Lesson 28

True Welfare – 14:22-29

In Deut. 14:22 we begin another section in chapters 14-15 and we’ve entitled it the unity of the nation as manifested in its religious practices. In the larger section of Deuteronomy this is concerned with the unity of the nation. In the small section of 14-15 it’s concerned with a particular kind of unity, the unity that is shown by common religious practices. In 14:1-2 we found that God did not want undue grief for the dead. In 14:3-21 we found that God did not want the people to eat corrupt food. Why? Primary for their topological existence as a people that would testify to God’s program. Corrupt food listed in Deut. 14 basically is food that is a memorial to the curse of Gen. 3. Some of it has been found to be medically harmful to the human body so there’s dual benefit here. Not only are they a testimony to the redemptive love of God but they also are saved from a lot of poisonous food in their own time.

In verses 22-29, this section deals with no undue hardship from tithing. You will see how tithing or the system of national taxation in Israel was related to welfare. In chapter 15:1-11 we have the problem of no unrelieved poverty and here we have the problem of poverty as such, although we get into a little bit of it tonight. In 15:12-18 this section deals with indebtedness, businessmen, other people who would borrow money and who would become involved in a debt spiral and never be able to break out of being in debt to someone had freedom announced to them in these verses. The last part of chapter 15, verses 19-23 dealt with no blemished offerings to be given to the Lord at the place of worship.

All of these details relate back to the main theme of this book. The first half of Deuteronomy deals with how “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,” and this is the inner mental attitude because the Bible recognizes that as a man thinks, so is he. Christianity is not a religion of doing this and doing that and not doing this and going to this place and not going to that place, giving money to this or that organization; these are works and can be done by anybody, you don’t have to be a Christian to do that. Christianity is an inner personal relationship with Jesus Christ and it concerns your mental attitude. Any unbeliever can put on all the front and appear to be a believer on the outside but a real Christian is one who has personally accepted Jesus Christ as Savior and as a result has an inward testimony in his heart, a changed mental attitude. This is “loving the Lord thy God with all thy heart.”

The second section of Scripture, and this is the one that involves many of these details, is how “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul,” or as we might translate it today how thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy life. We’ve diagramed this love as this: here’s your heart and inside you have a mental attitude toward the Lord; either it’s positive or negative at any given moment. But as a believer we do love the Lord our God with our heart involves all of the mental attitudes given in Deut. 5-11; beginning in chapter 12-26 we have a new series and that deals with loving the Lord in the details of life. The details of life include fellowship with other believers, your relationship with loved ones, sex, money, job, relaxation, health, your relationship to government, and if you have some friends. So these are all the details of life and no matter who you are, you have these details. Some of you are loaded in one area more than others; some of you have more problems in one area than others, but all of us as members of the human race face these details of life. Therefore, the Lord is not silent concerning what love looks like.

The details of the Old Testament, although at first glance to read through this you may say how boring, how unnecessary to go through all of these details. But the only way you can identify love is by its manifestation and here in all of these details you have love spelled out. Jesus said he that loves Me is the one who keeps My commandments. Love has defined content, it is not a mystical experience with someone contemplating his navel in a closet somewhere but love has an objective, existence, certain things are done and these are signs of love. We’ve worked through part of this section, and we ended last time with verse 21, the end of the dietary regulations.

We pick up the text at verse 22 and begin with tithing. Don’t worry; this is not going to be a pitch for pledging. In verse 22, “Thou shalt truly tithe all the increase of thy seed, that the field brings forth year by year.” One minor correction on the translation at this point, it’s referring to the produce of the field, that leaves the field year by year, “Thou shalt truly tithe” goes back to the Hebrew language of the infinitive absolute and when the infinitive absolute is added on to the end of a finite verb, you have a finite verb plus the infinitive, it always amplifies the mood of the verb. So when it says “you shall truly tithe” this is the only way the King James translations translates a finite verb and an infinitive in the Hebrew language. But what this means is it intensifies the mood of the verb. What’s the verb of this particular verb? It’s an imperative, you will do this. Therefore by adding the infinitive on to this you emphasize it and the emphasis is the emphasis on the imperative mood.

You are to understand here in Deuteronomy that you have a lot of these infinitives attached to finite verbs; you have a lot of this amplification. If you think a minute you’ll remember why this is true of Deuteronomy and not the rest of the Pentateuch, because Deuteronomy was preached, the rest of the Pentateuch was written, and what you are reading here was the sermon that Moses gave the nation, therefore as part of the sermon he would emphasize points and when he emphasized points instead of amplifying his voice it would be shown in the Hebrew by adding on the infinitive to the end of the verb. So here we have another one of these infinitives that emphasizes the imperative. “You will truly tithe all the increase of thy seed, that leaves the field year by year.” This means the businessman’s profits, not just the profit, all of his gross income, out of his gross income would come 10%; this is tithing.

Tithing was given to the nation Israel as a source of national income. It was not given as a system of individual personal giving. This was the obligation of every person in the nation, they had to give 10%. And it was not left up to the individual to decide how much; tithing is for the nation Israel, not for the Church today and nobody can come up to you and say did you give your tithe to the church, etc. Or, did you bring the tithe into the storehouse, as it says in Malachi. Do you know what that means? It means the money goes into the national treasury. Now if you want to be accurate today, if you want tithing it would refer to your income tax to the federal government, it has nothing to do with individual giving as unto the Lord. In this case the Lord was the government and so therefore the tithing was to Him, but it was to Him as a governmental head.

So “thou shalt truly tithe” means the Jews, the members of the nation Israel, they are to give 10% of their gross income. By the way, some of you who make out your income tax if you only had to pay 10% you’d think you were living in the Millennium. But 10% was a very lenient amount that was skimmed off the gross national product for the nation and for the priesthood, and for one other category which we’ll deal with.

Verse 23, “And thou shalt eat before the LORD thy God, in the place where He shall choose to place His name there,” that is a refrain, you have seen that at least twenty times since we started in chapter 12, “the place where the LORD is going to put His name.” Why? This is to be the central national shrine; this is to be the presence of the Lord. And so they are to eat before the Lord, in His place, in His presence. What are they to eat? Three things, “the tithe of thy corn,” now an Englishman translated this text and to an Englishman “corn” means “grain,” not corn as we think of it; they used the word “maize” to refer to what we usually refer to by corn. This is the wheat and grain, the grain of your crops and that’s what it’s speaking of, it does not speak of corn.

“…the tithe of thy grain,” and the word for “grain” in Hebrew, and this shows you how some of the gods got started in the ancient world, it looks like this, dagan, and dagan is the Hebrew word for grain. Can you think of a god in the Samson story? What was his name? Dagon and Dagon was the god of the ancient world and he was associated with prosperity in business, the business of raising grain, and that’s why he was called dagan. But dagan is the Hebrew word for grain.

“…of thy wine,” and the Hebrew word for wine is tishrow, and tishrow was the name of another god in the ancient world, a god who was related to the success a business man would have in his vineyards or wine production. “…and of thine oil,” we don’t know of any god with a parallel name for oil, “and the firstlings of thy herds and of thy flocks, that thou mayest learn to fear the LORD thy God always.” Notice that last purpose clause in verse 23, that shows you one of the fringe benefits of this system that the nation had; it was a system of self-education, a system of teaching so that by going and eating and by partaking of this ritual, they would learn. Why would they learn? They would go to the Tabernacle and the whole gospel of Jesus Christ was present at the Tabernacle. You have this Tabernacle; you have the Holy of Holies in the back, that’s where the presence of God is. And to get there they can only come… the access is through the mercy seat, the mercy seat, they had an ark which resembles a coffin in our day, and on top of this coffin was a gold plate and on top of that gold plate they had two cherubim. We don’t know what those cherubim looked like but they were images of two angels that guard the holiness of God. These cherubim were looking down at this gold plate and in the center of the gold plate was a dish, and the high priest used to go in here and take blood from the sacrificed animal and sprinkle it down on this gold plate, and it was only when this was done that the people had access before the Lord.

You say what’s the meaning of all that? The meaning is that God has a certain character. Two of God’s characteristics are righteousness and justice. This means that righteousness and justice have to be fulfilled. How are righteousness and justice fulfilled? You can’t fulfill it, I can’t fulfill it, Buddha can’t fulfill it, no other religious leader can fulfill it except One, who was virgin born and led a perfect life. He therefore died on the cross that these two attributes of God might be satisfied and therefore God’s love might pour out. You can’t release the love of God until first you satisfy righteousness and justice. This is what is wrong with 95% of the clergy today who talk about God is a God of love. God is not a God just of love; He is a God of righteousness and justice. A God of love who had no standards would be a sentimental God. God is not a sentimental God and doesn’t have this wishy-washy concept of love that we have in our society. He is a strong God who has abiding standards. And He will not violate those standards for any person on the face of this earth, including you. Therefore, since this is true, there must be a way of fellowship provided and this has been provided by Jesus Christ dying on the cross for your sins. Therefore you can personally trust in Christ and the act of becoming a Christian is not the act of being baptized, it is not the act of joining a church or giving money. The act of becoming a Christian is that point in your life when you realize that when you stand before the judgment seat of God you have nothing to commend yourself to His accommodation. In other words, your ticket to heaven is not based on something you have done. When you get it through your head that not a human work counts, then you are on your way to becoming a Christian.

Of course, the next step is to realize that Christ paid it for you; He picked up all the costs that is necessary to be paid in salvation by dying for your sins. All your sins were put right there on the cross and the sins bring on the wrath of God, righteousness and justice must judge sin, and this is why Jesus Christ abode on the cross for three hours in perfect darkness, when God made darkness come across the face of the cross so that no human person could look and actually see what transpired on that cross. People who were next to the cross did not see what actually happened and no theologian today knows exactly what happened. All we know is that in some way Jesus Christ took your sins on Him, paid for them, so the gospel, which means “good news” is not this bad news you frequently hear that if you’ll be a good boy God will accept you, etc. That is not the gospel; the gospel is you’re not a good boy so stop pretending. The gospel says that you are a sinner, every person who ever lived is a sinner and therefore our sins have to be removed in some way. They were removed by Jesus Christ on the cross so therefore there remains only one issue for you today, do you believe and will you receive Jesus Christ’s work on your behalf. It’s a simple act of faith, it takes a moment of time to tell the Father yes, right now I receive Jesus Christ as my Savior, I accept His work, I realize that there is not one work I could possibly do or ten million works I could possibly do that will commend me to You. The only thing that will commend me to You is the work of your Son, I accept that, and that is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

It is this which they learned every time they went to the Tabernacle. They learned this in the Old Testament. You say well Jesus Christ didn’t live in the Old Testament. That’s right, but every major aspect of Jesus’ ministry was in the Old Testament by way of prophecy, by way of typology, by way of dreams, by way of visions, by way of written text in the Pentateuch. So the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ was given, was known in the Old Testament and had any of those Old Testament saints lived in the time of Jesus Christ, they would have recognized immediately that this man was not a mere man, but He was the God-man-Savior, the Messiah of Israel.

That is why it says in verse 23, “that thou may learn to fear the LORD thy God always,” it means continually, they are going to learn, learn, learn, learn, learn and they were forced as a nation to come to the central shrine at least three times a year and there they were to learn from the priests, over and over again the way of salvation; the way of salvation in the Old Testament—by grace, the way of salvation in the New Testament—by grace!

Verse 24, “And if the way be too long for thee, so that thou are not able to carry it, or if the place be too far from thee, which the LORD thy God shall choose to set his name there, where the LORD thy God hath blessed thee, [25] Then shalt thou turn it into money,” now here is a provision, a wonderful provision of the Lord’s mercy in the Old Testament. Notice God was not a meany. I don’t want you to lose the forest for the trees as we go into this. You start reading this and you get into the osprey and the bats and the creeping things, etc. and you tend to lose the big picture. The big picture is that God is not a meany, He’s not that old bear that you’ve heard inhabited the Old Testament, God in the Old Testament was a God of mercy. He didn’t want His people to come to Him like groveling idiots. He didn’t want His people to come to Him on their knees before Him and whip themselves, and go through all these religious works, etc. God was a God of mercy in the Old Testament, He loved His people and He did not want to bring any undue hardship on His people. We saw that last time in Deut. 14:1-2; He said listen, when a loved one dies in your family, don’t go through all this agonizing business that the Canaanites go through, don’t sit there as the Canaanite women used to and slash themselves, you don’t have to do that for me, I don’t want you to, just for get it. And the food, I don’t want you to eat the corrupt food that the other gods demand that their people eat; you eat the food that is right for you.

Now we come here and once again, if when you’re tithing and you can’t do this, it’s a physical hardship for you, here’s a provision to help you out. You can transfer this into money, take the money and go and spend the money instead. It’s part of this that led to the incident of John 2. Turn there and we will again show how these Old Testament customs relate to the interpretation of the New Testament. I always enjoy John 2 because most people get the image of Jesus that here was this meek and mild person and He was holding up a sheet and it looks like He wouldn’t hit a flea, certainly wouldn’t step on an ant hill, He’s just the picture of gentleness. And yet you look very carefully what happened in John 2. As we would say today the mud hit the fan and in John 2 it splattered all over the Temple.

John 2:13, “And the Jews’ Passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem, [14] And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money, sitting.” Now these changers of money are the men who they said were fulfilling the Old Testament Law. They said after all, when the people come a distance, don’t they have to sell their cattle, translate it into money, come here and then when they’ve come to Jerusalem, turn the money back into cattle and sacrifice the cattle? And this was the legitimate reason for many of these money-changers that you see mentioned in verse 14.

In verse 15 it didn’t take the Lord long to react, “And when He had made a scourge of small cords,” this is a whip. Do you know what? He hit people, can you imagine that, the gentle Jesus hit people. He’d be thrown out of the National Council of Churches. “And when He had made a whip of small cords, He drove them al out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and over threw the tables,” now isn’t that a nasty thing to do, tip over the cash registers. And all the money goes all over; can you imagine this, in a whole crowd of people, birds, cash, oxen, sheep, everything, oxen, sheep running all over the place and people trying to pick up coins rolling all over the place. This is sheer confusion, and if the people got in the way He hit them. Now these tables, as far as we can tell, weighed about 200 pounds so you can get an idea that the Lord Jesus Christ wasn’t some little weak individual. He walked in here and threw tables over, knocked over the money-changers, drove out animals and oxen, etc. So you get the idea that the mud really did hit the fan when He walked in there and saw this.

Verse 16, “And [He] said unto them that sold doves, Take these thing from here; make not My Father’s house an house of merchandise. [17] And His disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.” What is the background for what happened here? How are we to understand this tremendous outburst of temper on the part of the Lord Jesus Christ? Because many times in His ministry He faced people who had taken a good thing and turned it into a bad thing. This thing was originally given by the Father to be an expression of His mercy to the people. And He said I realize it’s hard for you, I am not going to require you to do the impossible, I’m not going to require you to drive your cattle, a tenth of your cattle down the road to Jerusalem; I realize that’s going to be hard, so I make this provision by which you can turn this tithe into money and bring the money back, and of course the day of the Passover here was something else here but the same principle held.

Now what happened in Jesus day? There was a certain outfit which the best thing we can make an analogy to today would be Costa Nostra or the Mafia or something, and the man who was the head of it was Caiaphas, this man turns up in the Gospels and other places. And Caiaphas and his sons had a little operation going to the tune of about two to three million a year. This is how they operated the business. They’d have the people come in and of course this outfit operated through the priesthood and the priesthood had the final say in this situation, and you can see it’s a pretty neat game they had working. What they had, these people would come into Jerusalem; they had to buy these animals. With what? With money, but money from different lands so you had different kinds of money, you had dollars and pounds, etc. different kinds of money that came into Jerusalem. The money-changers were the people who said look, you can’t buy sheep here until you buy in terms of Jerusalem currency. Therefore they made the first roll, and this is how the racquet began, you can’t buy a thing in this city without buying it in terms of Jerusalem money, so we’re going to have a little exchange rate. You bring $5.00 and we’ll change it into Jerusalem currency for you. And of course they’d take a cut out of it and they wouldn’t give you back in Jerusalem money an equal value that you had originally, they’d skim off a cut and that went into the till and amounted to two to three million dollars every year that these men were making.

Then they’d get the sheep and they’d buy the sheep up from around Jerusalem at cheap prices and then they’d sell the sheep off at inflated prices, so they had a cut there. This was a regular business that was going on and they cut off the currency and they got the cut off the inflated price of the sheep and the oxen, etc. And this is why the Lord Jesus Christ collided, it’s not the fact that they were selling in the Temple. People often say well they were selling in the Temple. They were selling in the outer parts of the Temple and it was perfect legitimate to sell there, they’d been selling there for centuries. That wasn’t the point, that isn’t really why Jesus did what He did here in chapter 2 and you’ll see this in the Gospels because it’s developed further. The point that angered the Lord was this racquet that was going on of bleeding the people of their funds. This is why Jesus was angry, and in the Temple boundaries Jesus was supreme, because Jesus could exercise His authority. Outside the Temple Jesus could not, He would have to ask the Romans to do it, but in that Temple Jesus Christ could exercise His authority and when He found racketeering inside that Temple He moved in and broke it up.

And it was this racquet many feel that on the human level antagonized the priesthood against Jesus Christ in His day. Many of these priests never forgot that, and when the trial of Jesus Christ came who was the man who arranged the trial? The man whose son had been bumped out of the Temple racquet in John 2. We can find in the Gospels Jesus apparently did this at least two times and maybe more, so it was a regular thing, and you figured this happened two or three time in two or three years they got the point that they weren’t going to go very far as long as this man Jesus was around so let’s eliminate Him. So on the human level one of the reasons why Jesus was ultimately crucified as the racketeers of His day didn’t like His interfering into their little thing. Now there were greater issues why Jesus was crucified, but these are one of the many issues that led to this terrible thing at the end of the Gospels.

All right, turn back to Deuteronomy, I think you’ll see how in Jesus day so much of what had been originally declared by God as gracious, as serving to man’s true needs, had been turned by the archenemy of freedom, religion. Religion has caused more suffering in the world than any other item. Politics hasn’t caused half the suffering of religion. One reason we are going down is because the religious clergy of our day are intent on nothing else than destruction of law and order; they would rather see complete anarchy in the streets than righteousness and justice prevail, and of course when they’re involved they’d be the first ones to cry for law and order again. Religion is always the thing that takes the works of God and translates them and corrupts them into the works of men. Deut. 14:25, you now know what this provision, ultimately good, ultimately intended as a blessing for man by God, became in Jesus’ day as a result of religious operations. “Then shalt thou turn it into money, and bind up the money in thine hand, and shalt go unto the place which the LORD thy God shall choose.

Verse 26, again showing you the grace of the Lord, “And thou shalt bestow that money for whatsoever thy soul desires: for oxen, or for sheep, or for wine, or for strong drink, or for whatsoever thy soul desires; and thou shalt eat there before the LORD thy God, and thou shalt rejoice, thou, and thine household.” Here we have a problem that liberals have attacked the Bible for. They say that here it says that the tithing, or the 10% was to be completely consumed by the people in one big blast in Jerusalem; one big series of parties was to consume all of this in a few short days, and then they say yet if you go to Numbers 18:21 in particular, it says that the tithe did not go to the people, the tithe goes to the priesthood. So how do we reconcile Deuteronomy that says the tithe goes to the people and we take Numbers 18:21 and it says the tithe goes to the priest? Some Christians says either there must have been two tithes or the liberal says there must have been one tithe and a contradiction in the Bible. How do you reconcile this? There was only one tithe and it went mainly to the priests, but the people were allowed to have, you might say, a certain portion for celebration during the time when they brought the material to Jerusalem.

We know this because all you have to do is imagine 10% of the gross national product of Israel; do you seriously believe that all the people in the nation, partying in one city, could possibly consume 10% of the gross national product in a day! That’s ridiculous. So here while it doesn’t give you a hint in verse 26 that the priests at the Temple took it, it’s absolutely impossible that the people could have consumed 10% of the gross national product in a few days. By the way, you don’t even have to depend on this speculation because if you turn to 2 Chron 31 you will see an actual incident when it gives you a complete account of what happened when the people brought 10% of the gross national product to Jerusalem and they had so much left over that they didn’t even have places to store it, leave alone eat it. Therefore there’s no reason to believe that there were two or three tithes in the Old Testament. There was only one and it was in part, maybe half a percent was given and consumed by feasts in the people’s day. Isn’t this ironic, that in verse 26 if you read it carefully, who gets the skim off? The people do, the people are allowed to rejoice, the people are allowed the freedom, they’re to have a good time. Can you imagine religious people having a good time? Here they are, verse 26, and with strong drink. They’re having a very good time here and yet in Jesus’ day what happened as a result of religion? Who got the skim off? The hoods, crime syndicates, Caiaphas and sons. And religion had turned completely around what God had intended for man, religion intended for religion. That’s always the way it works, always! Religion will always corrupt the free grace of God this way.

Verse 27 is for the country priests, these are the Levites that the Bible teaches were in the individual towns and they were to come because they had no source of income. They depended upon this, so therefore they were to share in this feasting. [“And the Levite who is within thy gates, thou shalt not forsake him; for he hath no part nor inheritance with thee.”]

Verses 28-29 give you one exception to the tithe principle and this proves that the tithe of the Old Testament was not a religious function, necessarily, but served also as a social function. It served to provide true welfare for the nation. “At the end of three years thou shalt bring forth all the tithe of thine increase the same year, and shalt lay it up within thy gates,” this means that every three years, they operated on a seven year cycle which you’ll see next time. Here’s the seven year cycle, on the third year the tithe was kept in the city. You count three more years, it becomes the sixth year, the tithe was kept in the city. So every third year of this cycle the people kept the tithe in the city. Why did they keep the tithe in the city? They did not take it to Jerusalem. Because of verse 29, “And the Levite (because he hath no part nor inheritance with thee), and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, who are within thy gates, shall come, and shall eat and be satisfied, that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hand which thou doest.”

Now all of the classes of people mentioned here in verse 29 are classes of people that were legally unable to hold title to property in the nation of that day. For example, take the Levite. He could not hold title to property, they were all men, but men who could not hold title so therefore since they could not hold real property they had no means of producing income for themselves, and thus they became utterly dependent upon the free will offerings of the people. The stranger is the ger, and this was a person who voluntarily decided he wanted to be a member of the nation Israel, as a Gentile. Suppose you lived in that day and you said look, I look down in Egypt and I see corruption; I look up in there in what was later known as Assyria and I see corruption, I look over at Phoenicia and I see corruption. I want to live in Israel. Therefore you would have been allowed to live in Israel but you would not have been allowed to hold title to land and so you would have been a ger, or a foreigner, or one who would inhabit the land, be a citizen, except you could not hold title to property.

The next class is the fatherless; these are the children who are minors who have lost their parents. And these children, the fatherless, could not hold title to land either; they were completely at the mercy of the free will of the people. Since these children, these orphans, could not hold title, they too came under this provision, and the widow. Here you have the widow and the widows couldn’t hold title either. This is the story of the book of Ruth. Ruth was a Gentile woman who had accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior and the book of Ruth proves that the nation Israel would have accepted Moabites or any other Gentile in that day as long as these Gentiles would submit to the God of Israel. You get the impression from reading the Law we will not intermarry with the Gentile women, we will not allow them to be daughters and we will not take up the daughters of the Gentiles for our sons as wives, but there was an exception. If those Gentile women would bow down to the God of Israel, then they could intermarry. And Ruth did. Ruth was a Moabitess, purely 100% Gentile, but she bowed to the God of Israel and intermarried and lo and behold Ruth turns out to be one of the women in the line of Jesus Christ showing that Jesus Christ was born partly of the Jews and partly of the Gentile.

So here we find that all these classes, the Levites, the strangers, the orphans and the widows were people who were victimized in their time, could easily be victimized. And here we find God’s mercy providing for them. Notice every individual city, the word “gates” means city. For example, you’ve listened to Handel’s Messiah and heard that expression where it comes in a climactic city and it says “Open ye gates,” and in your mind you may see gates opened, but that’s not the point. “Open wide the gates” means open city council, submit to the government of Messiah, and the “gates” really is the town council, the men who sat at the gates and the men who ran the town, and that is what is addressed in that section of Handel’s Messiah, it means town councils, this is the governor of the nation who is coming, submit to Him. So the word “gate” here means city; lay it up within your gates so each individual city on a localized basis would have adequate provision for the poor and the victimized in that area. Notice it was not federally dispensed from Jerusalem; it was locally dispensed under the control of the local officials of the city. This is something that we are getting away from.

Notice that in the Bible that welfare, one of the most crucial functions of government, in this time was kept on a local basis, simple, not one cent of this was even taken to Jerusalem. It was very smart because God knew what would happen; it happens in our country. Here we have Lubbock and you all pay taxes; taxes go out of Lubbock over to Washington DC and here’s a big flow of taxes, and you say we get that back in federal aid? Oh you do, do you? You get back about this much in federal aid and you know where the rest of it goes? Washington DC, that’s where it goes. That’s the fallacy of hierarchical government, always, because as the saying goes, first of all Robin Hood starts out to rob the rich to pay the poor but finally it turns out that Robin Hood robs both rich and poor to pay Robin Hood. That’s exactly what happens in many of these government systems.

Here God had provided; it’s very interesting how this true welfare works. In verse 28 the money, or the equivalent in that day, the produce, never left the jurisdiction of the local people. That was a very smart provision; it indicates omniscience on the part of whoever wrote that law. If we were to use the same thing in Lubbock, taxes collected in Lubbock would stay in Lubbock and Washington DC could float down the Potomac for all we care. They would stay in Lubbock and be spent in Lubbock and you wouldn’t have all these nitwits coming around saying if you elect me you’ll get lots and lots of federal aid. Where do they get the money in the first place? They’re not doing me a favor to get elected and give me federal aid; I’ll take the money in the first place.

But I want you to notice something, that if you are a Bible-believing Christian you will always fight for a local government. It is the logical end of Biblical Christianity to disseminate and minimize power; you do not allow power to concentrate. Do you know why? What doctrine in tells you against centralizing power? The doctrine of the old sin nature; every man has it and the more power you give to people the more corrupt they must become. Notice I didn’t say “probably” would become, I said “must become” because all men are sinners, and that goes for the local church government. That is why we, as independent churches, recognize no authority above the pastor and Board. Why? Because you begin to bring churches together inside conventions and inside various hierarchal groupings and you begin to get this kind of a system, you get the power structure going. We have one, the National Council of Churches in a little office in New York City; you can drive by that center of apostasy and you can find them busy 24 hours a day cranking out position papers on what Protestants in the United States believe. It’s not what Protestants in the United States believe, it’s what six or eight men up in the headquarters believe, it has nothing to do with what Protestants believe.

That’s the danger of centralized government. I want you to see in the very first provisions of the nation Israel, and by the way, it is these provisions that the liberal clergymen always point to. They say well didn’t they have welfare in the Bible? Didn’t the people take care of the poor in the Bible? Yes they did, BUT, and it’s a big “BUT” with capital B-U-T, notice how the welfare program was structured. It was on a local person to person basis, and notice also it was people who had bona fide reasons for getting on welfare. Notice in verse 29, every one of those classes could have been victimized. Notice what you do not find in verse 29. You do not find some man who owns a lot of property that’s just too lazy to get out and work. You don’t find that there in verse 29. You only find those classes of people that could legitimately be victimized in their day.

Concluding in verse 29 we have how God provided by this purpose clause, “that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hand which you are doing.” The adequate welfare system of Israel would produce blessing. Why would it produce blessing? Two reasons: first, you have local government and local government would prevent the accumulation of power, that’s the first blessing. And do you know what happened and how this system finally got down and it’s very, very illustrative of our own day. Do you know what was the death of the system you’re looking at right here? It was in Samuel’s day, and remember what happened, the people said oh, we can’t wait on God to raise up proper national leaders Samuel, we don’t like your sons, they’re a group of idiots, they don’t take after you anyway, and we can’t wait, we don’t have the faith Samuel, to wait for God to raise up His man. Therefore because we don’t have the faith we want you to inaugurate a king; we want you to coronate a king and from that point on we won’t have to worry, we won’t have to trust the Lord because obviously the king’s son will be the one that will rule again. And when you have the king and the monarchy set up you have Saul; Saul was the first one, he goofed, and God replaced him with David. David raised several sons, one of them was very brilliant, Solomon, and he had a nitwit for a son called Rehoboam; Rehoboam lasted about a year and he lasted that long only because he didn’t listen to his teenage advisors. Rehoboam ascended the throne as an immature teenager and he had a lot of teenagers on his staff, all they were was against the establishment and they wound up having nothing because after Rehoboam and his boys got through they had two nations and a civil war and about a million people dead. So you had all that, and that was not blessing. That was because they violated the simplicity of the original constitution of the nation.

The second reason why you have blessing here, it is because these people would be caused not to become welfare victims. These people would have help available, but there was no provision for them to be on generation after generation. You wouldn’t have that go on; it was a self-eliminating system so that you wouldn’t have father on the welfare rolls, sons on the welfare rolls, his sons on the welfare rolls. In this country we’ve gone down the third and fourth generation, never gotten off the welfare rolls. Why? Because the system is wrong; liberals have taken the passion of the Old Testament against poverty and have forgotten the wisdom of the Old Testament that tells you how to solve it. This is why in our day we have suffering and we’ll have a lot more suffering because the welfare system in this country is going to run dry someday. Some day the whole thing will come crashing down.

What does this prove? It proves that God is a God of mercy, that God knows what He says when He designs something, when He tells you something. It starts at the point of salvation, when God tells you that you are a sinner, you’d better believe it. He doesn’t say you have to feel like a sinner, it doesn’t mean you have a guilt complex, it means that you have the status legally before Him as one who has violated His standard and one who is unacceptable to Him and therefore in need of a Savior.