Clough Acts Lesson 29

What About Famine and Hunger Relief – Acts 11:19-30

…you’ve handed in for answering; one person asks: Could you tell me where I might research some more the concept of Christ’s role as a our high priest and that our eternal salvation is eternal because He is interceding for us daily. The answer would be in the book of Hebrews; there’s a tape series on the book of Hebrews, and also chapter 3 of the fourth framework pamphlet.

Another person asks: considering the doctrine of the Trinity and the Romans 9 passages, would it be valid to conclude that a believer is become Christ-like as he matures, take the same attitude toward his fellow believers, the non-believers that he knows that God takes toward all men in this passage. In other words, can we exercise limited discrimination in this respect. We can exercise limited discrimination in the sense of the Sermon on the Mount, distinguishing dogs from sheep, believers from unbelievers. But also one has to be careful about taking it in precisely the sense of Romans 9 because in that passage you’re dealing with God pronouncing final judgment on people and we just don’t have omniscience and we can’t really go that far. So in that respect no.

In the passage in Acts 11, we left off last time with the 18^th verse and with that 18^th verse we concluded the section that dealt with the Churches transition to stage three of the gospel. It was during this stage that the Holy Spirit led the Church to get to the point of being able to witness to the world at large, stage three, the worldwide gospel witness. And during that time period you know the Holy Spirit did various things and worked this way and worked that way and the whole picture there is of us as sheep, being led by the super pastor, the Holy Spirit. And as sheep, therefore, it is not intuitively clear to us what we ought to do, when we ought to do it. Even the clear instructions of God are not clear to us and we need help there and so this is why, so often you have this unconscious leading of the Spirit in the book of Acts, just to teach us that it’s all grace; we don’t ask, we don’t deserve it.

In Acts 11:19-15:35 we come to the next section and this section of the book of Acts deals with the birth of world missions. And it begins to translate and emphasize a shift from Jerusalem to Antioch, and then of course eventually Jerusalem, to Antioch, and then finally to Rome because we said the book of Acts is a book of transition, theological transition from the early days of the kingdom in Israel to a geographical transition from the days in the city of Jerusalem to the days in the city of Rome, and we’ve already seen in the recent section the emphasis on the Holy Spirit getting the Church into a witnessing mode so that the gospel could go forward, could go into areas of different culture. Now we come to the point where they actually develop the mechanics of world missions and we’ll be looking at strategy, we’ll be, hopefully, which we haven’t done in our church yet really and that is develop a good perspective on world missions. And this will come as we come to these passages in the book of Acts.

You’ll see right away the strategy of early missions in Acts is somewhat different from modern strategy and probably better in that they followed an urban strategy; they mastered the areas of learning, they went into the areas, the metroplexes, the places where people were packed together in an urban population. And they did their first evangelism in those packed urban areas. Several reasons for that: first, people in an urban area are somewhat uprooted and therefore in some cases are closer to a gospel witness. Other places it’s just sheer efficiency in that the apostles only had so many days in their life, they could only witness to so many people, so you go to the maximum concentration. They did not go to the Hottentots, they did not go to all the country villages, they went to the cities. And the failure, if there has been this kind of a failure in Africa among our missionaries has been that they have gone out into the villages and so on, and won native chiefs to the Lord and the witchdoctor to the Lord and so on, and then the major metropolitan areas attained their freedom in the last hundred years, Belgium, England, France, Germany have pulled out of their African colonies and they’re turned the leadership over to the natives, the natives were never trained because the people in the metropolitan areas had not been thoroughly exposed to the Word of God. Whether this could have been done with different strategy is debatable, but at least this strategy in the book of Acts is urban first, rural second. The rural areas are evangelized once you get the cities down and then the cities expand outward into their surrounding areas.

In the passage before us, the rest of Acts 11, we go from verse 19-26 and in this section we have the Church being built by teaching. And then in the last passage, the passage we will spend most of our time on, the last passage deals with the first physical disaster to hit Christians, first that involved inter-church cooperation. So beginning in verse 19 we’ll read to verse 26,

Acts 11:19, “Now they which were scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose about Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, and Cyprus, and Antioch, preaching the word to none but unto the Jews only. [20] And some of them were men of Cyprus and Cyrene, which, when they were come to Antioch, spoke unto the Grecians, preaching the Lord Jesus. [21] And the hand of the Lord was with them: and a great number believed, and turned unto the Lord. [22] Then tidings of these things came unto the ears of the church which was in Jerusalem: and they sent forth Barnabas, that he should go as far as Antioch. [23] Who, when he came, and had seen the grace of God, was glad, and exhorted them all, that with purpose of heart they would cleave unto the Lord. [24] For he was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost and of faith: and much people was added unto the Lord. [25] Then departed Barnabas to Tarsus, for to seek Saul: [26] And when he had found him, he brought him unto Antioch. And it came to pass, that a whole year they assembled themselves with the church, and taught much people. And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.

27 And in these days came prophets from Jerusalem unto Antioch.”

Notice three times in this passage many people are believing. In verse 21, “a great number believed;” verse 24, “much people were added to the Lord;” verse 26, “taught much people.” The emphasis is now on numbers. This is a godly way of emphasizing numbers, not because the headquarters requires the filling out of forms but because there are certain advantages to a proper, biblically centered missionary strategy.

In Acts 11:19 we go back to those days immediately following the persecution of Stephen; the great upheaval that just slammed into the Christian community as the Hellenistic Jews began to persecute them for daring to go take the Word of God outside the soil of Palestine. And they “were scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose because Stephen, and they went to Phoenicia, and Cyprus, and Antioch,” three places. Let’s look at a map and check these three places out and see where geographically they are. Here’s the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the so-called Levant; the area of the Nile Delta, area of Turkey and the island of Cyprus where there’s so much upheaval between the Greeks and the Turks. Now three centers figure in, all well-known from today’s newspaper headlines, three centers figure in this passage. Phoenicia, this area is what is now today Lebanon. Cyprus, the isles of Cyprus you know. Antioch is in the country today of Syria. So Christianity begins to move northward; it begins to concentrate outside of the city of Jerusalem. You have a tremendous emphasis on Antioch. This is why, incidentally, some scholars believe that Luke, the author of Acts, came to know Christ in Antioch; he came to know Him here and therefore He began to write about Him. Luke must have lived in Antioch and therefore he wrote about Christianity out of this geographical region. So the people scattered but then they had a problem of myopia in missions, at the end of verse 19, the word “went to none but the Jews only.” The gospel was supposed to go to all men. But somewhere in the course of events, verse 20, there were men who Jews who began to speak to Greeks and these are not Hellenistic Jews, these are Gentile Greeks. And it’s the first time that the Greeks as a body are witnessed to; it is at Antioch. And this could never have taken place with the blessings of mother church down in Jerusalem had not that whole episode of Cornelius gone on before, God delivering the Church through Peter into this mode of evangelization.

And so we have in verse 21, “And the hand of the Lord was with them: and a great number believed,” they blessed this breakout of witnessing to a new group, a new race, a new culture. Verse 22, the church at Jerusalem hears about it and they send Barnabas. The word “bar,” like the word Bar Mitzvah, the word “bar” means son, and nabas is the word for exhortation. Barnabas, the son of exhortation. He was the man, evidently who had the spiritual gift of exhortation. He had that tremendous ability that some believers have of being able to lift you up when you’re depressed, with an exhortation from Scripture. Some of you have the gift of exhortation; some of you know it and some of you are training that gift and using that gift. Others of you do not yet know that that’s what you have but as you grow and as you take in the Word of God and begin to exercise yourself spiritually in helping other believers in the body you’ll see that you to have the gift of exhortation and that’ll be your major ministry, of encouraging other people. By the way, one of the side evidences that you have the gift of exhortation, usually, is that when you’re out of fellowship you’re vastly irritating to people. I’ve just noticed that as a point of interest, that people who have the gift of exhortation, when they misuse the gift, really get under people’s skin. And are just a general annoyance. So don’t feel depressed if you happen to be a general annoyance to people, it may just mean you’re out of fellowship and misusing your gift of exhortation, in which case you’re as close as 1 John 1:9 to a blessing.

So verse 23, Barnabas exercises his gift; it’s limited because apparently he can’t teach too well but he does exhort them, and therefore many people are added, verse 24, to the Lord. So he does stabilize that new group of believers but Barnabas is a man who is meek; not weak, but who is meek; that is, he recognizes his rank. If he’s a major he acts like a major, he doesn’t act like a brigadier general, and he doesn’t act like a sergeant. He acts his rank. And Barnabas is a man who knows that God has given him a certain rank of leadership, but that there is another rank higher than his in the area of teaching, not in the area of exhortation but in the area of teaching. He just kind of an average believer when it comes to teaching, and he knows, hey, look it, there are hundreds of people that are trusting in You and these people have got to be fouled up.

See, they didn’t follow this evangelism kind of regenerate them and leave them approach. Here they had a case where they had to follow it up, so he says I know just the man for this, and that’s why that whole Pauline thing was put back in the text. You see how the Holy Spirit did that Paul thing back in Acts 8-9, He did the Cornelius thing back in Acts 10. The Holy Spirit was investing, investing in men’s lives for a future time. God will do this to you; He will invest in your soul and you may be sitting aside, not playing in the game and wondering if you’re ever going to get on the course, and then all of a sudden the Holy Spirit points—you’re on! And you’ll be ready. So that was with Saul; Saul, who was put on the sideline, put on the bench for many, many years really, and then suddenly the Holy Spirit said all right, get off, you’re in the game now, you’re ready.

So Saul comes in and here’s where Paul begins his ministry. In verse 25, Barnabas went to seek out Saul. The word “seek” means that he sought him for some time; it’s an intensive search. Saul was thrown out of his home, his parents disowned him, they sent him away to college and their son comes back and instead of being a Jewish rabbi he comes back as a Messianic Christian. We didn’t send you to college to become a Christian. What’s all that about? And so his dad apparently disowned him and threw him out of the house and his mother had nothing to do with him either, and so this is why… and the scars of this remain on Paul because in his epistles he would often say, when he was talking about Christian men, he says: “Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.” Apparently that came out of personal experience, his own dad provoked him to wrath because of his overly strictness, his unbiblical strictness.

So here He seeks out Saul, takes some time, and finally in verse 26 He brings Saul back and for one year Saul teaches. [“Then departed Barnabas to Tarsus, for to seek Saul: [26] And when he had found him, he brought him unto Antioch. And it came to pass, that a whole year they assembled themselves with the church, and taught much people. And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.”] Now we know Saul’s pattern of teaching from other passages in Acts. He taught during the afternoon siesta; people in the ancient world went to work early in the morning, they took a break around noontime and stayed out of work for two or three hours, for the heart mainly, and then went back to work in the late afternoon. And so there was two to three hours each day when you could teach. It was hard teaching because you had a problem of heat; everybody kind of falling asleep. This is, by the way, for those of you ladies who always complain about the air conditioning being cold, I have ordered it cold; that’s to keep you awake, not because of you necessarily because of your husband, they have three layers of suits on that you don’t have, so the only way you can defend yourself, since I’m not going to elevate the air conditioning, is to put a shawl on or something. But that’s just for your own benefit so you’ll stay awake.

Now looking at Paul’s method of teaching, he had, let’s take conservatively two hours a day teaching; that’s times six, because he taught six days a week. That’s twelve hours of teaching per week. Now that’s the teaching schedule of the early Christians, lest it be said that we have too much Word at Lubbock Bible Church, we have a max of three hours a week and some people think that’s tough, oh, bad schedule. What would you do if you had twelve hours of teaching? I tell you one thing, you’d learn something. You go to some other Christian groups and you have about a half hour of teaching a week and that’s filled with all sorts of things about how many people went to Sunday School and if you bring five new people you get a balloon or some other thing, and all the gimmicks are used, and this week we need $8,000 for our new building fund and you’d better tithe and pledge and cheat on your income tax or something so we can get $8,000 in cash by our next payment. So actually less than half an hour of teaching a week. I know some people in Dallas Seminary, who ought to know better, men who are excellent expositors of the Word and their elders tell them don’t teach more than 20 minutes.

Paul taught two hours every single day. Now you figure it out; that is 24 times the teaching hours that average Christians get in America. Is it any wonder that these people turned the world upside down; vast amounts of teaching, we don’t come close, even at Lubbock Bible Church, to the Pauline dogma of teaching, emphasis on teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching, throughout the book of Acts. You don’t find any place in the book of Acts, never once… never once do you find in the book of Acts Paul saying now people, we’ve got to get out to witness; we’ve got to hustle down Joppa Street and knock on every door, and if you’ll do that we’ll give you ten big brownie points so you can get a pin. That’s not the way evangelism occurred in the book of Acts. Why is it that you have no exhortation to evangelize? Because it was a natural byproduct, it was not done in the Church, it was done by the Christians on the job in the street. And they could evangelize and open their mouth and explain Christ to someone because they had twelve hours of teaching a week to do it. That was the tremendous base that these people operate from. And you can image if we had that same base today what we could do.

So the first verses in this section of Acts 11 dealt with the early development of the first missionary church; this is what you’ve got here and the key to establishing that missionary church was teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching. When Barnabas, the missionary, went into an area and he saw they were going to establish a local church, what was the first thing the missionaries did? They went back and they got someone who could exegete the Word of God and they brought them to that site and said go to it. That was how they operated; tremendous teaching on the field.

Now we come to verse 27 and the second part of this section of the chapter, the section of the chapter and that is the great physical emergency that the Church faced. The first one was in Acts 6 but that was internal to the Jerusalem church, this one is the first emergency that involved cooperation between churches; it involves the problem of food, hunger and famine. Let’s read it:

Acts 11:27, “And in these days came prophets from Jerusalem unto Antioch. [28] And there stood up one of them named Agabus,” Agabus is the man who prophesied false [can’t understand word] later on in Acts, “and signified by the spirit that there should be great famine throughout all the world,” the word “world,” oikoumenos, which means the Roman Empire, “which came to pass in the days of Claudius Caesar.” Claudius Caesar reigned from 41-54 AD, this famine or the series of famines and crop failures that occurred during Claudius’ reign are recorded in Josephus, The Book of Antiquities, recorded in Seutonius’ Lives of the Caesars and recorded in Tacitus’ Annals.
So we have adequate extra-Biblical data that substantiates this series of famines, it wasn’t just one great famine but it was several crop failures during that time that really stressed the economy of the Roman Empire. [29] Then the disciples, every man according to his ability, determined to send relief unto the brethren which dwelt in Judea: [30] Which also they did, and sent it to the elders by the hands of Barnabas and Saul.”

Now we’re here face to face with a contemporary problem, famine, food and hunger relief. And there are noises being made in evangelical circles increasingly about our role in this problem. So as we have done in the book of Acts series, every once in a while when we get into a chapter in a crucial event I stop and we devote about half the service to kind of a foray out into the Scriptures to handle the problem. In Acts 1 we stopped and handled the problem of tongues; we did a special on tongues. We did a special in on the military when we hit Acts 10:1. We did a special on civil disobedience in Acts 4. Now we deal with a problem, a special on hunger. What does the Bible tell about hunger? Obviously it occurs and if the Word of God is sufficient unto every good work it must tell us how we respond to the problem of hunger, there must be a Biblical response. So this is the one we’re going to study right now.

By way of introduction, the hunger problem has already intruded itself into the fundamentalist and evangelical churches. Dr. Billy Graham and others have backed a right to food resolution in the United States Congress that reads as such: “Every person in this country and throughout the world has the right to a nutritionally adequate diet and this right is henceforth to be recognized as a cornerstone of United States policy.” Now the purpose of the resolution as far as many of the people involved with it is to give a criteria of judgment against foreign policy decisions, like when foreign aid goes to country X, Y, Z, the question will be does country X, Y, Z, promote a prosperous agriculture to feed its people or not; if they don’t we might not be interested in giving them any more aid until they do decide to have that one of their priorities. That’s the purpose of the resolution; we’re not debating the resolution, just announcing the fact that it exists; evangelicals are being asked to carry it out or to put pressure on Congress to pass the resolution.

Hunger is very, very real. Before tomorrow at this time 12,000 will be dead in the world; they did not die from bullets, they died from no food. So hunger is a problem that’s with us; no question, nobody is debating that. The only debate is what do you do about it? Interestingly about hunger and the portrait it has, we’re going to look at some Scripture shortly, but here’s Mr. Lloyd Garrison who wrote in the New York Times about the death of a young boy he saw in Southeast Asia who died from hunger. He says: “He stares at you blankly, without a flicker or recognition. You extend candy, a cup of powdered milk, anything, and the child just stares, too listless, too dehydrated even to taste. It is the irony of death from malnutrition, that in the final fading hours one is at least completely free from the pangs of hunger.” And his point is that it is just a peculiarity of dying of starvation that in your last hours you don’t feel hungry; it works that way.

Now the Bible also describes hunger and it describes some of its effects. The modern person interested in food problem, what’s the first one to discuss? Hunger. The authors of Scripture are intimate with the problem of hunger. Turn to Lamentations 4:9, the prophets faced hunger, they could describe its effects. Lamentations was the book written by Jeremiah during the days of the fall of his nation. Jeremiah watched the city of Jerusalem being invaded in 586 BC by the Babylonians; Jeremiah saw that something had to be done and the only thing that could be done in that day was to trust the Lord with the promises; everything had been done that could be done. So the book, the cry, the lamentations of the fall of Jerusalem, and he describes the people and in verse 9-10 he says this: “They who are slain with the sword are better than they who are slain with hunger; for these pine away, stricken through for want of the fruits of the field. [10] The hands of the pitiful women have sodden [boiled] their own children; they were their food in the destruction of the daughter of my people.” The horrifying picture that the prophet pictures here of hunger. Notice he says it would have been easier to die of military death, easier to have a sword stuck through you and bleed to death than it would be to die of this awful thing of hunger. And in verse 10 he describes what the mothers were doing during that siege of Jerusalem, when the mothers just worked into a frenzy of insanity by the pains of hunger killed and ate their own babies. That’s what verse 10 is talking about, mothers eating their babies. That’s how far a person can be reduced under the pain of hunger; many of those women were believers. It wasn’t that they didn’t have doctrine. It was that hunger drove them to the frantic action of turning into a cannibal.

Turn to Ezekiel 34:29, the future kingdom being described, the blessings of the future kingdom being described. And among those blessings of that future kingdom Ezekiel says this: I will raise up for them a plant of renown, and they shall no more be consumed with hunger in the land, neither bear the shame of the heathen any more. [30] Thus shall they know that I, the LORD their God, am with them, and that they, even the house of Israel, are My people, saith the Lord God.” What is the empirical sign that God is physically with His people? That hunger no longer occur, that hunger be eliminated. That’s the empirical sign that God is there.

Turn to the famous passage in Romans 8:35, talking about our security in our position in Christ. “What shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” Paul lists hunger and famine as one of the great adversities that Christians face. Not unbelievers, Christians can face this; Christians are right now facing it behind the iron curtain; when the dad has been put in Siberian jail, what does the wife of the house do to support her children because she’s disqualified from communist welfare because her husband is a witnessing believer. Her children starve, that’s what happens.

Turn to Revelation 7:14 at the end of history, the great close and climax, when the plagues hit the earth and men die of hunger. John is talking to the angel, “[And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest.] And he said to me,” the angel did, “These are they who came out of the great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. [15] Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve Him day and night in His temple; and he that sits on the throne shall dwell among them.” Again as in Ezekiel the sign that He’s dwelling among them, [16] “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. [17] For the Lamb who is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto the living fountains of waters,” food, and not just spiritual food, physical food is being made the issue.

That’s an interesting introduction to the problem of food; it testifies that the Bible recognizes that hunger has some awesome side effects, that hunger, in fact, theologically is related to God’s millennium, the final solution to it. So now we have to go to the Scripture to find out what did the Scripture do in the Old Testament to meet hunger in society; how was the Old Testament society structured to avoid the problem of death through starvation. God designed a perfect society in the Old Testament and if some of our know-it-alls in high places would simply go back to the legislation of Moses they would find great wisdom principles.

In ancient Israel there were two ways that they met the problem of hunger. One is in Leviticus 19:9; here is one system that society used in the Old Testament that did not violate free enterprise, it was not socialistic, but yet it answered the problem that the socialists always cry about, the problem of the poor. By the way, this is the answer to those who say does not Adam Smith laissez faire, lead to a selfish capitalism. Well yes it does, except it has self-correcting devices within it and Adam’s Smith laissez faire free economy in the Old Testament was moderated by the Word of God, that is, the people who functioned in that free economy obeyed the Word. Leviticus 19:9-10, “When you reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of your field, neither shall you gather the gleanings of thy harvest. [10] And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger: I am the LORD your God.”

Now at the end of verse 10 God places His authority on that piece of welfare provision. You will do it, He says, not because the state says it; you will do it as unto Me because I say it; I am the Lord your God, not David, not Moses, not Joshua, not a civil servant but I am the Lord and I say you do it and you do it as unto me. Now let’s look a little bit what in fact was done. First of all notice in verse 9 it says “when you reap the harvest of your land,” … your land, private property is the basis of this system of welfare. It is not the state’s property, it is not an act of charity, what we have today; this is not charity. It is not an act of charity for some Congressman to say well I’m so charitable I voted all your money to the poor. Wait a minute, if there’s charity I’ll vote my money to the poor, I have no right to vote your money to the poor. Charity begins with the volition of the individual who owns the property, not with somebody imposing it upon. See, you may have a lot of giving to the poor but it’s not charity. Charity presupposes private property; you cannot have charity unless you first have private ownership and so your land was used in that your capital.

Now let’s look at this field. It was harvested; it says in the corners, they didn’t have tractors so this wasn’t where he turned his tractor around the corner at the end of the row, this was just in the corners of the field where the oxen turned around and they left this unharvested. They left quite a bit of it unharvested. And the vineyards they left quite a bit of the vine unharvested. Now this field stuff that’s left is called the gleanings of the harvest. And that is method number one of providing for the poor, the system called gleaning. Now the system of gleaning has tremendous merit. Here’s some of the advantages of the gleaning system that our modern systems fail and the modern systems do not have this advantage.

Number one, in the system of gleaning it is the private person’s whose wealth is being used to provide for the poor and therefore you have personal interest in the poor. It is not just well, I just drop it in the pot and somewhere 35 people down the bureaucracy, a brokerage fee gets a pay off and then we give it to the poor. That’s not it at all; personal interest! The closest thing that we come to this would be Goodwill Industries would be a typical gleaning type operation in our modern society. So you take produce… notice something else, besides it originating in private property it is a tax on the produce not on the property. This is not a property tax. It is not a sales tax; it is ultimately a tax on the absolute profits; it’s more of an income tax, if you want to say it that way, yet it really isn’t because it never became income for the person.

Now this is applied in verse 9 to agricultural industries but I would claim that in our modern day if Christian businessmen thought hard enough there ought to be ways of applying verse 9 to modern industry as a counter to socialism. Theoretically it ought to be able to be that a company and a manufacturing company’s assets, that a certain fraction of it’s produce be reserved, in this case. Another thing about this is that in both verse 9 and 10 the poor are going to do the gathering. The poor are going to do the gathering! What’s that mean? It means that the people that are on the welfare do not get a dole; it is demeaning to get a dole; it is demeaning for a person who is made in God’s image to have to say well give me, would you give me this. A person cannot go through that experience of having to take welfare and ever remain the same; it is humiliating to have to take a dole. And don’t you think that many of the people on the welfare… yes, there are the moochers, but there are also people who are being systematically destroyed in their soul by that horror of having to take a handout. There are people, therefore, in the way our present welfare system is structured, that would starve to death in our inner cities rather than go down and get food stamps, because of that problem, because they can’t bring themselves to that position and that ought not to be. In the Old Testament these people could do their own gathering and that meant that they had to work in part to get the welfare. They had to go into the fields and they had to harvest it. So skill and effort was required on the part of those on the welfare system.

But here’s something even more intriguing. A fourth advantage of this was that the skills that they needed to garner were precisely the skills that someday they’d need to make a living with, so that while they were on welfare their sills were being maintained because the same skills involved in gleaning were the skills that when they finally got their piece of land and could establish their own farm to grow their own food, they would have all the skills necessary to immediately go to work. So you had a conservation of skill in this system of welfare. You think of this for a moment. Just a creative line of thinking; see if you can incorporate all these elements in a modern context that would have all of these advantages. Think creatively if we could come up with a better system.

Another advantage of this system is that it was locally administered; the farmer’s field was just there; the farmer didn’t take a cut and send it to Jerusalem and then Jerusalem revenue-shared back again, minus a brokerage fee. There was none of that; it was all pure wealth devoted without cuts, it all went to the poor. So there were many, many advantages of this system in Leviticus 9:9-10; gleaning, a system of providing for the poor.

A second system is more classical in Deuteronomy 26:12, this is where Christian citizens, if they would just study the Word of God and stop emoting about the way some candidate parts his hair, and read the Word and understand the wisdom principles we could be inputting the system. We’d have our testimony; Christians may not be liked, your object is never to be liked, your object is to be respected, and at least Christians citizens would be known as, hey, see those guys over there, they’re the guys that thought up this program that works so well, they’re the ones that when all the programs were failing they came up with this idea, tremendous, now we don’t buy all their Jesus business but it’s interesting that they come out with these good ideas, I wonder where they get their ideas from. Here’s where we get it from; open testimony of the Word. It would be a pragmatic sell before the unbelieving world of the reliability and the authority of Scripture.

Deuteronomy 26:12, the second technique that was used in the ancient land to solve the problem of hunger. “When you have made an end of tithing all the tithes of thine increase the third year, which is the year of tithing, and you have given it unto the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, that they may eat within thy gates and be filled….” Now the interesting thing about this is that this is a system, not of gleaning but a system of taxation. The taxation rate was ten percent. “Tithe” in the Old Testament was not church giving; tithing was taxation, so relax, this is not a pitch for money. This is going to be an exposition of what tax was in the Old Testament.

Again, let’s look at some advantages of this tax in the Old Testament. Even some Christians are confused here. First of all, the tax was a flat rate across the board tax; it was non-graduated. Graduated taxes are theft. Graduated are taxes discriminate; graduate taxes say that because that guy is wealthy I’m going to juice him, going to get it all back, we’ll pass a graduated income tax, and those rich people, those bad rich people, make them pay. Is that what God says in the Bible? Is it a sin to be wealthy? Since when? That’s socialism, that’s Marxism. Christians who are for graduated income taxes are secret communists at heart; they think like the communists. Their cry to redistribute the wealth, the Robin Hood cry that the government will steal from the rich and give to the poor always winds up with the government stealing from rich and poor alike to pay Robin Hood. And that’s the way it always winds up and always will wind up. There was no graduated income tax of any sort in the nation Israel. Now someone has estimated after studying the tax structure of the federal government that if we went to a non-graduated tax in this country, just as an illustration of an application of a biblical principle, wiped out all the tax loopholes, no allowances for anything, just flat tax across the board, everybody pays the same percent, they computed, they put it into a computer and they figured what tax rate would we have to charge everybody to generate the same amount of revenue that we’re now generating with this cumbersome tremendous bureaucratic thing where you’ve got 800 loopholes over here so someone who’s super rich pays $500 and here’s the average in the middle class paying $5,000, a marvelously equitable system. But instead if we had a level system, like God said Israel should have, they computed that the tax rate for everyone in this country would be less than 4%. Now you’d think the millennium had hit if your income tax was dropped to 4%. But that’s what would happen if the tax legislation would design an across the board no exemption, no allowances, nothing, just 4%, everybody. The reason we’d get such cost savings is that you’d eliminate all the tax lawyers, you’d eliminate all the forms, all the bureaucrats, and so on involved in the process of administrating this cumbersome thing. And you’d have equity. So this is the first advantage of this system, non-graduated tax.

Another advantage of this is that when you divide it by three, because only one-third of the 10%, once every three years, went to the poor, the total welfare costs were three and one-third percent of all wealth. Isn’t that amazingly low; think of Sweden for a moment; think of Israel and some of the other places that really get ripped off on taxes. And here God his providing completely for all the basic necessities with a mere three and one-third percent income tax. It’s amazing. But this is what you do when you have someone that knows what He’s doing design the structure and design the system.

Somtehing else that’s interesting about this tax structure, it was local. You didn’t have the farmer here taking one-third of his produce and he shipped it to Jerusalem and the Pharisees and Caiaphas and all the other boys got their hand in it and they said well, here’s Hebron, the guy lives in Hebron and he sent his taxes up to Jerusalem, and now Jerusalem comes down and says in the next election we’re going to give you revenue sharing, Hebron, for every hundred dollars you send us we’ll give you five back; we call that revenue sharing, because we keep a little brokerage fee, after all, we have to pay the bureaucrat that administers the program, we have to pay for the ink, the paper, the secretary that types it and all that, and after all that’s subtracted we give you your money back. Has anyone ever bothered to ask the startling simply question why bother to send the money there if it’s going to come back? Why not just keep it here? Marvelously simple question, and that’s what the Old Testament did, it didn’t sent the money anywhere, it just left it in the local community. So this is why they could have such low tax rates. And of course in the millennium the tax rate was forecast to go down. So if this is the tax rate that God ordained for a complete working society and we have tax rates ten to fifteen times what this is, something’s screwed up some place and I dare say it’s man, not God that’s screwed up.

So this is how God protected the society in general against the problem of hunger. Now we want to come to how do we respond, to the problem of 12,000 people a day dying of starvation, as Christian citizens. We ought to respond, if you say it’s not a Christian thing, just remember the words of [can’t understand; sounds like: Beurd neff] who wrote this: “When our bread is concerned it is a physical matter; where our neighbor’s bread is concerned it is a spiritual matter. And so we’re going to analyze the Christian position under five points; five points that are given in the wisdom pamphlet which is available in the church office, The American Believer and the United States Foreign Policy; these same five points can be used on any basic foreign policy problem for you as a Christian citizen. Don’t despair if you’re not interested in politics, we’re gong to get back to the Word and I’ll show you exactly where the Word pertains to this. We have to do this because you have the right to vote and God is going to ask you what did you do with your vote; what did you do as an American citizen in 1976? I sat and watch TV, there was a good football game on. That isn’t going to quite hack it’ we have obligations to function. We have a certain sovereignty that’s been given us, it’s part of our possession, let’s use it.

The first thing you always want to do when you’re faced with this thing is you want a divine viewpoint question, not an human viewpoint question. You want to analyze the question itself and in this case the question is why hunger? Ever stop and ask that; just a minute, before we start saying what are we going to do about it, let’s just ask ourselves why do we have it in the first place. And let’s think through biblically why we have hunger. Turn to Genesis 3:17-19, the fall of man. Notice that the curse that was given in Genesis 3:17-19 is given in precisely the area of hunger, food production. “…cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; [18] Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; thou shalt eat the herb of the field;” BUT, [19] “In the seat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground,” what is the curse and how is related to food production and hunger.

It says that there were physiological changes worked into the universe due to man’s fall that caused food production to require vast abnormal amounts of energy. It means that man compared to what he could have done before the fall now must expend far more effort in raising his food. The problem of hunger, therefore, is one of the scarcity of resources caused by the fall of man. Hunger is part of the fall of man, the scarcity of resources brought about by mans rebellion against God and therefore the ultimate cause is spiritual. It is not a lack of technology; it is not the weather, it is not the soil, it is not some other less trivial type answer. The ultimate answer is because of the fall. God has caused this because… and there’s also grace involved in verse 19. Someone said the word “sweat” is put in verse 19 to replace the word “blood.” In other words, what God did, because if we had as much leisure on our hands as we would have had without this curse what would we be doing in our leisure time. Just what the teenage kids, the hoods, are on the street, you know daddy pays for the car, the tires, the gas so I’m going to rip up and down the alley, see how fast I can come out of the alley on one wheel if possible. This is what is done in leisure time. In God’s universe, and the way God looks upon it in the Old Testament is if we were let loose in leisure time we’d be at each other throats; we’d be murdering one another, and so to keep us down and help restrain us He’s caused us to have to spend far more labor just to get along on the necessities of life; make us have to produce our food the hard way. This is the general purpose of hunger.

But there are particular reasons why particular peoples hunger. So besides the general reason for hunger in this first analysis we’re going to look at something else. There’s a general purpose of hunger but there are particular purposes of hunger, two in particular. These two specialized causes, one is given in Genesis 4, the other one in Genesis 41.

First look at Genesis 4; one of the reasons why there is hunger in certain parts of the globe is because of what we call human viewpoint nomadism, the rise of nomadic cultures. I know if you’ve been through Jr. High and Sr. High you’ve gotten this jazz that man kind of dropped out of a tree and left his banana on the lowest branch, uncurled his tail and began to evolve. And then from there we go on and we finally have a nomadic culture that developed and then somebody conceives of the idea of dropping a little grain in the dirt and this is the rise of the fertile crescent in the Mesopotamian Valley and out of this comes a great civilization, blah, blah, blah. What this is, by the way, that they’re looking at is the data of the postdiluvial flood, it is not the original data of Genesis because the antediluvian world has been destroyed, it is now buried and lost in our strata in geology. But here we have the true testimony to what men originally did and nomads were not the first one.

Notice verse 2, the two sons of Adam and Eve, “Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground,” they are not nomads. One is a rancher and the other is a farmer and they both have private property and they are both settled down to one geographical place, they’re not wandering around living off the land. They are in one geographical place and they are food producers. They manufacture wealth in one location through discipline, through submergence to the laws of nature that God has set up. Now in verse 11, the rise of the nomads, Cain. Cain murders his brother, and now says God in verse 11, “And now” says God, “you are cursed from the earth,” by the way, the earth was his ranch, the word eretz, the land, “you are cursed from the ground,” the field, “which has opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from your hand, [12] And when you till the ground now, it will not henceforth yield unto her her strength; a fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be in the earth.” Cain, the rebel, is the archetype nomad.

And every culture and every tribe that has degenerated into nomadic life has basically followed the way of Cain. They have rebelled against staying in one place and being a rancher or a farmer in that one place and producing wealth from invested capital. They have sought, rather, to live off the land and nomads can never raise food, in the history of mankind there has never been an under-populated nomadic culture. The Indians, to cite one example, in the North American continent, by best estimates numbered 300,000 at their maximum. Do you realize when the North American Indians lived in this land and they had a total population of 300,000 they were over-populated. Do you know why? Because they starved to death. The glorious Indian, and this is not to demean the Indian as a person; the Indian had some fantastic traits, some of which, by the way, the white man totally depended upon, but we’re just criticizing this one aspect of Indian culture, the nomadicism that evolved. This nomadicism that developed among the Indians was the cause of their hunger and their poverty.

When the white settlers, that much maligned Anglo-Saxon white man, who came into the great plains of Kentucky and Oklahoma, when he walked out there he didn’t just drive his little covered wagon around some city and say hey hon, you want to go for a ride out to Kansas and take off. It was rather a case where they carefully accumulated at least two years savings and then those pioneers said I’ve got two yeas to get my wife and my family out to Kansas, out to Wyoming, some place where we can settle and get self-sustaining; two years capital. And what did the white man do when he came to the plains? Did he take up the nomadic way of life of living off the land. He did not, even the trappers had to take food with them that was raised from the people that supported him who were farmers and ranchers in one location. The Cain and Abel of Genesis 4:2 was the way of the white man, and it was not because he was white, it was because he simply accidentally operated according to Biblical principles. This is not racial prejudice, it’s just a simple fact of history. And the white man came and the white man did not starve and the white man therefore has metropolitan areas, many of which are higher than the entire Indian population of the North American continent and function fine.

What’s the difference? We’re not nomads, that’s the difference; we’re not following in the way of Cain. And we raise our food as God ordained in verse 2, not verses 11-15. That’s the difference and that’s why people starve in many places on the earth. When I drove through the Negev in the southern parts of Israel, you go there and you see one or two Bedouins per forty or fifty acres and that’s the good ratio. And they’re trying to live; there’s the abject poverty level, trying to eek out an existence, wandering around as nomads in this area, never can make it; abject poverty. Whereas the Israelis go in and what do they bring in? Irrigation, localized agriculture, food production and immediately there are bodies there that flourish and prosper and do not hunger because they’re not nomads. The nomadicism is the way of Cain, it’s a horrible way of life and it causes poverty and hunger.

A second reason is given in Genesis 41:28 for the world’s hunger. Again notice that all of these reasons are not technological, they are spiritual. It is a spiritual rebellion against the ways of God. In Genesis 41:28 the famous Joseph and Pharaoh story. You say wait a minute, I thought the Joseph Pharaoh story was a story that said how not to hunger, how not to die in famine. Just a minute, let’s watch the process. Pharaoh has this dream of the upcoming famine, Joseph is there, but Joseph is a prophet; watch that carefully. “This is the thing which I have spoken unto Pharaoh: What God is about to do He shows unto Pharaoh. [29] Behold, there shall come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt. [30] And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt, and the famine shall consume the land. [31] And the plenty shall not be known in the land by reason of that famine that follows; for it shall be very grievous. [32] And for that dream was doubled unto Pharaoh twice; it is because the thing is established by God, and God will shortly bring it to pass. [33] Now therefore let Pharaoh look out for a man discreet and wise, and set him over the land of Egypt. [34] Let Pharaoh do this, and let him appoint officers over the land, and take up the fifth part of the land of Egypt in the seven plenteous years. [35] And let them gather all the food of those good years that come, and lay up grain under the hand of Pharaoh, and let them keep food in the cities. [36] And that food shall be for storage in the land against the seven years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt; that the land perish not through the famine.”

You know the story but let’s look at that story because that story shows us two things about the opposite reason; human viewpoint statism, that’s the second reason why there’s hunger in the world today. It’s not due to lack of technology; it’s not due to bad climate or bad soil; it’s due to spiritual reasons. After all, don’t you think God knew there’d be bad soil; don’t you think God knew there’d be technological problems when He told man to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth,” He said. I don’t see any worry about overpopulation in Scripture. This jazz that you always get, have no more than two children or you might overpopulate. It’s the cry of the hand-wringing weak socialist who can’t bring himself to produce any more wealth, so rather than try to work hard to produce more wealth he conserves and cuts his family down to the wealth that being the lazy person he is he limits himself to.

So here we have the statism, the human viewpoint statism. It always operates in two directions, this statism does, and it always operates because of a hidden assumption. Here’s the assumption. The example you just read is the only case in history where statism ever worked. And even here it worked in a horrible way. Here it worked only because there was an infallible prophet of God heading the bureaucracy—Joseph. That was the factor in Egypt’s success; 100% successful prediction of the future because you had a Joseph in the bureaucracy. And even when the state made the decision to go with the grain what happened.

Well, the first year the people came to buy the grain out of the Egyptian granaries and the family had money so they gave them the money. The next year the people came down to buy the grain and didn’t have any more money so they hawked their furniture to the people. The third time they came down they sold their land to the people, and then the years come, the people had nothing left to buy food with and they sold themselves and so what happened out of Pharaoh? Egypt became a total dictatorship that owned the very bodies of its citizens and became the model of totalitarianism that is used throughout the Scripture as a picture of Satan. Egypt became the totalitarian state from which only one group of people escaped—the Jew at the Exodus. So that’s what happens when you have 100% efficient state; oh yes, it keeps the people from starving—it turns them into slaves also.

But then in 99.999% of the time the state is not right because what happens when you concentrate all of your bureaucratic decision making in the group of a few men, they make massive mistakes instead of little mistakes. Let’s illustrate that point for a minute. Let’s suppose there’s no Joseph in the bureaucracy. We cannot perfectly forecast the future and so therefore here’s the collective farm of the state, the state owns all the tools, the state decides we will plant crop number three this year because the state says that this is going to be a good year for crop number three. The state scientists say we have carefully crossed-bred, we’ve got the best hybrid crop that you’ve ever seen, everything’s great. Let’s compare that with the private farmers who totally might own less land. One farmer says I’ll go crop two; another farmer, I’ll go crop three; another farmer I think I’ll grow crop one, and so you have crop one, crop two and crop three. And along comes a disaster, crop three doesn’t work. The collective farm is a collective collapse. Nothing is produced and there’s hunger and there’s poverty and people die of starvation. In this case, where you had diversification, with each farmer deciding what he was going to do on his own, farmer three goes out but farmers one and two have grain to eat and the people that run on farm three can buy food from farm one and farm two. That’s the marvel of when the state doesn’t intrude; when you have diversification through private businessmen, each making their private but fallible forecast of the future and planning accordingly; you are saved from massive mistakes.

So the second reason why you have hunger and famine is because you have the omni-competent state invading. To seal this last point off let’s give two illustrations everyone can see, convincing illustrations, when you don’t have a Joseph in your bureaucracy you’d better not have a bureaucracy. Years and years ago, it was before 1900, do you know what the bread basket of Europe was? Do you know where all the Europeans got their grain from? A place called the Ukraine. The Ukraine was known as the breadbasket of Europe. The Ukraine, inside Russia, fed not only the Russians but it fed all of western Europe. Now isn’t that amazing; with all the added technology and the tools, now we come to the amazing thing, the Ukraine can’t even feed the Ukraine. What’s happened to the Ukraine? Over-population? Not at all. What happened to the Ukraine was that the Soviet government had centralized planning, we know more, we bureaucrats know more than the individual farmer, we’ll tell him how to grow his fields, we will tell him how much money he’s going to invest, this, that and the other thing. And we will produce a mighty Russia, that now buys grain because it can’t feed its own people. That’s what centralized planning does. And then of course they made another mistake.

In the 20s Stalin thought he knew more than the farmer, he had that same attitude Christians have toward graduated income taxes, let’s just juice the rich people. And so Stalin said I’m going to go in there and those kulaks are making money on their grain in the Ukraine, I’m going to go in, I’m not going to use graduated income tax, I’m going to execute them. One small problem, you kill the farmer who drives the tractor? You kill the farmer who makes his decision, who tells you what seed to plant in this particular locality at this time of year. It’s gone. Do you know why the Russians are starving? Because the idiots killed their farmers. And it’s not due to crop failure due to weather, and it’s not due to the poor soil of Soviet Russia. It is due to a spiritual apostasy that ruins their whole economy through socialism; that’s what happens. They thought they could do it by centralized planning but they did not have a Joseph on their staff. All Josephs, by the way, have been retired from service since the closing of the New Testament canon, so there’s no centralized government on the face of this earth who can employ a Joseph today to help them in their centralized planning.

But then we’ve got an example closer to home of self-induced starvation. All of us have read this story but how few of you have ever been told what happened at Plymouth Rock. You tell the story every Thanksgiving of the Pilgrims coming to this country; the Puritans later in the waves that settled New England and you read oh, this was a glorious day of our founding fathers. How many of you have ever read Bradford’s History of the Plymouth Colony? And do you understand what happened in the first years of that colony? They starved, they died of hunger and do you know why? Because they had the grand idea they were going to come to Plymouth Rock and they were all going to share their farm tools; they were all going to share the field and everybody was going to go out to work. But then obviously the lazy people said well, I don’t have to work because Joe Blow is out hoeing today, I’ll just sit in a few hours and take a break while Joe hoes.

Only one problem, now Joe is hoeing and Pete is sitting back home so we only have 50% production. And so they had saved none and during the winter many people died of starvation; others died in sickness induced by malnutrition and the advantage of our founding fathers, these sensible people, they had the Word of God, and they woke up one day and said hey, you know, we’re starving to death, what’s wrong around here. They didn’t apply for federal aid from the Crown. What they did say was that there’s something wrong with the way we’re running the show and guess what? The early Puritans and the pilgrims converted from socialism to capitalism; they converted to every man owns his own tools, owns his own plot of land and will be responsible for his own food. A strange thing happened on the way to capitalism; they fed themselves.

So that’s the story of what happens with our centralized planning. It is all due to spiritual apostasy. So why hunger in the world? Because of man’s rebellion against the laws of creation. The top United States Air Force Nutritionist said this: that the world today can feed three times what is feeding itself with just our present technology. He said in the underdeveloped world I figure more than half the potential food source is wasted. In India, for example, the amount of food waste is unbelievable. India produces a lot of rice; they smash the rice on the stalk and then they crush the grain; they do not utilize the husks of the rice which provide minerals and vitamins and they use the straw for fuel. Rice stalks can offer a tremendous amount of vitamin D. As [can’t understand who] said, countries are not cultivated in proportion to their fertility; countries are cultivated in proportion to their liberty.

But there’s one closing point on this analysis of our problem. Turn to John 6, that has to do with right in our own back yard. Easy to criticize someone at a distance. It’s easy to look down our nose at someone else but now let’s bring the criticism right back, literally, to our back door. We’re still on this first point, which is the major one of the five, on how to analyze the problem or how to cope with this question. We said the first point is analyze it and trace it back to its spiritual origin. In John 6 you have the feeding of the thousands of people, a miraculous feeding; this is literally the bread machine at work, literally!

Now you would think that since all this food was free people would say wow, this is a great feast, just sort of stuff down and take off, after all, there’s plenty of it, you know, Jesus just waves His little wand and makes food; you know this really happened. But what, in John 6:11, do you see the Lord do with the food that was miraculously made. “Jesus took the loaves, and when He had given thanks, He distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were sitting down; and likewise of the fishes as much as they would. [12] When they were filled, He said to His disciples, Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.” The word “lost” is wasted. This is food that was created out of nothing, food that was instantaneously created and Jesus said don’t waste it. So they went around and they picked up the scraps of the food to use later on for something, but they did not waste their food.

Christianity Today, in July 16, 1976, article had an author who was commenting on the food problem and he said: Visitors from poor countries and missionaries returning from those countries frequently say that one of the things that shocks them about the United States of America most is our garbage. Another writer says: Will our garbage cans testify against us in the day of judgment?

So bringing it back home we also have a spiritual problem; yeah, the nomads have their problem, they’re rebelling against God’s ways. Yes, the omni-competent state bureaucrats have their problems but freedom loving Americans also have our problem, and that is we waste food like it was going out of style, like it came right from the hand of the Lord, and that’s why this John 6 should stick with you. Here’s where food came out of an infinite source and still you’re not supposed to waste it, and we have it on good authority, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

Very quickly, there are other ways of looking at the hunger thing. You can read the wisdom paper if you want to see the detailed reasoning but the second thing we ought to have is hope; 12,000 people are going to die in the next 24 hours but the situation can’t be hopeless because Genesis 1:28-31 has never been revoked. God has never said stop having children because of the food problem, and therefore whatever the food problem is cannot be an unsolvable problem or God would never have left the creation mandate in force. There has to be a solution. The Israelis are showing us; I’m trying to get a film in here of some of the new techniques of triple irrigation; vertical growth techniques that they’re developing instead of whining and crying about there’s no food they’re doing something about it.

The third thing is to avoid using divine institution four to solve the problem; it is not a government problem, Genesis 41 is the testimony against that. You either have slavery when the government works right or you have starvation when the government works wrong.

The fourth point is use divine institutions one, two and three; those are your wealth producing divine institutions. That’s the family, the home, and private property. This alone is where wealth has always been generated, always will be generated.

And finally the fifth point deals with realistic choices that you can read in the Framework pamphlet itself.

But we want to return and close out by going back to Acts. Turn to Acts 11:29; because we’ve gone all around the details of hunger, we’ve said it’s not a government problem because the government really can’t solve the problem, it can only make the problem worse and compound it, so we wind up with two verses at the end of Acts 11; this was how the Holy Spirit solved the problem of hunger. Now listen in the light of everything we’ve said, let’s read those two verses again, this time carefully.

“Then the disciples, every man according to his ability, determined to send relief unto the brethren who dwelt in Judea, [30] Which they also did, and sent it to the elders by the hand of Barnabas and Saul.” Let’s look carefully at what we notice here. First of all, this is not a food relief program to anybody. It is a food relief program to believers, verse 29 it is sent to the brethren. Why? Can you think why? Because the brethren would have the doctrine to once they could get over the immediate food crisis they would have the doctrine to go out and subdue the land and to make it produce. So what you do by giving food relief to your most doctrinal people is that you get them back functioning faster so they can grow food in turn for the other people who are starving. So therefore the most sensitive people go in and feed the doctrinally oriented people first. Get them functioning because when you get them functioning you’ve got far more efficiency in your operation of relief. So the first thing, they go to believers.

Notice in the second thing in verse 30, they sent it to the elders, it was administrated through the system of local churches. It was not done by government agencies. A few local churches, including our own, do anything about this. We just present this for some of you in this congregation to think about, what we are doing in this area about other believers in other lands who are starving. Verses 29-30 present us with a model. The model was seen and noticed by the pagans of the ancient world; Julian, the apostate, the great Caesar who was against the Christians, had to say this in one of his government meetings one day; it’s recorded in his journal: “We ought to be ashamed, gentlemen; we ought to be ashamed that there is not a beggar to be found among the Jews and those godless Galileans. Those people feed their own and we don’t so much as help our people.”

That was the model of the early Christian; nobody on the Roman dole because the Christians took care of their own. Keeping this in mind and some of the spiritual overtones, let’s sing…..