, but you were required to restore more than what the item was worth, depending on the value of the item. If you can't restore five oxen or four oxen, you have a problem. You usually end up being an indentured servant. You now have to work for the person until you have paid off what you stole. Restitution is at the core of the concept of property rights, and someone who steals that property must pay back plus a penalty.
Now, this really gets expanded in Leviticus. Let's go to Leviticus 6. Leviticus chapter 6. And here we begin to see how the law about stealing expands out to all kinds of aspects of everyday life. We're going to go through it a little bit how we can break this down to modern life. Your life and my life today. How does this break down? But let's look at what it says here.
Verse 1 of Leviticus 6. And the Lord spoke 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. Now, let's stop. He's giving a list of sins here. These are all sins. They're actually all breaking of the eighth commandment. These are all breaking the eighth commandment. The first one listed is someone is giving you something for safekeeping and you lie about it. You know, sometimes when we go away for a while, we'll say to our neighbors, hey, we're going to be out of town. Can you just sort of, you know, make sure that no one breaks into the house or something?
You know, neighbors do that all the time. Well, what if you ask the neighbor, you know, would you watch over my house? Well, I'm going, I say, sure. And what they do is instead, they sort of break into your house and they sit around and watch your television, use your electricity. You know, they don't really stealing anything. And you come home and say, well, my house is a mess. Obviously, someone broke the window and they say, I don't know what happened. Is anything missing?
No. But someone was in my house. When you lie about something that was given to you for safekeeping, it's a sin. You've actually stolen something from them. Let's go on. He says, or about a pledge. A pledge has to do with a down payment. You have promised to buy something. You've given a pledge and then you break your word. Now, once again, there can be instances where someone, you know, puts a down payment on something and then loses their job. We're going to go through and show. That's one reason why there are different penalties for stealing. Because there are certain circumstances where something can happen that you have no control over.
It doesn't change the law. But a deliberate breaking of a pledge. I just decided I don't want it anymore. Is it sin? Or about a robbery? Or if he's extorted from his neighbor. We're going to talk about extortion a little bit. But it means to cheat people. Or if he has found what was lost and lies concerning it and swears falsely. Wait a minute. I always thought finding finders keepers, losers, weepers. Right? He says, if you find something and you lie to people about it and you don't try to find out who it belongs to, once you say the rest of the sentence, in any one of these things that a man may do in which he sins.
I don't know. I can remember finding a dollar or something and telling my sisters, well you lost this. It's mine now. Well I've been looking at it for two weeks. Yeah, but it's mine now. I found it. That holds no water under the law of God. We are actually to try to search out who belongs to you. Now sometimes you can't. I can remember years and years ago, one of the best hammers I ever had, I found on the side of the road, must have blew out of some guy's truck. This is the most expensive hammer I've ever had. You know, there's no way to find out who owned it. So it wasn't something I could return. But we do have a responsibility to try to return. If I had any idea who that hammer would have belonged to, I would have had the responsibility to go return it to them. All right, it's still the same as stealing. Now what's interesting here is the penalty, because there's two parts of the penalty. That it shall be, this is verse 4, because he has sinned and is guilty, that he shall restore what he has stolen, or the thing which he has extorted, or what has been delivered to him for safekeeping, or the lost thing which he found, for all that about which he has sworn falsely. He shall restore its full value, add one-fifth more to it, and give it to whomever it belongs, on the day of his trespass offering. Now there's two things here. One is, okay, I have to take the thing back. Now remember the first law was you've destroyed the thing. You've eaten it, or you've sold it, okay. Okay, well you still have the thing. You cheated somebody out of something, and you got something from them. Or you found something, and you sort of knew what belonged to me, and you kept it anyways. The law is no, no, no. You have to go take it back, and you have to give them a 20% bonus. You have to give them more, because you held on to their thing. Then you have to go do a trespass offering, which would have cost you even more. Now this is real important, because this means, in this case, the person is repentant. Okay, the person is repentant.
So they restore, they pay 20% more than whatever the value of it was, and now they have to go give something to God, because all sin is against God. You think about David, when confronted with his sin and committed with Bathsheba, and what was his first words to Nathan? I've sinned against God. We had sinned against a lot of people here, but he understood that all sin is taken personally by God. All sin is taken personally by God. When we commit against each other, because we're all the children of God, he takes it very personally. So he said, now, okay, you've decided what you did was wrong, you take, you give it back, you give them 20% more, and now you have to come give an offering to me.
Verse 6 says, and he shall bring his trespass offering to the Lord, a ram without blemish from the flock with your valuation as a trespass offering to the priest. So now they had to go give an offering to God. Now, there was one kind of stealing, and it falls under the way it's worded, thou shalt not steal, commandment, is kidnapping. And there was no atonement for that. There was no restoration for that. If you kidnapped, if you took a human being, the value of a human being is so high, the penalty for kidnapping was death. It was a capital crime in ancient Israel to kidnap somebody, because you stole a person, and a person had such high value to God, there was nothing you could trade for it. And so it was a capital crime. Now, what's very interesting is the understanding that motivation played a part of it, too. Not in the fact that you committed a crime, but in the penalty for the crime. In other words, you cannot erase the law because of a motivation that may not be evil.
See, we live in a land that says, well, I didn't have an evil motivation, so the law doesn't matter. That wasn't what the law of God said. But there could be a difference in the sentencing of the crime. You understand what I'm saying? If the motivation is different, if it's not evil, you could have a different sentencing. Let me show you what I mean. Look at Proverbs, because this is written long after the Torah. But Proverbs, chapter 6.
Proverbs, chapter 6.
Where Solomon had to give constant edicts. He had to pass sentencing on people who had committed crimes against the law of God. That's part of what he did as the king. He was sort of the highest court in the land.
And he writes this in Proverbs 6.30. Now, people do not despise a thief if he steals to satisfy himself when he is starving.
We see that differently than someone who steals because they're greedy. Now the question is, does that mean the law says it's okay to steal? Well, look at verse 31. Yet when he is found, he must restore sevenfold. He may have to give all the substance of his house. In other words, he still may have to pay a penalty. Now, the penalty may be different than someone who did it for greed, but the law is still the law. I think I told this story before, but I'm going to pass it on because it fits this. Because it was something that I read years ago that I just found so fascinating. Mayor LaGuardia of New York City during the Great Depression, he was well loved by the people because he helped them through the Depression, his leadership. But one of the things he would do is, late at night, they had like a midnight court, and as the mayor, he could actually go and act as a sitting judge. I don't know what the laws and why that was possible, but it wasn't a court where capital crimes were being presented. But he could go sit as a sitting judge. One of his most famous cases was he's at the midnight court, and they bring in a woman who was caught stealing food.
Her only defense is that, here it is in the middle of the Depression, it's 1935, and her children were starving. Now, LaGuardia is presented with the law requires a penalty. Well, the lowest penalty he could give her was a $10 fine. I'll tell you this story more. No, okay. A $10 fine.
So, he says, guilty as charged $10. She said, I can't afford $10. He says, I know. He said, and now when LaGuardia would come to act as the judge, the place is just full of people. Everybody wanted to come and see what kind of sentences he would give, and what he would say, and what he would do. And he said, what appalls me is that we live in a city that a woman would be left in such destitution that she would have to go steal. Therefore, I find everybody in this room $10. He then took the money, paid her fine, and gave the rest of it to her. Interesting, isn't it?
That's sort of injustice. That's sort of what Solomon's talking about.
Solomon's saying, I can't do away with the law here, but we have another problem that we have to deal with also. And nobody gets upset with him. Everybody happily gave their money. Yeah, I mean, it was not, he was not put down for this. He was actually looked on as, wow, he's, that's, he's right. So everybody in the room paid their fines, and he gave it to her, and took $10 out, and gave it to the bailiff. So this is what Solomon means. He's not justifying stealing by any means.
But he is saying there are different motivations for stealing.
We have to consider that when we pass sentence.
Now, let's look at ways, then, that you and I can break this commandment and not even think about it. I mean, there's lots of ways that you would say, wait a minute, I'm not stealing. I'm not taking, you know, I don't take pencils home from where I work. You know, I'm very careful not to take home anything from where I work, and I don't steal anything. Well, the first way that we break this commandment is the obvious way, right? We steal other people's property.
We steal other people's property. But most of us don't do that.
Well, maybe we don't. You know, you're not stealing your neighbor's car.
But what about plagiarism? You know, for those of you in high school and college, plagiarism is a huge issue, right? You get kicked out of college for plagiarizing, and there's a reason for that. You know, I don't have my work done. I get a term paper that needs to go in. Oh, look, here's an old book that no one will ever recognize. I'll just take three pages out of this book and put it in my word processor and change a few things and hand it in as my work.
And then you get, you know, a failing grade on it, and the professor says, why don't you meet me in my office at one o'clock?
And maybe you face expulsion from the university. And the reason why is you stole somebody else's work. That's the reason for copyright laws. You can't steal somebody else's work if it has been copyrighted. Now, there's some gray area in there. I mean, if I go download a song for 99 cents and make a copy for my wife's iPhone, usually that's considered within the copyright. But I knew a man one time years ago, came to church. He had taken all his favorite Christian songs, worship songs, like 15 of them, downloaded it, put it on a CD, made 100 copies, and was giving out to everybody at church. This was another church area that I was in. You know what? That's actually against the law. I know that's a bit of a gray area. You sure can't sell it. And you say, well, that doesn't seem right. I mean, big deal. I paid the 99 cents. You know, if you go buy a book and you decide to sell your used book, you can sell that used book, right? A number of years ago, I published a book. There are people selling that used book on Amazon. They can go buy my book used. That's perfectly within. And I own the copyright to the book. But I've also found at least two websites that scanned my book and have it available online for free download. Now, that book is not my main avenue of income. I would rather people get the information. So I'm not going to do anything about it. But I want you to think about something. If I was a professional, I mean, the way I made money was through my books.
That means every time, because they scanned that book was against copyright laws. Every time someone downloads that book, they're stealing money from me. I wrote the book. I'm the author. I'm the author. It's my work. I paid to have the copyright.
And I get paid every time somebody buys a book. So by giving away the book freely in that way, they're stealing from me. Now, I'm not going to think about it because I don't consider it stealing because I don't care if they give a book. But understand, the way I made money was for my book. I would be upset because every time they give that book away, without my permission, they're stealing from me because it's mine.
So we have to even be careful about copyright laws. That's why we pay. You know, when we get a parent, the choir sings music, we buy the music. By buying the music, we have permission to sing it. But we don't always broadcast that on the Internet. We do live services here. Why don't we broadcast the special music most of the time? Because we don't have the copyright to broadcast it. Those are two different copyrights. We have to pay extra money for that. And you think, well, isn't that wrong? Not if you're the person who wrote the music.
It's their music! Or the people who own the copyright now. I mean, even if a person dies, other people, companies, can own the copyright. The thing is, it's theirs!
Now, if it's in the public domain, that's something totally different. But, you know, much of the music we're going to sing is not in public domain, so we buy the music.
See, we can steal and not even know it. We don't think about it. Now, copyright laws can be sort of gray. So I'm not going to step here and do all the do's and don'ts of copyright laws. The book I have on copyright law at home is about that thick. Copyright laws for pastors, you know, basically. We have to be aware of it.
The second way we can break this law and not even think about it is in Psalm 37. Psalm 37.
Verse 21. David says, The wicked borrows and does not repay, but the righteous shows mercy and gives. The wicked borrows and does not repay. When someone lends us money, we are morally obligated to pay it back. Now, there may be times you can't.
But you have to go work that out with the person.
I've had people that I've lent money to in the past and they never paid it back. I would have simply said, forget it. But I always felt bad because they never even gave me the chance to say, forget it. Probably because they're too embarrassed. They can't pay it back.
Never lend money that you're not willing to never get back. That's another thing, too. But when we borrow money, and it's so easy if the person is a family member or a friend to say, they'll understand, you know, Uncle Jim, he lent me that money for that car. He lent me $1,000. I wonder why he hasn't invited me over for dinner for the last two years. Well, maybe it's because you gave Uncle Jim $10 and never paid anything back. And actually what we've done when we do those things is we steal from them. And we think what we do, we have to be real careful, you wouldn't treat a bank that way. You couldn't. But we'll treat our friends and fellow church members and family members that way. And we actually are breaking the commandment. A third way, a third way is by oppressing people in order to cheat from them to get gain.
And this really applies a lot to business deals and employers.
You know, in business, what we should strive to do is all transactions are win-win, same way with employer-employee relationships. You know, you come home, you just bought a new computer, you get home, you set it up, it's great, it does everything it's supposed to do. You feel good and you say, man, I get a good deal. And Best Buy says, man, we got a good deal. And the people who made it, the computer, you know, they're getting the amount of profit they need for their shareholders. And everybody says, well, we got a good deal. Right? That's win-win. Everybody wins in those things. But a lot of times what happens is we see life through this competitive sort of concept, so everything has to be a win-lose. I don't win unless somebody loses. You know, win-win? Wow, that's like kissing your sister.
Somebody's got to lose. Right? Somebody's got to lose here.
A lot of rich people have so much money that getting more money doesn't matter. But you know what matters? The game. And winning the game. And what's very interesting is throughout the Old and New Testament, there are a lot of instructions to rich people. Though most of us in this room are not rich, but the instructions are to rich people and to employers not to cheat others in order to get a gain. One of the most powerful statements is actually made in the New Testament, the book of James. Let's go to James chapter 4.
James chapter 4.
I've given Bible studies in the book of James. I'd like to give a series of sermons, maybe, some day on the book of James, because James has about five different themes that run through it. He's writing to the church at large at that time period, churches all over the Roman Empire, and he deals with five specific issues that must be very common in the church. And one of them is the relationship between rich people and poor people.
Look at verse 1 here in chapter 5. Come now, you rich, weep and howl, for your miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches are corrupted, your garments are moth-eaten. No, we're already talking to the church here. This isn't to the world. Your gold and silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be a witness against 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 have kept by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord of Samioth.
You know, in the Old Testament, they were commanded that wages had to be paid on the day that the person worked. That's part of the law of God. Now, we live in a different world, and that's why we don't apply those exactly under the New Covenant. But the principle still applies.
You know, an employer couldn't say, I'll pay you tomorrow.
And the employees say, but I need to get bread for my kids tonight.
You're supposed to pay me at the end of every day. Well, you know, I've seen cases, and old cases, where an employer said, I'm not supposed to pay you, you know, every other Friday, but we're going to pay you a little bit late next month or next week. Because maybe they would invest that money for a fast turnaround, or they need to buy some new equipment, and they buy the new equipment on the backs of their laborers. And our capitalistic society, that can seem okay. In accordance with the law of God, it is not.
It is not okay to take the wages of laborers away from them to do something else.
It is a very difficult thing to understand sometimes, but we have to remember that we're looking for win-win situations. You know, what's really interesting here is James' use of the Lord of Sabaoth. It's like Abram's use of El-Elian, the possessor of heaven and earth. He's making a point. Sabaoth isn't the Sabbath there. It's the Lord of Hosts, the Lord of armies. Whenever God refers to himself as the Lord of Hosts, he means this is power. You think you understand power? This is power. I am power. And James says, when we as employers take advantage of employees, we now are judged by the God of power. Now that's a little frightening of a statement. We can steal and take advantage of employees.
Now, lest I be seen as a socialist, let's go to the next point.
And that is, we can steal as employees from our employer. We can steal the other way, Titus 2. Instructions here are given to employees.
The relationship between employer and employee is stressed in both the Old and New Testaments. And you know what is a shame in the Church? I've seen this many, many years. I've seen it in families and the Church. That sometimes the worst employer or employee relationships are between family members and church members. Because we don't want to live by these rules. Now with each other, you'll understand. I wanted to spend the afternoon with my kids, so I just took it off.
I mean, you're the same church I am. You understand the importance of family.
Come on, you'll understand. I need you to work an extra two hours a night this whole week. I really don't have enough money to give you any more money. But you'll understand, because if you don't, you won't keep your job.
Well, I know. Come on. It's my son. I know he had plans Sunday, but I need him to work Sunday. So he's going to put in eight hours on Sunday. He's my son. I just expect him to do it. But that's not the employer-employee relationship that is explained in the Scripture.
Somehow, we don't think this applies to us if we're family members or church members.
But it does. Remember, employers can steal the wages of employees by somehow maneuvering that around so they get some kind of gain and the employees suffer.
Or we can do it in business. You get a deal and you make somebody lose just because you've got to win instead of looking for win-win situations. Look what it says in Titus 2, verse 9. Exhort bondservants to be obedient to their own masters. Now, we can apply this to any employee-employer relationship. To do well-pleasing in all things, not answering back, not pilfering. I love that old English word. Pilfering.
Taking things you shouldn't. But showing all good fidelity, that they may adorn the doctrine of God or Savior in all things. In other words, the reason for being a good employee is to be a good example of a Christian.
I'm going to read this from the NIV. It says, teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them, not to steal from them, which is what pilfering means, but to show that they can be fully trusted, so that in every way they make the teaching about God or Savior attractive.
As employees, we should strive to be fully trusted, that our employers know we won't steal from them.
We won't take their things. We won't misrepresent them.
You know, one of the ways that we as employees steal from employers and not even think about it.
As an employee, you are paid to go to work for a certain amount of time and produce a certain amount of work, right? When you go to work and you spend your time talking to everybody about your personal problems, or just talking about how bad your boss is, or answering personal emails, or playing a video game, or paying your bills, you're stealing his time, you're actually stealing his time. You agree to work for him and it's his time. So when we go to work and waste the time instead of doing our work, at the end of the day, again, figuring out why the boss is so upset with us, it's because you have stolen his time. Actually, you've stolen his money because he's paying you.
Boy, this whole idea of stealing is a little more complicated than we thought, isn't it? It's a little more complicated. You really do a study sometime, just the New Testament, all the instructions given to employers and employees. There's a real contract relationship that is expected to be there, in which God is involved in that contract. It's a covenant relationship. And they are not to steal from each other. So there's another way that we can do that. By stealing our employer's time, a fifth way is in Deuteronomy 22. Now, this one comes sort of out of nowhere a little bit, and seems like a bit of a surprise, but it actually works back into this concept of the right to private property. Private property is a right, and it must be protected. And not just your property, but other people's property. How many times we have to tell our children, no, that does not belong to you, right? You cannot have that. Well, I was just going to play with it. It doesn't matter, but I wasn't going to keep it. That doesn't matter. But it was just sitting there. I know, but it does not belong. I had that conversation many times. It does not belong to you.
But, Daddy, I wasn't going to steal it. We have, if we understand the right to property, we must protect property, other people's property.
Look at chapter 22, verse 1 here.
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. And if your brother is not near you, or if you do not know him, the brother who just means neighbor, do not know him, because you don't, you know, obviously, he's not your physical brother, you'd know him, you don't know him, then you shall bring it to your own house, and it shall remain with you until your brother seeks it. Then you shall restore it to him. You shall do the same for with his donkey. You shall do the same with his garment, 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.
Oh, look! That's a pretty dog running down the street. I'll catch it and keep it.
The right to private property means I have a responsibility to find out who it belongs to, if at all possible. My wife has done it numerous times. Come over, there's a dog, you know, in the front yard, tied up. I call the person on the collar, I'm going to keep calling until they come pick their dog up. Or did you find it running up and down the street? I caught him and tied him up in the front yard. That is understanding and appreciating the right to public or private ownership.
And here we have a law that says, now if your neighbor gets in trouble. I was when we were out in California, my brother-in-law lives out away from town in an area that gets a lot of wildfires, like much of Northern California does.
And they were showing us pictures of a wildfire that was sweeping across, they live in these sort of rolling hills, sweeping across these hills and came right up to their fence line. And the reason it didn't come into their yard is because they had sprinkler system. And they turned all the sprinklers on and everything was soaked, but it was headed towards a neighbor's house and the neighbor wasn't home. So they got a bunch of church people over their house and they spent the evening watering down their neighbor's house and watering down the neighbor's yard and the fire went around it. Now they could have said, that's not my responsibility, I've saved my property. But in accordance with this law, we should go try to save our neighbor's property. See, the concept of property rights, the property ownership expands out into all areas of responsibility. And this is all tied into that because if you don't have any neighbor's personal property rights, this law we just read about taking care of your neighbor's donkey doesn't mean anything, does it? Has to be tied in with this concept.
The possessor of heaven and earth says you get to own things. Now we don't get to own them forever, right? You probably live in a house that somebody else used to own. When people die, somebody else owns those things. They get the right to own it, generation after generation. Now the sixth thing, there's seven things that I want to cover. The sixth one, as soon as I say this one, someone's going to say, okay, you've stepped over preaching and you've moved into politics. It is stealing not to pay your taxes.
They came to Jesus and said, should we pay our taxes?
Jesus said, show me a coin. They did. He said, whose picture is on the coin? He said, Caesar's. Give to Caesar what belongs to him. Give to God what belongs to him. This is difficult at times because we as Christians say, but it's an evil system. In fact, I've talked to people say it is immoral to pay taxes. Absolutely immoral because you're subsidizing an evil system. The system you and I live under is bad and rotten as it is. I would take this over Nero any day or Claudius any day. Caligula, the Roman emperors. I mean, Caligula was insane. Absolutely insane. Well, Nero was too.
So when we look at that, at Jesus saying, as long as we live in the Roman Empire, we give them their taxes, then we need to pay our taxes.
As if not, Paul says in Romans that we are to give taxes to whom taxes are due. That's the exact statement. It's due to them. Now, what does it mean when somebody's due something and you don't give it? It means you're stealing from them. If something's due, this is what you should have. This is what you are to be given, and you refuse to give it, you're stealing. If at the end of your work week you walk up to your boss and you say, well, I'm due my paycheck, and he says, no, you're not. I'm not going to give it to you. He says, well, yeah, I'm due that. He's stealing from you if he doesn't give it to you. Same way with taxes. Now, I did not say taxation is fair or good or righteous. Neither did Jesus.
That wasn't the point. I mean, if you really want to understand the point, you have to read almost the entire chapter of Romans 13. There's a sermon in Romans 13. Someday I'll have to give a sermon on that. But to read the entire chapter almost, because he deals with the fact that there is temporal authority that we temporarily submit ourselves to as long as it doesn't tell us to do something against God. And in that responsibility, we have the responsibility to pay taxes. So when we don't pay taxes, not giving the do what is due, we're stealing.
The last point I want to make is in Malachi chapter 3. Malachi chapter 3.
Boy, I thought he could get 10 minutes and thou shalt not steal here. Verse 8. This first sentence is from God, then it's the response of the people, and then it's a response from God. Well, a man robbed God, yet you have robbed me. That's a statement from God. He's telling ancient Judah, and of course, at the time of Malachi, they'd been brought back out of the Babylonian captivity, and over a couple of generations, they were starting to slip back into the same problems they had had before. And God says, you're robbing me. You're stealing from me. Yet you say, in what way have we robbed you? In tithes and offerings is God's response. The basis for tithing and giving of offerings is the basis for the whole concept of even private property, the possessor of heaven and earth.
I suppose it'd been absolutely fair for God to say, I tell you what, I'm going to give you 10%, and I'm going to give you, give me, you know, 90. Who could have argued? He's the possessor of heaven and earth. Why couldn't he have said that? What he said was, I want you to give me 10%, plus offerings. Why? Does he need our money? The possessor of heaven and earth.
You know, God's never going to show up and say, I need a loan. You got 10 bucks? Okay, never going to happen. He has us give this, these, of our, what we produce, give it to him as a way of acknowledging that he is possessor of heaven and earth. Now, he doesn't want us to forget that.
It is a way of being thankful, and it is a requirement. When we don't do it, we are robbing God. Now, he goes on and tells the nation of Judah, when you don't tithe, you are cursed. When you do tithe, you are blessed.
He said, that's part of what I will do with you. But when you don't do it, he says, you're robbing me. This is a way that is easy for people, for all of us, to sort of work around, well, I know God wants me to tithe, but then we fill in the blank. There's a good reason I can't. That's a great issue of faith, because sometimes tithing is not easy. But just remember, not tithing is stealing according to what God says, but you're stealing from Him. You shall not steal. That's a simple enough concept, but the implications encompass all kinds of things. More than just, don't take something that doesn't belong to you. It encompasses refusing to pay a debt, oppressing others by cheating them for a gain, cheating your employer, not trying to find the owner of something that has been found, or taking care of somebody else's property when it is lost, refusing to pay taxes, and refusing to give God the tithes and offerings that He requires.
Understanding the right to own property given to us is an amazing thing.
If we really understand it, we want to take care of our property.
We want to take care of what we have. It is a right. And many times in history, other people will come along and take away the rights that God has given to us.
There's been many times in different societies where people had no rights to ownership, and yet it is something that God has given to us. It also should keep us mindful to take care of other people's property. We can't just go destroy or damage other people's property, because they have a right to own it. And this right comes from a very simple concept that Abraham understood when he refused all these spoils from the king of Sodom. He said, no, I am fine. I am fine. He said because he worshiped, he had held his hand up.
To the El Elyon, the Most High God, the possessor of heaven and earth.
