Clough Deuteronomy Session 51
Deuteronomy 23:19-23 — The Rights of Derivative
Ownership
Fellowship Chapel; 19 April 2011
I had hoped that we would finish chapter 23 and get
into the first part of chapter 24 which would then finish this section, but
after I got working with verse 24-25 I realized that we’ve got just a lot of
material on ownership and the principle of ownership under the theocracy versus
our culture today.
As we begin tonight I want to point out a structure
and we’ve mentioned over the weeks that we’re trying to expound this section in
the book of Deuteronomy, this section that deals with loving the Lord with all
your heart by sections that tend to emphasize one or more of the Ten
Commandments. Because that’s the whole point of these details, that they
express the Ten Commandments, what the Ten Commandments really look like, and
it’s important we do that because by understanding that we understand
concretely what God’s standards are and therefore where we violate those
standards. Because the law was given, as Paul says, to convict, to bring a
sense of awareness of what sin is.
So we have, then, to deal with why it is that—like
for example tonight, we’ve got a passage on ownership. We already had a passage on
ownership—we have these two verses here and then ownership was, in
chapter 22, verses 1-4, over there.
So it seems like it’s fragmented, it seems like it’s disconnected. So I thought I’d pause at the beginning
and point this pattern out that we’ve noticed on this chart. And I think on the handout you should
have this chart on the back page of the handout.
But if you notice, charitable loans have come up twice
now. We’ve had one section of
charitable loans back in Deuteronomy 15 saying essentially the same thing, now
it occurs in 23:19-20. Now the
higher critics love this kind of thing because they say the explanation is
multiple sources, that somehow the editor just compiled it and he was grabbing
fragments, and it sort of just jammed together in the book called Deuteronomy,
and that’s what you would get in a university course in higher criticism. But I accept the Mosaic authorship and
the Holy Spirit through Moses, that this is the authoritative Word of God, so
obviously God is not a God of chaos, there’s a pattern it and you have to look
for it.
So if you look on the chart here you’ll see that in
the first group was dealing with the fourth commandment, the second group
where charitable loans occurs is in the eighth commandment that deals with
theft. The fourth commandment
dealt with Sabbath restrictions and work. So if you look at your outline you’ll
see, that where I say, “the limits on interest charged on charitable loans",
and I give you those two passages, 15:1-8;
23:19-20. As I said, essentially
it’s saying the same thing but it’s in a different context. Under the fourth commandment the limits
express Yahweh’s demands upon labor and rest, and the emphasis back there in
15:9-11 was if you see a neighbor in need and you give him a loan, a charitable
loan. Don’t say to yourself because it’s year four in a seven year cycle that
it’s only three years, this guy is going to have three years to pay me back and
gee, this is going to hurt me economically. And so the emphasis back there, the first time this occurred
was the fourth commandment, the Sabbath rest, relax about that because God
will, if you obey Him and you shut your production down on that seventh year,
He’s going to bless you in the sixth year. So it’s a matter of trust in order to obey that fourth
commandment. And in that context,
charitable loans came up because that’s an action, that’s a specific thing that
had to happen and you had to deal with this economically in your business, in
your money, in your wealth. So
that was back there in that first group.
Now when the charitable command occurred, as we said
last time in chapter 23, on your notes let me fill in the blanks here. Under
the fourth commandment,
these limits express Yahweh’s demands upon Labor and rest, so that was the
context of charitable loans. Under
the 8th commandment, these limits express
Yahweh’s protection of the emancipated theocratic citizen to live out a
redeemed life. In the eighth commandment remember what we’ve been seeing. That’s
“thou shalt not steal,” but the problem is God is enlarging our understanding
of what it is that can be stolen.
It isn’t just that you can steal a piece of property or wealth; that
commandment, “thou shalt not steal” meant that you could steal the intangible
things. That’s why the oath was in there. When you make an oath to somebody,
like in a contract, or when you make an oath to God out of your mouth, when you
make that oath or that promise you are now in debt; that person has a right to
claim the fulfillment of what you promised. And we never would think of that as part of the eighth
commandment, “thou shalt not steal”, because we come to that eighth commandment
thinking of just physical property.
But God had in mind more than just physical property: there are the
other things I mean when I say, “thou shalt not steal.”
So there’s a lesson here. It emphasizes difference between the theocratic
citizen and the foreigner, remember, the theocratic citizen had a right to live
in a non-debted lifestyle. God wanted to protect that
right, and that right could be stolen if for some reason he had hard times and
nobody would charitably loan him that. The only way he could get out of it
would be to go into servitude, and that was not fitting for someone who had
been redeemed. And that picture
gives you the idea of what redemption looks like in the Scriptures. The word “redeemed,” before it got a
religious meaning, a spiritual meaning, simply meant to get rid of the
debt. That’s what redeemed means.
And then it later came to mean the spiritual side.
And then the last one, the difference between theocratic citizen and the
foreigner, and that’s Proverbs 22:7, “The rich rules over the poor; and the
borrower is slave to the lender.” And that was what God was trying to
avoid: His people being in
servitude.
Now what all this shows is that a given statute can express multiple
moral values. And that, in turn,
leads us to the next diagram that we’ve seen before, and that is God’s design
of society. And the point that we’re making here is that when He gives a
statute, that statute is related to his overall design of society. In other words, He has a pattern that
He has built into society and He wants us to understand that when He tells us
do this, or to not do that, then we are supposed to understand that this is
related to a pattern. Let me back
up here. We’ve seen this diagram again and again, and that is the idea that
there’s a structure to society. Remember the bottom part of the picture here,
the allegiance, the integrity of communication, but we’re not up at this level,
the labor and property which is necessary in order to
support the family. And isn’t it
interesting that in talking about the charitable loan, what were the two
commandments? The fourth and the
eighth, and both of those deal with labor and property. So they deal with it from a slightly
different angel.
Now we can look at the oath. Remember that was what we covered last
time, the inclusion of oath performance, and again, this is really hard to
think of in terms of stealing, because how you associate an oath with the
eighth commandment. You might think the oath ought to be linked with the ninth
commandment, thou shalt not lie, thou shalt
not perjure yourself; but in the eighth commandment the only way we can kind of
make sense of this is that when an oath is given there’s an obligation that is
created and Yahweh said look, if you don’t make an oath I’m not going to hold
it against you. But I will hold it
against you if you promise Me you’re going to do
something and you bale, then I will make it a sin issue. So that focuses in on this idea of owed
obligation, and that’s what we mean there when we say non-performance equals
theft of an “owed obligation” created by what has “gone forth from your lips.”
And we then spent some time showing socially and economically in Western
civilization this idea has been very powerful, and that is integrity; the idea that in business if you enter into a contract you
are obligated to perform that contract.
Now a lot of societies don’t have that. A lot of subcultures in our country don’t have that, and
we’ve said again and again, and it sounds unspiritual to say this, but one of
the bottom lines in the Mosaic Law Codes if you trace it is that sin costs
dollars. There is an economic cost
to sinful patterns of behavior.
And sinful patterns of behavior cause poverty. Poverty is caused—barring
an earthquake or a disaster or sickness or something like that, a lot of
poverty in the world is not caused by some random thing—by a failure to
live according to God’s designs.
And so, what God is saying here is look, you know, it’s not a gospel of
wealth and health, it’s just saying that when we live in rebellion against the
things that He has designed we pay an economic price for that.
So the analogy between God’s contractual oaths and men’s contracts. So
one of the things as you go through these details is think about what this
implies. This thing that dealt
strictly with an oath performance to Yahweh turns out to have an analogy with
business contracts: the prohibition of contract violation, a promise creates a
right to expect performance. That
is fundamental to an economically successful society. If that is not there, you will pay more for the goods
because the point is that now there’s a cost for default. A culture with integrity of language
develops contracts and a legal framework around them. Christianity spawned the
Western concept of law. That
wasn’t true, as we’ve discussed here in the Q and A, and I am so glad {gives
name} because has gone to China three times to adopt those girls and it was he
who came up here after we had the Q and A saying, when we were talking about
Asia, how did Asia have family discipline and so on when they didn’t have
Christianity, and he said wait a minute, the Chinese as a culture do not have
integrity in their business and clicked with me because I have a Japanese daughter-in-law,
and of course, there’s rivalry between Japan and China.
But the Japanese consider themselves a step above the Chinese and the
reason they do is because they say the Chinese tend to welsh on their
obligations. And we see that, it’s going on. Businessmen, the Chinese are
ripping off trademarks; look at what they’ve done on the Internet. They just do
this, they’re very aggressive economically, but they cheat for themselves. And
one of the problems the economy of China has right now is that they rural
areas, the rural people who are realizing that wealth wise they’re not keeping
up with the people in the cities, there are all kinds of regional rivalries
going on in China right now, and it’s very problematical to see how they can
rule this thing. They’re sort of sitting on a boiling pot. And this is why some
people believe they’re persecuting the Christians, because they feel that
Christianity makes people think that there’s a transcendent authority above
them, the politicians, which it does, and this becomes a tremendous threat to a
closed society for individuals within that society to think that they have a
relationship with a super Caesar, so to speak.
So, all this to say that this structure of having these commands show up
in different groups is not a detriment to the order of the Word of God, it’s
rather a manifestation of the complex structure socially that God has designed,
that these statutes have to be repeated in different contexts because they’re
there to reinforce these principles.
So we say in our notes, the underlying subtleties in the statutes and
judgments parallel the underlying subtleties in the Ten commandments themselves
as Jesus pointed out in His Sermon on the Mount, which should lead us to a greater grasp of
how we sin. When you start to see
these details, just think about what we expanded our understanding of what it
means, “Thou shalt not steal.” All of a sudden you think to yourself, well,
wait a minute, with this larger concept I’m more liable to steal because I
don’t see the full implications, but God does see the full implications. So it tends to make you more careful
about decisions and choice.
So let’s look at verse 24-25, the last two verses of chapter 23, and see
if we can put this in some sort of order.
Keep in mind that we’ve already had one section on leadership and that
was 22:1-4, so why don’t we read verses 24-25 and then we’re going to go back
to that first instance? In verse
24 it says, “When you come into your neighbor’s vineyard, you may eat your fill
of grapes at your pleasure, but you shall not put any in your container. [25] When you come into your neighbor’s
standing grain, you may pluck the heads with your hand, but you may not use a
sickle on your neighbor’s standing grain.” Now this is dealing with property
it’s dealing with somebody coming onto your property and doing something.
Let’s turn back to Deuteronomy 22:1-4. This is the last time ownership came up. It says, “You shall not see your
neighbor’s ox or his sheep going astray, and hide yourself from them; you shall
surely bring them back to your brother.
[2] And if your brother is not near you, or if you do not know him, then
you shall bring it to your won house; and it shall remain with you until your
brother seeks it, then you shall restore it to him. [3] You shall do the same with his donkey, you shall do the
same with his garment; with any lost thing of your brothers, which he has lost,
and you have found, you shall do likewise, you must not hide yourself. [4] You shall not see your brother’s
donkey or his ox fall down along the road, and hide yourself from them; you
shall surely help him lift them up again.”
Now that ownership thing is back over in the seventh commandment area. Remember
what the seventh commandment was? What we think of is “Thou shalt not commit
adultery” but it’s a protection of boundaries that God has given to preserve
life, and ownership is one of those boundaries. And he’s saying you’ve got to respect that boundary, if you
see something out there, a lost item, you have to think to yourself, the lost
item is somebody’s. It’s not just mine because I found it, it’s being sensitive
to ownership. It’s the boundary,
that thing, that lost thing belongs in some boundary somewhere. So that’s the emphasis back there.
But now when we come to this section of ownership, it crops up again. Now
we want to say what is going on in verses 24-25 with this business of being
able to go into your neighbor’s field or into his vineyard, pick stuff, feed
yourself, but then there are limits.
So again on the outline, where I point out there’s a limited incursion
here. First of all, let’s just
observe the text. There’s a limited incursion; it doesn’t mean going in and harvest
his field and rip him off. There’s an incursion of some sort, and it’s limited
in time because obviously if the grapes aren’t ripe and the grain isn’t ripe
then you’re not going to have the incursion. The incursion occurs only at a certain time of year. So this is not some sort of socialist
feeding program, where the guy owes you food for the year. And you can see by
the quantity that they’re not taking out of the field something to store
themselves for the whole winter here.
This is a very limited, almost like a snack. And of course, by now you should remember the issue of Jesus
which we will get to in the New Testament, this actually happened and Jesus
created a big dialogue and the Pharisees did over this incursion thing.
So here’s how it’s presented, first in the text. Now Dr. North, in commenting on the ownership,
points out a very fascinating thing.
There are theories of ownership and if you read in books on economy or
law or history, maybe you haven’t thought much about this, I know I hadn’t,
until I got into this a little bit, but there are various theories of ownership
and we’re going to spend the rest of the evening dealing with what ownership
really is, because believe it or not, there’s some radically different ideas of
what is ownership.
So the first thing is that in this case, in this case, verse 24-25, ownership of land. “Ownership of land, seeds, and prior
labor,” that’s the guy that owned the vineyard or the guy that has the field of
grain, “Ownership of the land did not entitle him to that portion of the crop
which a neighbor could pick and hold in his hands.” Now that is not equal to what we normally think about
ownership in this country, the idea that somebody can just waltz in and take
this stuff. So we’ve got to start
thinking about what is going on here in this passage. “That is, his prior
investment was not the legal basis of his ownership.” Right? If somebody could come into the property, but he owned the
property and he had invested time and effort in the crop, that still did not
give him absolute ownership of that product. So this raises a question in our
mind, what is happening here?
“Legal title in Israel had nothing to do with some hypothetical original
owner who had gained legal title because he had mixed his labor with un-owned
land – John Locke’s theory of original ownership.” That was something circulating prior to
the American Revolution, it was a theory of ownership that you owned something
because it wasn’t owned before, you invested in it you worked with it; it
becomes yours. So that was John Locke’s theory of ownership. “The kingdom grant preceded any man’s
work. The promise preceded the inheritance. In short, grace preceded law.”
Now we have to reflect on what is going on here. One of the questions that North in his
commentary on Deuteronomy brings out here is, why is the grocer, or the storeowner
not mentioned in verse 23-24?
You’ll notice verses 23-24 deals with only some kinds of property. Do you see in verse 23-24 what kind of
property is involved in this little statute? It’s land. Where
did they get the land from? They got the land by conquest from the Canaanites. God gave
them the land. So interestingly,
this land that is involved in both verses 23 and 24 is something God granted
them free of charge. That land did not come by their investment activities. It was farmed later by their activities
but the land itself never came about because of a successful business
deal. The land came about only
because God gave it to them in the first place. So this sort of separates verse
23-24 from a storeowner or anybody else in ancient Israel that had a
business. This is a particular
from of property.
Now that leads us to a greater discussion that we have to deal
with. Down at the bottom you see
what is ownership in theocratic Israel. Yahweh gave the land to the entire
nation, so all residents shared in its blessings. Tribal families could not totally exclude neighbors from
this tiny incursion. Notice it is
a tiny incursion, not theft, but it like this land is sacred to the entire
community, all twelve tribes. It
was given to them. So there’s an
incursion here. We’re going to get the principle out of this in a moment. But I want to come back up in your
handout to the paragraph that’s entitled “What is ownership?”
We have had a Supreme Court case of momentous proportions and I’m very
familiar with this because every year Carol and I go up into the New London
area and we know the people there in southeastern Connecticut. And this was a
devastating lawsuit that happened. It involved the city of New London, Connecticut,
and it involved a series of people that had owned property there in their families
for over a hundred years. These were old New England families that had
inherited the property, inherited the property and passed it on, father to son,
father to son, mother to daughter and so forth. So they owned this for generations and the city of New
London decided that they needed tax revenues, so their argument was that they
could confiscate their property and turn it over to the drug, pharmaceutical company.
What’s the one up there in Connecticut? Pfizer. So if we could confiscate the
property of these people, take their homes away, give them compensation, turn
the land over to Pfizer, Pfizer would built this big factory and then we could
tax Pfizer and get more money for New London, Connecticut. So it was strictly a business deal.
Now that involved something called eminent domain, and eminent domain means
that none of us really own our property, the State can come in and take our
property with “due compensation, and walk away with it, and the justification
for eminent domain in a modern society is, well, if we want to extend
Interstate 95 you’ve got put it somewhere, and if it’s through your farm or
through your backyard, well sorry, the greater need for the community than for
your personal needs. So we’ll pay you X thousand dollars for it and then we’re
going to take your property and get you out of here. So that’s eminent domain.
Now eminent domain is actually mentioned in the Bible, in Daniel 2:37-38
because that’s when God kicked out Israel and put them in exile and then He
turned over to the times of the Gentiles. And in Dan 2:37-38, that’s when
Daniel is interpreting the vision to Nebuchadnezzar, and he says God has given
you, Nebuchadnezzar, all the land.
So the State, the Babylonian State, under God, had been given eminent
domain. So that seems to be an axiom of Gentile countries. Israel was different. Remember in Israel if your family had
property it had been given to you and your family and even you couldn’t get rid
of the land because in the 50th year what would happen? The title would come back to you. And that’s a picture, that inheritance
is a picture of eternal security. That’s why God designed that whole real
estate deal as a physical easy to see example of ultimate inheritance in
Christ, that nobody can take, it’s eternally secure.
So there is a difference now between Gentile and Jewish nations. Here’s the distinguishment,
and here’s the key to trying to work our way through verses 23-24. What is
going on with this limited incursion thing? God is absolute owner by virtue of His creation work. So we have absolute ownership is in the
hands of God. Now watch this
because we’re going to show you a heresy that’s developed in western civilization
and it’s promulgated itself into our political structure. So let’s get it straight, what the
Bible is talking about here. God
is the absolute Owner by virtue of His creation work; man is given derivative
ownership. So our ownership is derivative of His ownership, and the example
starts out in the garden of Eden.
God turned over the garden to Adam, but there was one exception and what
was it? The tree
of the knowledge of good and evil.
So even though derivative ownership was handed over to Adam for that
garden, Adam did not have absolute ownership of the garden. And to make Adam
cognizant of the fact that his ownership was derivative and not absolute God
said I have the right to restrict your ownership, and you do not own the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil; I own that. And by making just that one
exception, how many trees were in the garden? I don’t know, maybe a thousand trees in the garden of Eden,
so this is one one-thousandth of the garden of Eden, but it’s still a limited
piece of property which tells Adam every time that he didn’t totally own
things. You own them by My permission.
So that’s the concept now between absolute ownership and derivative
ownership. So by giving a limited
incursion, what God is doing here in verses 23-24 is showing that ownership of
the vineyard and the ownership of the field in which the grain was growing is
not absolute.
Let’s go now and we’ll see how this plays out in the Old Testament. Last time, remember oath, we traced it
through 400 years of Israelite history to show you the power and the reality of
oaths. Now we’re going to do the
same thing with property and we’re going to turn to a famous incident in 1
Samuel 21. So if you’ll turn to 1
Samuel 21, this is the passage that causes commentators to fall all over
themselves in emotion, because it’s one of those cases where David deceived and
lied. So this is one of those
passages that makes commentators very uneasy because of a moral issue that’s in
the text; why they get so upset about Rahab when Rahab is viewed in Hebrews 11, obviously as a woman of
faith and commended for her faith that was shown in her treachery, treason and
lying. And people say well how can
you justify lying? Well, the answer is the context of when Rahab
lied. She lied in the middle of war, it was a holy war between Israel and the
Canaanites and she committed treason to the Canaanite population and became
allied to Israel. And as Israel in
a military conflict, deception is part of the military tactics. So lying and deception go on all the
time.
When you have war you’re going to have lying, deception and deceit;
that’s the corollary. Those are legitimate tactics given a wartime
situation. I mean, after all, in
World War II when Eisenhower wanted to hide the site of the landings in Europe
what did he do? He knew the
Germans were looking at General Patton so he constructed a total deceptive army
that didn’t even exist, but they had radio traffic that they knew the Nazis were
watching and listening and so they created a fictitious army under George
Patton that was going to invade Europe at a totally different place. And it was a deception, a lie, but it
was in the middle of war. So we’re not saying that integrity of language, I
mean, after all, the Bible is for integrity of language, but in the time of war
you have deception.
Well now here we’ve got another situation, similar to that of Rahab. And it starts out in verse 1, “And David came to
Nob, to Ahimelech the priest. And Ahimelech
was afraid when he met David, and said to him, ‘Why are you alone, and on one
is with you.” See, the background
there is at this point Samuel Saul is still king; the Saulite
dynasty reigns, but God has taken the Spirit away from that dynasty and given
it to David. How do we know? Because in chapter 16, notice this is
chapter 22, in chapter 16 the Holy Spirit has been transferring authority over
to David. So David has already been prophetically designated as the king and
he’s waiting for God to deliver the kingdom to him. And Saul has chosen, in his rebellion, because God is kind
of greasing Saul’s slide, like He did Pharaoh. Saul is getting very, very
angry, he feels betrayed because his own son, Jonathan, is in league with
David. And so his son that would be the crown prince of Israel is turning
against his dad, and Saul is really upset by this. And he sees David now, who’s a national hero, because of the
Goliath incident, and his military success and prowess, and so here’s this top military
hero of the day in league with his own son. And so dad feels betrayed, he feels
angry, and very frustrated at this point.
So in the book of Samuel there are several attempts Saul makes on
David’s life. He tries to kill
David six or seven times here, so he’s going after him. So now they’re in what is in effect a
political dynastic war going on between the house of Saul and the house of
David. So that’s the context. Now
Abimelech is caught in the middle because he’s the priest at the tabernacle, and
he knows David is the commander, David has a bunch of guys with him and he
can’t figure out why is David alone. So now he’s afraid because oh-oh, I’ve got
a political problem now. If I help David out I’m going to alienate Saul, and if
I don’t help David I’m going to irritate David and now I’m in trouble with
David.
[2] “So David said to Ahimelech, the priest,
‘The king has ordered me on some business, and said to me, don’t let anyone
know anything about the business on which I send you, or what I have commanded
you.’ And I have directed my young
men to such and such a place.” [3]
“Now therefore, what have you on hand?
Give me five loaves of bread in my hand, or whatever can be found.” Now
there’s where the commentators get all upset that well David is lying to Saul
at this point, he’s misleading Saul, he’s not on the king’s business. The king is Saul, so he thinks, but
there’s sort of a double meaning here, because who’s the real king of Israel? It’s Yahweh, and so in one sense you
could say David is being sort of sneaky here, he is on the King’s business,
it’s King with a capital K, not Saul.
But it is deception; he is misleading Ahimelech. But, he is making a claim, in this
misleading thing, that he is on royal business. Now keep in mind the incursion issue here.
The priest, Ahimelech, is in charge of
what? The
tabernacle and the holy bread that is in the tabernacle. So that’s owned
by the priest and in the Law who can eat the showbread? Now remember, the showbread every
seventh day is changed out because it would get moldy. So the showbread is put in the
tabernacle and on the Sabbath (and that’s key to this passage) the bread is
changed out. So next, when we read
verse 4, “And the priest answered David and said, ‘There is no common bread on
hand'.” Now that tells you it’s the Sabbath, because every other day people
would be eating bread, “there’s no common bread” because on the Sabbath they
couldn’t cook the bread. So
“there’s no common bread on hand; but there is holy bread,” and the reason the
holy bread is there is because it’s Saturday and they’ve taken that back out of
the tabernacle. “If the young men
have at least kept themselves from women.” Now you say, what is going on
here?
Well, notice what the priest does not say. The priest who has been instructed that only priests can eat
the showbread because the showbread is owned by the priesthood doesn’t see this
as a violation of the eighth commandment.
His criticism isn’t here, David, you can’t take this bread; it’s
mine. His criticism is are they
young men with you kept themselves from women. Now what’s that all about? Well, the three day abstinence from women goes back to
Exodus and on your outline I have it there, Exodus 19:15, where God Himself
said no man can come unto this mountain that’s had relations with women in the
last 72 hours. So the idea there is approaching God there was thing. So in coming to the tabernacle, which
was the meeting place of God, the priest is concerned that this
showbread that’s holy will not be desecrated by the men. But he does not
raise the eighth commandment, which now gets into the ownership issue.
So here again is a case where the priesthood did not absolutely own the
bread, even though it was commanded that they only could eat it. There’s an
exception to the rule and the exception to the rule is that if you’re on the
King’s business you have a right to eat this. This is one of those limited incursions. Now it’s not
supposed to be routinely done, but if there’s an emergency or some special
mission going on then we have to support that mission and somebody on the
King’s business has the right to eat this bread. We priests don’t have absolute ownership, it’s derivative
ownership, and there is an incursion that is allowed here.
If we go to Luke 6 you’ll see how this thing plays out, I’m always
amazed at Luke 6, having worked for the government for many years it’s amusing
to me that here Jesus and His disciples, on a Sabbath, see, keep the theme in
mind, verses 1-5, and the blank there is, just before Luke 6:1-5 in your
outline:
Even the tabernacle showbread was not absolutely owned by the
priesthood. Now in Luke 6 the
scene is the Sabbath, so the same day of the week that happened in 1 Samuel 21,
“Now it happened on the second Sabbath after the first that He went through the
grain fields. And His disciples
plucked the heads of grain and at them, rubbing them in their hands.” Now is that legal? Yes, because here’s
an example of Jesus and the disciples using the principle we’re studying back
in Deuteronomy 23, that is, a limited incursion on a field of grain. That was their right. And when the Pharisees object in verse
2, notice they do not bring up the eighth commandment either. They don’t see this
as theft, which means that they understand this passage in Deuteronomy just
like we’re saying tonight; that limited incursion on private property in Israel
(because the land was given to them by God) was legitimate.
So their complaint was that it was a violation of the fourth
commandment, that you can’t do work on the Sabbath day. So they’ve moved the debate from the
eighth commandment over to the fourth one. So now Jesus is going to answer them. [3] “But Jesus
answered them and said,” and by the way, Jesus didn’t say you know that dirty
passage in the Old Testament where David lied, you don’t see Jesus talking
about the passage that way. Jesus
deals with it as totally approving, “Have you not even read this, what David
did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: [4] how he went into
the house of God,” that’s the very presence of God Himself, the tabernacle; he
“took and ate of the showbread, and also gave some to those with him, which is
not lawful for any but the priests to eat?” So Jesus takes the text of Leviticus and Deuteronomy and
throws it back at the Pharisees.
Now you ask, well how does that answer verse 2? In verse 2 the Pharisees are objecting
that on the Sabbath you can’t do this; they’ve moved the discussion over to
this fourth commandment. Well,
what Jesus is saying is that if you go back to David’s situation, he was
authorized to do what he did because he was on the King’s business. Then look how he calls Himself. Look at
the name that Jesus applies to Himself in verse 5, “The Son of Man is Lord of
the Sabbath.” So what is He
saying? I am the King and I will
determine what is done on the Sabbath.
You see, if Jesus isn’t who He claims to be
He’s arrogant. See, people are
careless about reading the New Testament, and don’t seem to ever understand
this, but the things that Jesus says and does make no sense unless he really is
who He claims to be. And here He
says I am the Lord of the Sabbath, and just as David, on the King’s business
could intrude a piece of private property, because these disciples are Mine,
they can do anything I allow them to do on the Sabbath day, I am the Lord of
the Sabbath. And of course Luke
brings up another issue later on, there’s a friction going on here between the
religious establishment and the Lord Jesus about this issue. But what I wanted to show you was that
this is an example of limited derivative ownership, the theme here.
Now I want to, because we’ve gone through these two verses so far, if
you’ll follow in your outline I’ve kept all of the reference material in the
outline because I want to show you this theme of ownership, since we’ve got
into this in this chapter. And I
think this is about the second and only time we incur this again in the law
code.
Historical distortions of this principle: Now some of you I know you’ve
come out of the Roman Catholic Church and this may irritate some of you but
it’s history, so let’s follow through this step by step.
Classic paganism held to the idea that a Golden Age once existed in which
all things were held in common.
That is a pagan idea, notice “classic paganism,” not Christianity,
paganism held to an ancient golden age of communism. So the idea was that in
this ancient golden age ownership didn’t exist, and the proof of it is Aristophanes—notice
his dates, long before Jesus, (445-388 BC)—in one of his plays has Praxagora say, “All shall be equal, and equally share all
wealth and enjoyment, nor longer endure that one should be rich and another be poor. . .All this I intend to correct. . . now all of all
blessings shall freely partake, one life and one system for all men I’ll make.”
So clearly it’s a communist theme of a classic paganism.
Point 2, Virgil, in his book,
Georgics, says “to mark the field with bounds was unlawful. Men made gain from the common store”. See, they have this idea of a golden
era, somewhere in the past and they want to bring it back, the commonality and
a denial of
property.
3. Seneca the Stoic, so
I’ve given three references to classic paganism here, “has told us that with
the gods lies dominion, and among men, fellowship—This fellowship remained unspoiled for a
long time until avarice tore the community asunder and became the cause of poverty. . . . But avarice broke in and by its eagerness to
lay something away and to turn it to its own private use, made all things the
property of others. . . .” Now Seneca here is dealing with a pagan equivalent to what
we call the fall. In pagan thought
private property and the origin of ownership was seen to be a fall from this
glorious golden era when everybody had everything in common.
Then, Christian theologians adopted this concept:
(1) “This thesis that private property came into being as a result of
the Fall had great influence in the history of the
church. We find it later among the Franciscan theologians and then again in
Zwingli and Melanchthon. . . .Of course ‘theories of
property’ like this are not specifically based upon the New Testament. Appeal
could be made equally well to philosophy and natural law.
. .” So we now have the idea of
communism picked up by some, not all, some of the early theologians, really in
the first couple of centuries of church history.
Then we have Chrysostum, who otherwise is an
orthodox church father, Basil and Ambrose, who are leaders in the second and
third century, who have bought into the same idea, and that is: “If only each
one would take as much as he requires to satisfy his immediate needs, and leave
the rest to others who equally needed it, no one would be rich and no one would
be poor.” So this is an idea that
has crept into the Christian church.
Now the guy that really structured Roman Catholic theology is Thomas
Aquinas, and he is considered to be the genius of Roman Catholicism. Notice his dates, 1225-1274. He wrote of “natural law” and “positive
law.” Now what Thomas means by natural law means the way it’s there, it’s just
structured. Positive law is something man adds on to natural law. For example,
by natural law women are women and men are men, positive law would be gay
marriage. What we’re doing is we’re adding to the original design. So Aquinas
said: “The community of goods is
part of the natural law;” in other words, that’s the natural state of man, to
not own anything, a commonality of good, “private property is part of the
positive law.” So he says the idea
of ownership is something man has added onto the substructure of what God has
created, and “it does not enjoy the same metaphysical or ethical status as the
community of goods. While men cannot change the natural law they can change
positive law, and they may do so in whatever manner is expedient and moral.
Several things might make such a community of goods expedient, but one makes
the community of goods morally imperative, and that is need.” Neither the early
church theologians nor Thomas, unfortunately, informed us what need is or how
it might be ascertained. See
what’s going on here, the idea is that the ideal would be each according to his
need. Now guess who made that one
up? That’s Karl Marx. See where Karl Marx gets his idea? He got some of his ideas right out of
the church. And this explains
something we’re going to get into a little bit later.
[Robbins, Ecclesiastical
Megalomania: The Economic and Political Thought of the Roman Catholic Church,
pp 31, 35. (4)] “To enforce
re-distribution of owned assets from the rich to the poor became the legal duty
of the Roman Catholic Church when it had political power or pressuring secular
rulers to do its bidding. This was expressed through papal encyclicals,
especially Rerum Novarum, On the
Condition of the Working Class (1891) which repeated the teaching of Marx’s
Das Capital published only 10 years
before, Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931), and John XXIII Mater
et Magistra (1961).” All these papal encyclicals are a matter of historical
record, you can go back and read them, make very clear that the Roman Catholic
Church argues that private ownership is basically not the last word.
So now let’s think about what’s happening here. Biblically, is it or is
it not true that all men have derivative ownership? Yes, we’ve seen that in the Scriptures. And God is the absolute owner, right? Okay, now Thomas is trying to come to
grips with this when he says “natural” but the problem is that Aquinas is
philosophical and he doesn’t deal with the exegesis of the text. In the exegesis of the text the first
private property is given in Genesis 2, God designates the garden to be the
responsibility of Adam and Eve. So
it’s not the case where he’s denying ownership, that ownership happened before
the fall. The fall happened in
Genesis 3, not Genesis 2. So
private property preexisted the fall, by God’s decree. Derivative, yes, but the
point was it was given to man; man was expected to take care of it. What does
it mean to take care of it? It was
his, it was his responsibility; ownership carries responsibility to take care
of it. And when you think about it you can’t have the eighth commandment if
there’s not property to steal. How
do you reconcile the lack of ownership with the existence of the eighth
commandment? The eight commandment
implies private ownership or you couldn’t steal it.
So, the Roman Catholic Church picked up this idea, Aquinas, basic Roman
Catholic theologian held onto this idea, and then the popes, through
encyclicals, actually put it forward as part of their papal rulership. And notice the dates, I gave you the
dates of the papals: 1891; Karl Marx published his Das Capital in 1881. Do you notice something interesting? And the reason this is, is Dr. Robins
who got his PhD in history from John Hopkins wrote the book, The Ecclesiastical Megalomania: The Economic
and Political Thought of the Roman Catholic Church, excellent documentation
in that book.
The Roman Catholic Church opposed the economic implications of the
Protestant Reformation for many years and eventually aligned itself with
Marxist property theory. See, when
the Protestant Reformation occurred several things ripped Europe to the
core. Today I believe that most American Roman Catholics have been so heavily influenced by us
evangelicals that they can’t tell the difference between evangelical theology
and Roman Catholic theology.
When I grew up, when I was a young boy I went to school with Roman
Catholics, the old Roman Catholics, the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholics, and
I’ll tell you something, it was nice in one regard because they knew what they
believed. Today you ask twenty Catholics what they believe and you get
twenty-one different answers. And
things have changed in the Roman Catholic Church. But back when Catholics were Catholics, it was very clear
what Roman Catholicism believed.
And so the argument was that when the Protestants came along, and first
of all, what great thing did the Protestants do that transformed political
theory? They said the ultimate
authority is this, and in order to make this the ultimate authority what did
the Protestants always do? They
translated into what? The common language.
Why did the Protestant Reformation take this book out of Latin and turn
it into German, and turn it into English, and turn it into French, and turn it
into Italian? So
that the average believer priest could come directly in his language to the
Word of God. We have no
sense of how radical an idea that was. What do you suppose that did to the
church hierarchy? You have a
structure here with God, the Pope, the priesthood, and then the lay
people. And all of a sudden these
Protestants come along and feed the lay person the
Word of God and they no longer need who?
That’s right. That was a revolution that caused grief throughout Europe
and it had a political implication.
And that’s the basis of the American republic, why we had a
Constitution; we are not a democracy.
The whole political structure of the United States of America came from
the congregational concept of government, that a church had a document that was
its authority and it activated and organized itself under the authority of a
written book. And the Constitution
sort of becomes analogous in the political realm of this.
Then to add insult to injury what else did the Protestant Reformers
do? They taught vocation. Do you
know what the word “vocation means?”
Voca,
the Latin word call, and when they said vocation and calling of the priests,
they meant everybody has a calling under God. The secular shoemaker has as much of a vocation, a calling,
as the priest. Now what do you suppose that did economically? All of a sudden now people can use
their hands. Remember, labor in classical paganism was demeaned, that’s why
they had slaves. Everywhere you have a slave society you have idleness. This is
what happened in the American south, this is what happened in the Roman Empire.
Wherever slaves exist slaves do the work, and everybody else lives off the
slaves. Now work became honorable
and so it was godly vocation to touch and to farm, when you farmed you were
doing God’s calling and so this made, all of a sudden, people responsible
economically. And guess what, it reinforced the idea of ownership and
property. And the Catholic Church
saw that as a threat because the Catholic Church is supposed to own
everything. And now all of a
sudden these peasant Protestants are going around saying they’ve got a calling,
and they’re in competition with the priests, the priests and the monks have the
calling. No, the farmer has the
calling; the shoemaker has the calling. And so there was a collision
economically. That’s what Dr.
Robins means in his
The Roman Catholic Church opposed the economic implications of the
Protestant Reformation for many years and eventually aligned itself with
Marxist property theory. That’s
why the papal encyclicals post-date Das Capital, when
Marx came along the church saw aha, we’ve got intellectuals now in Europe that
we can align with.
And thus it has promoted “Christian socialism” throughout Europe,
Liberation Theology in Latin America, and quasi-socialism in US politics: “Much
of the interference by federal, state, and local governments in the affairs of
citizens is due to Roman Catholic influence in American politics. Following
Vatican directives, Roman Catholic politicians, legislators, and intellectuals
brought us the Progressive movement, the labor union movement, the graduated
income tax, the New Deal, and the growth of government in the United States.”
[Robbins, p.47] So here, if you
trace the big idea you can see it working its way out in the history of our
country.
The reasoning process is five
steps, and we’ll end there.
It starts out right, point (1) God is absolute owner; man is derivative
owner, we agree with that, that’s biblical. Point (2) The Roman Catholic Church is God’s civil state on
earth—careful, and notice the word s-t-a-t-e. The Roman Catholic Church is not just a church; the Roman
Catholic Church is a nation. We send ambassadors to the Vatican. The Roman Catholic Church is a Roman
Catholic State and Church. We
disagree with point 2.
But point (3) is a result of the logic we have points 1 and 2. Therefore, the Catholic Church
represents God’s absolute ownership over all private property. Obviously if
you’re standing in God’s place and God is the absolute owner, the church is the
absolute owner. This is why they
were able to rule Europe for so long. The Popes claimed absolute ownership. Marxism comes along in the 19th
century and agrees economically in the sense that there is no such thing;
private ownership is bad. So this
is why even though Marxism is inherently atheist and the Catholic Church is
theist I never could figure out until I read Dr. Robins why it was in Latin America
that the priests were pro-communist.
In Nicaragua the Roman Catholic Jesuits were the ones that said the
Kingdom of God has come in communism; you can’t be a Christian and believe in
the Kingdom of God unless you’re a communist. This was the whole slogan behind the Nicaraguans. So the idea here is that they coalesce
in that one is an atheist, one is a theist, but they agree on the issue of
poverty: what causes poverty is ownership of property. They both hold the same
view, so that’s why there’s an alliance there. .
Therefore, Roman Catholics in poverty situations the average Roman
Catholic that is poor, is set up to demean private ownership and support
communism. They’ve done it in Italy; they’ve done it in Latin America, and in
Vietnam they did it. Vietnam was a Roman Catholic country.
So we see this as an effect of ownership. The two last blanks under point 3, the first one is a group
concerned with the eighth commandment, and the other, ownership appears in the
seventh commandment. Again,
reiterating what we started with tonight, that the same statute can occur in
different groupings, different commandments.
That’s all and we’ll have just a few minutes for Q and A.
Question: No, I’ve seen pictures of it, it’s beautiful. But the artwork of the Sistine Chapel,
Michelangelo’s famous paintings and so on, that was the wealth of Europe that
was given to them and there are magnificent cathedrals and architecture. The Roman Catholic Church is probably
the wealthiest institution on earth but it’s gotten that way because of ideas.
[question asked] Yeah, I’m not familiar, you’re asking about the Roman
Catholic versus Islam on the doctrine of the land. Islam has a strange thing
with land too and I’m not that versed in it to comment on it. I just know that
one of the current political problems with Israel is that, according to some
Muslims that I’ve read, they view the existence of the Jewish state, the real
estate now I’m talking about, the physical land that’s owned by Jews with a
Jewish nation as a challenge to the evidence that Allah is sovereign totally in
history. In other words, that’s
why Hamas and Hezbollah want to keep rocketing the settlements. They don’t want
peace; they want to destroy Israel.
There’s a theological reason why they want to destroy Israel and that is
because as long as Israel exists right there in the belly of Islam, it’s like
Allah’s too weak. They think of it: it makes Allah look weak, that Allah can’t
control that little bit, when he controls everything else, why can’t he control
that piece of property? And of course we know why, but it’s an affront to them
and they see it that way. The political picture is a theological affront to
their beliefs. These are powerful
ideas that we’re encountering here and I think maybe tonight you’ve seen some
of the ramifications.
These ideas float through history century after century and cause
tremendous changes in a culture.
And we forget, the Protestant Reformation had an enormous economic
effect, and I’ve said this several times, but if you want to get a feel for the
Protestant effect, I always recommend taking a blank map of Europe, maybe go
into a map of Europe, draw all the European continent, draw some of the
boundaries on a tracing paper or something, or Google it or something, if you
can get a blank map of Europe, and then go back in your history and color, with
one color, color every place that Protestantism dominated. And then on the
other color, color every place Roman Catholicism dominated. Then take a second
map and color in the places that were economically prosperous, and then ask
yourself: which parts of Europe were economically prosperous? It’s the Protestant parts. And you have to ask yourself why, why
did being a Protestant and being a Catholic make such a difference
economically. And there have been
books written about this, Max Webber and others have written books. And of
course, they’re criticized today but the idea was that something happened in
the Reformation to make this economic impact.
[question asked] Oh yes, exactly.
He has brought up a point and I thought most of you would catch as we
read this, that what Obama is pushing and what the Democrats… remember it’s not
just Obama, Obama is just a spokesman for a whole community of people, and what
he is saying is not something he created, he is articulating the classic
communist/socialist line. And today if you say that out in the barbershop or
somewhere, people look at you: are you calling him a communist? Well, yeah, I
mean, it goes back to this is the theme that has gone on for centuries and the
problem with it goes back to what I just said about why is it that Protestant
Europe was more prosperous than Catholic Europe. It wasn’t just that they had more resources because they
didn’t.
What is different is that when ownership exists, you are incentivized to
make it better, because you are responsible; you see the result of your
work. And somebody doesn’t want to
rip it off, and when Obama talks about taxing the rich what he’s really talking
about is taxing anybody that makes over $250,000 a year, which probably is most
small business owners. So a man
and his wife own a small business, they’re going to make more than $250,000
say, those are the people that he’s going after. If you are a billionaire, like George Soros, do you think
you’re going to be affected by what, the United States tax rules, come on, you
can afford more lawyers than the federal government can and you can end-run any
tax legislation. You’re not going
to get any more dollars out of billionaires, you’re going to suck the dollars
off of the business people and guess what the business people do? They’re the
ones that make the jobs.
So what you’ve just done is you’ve disincentivised,
and that was the story of Catholic and Protestant Europe, if you keep taking
away money from the people who are producing what incentive do they have to
keep on producing? And you can see
that, I mean, imagine, and I’ve seen this on the internet, you can see it in
the classroom, and some conservative professor did this in one classroom,
apparently where he said we’re going to give everybody the same grade, do a
test and we’ll average out the grade and then everybody gets the grade. What does that do to the students who
are trying to work hard for their grades?
The heck with it. If I don’t get rewarded for the extra work, why should I
work? And of course, the counter of the socialists and the communist, oh, well,
then you’re being selfish. No you’re not, you’re being productive. And the sad thing is, this always works
out because socialism and communism always go bankrupt and they can’t figure it
out. Every time socialism and socialist views have permeated the culture the
culture’s always rotted economically because you’ve disincentivised
production. It always happens that
way.
So it’s ridiculous that we keep going back to the old idea that was
refuted in the days of the Protestant Reformation. I mean, when was the Protestant Reformation? 1513-1515, and here it is 2000, we’re
500 years later and we’re doing the same thing; we haven’t learned anything in
five centuries. I mean, come on.
So that’s what the fight is right now in our own culture and it’s only people
like you, who have a grasp of the Word of God, that have a desire to do things,
go make accomplishments in your life because, not just selfish, what is the
corollary of the Protestant Reformation, what was the V word… Vocation. And whom do you answer for in your
vocation? You answer to God for
the vocation.
I mean, in any history course you’ve ever taken, anybody here tonight,
ever hear of an explanation of how the industrial revolution was paid for? Anybody ever hear about that? Everybody’s talking about the
industrial revolution, all of a sudden we had factories, we had all this wealth
going on and we had production. It
took money. Where do you think the
money came from? It came from
savings accounts that Webber points out were mostly Calvinist believers. And
you say well, what does Calvinism, Protestantism, got to do with savings
accounts? Because
they believed in the future.
And because they believed in the future they put off spending today
because they would save for tomorrow for a better opportunity. If you don’t believe that you’re pessimistic,
you would spend today, you know, get a pay check and spend it, pay check and
spend it, live pay check to pay check until the pay check stopped and then
you’re stuck, now you’re having to depend on the Messianic State for handouts. And this is where we’re going; these
are the ideas that are all there in the Mosaic Law Code.
Next time we’ll get on to the marriage thing and go on to another
section of Deuteronomy.