Clough Manhood Series Lesson 20

Law: View of Money and Property

This is the 20^th lesson on the doctrine of Christian manhood. We’re approaching man under the law, and we said that if it’s the law, the framework of the law, that gives confidence to the Christian believer that when the Christian believer has his feet solidly planted on the standards of Scripture then he has a platform for living. We’ve said this in relationship to 1 Corinthians 6:20 through the temple of the Holy Spirit which is the body and we showed from the Old Testament text that care for the body, physically, is an expression of Christian faith. Neglect of the body is an expression of paganism. And so we said that this would play out, among other things, in temperance in food, exercise, and bodily usage.

Then last Sunday night we dealt with guarding and protecting life and we mentioned the two concepts of just violence and unjust violence. Unjust violence is violence that is due, unauthorized to God, it is violence against the defenseless, and we showed the Christian leader, if he is truly leading, ought to be sensitive to unjust violence; violence to the orphans, violence to the widows, violence to those who cannot normally defend themselves. And this is an expression in Scripture of grace. Then we said there’s a concept in Scripture of just violence, and in the anti-violent ethics that are being promoted today, one has to back off a minute and say no, all violence is not wrong, there are just forms of violence and the Scripture commends them. In fact, the Scripture insists that there ought to be just forms of violence because if there aren’t just forms of violence then society cannot be preserved. And so we showed how capital punishment is a form of just violence, just war is a form of just violence and so on.

Two areas remain in the area of manhood and the law, one we’ll handle this week and one next week. Again, there are more details we could go into but we can’t really, in a survey type topical approach as we’re doing in this series, we can’t cover every detail. But two areas remain of interest to every man; one is the handling of money and finances, and the other one is being a husband and a father. Now these are two areas that are explained in the Scriptures, though the husband and the father role will be illustrated a lot more frequently as we go on down the line. So tonight we’re going to stay with the money and finances and show how the Old Testament speaks to this problem and how that basically is carried over into New Testament ethics. Keep in mind, the New Testament is very abbreviated because it presumes that you know the Old Testament. It presumes that you can take one of Paul’s commands and just load it full of content out of the Old Testament. It presumes all of this. So don’t think just because the New Testament doesn’t speak to these things that therefore they are of no importance.

Let’s go first of all, in the area of finances and so on, let’s go to the fundamental concept behind it all and that is the concept of ownership, just basic ownership and what it means. In Genesis 1:28 we have this concept. In Genesis 1:28 God is the author in an absolute sense of all ownership. God gives the land to man. [“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”] In Genesis 1:29 you’ll notice, “I have given you every herb” and so on and so on. And He gives man authority.

And so at Genesis 1:28 you have the first instance of creature ownership and this first instance of creature ownership becomes the norm for all other ownership, that all creature ownership is derivative ownership. There is no such thing as emanate domain which we will explain in a moment, only creature domain under the Creator’s domain. God owns it all, we own only insofar as God has granted us the privilege of ownership. And immediately at the very start this makes all ownership derivative, and temporal. There is no such thing as absolute ownership of anything, including our own souls. This means we don’t own people, we don’t own fame, we own them derivatively; we own them because we have been entrusted with them by God for a certain period of time.

If Genesis 1:28-30 wasn’t enough, after the flood in Genesis 9 God does the same thing. When he talks about “be fruitful and replenish the earth” or “fill the earth,” He gives the earth back to man. The earth has been destroyed in the flood; been torn to pieces in judgment. Now refurbished it is given once again back to man. So we have, once again, God’s absolute ownership and man’s derivative ownership. I labor this point because by now there ought to be two things clear in your thinking about our own society, where we go as Christians, how we look at things versus how our humanist neighbor looks at things.

So far in the manhood course there are been two areas where deity shows; one area was back when we started the Law, and we made the statement that law is sacred, and that you can use as a rule that the law-making authority is the god of any society. This is just the standard, that the law, the law-making authority, the legislative power is the God of a society. All right, if that’s the case, then whenever you have a legislature that derives laws without reference to God’s laws, that legislature is in essence declaring it’s divine nature. That’s how the Bible-believing Christian who loves the Lord has to look at the situation. This means that when a legislator says that he legislates, that he designs this law and that law and so on, without reference to any higher law, then what he is saying is that he is the law. And therefore he is the God of Mount Sinai who legislates.

So one test you can to do measure your own society, your own group is watch who makes the laws and on what basis. If the laws are not consciously derivative of an absolute higher law then they’re autonomous and then they’re the false claim of being God. Okay, there’s one test, where is the legislative power located? Wherever it is, that’s the god of the society.

Now we add to that point a second point from this text and that point is that whoever ultimately owns things, that is god, that is the god of that particular society. If the state, through the doctrine of emanate domain, is making the claim that in fact it absolutely owns that property, the state at that point has declared itself god. The declaration of emanate domain is a declaration of deity as far as the Bible is concerned. For those not acquainted with this term, this is a term used in legal circles to refer to the power of the government over your property. For example, if they want to put Route 289 through your backyard the government has the right to confiscate your property to put Route 289 through your backyard, the excuse being if we didn’t have emanate domain then we’d have chaos. But that objection in turn is grounded on the assumption that God’s law is incompetent to rule. And so emanate domain has come into existence, if the state, though it may give you [quote] “just compensation” for your property when it puts Route 289 through it, nevertheless, the state can finally get you out, by force if necessary. If you say no, my grandfather had this property, it’s been handed down over the generations in my family and I’m not going to move, the state has the right to come in with police and soldiers and kill you if they have to get you off the property.

That is the principle of emanate domain and wherever the principle is exercised the state is declaring itself to be the owner of all. Instead of singing, as in the Psalms that God is the owner of the hills and the mountains and the earth, we sing the state is the owner of the hills and the mountains and the earth through the principle of emanate domain.

So now we have two measures that are objective, non-emotional devices to measure how far along the path we’ve come to making the state divine. When men legislate law without reference to higher standards we have divinity; when the state insists on the confiscation of property, even with just compensation, we have a claim to divinity being made. So that’s the importance of these doctrines we’re teaching; they’re not just little academic things. These things work out with sometimes very horrible results. Those of you who saw The Incredible Bread Machine, remember the scene with the police firing on the poor guy to get him out of the house, so that they could convert the house into a major parking lot which was never used; this is the typical instance of the use of emanate domain.

Now in God’s sight ownership that is derivative is given from God to man; it is given in Genesis to the whole human race, and now if you’ll turn to Joshua 15 you will see how it was given to all the tribes of Israel. Here is the origin of ownership. There’s a principle with creature derivated ownership. The principle is that your freedom, political physical freedom, is directly proportional to your ability to own and use property according to your dictates. That’s a measure of your freedom. If you’re a college student and you’re in debt to your hocks because you’ve borrowed money and borrowed money and borrowed money to get through school and you own no real goods, technically speaking in the Scriptures you are a slave. You are not free, you have no real physical freedom because you’re in debt to someone else. That’s all right, sometimes you have to go through this period; I’m not saying it’s necessarily wrong; we’ll have more to say about indebtedness later but just understand, indebtedness in the Scripture is slavery because indebtedness means that the property isn’t yours; you owe someone else for it and if you owe someone else for it then you can’t use that without consulting them. And if that’s the case you don’t have freedom, then; not freedom according to the Scriptures.

So, freedom and property ownership are tied very intimately together. This is why all socialists want to destroy private property, because that way they destroy freedom and therefore transfer freedom to the government. Now look at it for a moment; somebody has to own it, right? If you have land somebody owns it; it might be the squatter, it might be the government, it might be an individual but somebody owns the property or has claim on the property. Now here’s the point; if it’s true that somebody owns the property let’s go through the three political systems possible and look at them. There’s the theocratic system of the Scripture which God owns it and men derivatively own the property underneath God’s law. There’s the anarchist theory that individuals absolutely own the land and can do with it as they please. Or there’s the totalitarian theory that the state owns it all. The totalitarian theory has many subdivisions; you can call it socialism, you can call it communism, you can call it welfarism but call it something, basically the property is being owned by the state. So ownership is always there, you see, there is always capital available, it’s just in whose hands is the capital available? Is it in the state’s hands or is it in the individual businessman’s hands. It’s got to be some place.

Now in Joshua 15 you have the land allotment. Now what’s the meaning of the land allotment to today’s businessman, today’s working Christian? The meaning of the land allotment is this. That for every Jewish family; let’s put family one, family two, family three, family four and so on; to every Jewish family there was given a land allotment at the beginning, at the conquest period. Notice in Joshua 15:1, “This, then, was the lot of the tribe of the children of Judah by their families: to the border of Edom, the wilderness of Zin southward,” and then if you look down, your eye scans down those various verses you’ll see geographical points of reference are mentioned. And that outlines the exact property line. Turning the page, and by the way, notice verse 21 particularly, this is an intimate description of property lines. Have you ever wondered as you read passage like this, why was the Holy Spirit interested in preserving all this nitty-gritty detail for so many centuries and I can’t even pronounce the names. You know, you read down there, “the valley of” huh? What? [33] “Estaol and Zorah, and Ashnah,” have you seen that in a real estate ad recently? What are all these names about? Well, those names have been permanently put in the canon of Scripture as a memorial to the importance God places on property. That’s how important it is; it’s important enough to be included in the canon of Scripture. Joshua 16:1, “And the lot of the children of Joseph fell from the Jordan by Jericho, to the water of Jericho on the east, to the wilderness that goes up from Jericho throughout Mount Bethel, [2] And goes out from Bethel to Luz, and passes along the borders of Archi” and so on. So there you’ve got, again, boundary points, allotments given.

All right, to each family, then, we have beginning capital. Let’s say family one received capital one; family two, capital two; family three, capital three; family four and so on. Each family is given a degree of wealth as they begin life in the new land. The giving of the land is their freedom. That’s the whole point of all this; that’s the evidence that we free people. They own their property.

Now let’s go back to Exodus 12 to see that they own something else besides property. Exodus 12:35, back at the time of the Passover, before they got into the land, their forefathers who had been slaves in Egypt for many centuries, worked for nothing. If modern chronological reconstructions are correct, the time that Dr. Courville has been working on recently in connection with realigning the Egyptian dynasties, if that is the case, it can be shown that the Jewish people are the ones who built most of the pyramids. Now that sounds radical if you know your Egyptian history, but if the chronological adjustments are made, most of those pyramids, particularly certain ones that he has shown are made of brick underneath the façade, those were made with slave labor of Jews; people who were never paid for their slave labor.

Well, before God took the Jews out of Egypt He made sure that their back wages were paid. And so in Exodus 12:35, “And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses, [and they asked of the Egyptians]” and it says they borrowed of the Egyptians, that sounds like they went in and borrowed, it wasn’t borrowing, they took it, “they took Egyptian jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment. [36] And the LORD gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent [gave] unto them such things as they required. And they spoiled the Egyptians.” In other words, given with each family besides capital in the form of land was capital in the form of cash and easily made liquid assets. And this was how freedom began; freedom began politically with property and capital. Now fix this in your mind next time you’re in a discussion about freedom. God’s Word says the first free nation on earth began and was free because of individual property ownership. Why?

Turn to Exodus 19:5, here’s Mount Sinai. “Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people; for all the earth is Mine.” In other words, it’s God’s right because God has the right of emanate domain, not the state. Never is the state granted emanate domain in Scripture. It is always Jehovah God who has emanate domain.

All right, so the first thing we know about basic ownership is that it is derivative. A second thing we know about it is that it is the basis of freedom. Now what else do we know about it? Turn to Leviticus 25:23. Many of you who may be new to the Bible, you may have accepted Christ recently and as a result therefore really have never been exposed to this kind of thing, it probably will be a surprise to you that the Bible speaks in such physical terms. But it does because the Bible speaks to every area of life. In Leviticus 25:23, in addition to property being derivative and being the key to freedom, the divine institution that is involved in derivative ownership is the family. It’s the family, not the individual… not the individual. If I made this chart again I’d bring money down into divine institution three because the point is that it’s the family that is the basic property holding unit. This is why you see you have all this anti divorce legislation in the Scriptures, and why all the deal about the bastards, because the children born out of wedlock simply are children who have no property. And they have no property because they’re born out of wedlock and they’re born out of wedlock, they’re outside of divine institution two and they’re outside, therefore, of divine institution three.

So it’s not just a case of kids being called bastards and just kind of scraped off to the side of society. All those laws about bastards and divorcees in the Mosaic Law are basically property regulations that try to track and bring order out of chaos, and who owns what and therefore we have to have that kind of legislation. Who owns what? You can’t fracture a marriage in a home without fracturing possessions of the marriage in the home, and now right away we’re smack dab in the middle of property legislation. Therefore we have to have these property laws.

Leviticus 25:23 says, “The land shall not be sold forever, [for the land is Mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.]” that means repetitive selling, you can’t sell your lot and then sell it again, and keep on selling it to anybody until it goes outside the control of the family. See what it says, [24] “In all the land of your possession ye shall grant a redemption for the land. [25] If thy brother has become poor, and has sold away some of his allotment [possession],” there’s his capital, if he had to dip into his capital because he hit on hard times, “and if any of his kin come to redeem it, the shall he redeem that which his brother sold.” The “kin” would be people of his family. And the point there is that the people in the family are to help redeem and hold it in the family.

All right, verse 26, “And if the man have none to redeem it, and he himself be able to redeem it, [27] Then let him count the years of the sale thereof, and restore the overpayment unto the man to whom he sold it, that he may return unto his possession. [28] But if he be not able to restore it unto him, then that which is sold shall remain in the hand of him that has bought it until the year of jubilee: and in the jubilee it shall go out, and it shall return unto his possession.” And the year of the jubilee was the seventh Sabbath; after forty-nine years had transpired, then… here’s capital, say from family two, capital had been sold to we’ll say owner number two who was different from owner number one who was in the family; owner number sold that property to owner three, owner three sold the property to owner four, and the forty-ninth year came up; owner four would be compelled to return it to the family of owner one. So the law provided some flexibility in the use and sale of land because the law recognized hard times could happen and you might have to dip into your capital to make go over those hard times. But when all is said and done the capital must revert to the original family.

Why is this provision made? You say well that surely would affect economic prices in the real estate market? You bet it would; you have a totally different real estate economy in a theocracy. There’s no question about it; a completely different real estate environment works in this situation. But look how it worked; it worked such that the capital of each family is ultimately safe. And therefore if the capital and ownership of the family is safe then freedom is safe. These property safeguards in the Mosaic Law are here for an extremely serious reason. They’re not just what Moses dreamed up because he got lightheaded in the high altitude of Mount Sinai some place. They are particular guards to political freedom. See, the land would revert to the family. You see the power of the family unit once again, over and over in the Scripture.

Now another thing about this? Nowhere in all the taxes in the Bible is there ever a property tax. Now that’s very interesting. Never is there a property tax. There’s a poll tax, a tax on each person individually; there’s a tax on his income, the tithe, what the land produces, but never is that capital taxed. And the reason again is because the capital is a source of freedom. And no property taxes means that the property is respected, it’s held inviolate. There’s a practical reason about it because basically a property tax assessor always is assessing property with political pressures in the background. When the tax assessor comes down the street and assesses your property, he’s not considering, really… he’s really not considering the economic ebb and flow of the market. He’s concerned what the city wants to do about this section of town or that section of town or he’s got somebody breathing down his neck to bend a little bit here and bend it a little bit there and the man operates in this kind of highly charged political environment. So a tax assessor does the best he can but the man is subject to tremendous political clout on how he works in his office, generally speaking, in the west. And so this is another practical reason why all property taxes were out in the Scriptures.

You say how did they finance their schools? Parents financed the schools directly. Now lest we get all bent out of shape by this, let’s just think a minute; a very elementary thing. If we have a hundred people in a city, with a total amount of money, now that total amount of money is there regardless of how we’re going to distribute it and use it or do anything else with it. Now if the individual families want to use that money for education, they use the money for education. That’s one way of doing it, you have one step, from parent to teachers. That’s originally how it was in the Old Testament, from father to rabbi, one simple step, no bureaucracy involved.

Now with the pressure on the United States you’re going to see the schools basically taken away from local leadership, there’s always some pious reason why it’s done, but that’s the flow of power, the local community less and less power over the schools, and so here we have the family with their money and the money goes outside and it’s first collected by some government agency. And then it’s funneled over to some education department and then partly funneled back, but in the meantime you’ve had losses, a slippage of a certain percent. So now what we’ve had is an inefficient transfer of money; money now being transferred from parents through three or four intermediaries back to the teacher. And by this time everybody’s had his hand in the till and we have out of the original dollar that was sent out of the community, we have much less coming back into the community. So the number of hands that dip in the pot, you see, decreases the amount of dollars being used.

So in the final analysis which is the best? The direct system; let the parents pay for the education. That was one of the great mistakes we’ve made in our country, to go to public education. Public education has not improved the educational standards of this nation. You just read the literature of the colonies when there was no public education and read the literature of America today with “education” [quote] and see the difference. It just a simple test, anybody can do it. Public education has not improved conditions. And if it was the Bible would have public education in it. Didn’t God rule Israel? Didn’t it say in the book of Deuteronomy that there’s no nation with legislation as wise as this nation? All right, that’s why the Mosaic Law is a repository of wisdom for a social design today. So there were no property taxes on family ownership.

Now let’s prove the point that emanate domain was not tolerated. Turn to 1 Samuel 8:14, “And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your olive yards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.” That was the prognosis that the prophet Samuel said when you go to centralized government, the first thing that happens is what? Confiscation of private property always happens. And so Samuel the prophet, and by the way, for those interested in politics 1 Samuel 8 is one of your key texts. 1 Samuel 8 is the key political tract of the Bible; it is a complete prognosis on what happens with centralized government. So Samuel predicts emanate domain. That’s what it’s saying, the king will demand ownership. We dress it up, we don’t have a king today, but now we have all power to the People, “People” with a capital “P”, now the “People” own everything in the form of the state, which means basically the elite of the people own everything in the name of the state.

So we’re back to 1 Samuel 8; 1 Samuel 8 predicts sin causes the loss of freedom. You see, at the beginning of 1 Samuel 8 what did it say? It says in 1 Samuel 8:7, “And the LORD said unto Samuel,” Go ahead and give them their centralized government, “for they have not rejected thee,” Samuel, “but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them,” that the principles of Scripture shall not control My use of property, and therefore the price that society pays is… says the sate will use the property and confiscate it.

Turn to 1 Kings 21:1, “And it came to pass after these things, that Naboth, the Jezreelite, had a vineyard, which was in Jezreel,” Naboth owns a vineyard, there’s private property. Now watch what happens. It happens to be near the palace “ of Ahab, king of Samaria. [2] And Ahab spoke unto Naboth, saying, Give me your” private property “your vineyard, that I may have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house, and I will give thee for it a better vineyard than it; or if it seem good to thee, I will give thee the wroth of it in money.” Here’s the king, the government, coming in, the government wants the private property. It even offers what was now legally called “just compensation.” That’s what Ahab says, I’ll even give you more than it’s worth. So this is a very interesting text of Scripture. It shows you still the Holy Spirit’s attitude.

[3] “And Naboth said to Ahab, the LORD forbid me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers to you.” There’s the answer. The government versus God. Who has final claim on the property. The government cannot have emanate domain unless the government at the same time is claiming to be god, which Ahab is. [4] And Ahab came into his house heavy and displeased,” he pouted, and he was kind of a mousey type so he got his wife to do his dirty work, Jezebel, and she did, she wound up knocking off Naboth. And so the long and the short of it is that the vineyard finally wound up in the government’s hands, without just compensation. So 1 Kings 21 is again a classic text to use to show, in our arguments as Bible-believing Christian, against the position of emanate domain, and we argue in the name of Scripture.

Now finally, lest this be considered a quirk in the Mosaic Law, let’s look at a passage that has reference to the future, in the millennial kingdom; Ezekiel 46:18, here is Ezekiel’s norms and standards. “Moreover, the prince shall not take of the people’s inheritance by oppression, to thrust them out of their possession, but he shall give his sons inheritance out of his own possession, that my people be not scattered every man from his possession.” That’s the point of the Mosaic Law, interpreted in the context it’s saying government ought not to intrude by the doctrine of emanate domain against private owners because private owners derive their ownership, not from the state in the first place, they derive their ownership from God, and therefore if the government intrudes in the situation the government must take the place of God.

And you can argue, given our situation in our society, what are you going to do about it? Well, we can’t do anything about it; namely we’re stuck. Government today says emanate domain so we’re here and we have to accept it. But in accepting it let’s also understand to the degree that we’ve accepted it, to that degree the government has become god in its own eyes, because that’s a corollary. Okay, go ahead and accept emanate domain, but you also therefore ought to accept that we have an idolatrous state. There’s no middle position that I can see possible on the basis of Scripture. So now we find this about basic ownership. We find it’s derivative; we find that it’s the source of freedom; we find that it’s familial, that is it carries in the family.

Now let’s go to another section on finances and money, and go to what we will call safeguards in the ownership of property. God has certain safeguards that He has built into the system to protect freedom by protecting property transaction. The first one, Deuteronomy 19:14; we have the reference, “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbor’s landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance,” there’s that capital again. And so we would say the landmark was what, in modern terms; it’s a legal record, it’s a title deed to the property. And so therefore the first thing that God’s Word insists is necessary for freedom and orderly society is legal repository that is untouchable by man; a protective legal repository where property title deeds can be kept and kept secure. So if you were to start a new society on a desert island tonight and looking to the Mosaic Law for wisdom, one thing you’d have to make provision for is the provision for legal records. That’s one provision, it’s very obvious, it’s very clear from Scripture.

But now there’s another provision in Scripture for private property and freedom that is not so obvious and it’s not so clear. Turn to Leviticus 19:35-37. “Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in measure of length, in weight, or in quantity. [36] Just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin, shall ye have: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. [37] Therefore shall you observe all My statutes, and all Mine judgments, and do them; I am Jehovah.” The point is, the second provision besides legal records is just weights and measures, or we would say just standard of value. In order to trade we must have some standard of reference, some measuring stick. And if you don’t have a measuring stick in society you then have chaos and disorder.

So therefore a just weight and measure was important. This was noticed in the medieval times in the time of the Reformation. Martin Luther said, when he examined this: “A just weight and a just measure should be preserved in the community so that a poor person, and one’s neighbor, are not cheated. This also has general validity for all exchanges of all contracts that the seller give just and equitable wares for the money of the buyer. Here greed knows unbelievable injustices and tricks in changing, cheapening, imitating, and adulterating merchandise. Therefore it is no small part of the concern of government to have an eye here to the common good.”

Now here’s where the government does have a legitimate area to police and that is maintaining the standards of value. The standards of value, always, when warped, hurt the poorest people worst. For example turn to Amos 8:4-8. We flip back and forth because these prophets are commenting upon the Mosaic Law. “Hear this, O ye that swallow up the needy, even to make the poor of the land to fail, [5] Saying, When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, that we may set forth wheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying the balances by deceit? You see, the prophet [can’t understand word] against this practice of tampering with the society’s standards of values. Why? Verse 6, “That we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes; yea, and sell the refuse of the wheat?” In other words, the poor people wind up getting faked out, that’s what happens, and they’re always the ones who fall victim. Your lower middle class people and your poor people always bear the brunt when you mix and tamper in inflating currency and so on, which we’ll show you this is indeed what’s talked about.

On the way back to the Mosaic Law stop off at Isaiah 1:22, this is the classic text that shows that inflation is sin. I once mentioned this to a certain well known Congressman and he said hmm, I’ve never read that before in the Scripture; many, many years in the United States Congress and had never discovered that the classic Christian position on inflation was that it was sin. And I can well understand and sympathize with the man, trained as he was in some liberal church. “Thy silver has become dross, thy wine mixed with water.” That is a sin.

Now let’s examine what Isaiah has just said and watch how pertinent it is. “Thy silver has become dross,” what was the silver; they didn’t have silver coins, necessarily, the shekel, yes, but basically they measured silver out by weight. And so what they would do is they were putting tin with it to make the scales balance. In effect, they were debasing the coinage of the time. They were debasing the currency, so that now, say we had a dollar’s worth of silver, after we fix it up with a little tin and take away the silver and put it in the next dollar, basically what we have is seventy-five cents but we’re still going around and we’re calling the seventy-five cent piece a buck, but it’s only really worth seventy-five cents. We have had currency debasement. And that’s what Isaiah is arguing is a sin.

But then he goes on to say the corollary to this is that your wine is mixed with water. Now this always happens in an inflating economy, because here’s the merchant who knows, here’s his wine, the guy is selling wine. Of course, the Christians never buy wine, and this is bad wine, it’s seventy-five cents. So he goes and he buys this thing and he knows that the guy that’s handing him the buck is only handing him seventy-five cents, so if you’re the merchant and you’re selling the wine, what are you going protect yourself; you can’t make the jar any smaller so what you do is you add water and you try to balance it out, give him only seventy-five cents worth of wine. So everything is nice, you still have the same size bottle, you still have the buck. Only one problem, we’ve had a complete faith transaction, haven’t we. And God calls that sin. Now it doesn’t require but just a trip to the grocery store to see the same thing happening right here, and not just the grocery store, any store, because the merchants are trapped in it themselves.

But God says it’s a sin, and why is it a sin? You remember the passage in Amos 8; the reason it is a sin—because people can’t make choices if the balances are wrong; can they? You see, every time you tamper with weights and measures you introduce chaos in an economic system. And you have a businessman who’s trying to measure his performance in 1967 with his performance in 1977. Now how can he measure his performance? Because he’s got a dollar bill of 1977, he knows it doesn’t meet the dollar bill of 1967. Well how much does it? Well, he can try some statistical model but frankly it’s very hard to evaluate what a 1967 dollar is. It’s not just a simple trick that you go to a computer and ask for a model for an average valuation. The price index, for example, that is just a statistic itself. You have introduced chaos. So here a businessman is trying to plan his business and he can’t plan his business any more. Why? Because he has to figure the fudge factor.

Now what happens? Before you had an inflating economy the businessman could concentrate on one thing—selling his goods. Now what does he businessman, the successful one have to do? Figure out what the government is going to do. So basically you have a politicalization of your businessman, don’t you? Your most successful businessman now is no longer the man that sells quality goods, he’s the man who can second guess what the government is going to do. So you have a deterioration in your production. Production is not now the number one thing because with inflation I can’t produce and make a profit unless I figure out what the local Mount Sinai is going to decree in the next five minutes and if I can figure out the new Ten Commandments then I can fudge my business and work it up for that. If I’m a businessman today and I’m worried about the government coming in with price controls what am I going to do? I’m going to jack my prices as high as I can and then give rebates to everybody, so if the government comes in and says oh-oh, freeze your price, okay, fine, I freeze it right up there. But meanwhile till the government puts in price controls I’m giving rebates out and effect setting my price at a lower level.

Well, why do you have to go through all this trickery and all the bookkeeping and all the rest? Because we’ve introduced chaos into the system. God says it is sin. And that’s what’s wrong. That’s one reason why we are tripping all over ourselves economically. Inflation: so, it is a violation of God’s Word to adjust weights and measures. Now here’s the ironic thing of it all. As we went through this so far tonight we stressed that the family is divine institution number three, the family is the one that [can’t understand word]. What did we say was the one thing government was supposed to do? It was to hold the standard of value and in our day the perversity is such that that’s the one thing the government doesn’t do, is hold the standard of value; it’s exactly the government that’s decreeing, the power of the people, that want an adjusted standard. Like someone said, if we want a new building, if we were to follow the mandate of modern political thought there’s an easy way to get a bigger building for Lubbock Bible Church, we just change the yardstick, and now all of a sudden we have lots of extra square feet. So you see, it’s very simple, by a simple fiat decree you increase your wealth, and that’s exactly what the government’s doing. Same thing, just changing the size of the yardstick and all of a sudden, look at that, we’ve got lots of dollars now, go out and invest them.

All right, so the safeguards were two in the Old Testament, for private ownership. One was the landmark and legal records; the second was just weights and measures. Without these we could have no freedom.

Now lest one think that I’m just out on a tangent, reading too much of Gary North or something, let’s go back in the history of our country, when the Constitution was being written and go back to one of the great Bible teaching Christians who was in and a signer of the United States Constitution, Rev. John Witherspoon. He lived from 1723-1794 he was a few other things besides a minister, he happened to be President of Princeton University, he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a member of the Continental Congress, a philosopher, theologian, economist and Presbyterian leader. His students included many members of the Constitutional Convention and in the federal union. His students included one President, one Vice President, ten cabinet officers, twelve Governors, twenty-one Senators, thirty-nine Congressmen. Outside of that he didn’t have much of a ministry. Now of course, John Witherspoon is never mentioned in our secularist humanist history texts, because we can’t have religion interfering with the government, we’re neutral today.

But John Witherspoon did not believe in that doctrine of neutrality. John Witherspoon taught the Word of God to his students and deeply influenced them. He wrote a tract; his tract was called An Essay on Money, and it was the classic reference of colonial times. And he was attacking the concept of paper money because of Isaiah 1:22. He said that if America permits paper money to become fiat currency, America must go to an inflating economy. He didn’t have the gift of prophecy. He just was a wise man. And that’s exactly what’s happened. The issue of Witherspoon’s day was should the government and should the Congress issue paper money?

All right, said Witherspoon, fine, issue your paper money. I have no problem with your paper money, just don’t print this on it: [he writes something on overhead] If you leave that off, go ahead and print your paper money because if you print your paper money and you come to me and I don’t like what’s happening to that paper money I can refuse it. But the moment you put “legal tender” on a piece of paper you compel me by government power to accept your funny money, and this again unloads the balances of freedom. So this is an excellent, excellent essay, the Essay on Money, long before 1977, right back at the foundation of our country he called the shots exactly. Why? Because he was an unusually brilliant man? He was an unusually brilliant man but that’s not why he was right. He was right because he caught a wisdom principle from Scripture.

So much for the safeguards which we’ve knocked over today, basically, in our lust for wealth, and let’s go to the concept of indebtedness. Let’s turn to Exodus 22:25, the Christian man and debt. We have to be very careful here because it is here that the Church got off historically. In Exodus 22:25 we read, “If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor among you, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury. [26] If thou at all take thy neighbor’s raiment to pledge, thou shalt deliver it unto him by the time that the sun goes down.”

So one of the points here is no usury, and over the many, many centuries of Christendom, you don’t hear much about this today, there were anti usury laws. These led, eventually, to anti-Semitism. Here’s what happened. The Church interpreted the Mosaic legislation as saying you could not lend money at interest. Well, obviously you’re not going to get too much money if you don’t lend it at interest, if you don’t borrow it at interest. So the question was that during the Middle Ages who was going to do the money lending? Well, the Roman Catholic Church saw to it that no Christians would do the money lending, so guess who was left? The Jews. And the Jews were forced into the banking business by the anti usury laws of the Roman Catholic Church. And so obviously the Jews were the bankers, nobody else wanted to be one. And so the Jews came to accumulate money and of course they had the only capital of the day and they became very wealthy, and thus it was that it was the Jews who financed Columbus’ trip and then later were thrown out in the Spanish Inquisition. Out with the Jews that accumulated wealth in one country after another and them somebody came up ahhh, the Jews [can’t understand words]. Well, of course they [can’t understand words] the Christians are stupid they didn’t read their own Scriptures; the Jews knew the Mosaic Law better than the Christians did. After all, it was written in Hebrew.

So what happened then? We had the anti usury laws? How did they get started? Because in the Mosaic Law it said zero interest percent loans; that looks like sure it’s anti usury laws. And there’s a number of other passages we could cite, Leviticus 25, there’s a section in it, and Deuteronomy 23, there’s another section. We could cite these as evidence, as the medieval Christians did, that the Christian is not to buy and sell money. Incidentally, one footnote here, this proves to you that the Mosaic Law was being used as norm for the Christian life, not in the sense of the Christians under the Law, but in the sense that it was used as a repository of daily wisdom. You would never have had the anti usury laws if that had not been the case, all during the centuries of the medieval period. That’s why our humanist friends love to refer to the Middle Ages as the dark age; the dark age means to them that when the Word of God was trying to be applied, incorrectly but trying.

So we have zero percent interest loans, but now here was the difference. Calvin, and the Reformation came to these passages and they said now just a minute, let’s look at these laws again and see what the problem is. And Calvin recognized that there was a difference between commercial loans, loans given to foreigners and the loans that were charity loans. So now in exegesis a change developed. Charity loans versus commercial loans. Let’s see the Scriptural text for this; turn to Deuteronomy 23:19; the question is: is usury ever permitted in Scripture, and the answer is yes it is. “Thou shalt not lend upon usury [interest] to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury. [20] Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury [but unto thy brother shalt thou not lend upon usury]…” Now why would a stranger need money? Because he was a traveling businessman. This man is [can’t understand word], and Calvin notice this and he said ah, here’s the solution to the problem, the Mosaic Law all along was not saying against usury; these were charitable loans to poor people. You weren’t giving the money to them but what you were doing is you were loaning the money for nothing to them, so the amount of your gift was the amount of the interest, and at that time it was twenty or thirty percent on a loan. So that was how you were able to give funds to poor people. You’d give the capital, they’d pay you back the capital but they don’t have to pay you back the interest.

But then, these loans with interest were made to foreigners, and here are your business loans. The proof that this was permitted is that Jesus Christ Himself permitted usury by His use of the parable of Matthew 25:27. So if Jesus Christ is permitting usury then the medieval period was wrong; they took the Mosaic Law too far. As Calvin said, he said he didn’t like interest but he said if I look at the text I can’t honestly prohibit commercial loans. He said I do not dare to pronounce upon so important a point more than God’s words convey. And Calvin broke a tradition that had been instilled for almost a thousand years. It was a revolutionary break and that was one reason why the Reformation suddenly released capitalism, why now we had commercial loans being made, and why men could now build up their business. It’s not wrong biblically for you to engage in a commercial loan. So we hope that we’ve freed up that point.

There are, however, two restrictions of common sense on loans in the Scripture. One, Deuteronomy 15:1; in Deuteronomy 15:1-6, “At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release. [2] And this is the manner of the release: every creditor that lends anything unto his neighbor, shall release it; he shall not exact if of his neighbor, or of his brother, because it is called the LORD’s release. [3] Of a foreigner you may exact it again, but that which is thine with thy brother, thine hand shall release.” What’s that talking about? Well, every six years we have this seventh year in which we have a release of all loans. So let’s suppose you loaned some guy $1,000 on year two, and he paid back, after year three, four, five and six, and by the sixth year he had paid you back about $850 of that original thousand dollar loan. This meant in the seventh year you just lost $150, because you could not collect on any outstanding loans. It cut off at the end of six years.

Now what do you suppose that did to the money market? Well, if you’re going to lose $150 what are you going to do to your loan? You’re going to decrease your loan so it could be paid off in six years, aren’t you. So what you have is the Word of God determining economic structure of a society and a completely different money market resulted from Mosaic legislation where usury applied. And what net effect did this have. Limited indebtedness. That meant no matter where you go you couldn’t get over a certain amount that you could pay back in six years. And I think Dr. North is right in suggesting that the reason for this is that no creature knows enough to forecast the economic climate more than six years ahead of time. And therefore six years is about the maximum that you could make a good business projection, at least good enough to have a quantitative loan. So in the Old Testament loans were limited as to their time and therefore as to their amounts.

But there was another limitation. Deuteronomy 24:10, “When you lend your bother anything, you shalt not go into his house to fetch his collateral [pledge]. [11] You will stand outside, and the man to whom thou hast lent shall bring out the collateral to you. [12] And if the man be poor, you will not sleep with his collateral. [13] In any case, you will deliver him the collateral again when the sun goes down that he may sleep in his own raiment and bless thee; and it shall be righteousness unto thee before the LORD thy God.” Now what’s all that about? It’s how the loan is secured; the collateral on the loan, what do you give the lender so that if you don’t pay back he confiscates to get his money back. In this case you’ve got a man reduced to poverty and what is said? Here’s his last coat, and that’s all he’s got as collateral. He gives the guy the coat during the daytime, but at night he gets the coat back.

What’s the principle there? At night the banks are closed, and he can’t take the collateral down to bank B and then Bank C and Bank D and take out another loan on the same collateral, and take out another loan on the same collateral, and take out another loan on the same collateral, and have four loans against the one coat. That’s called multiple indebtedness, and that’s prohibited by the Mosaic Law. Now it doesn’t require a genius to realize that the entire fractional reserve banking system in the United States and Europe violates this principle, because banks are multiply indebted. If everyone of you wanted to go down and get your money out of the savings bank I’d like to see them give it to you, because they’ve loaned it over and above and on top; three or four people have gotten your dollar. That’s why we generate a lot of money, because the fractional reserve, that means the bank is only required to keep a fraction of that which you’ve given it. You can’t get all your money at the bank at once because it’s not there, it’s been lent out and the bank is gambling on enough of us won’t go down and get our money out of the bank because if we all do the bank goes down. But there’s a risk factor. So we have fractional reserve banking as multiple indebtedness, violating the economic wisdom of the Mosaic Law. So this is a second restriction on loans in the Old Testament.

All right, what’s the gist of all this indebtedness? It’s simple—don’t get head over heels in debt. That’s all it’s saying; it’s not saying that you can’t get indebted for things; there are obvious ways, we don’t live in Israel today and so we come out of families with low capital. So how’s a couple to get their house except mortgage. That’s the only way you can get it. You’ve got to it that way. But as we do this, let’s keep saying to ourselves theologically, that’s because we are not really as free as we think we are. The house that is mortgaged is owned by the bank, not us. And there’s a mentality about the way you treat your goods; if you’re making car payments on a car, the Scripturally speaking if you don’t own that car, then you’d better treat it like it’s the banks and not yours. And keep thinking that, and it will guard you and protect you against getting over extended in debt. Just say to yourself, who owns this thing; if I’m making payments on it I don’t own it, somebody else does, and I’d better have that very, very realistic view of my money and my assets.

Again, it is not wrong, we’ve had some men in the congregation in the past who have gotten hold of this thing and they’ve gotten so squeaky about going in debt that they won’t go into debt at all. And the result is their business doesn’t expand and they can’t do anything because they’re being over restrictive in the use of the principle. That’s not the point. The Mosaic Law allows you to get in debt; it’s just saying go easy, that’s all. It’s very simple.

Now, final topic on the use of funds is the Lord’s claim in these funds. Now don’t worry, we’re not conducting a pledge campaign; this is not going to be any card-signing affair, but we have to confront the fact that if we are only derivative owners of funds then God must have something to do with it.

So let’s conclude with some principles of Scriptural giving in the New Testament. Turn to 2 Corinthians 8, again I did not design this for the benefit of the music program, it just turned out that way, one of those Calvinist accidents. Now let’s look at some common sense principles about giving. 2 Corinthians 8:9, which I often quote in the service, speaks of the ultimate source of ownership. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be rich.” He starts theocentricly and works down from God’s ownerships to man. God owned Christ. Christ owned His life, but He graciously used His life. And Paul says that is a model of the Christian use of his possessions. Notice how Christ used His possessions and then you’ll know how to use yours.

Now 2 Corinthians 8:12, another principle, there are many, many more principles in this passage, this is not an exegesis, this is just a survey. In verse 12, “If there first be a willing mind, it is accepted according t that which a man has, and not according to that which he has not.” Now just look at that. See, that’s why often times in the offertory I’ll say that it’s the tangible and the intangible assets; that when we come to that point in the service of offering, it is a mental attitude issue; it is how am I using my resources. It might just be the intangible things of my talent. It might just be that. Some of you have great musical talent and you’re not using it. Some of you have managerial talent; you’re not using it on your job, you’re not using it in Christian work, you’re just not using it. Many of you can do things but you’ve talked yourself into saying you can’t do them. You’re defeated; of course you’re defeated, you can’t do it because you’ve talked yourself into defeat before you got off the starting line.

Now, what this is talking about is God is looking at the mental attitude. If there be first a willing mind, a mind that will use the possession scripturally, then God says I’m not asking you to take what you can’t afford, that’s not the point. The point is, if you could afford it would you give it? That’s the point; it goes back to mental attitude.

Then he goes on to describe in 2 Corinthians 8:19 the careful administration of funds. One of the worst things that a pastor can get involved in in church work and it’s a downfall of many men in the ministry, and that is get involved directly with the money. And I vowed when I became pastor of this church I’d never… all the money I want to see is my paycheck, period. If the funds are low, so the funds are low and I don’t get my paycheck, but the point remains that’s the only money I want, period. And I don’t want to see the money, I don’t want to be involved in the records of it and we have always had fine men in charge of our finances. Our finance committee is one of the best well-run committees in this congregation and it always has been over the years because we’ve always had men on that committee were sticklers for details, who were very conservative in their disposition and use of funds, and therefore this church has always run in the black… always ran in the black, never in debt. And it’s because of the fine men who have always steered the congregation properly. It’s a background thankless job, most people see [?] get up and walk out and they see [?] signing a sheet, and the one who gives the finance report in the annual meeting, but you don’t realize the hours and hours that go on, them and other men who work with them in watching where the funds go. Have you ever tried to balance your own checkbook? Try the churches.

All right, these are some of the areas of funds from 2 Corinthians. Now in Phil 4 there’s another passage on giving. Notice the tithe is not mentioned in the New Testament and the reason it is not mentioned in the New Testament is because it doesn’t apply. The tithe was a sixth tax under the economy of the state of Israel, 10% and more, in fact it amounted to 30% at times. And in the New Testament it’s on a grace basis, church age, and in Phil 4:10, “I rejoiced in the Lord greatly,” remember this is the incident we talked about this morning, “I rejoiced in the Lord greatly that now t last your care of me has flourished again; of which you were careful [mindful], but you lacked opportunity. [11] Not that I speak in respect of want;” now there is the context, notice, for that one that Christians always quote, “for I have learned in whatever state I am, in this to be content.” See, the original context is a financial problem. Paul was making tents down in Corinth and he couldn’t preach the Word like he wanted to and it was frustrating him, he had to do this tent business, and he could only teach the Scriptures on Saturday in the synagogue, and it bugged him. But he had to learn to be content. And that’s what he means in verse 12, “I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound; everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.” And that’s where he said, [13] “I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.”

Now they did give money to him. So what does he say? Philippians 4:16-17, “For even in Thessalonica you sent once and again unto my necessity. [17] Not because I desired a gift; but I desire fruit that may abound to your account.” Now look at that; those are financial words in the original language. It’s talking about an account with God, and what he’s saying is that your disposition of funds on earth has a counterpart to records in heaven; that God is concerned with funds; He is concerned with how you use those funds, that they not be unwisely used. And therefore we gain credit or we gain condemnation for how we have used them.

And then of course he concludes in Philippians 4:18, it was “…an odor of a sweet smell, a sacrifice acceptable, well-pleasing to God.” And act of Christian financial giving is called a sacrifice, and one need not be an expert in the Old Testament to catch significantly and immediately what that says. A sacrifice was a form of worship. And what he has just said is the disposition of funds can be a private act of worship between you and God. At the moment that you give, whatever the organization may be, you are actually worshipping God because you are affirming the derivative nature of ownership. At that point you’re acknowledging, yes God, I am a creature and I acknowledge you as the ultimate owner of all my assets.

Finally, the Scriptures warn us about not giving. Let’s turn to 2 John 1:10, “If there come any of you and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him Godspeed, [11] For he that bids him Godspeed is a partaker of his evil deeds.” Do you know what that’s telling us? Don’t support apostate ministries or you participate. If we are right in our logic, that giving is an act of worship, then giving to an apostate organization is an act of worship also. And John says be very careful, check out that to which you are giving.

Finally, a last principle in 3 John 7, John says that they went forth and they were dependent financially on other people. “Because that for His name’s sake they went forth,” now notice, “taking nothing of the Gentiles.” Just like Abraham, who took nothing of Melchizedek or the blessing. Why? Because only believers are to give. And that’s why you will often hear at that point in the offering, that I say if you have personally accepted Christ then it’s your privilege to give. If you’re here this morning or this evening and have not accepted Christ, the issue is not you giving a thing, the issue is you receiving Christ. And that is the reflection of this theology. Nowhere ought the Christian to be soliciting in the name of the Lord non-Christian funds. Now if Christians want to indebt themselves to non-Christians, that’s all right, but don’t do it in the name of the Lord; label it for what it is, it’s a business transaction, a cold pragmatic business transaction. Financing by charity and grace, however, is a ministry for believers and only believers.

We’ve covered ownership, we’ve seen its basis in freedom. We’ve covered some of the safeguards to ownership. We’ve covered indebtedness, and we’ve covered giving. Those of you interested in reading further, there are a number of books that I could suggest in the library; one of them is a book put out by Larry Burkett, Your Finances in Changing Times. Another one would be Dr. Gary North’s Introduction to Christian Economics. And another one would be Rousas J. Rushdoony’s book Institutes of Biblical Law, the section on laws and usury.