Property, Tithing, and Taxes. Acts
Stealing is what happens
under socialism. It is what happens when a person does not have the right to
determine what to do with their own productivity. It is what happens when a
government comes in and abuses their authority of taxation by taking that which
it has not produced and is engaged in a social experiment to redistribute
wealth. “You shall not steal” recognizes that there is the right to private ownership
of property.
Then the tenth commandment,
Exodus 20:17 NASB “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or his male servant or his female servant
or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
This focuses on a mental attitude of jealousy and envy and lust for what is not
yours. This we see in a number of different movements like “Occupy Wall Street.”
While they are out on the street accusing and being critical of corporations
for their “excessive greed,” on the other hand they want all student loans to
be wiped out. Well that is just their form of greed. They just want to
substitute their form of greed for the form of greed that they perceive to be
in various corporations. It is just one form of evil fighting another form of
evil, one form of greed fighting another form of greed; and neither is
righteous.
We go to the parables not to look at what
the message of the parable was at the time that Jesus gave it, but as He gives
the parable He is validating certain economic practices and principles. That is
what we are looking at. Luke 20:9 NASB “And He began to tell the
people this parable: ‘A man planted a vineyard and rented it out to
vine-growers, and went on a journey for a long time.
Luke
So we pick a few principles and an
illustration here of what covetousness is. It is envy. Taking something that isn’t
ours, something that we haven’t earned.
The validity of wealth accumulation: the
validity if not the righteousness of wealth accumulation with no limits. Think
about that. How many times have we heard that it is okay to make a couple of
million dollars or twenty million or thirty million, but if you are making
20-billion or 30-billion that is just too much money? Who has the right to say
that? What human being has the right to limit another person’s ability to
produce? Because that is what it is. Somebody who is
smart enough and talented enough to produce something that is valuable to the
rest of the human race and to make unbelievable amounts of money, ought to reap
the rewards of their work. Each one has the right to enjoy everything that they
produce, except for that which is legitimately taxed.
Proverbs
The idea that is often heard today: We
want everybody to pay their fair share. Fair share does not mean that the more
you have the more you give in taxes. That is not fair; that is not righteous,
according to the biblical standard; that is unrighteous; that is theft on a
biblical basis.
The divine viewpoint on this is that
property was to be accumulated over the generations, so that one generation
would pass on more property, more wealth to the next generation. What does this
develop? This develops and provides for the next generation and the generation
after that to go through a prosperity test. We know, sadly, that no group of people
and no culture has really passed the prosperity test.
But that is what this was for, to put them in a position where they were
prosperous. Why was that a test? Because the second greatest command in the
Torah was to love your neighbour as yourself. You can’t give if you have
nothing. If you have much wealth then you have much to give, and so it becomes
a test of generosity, a test of grace. So with wealth comes the prosperity test,
and with that comes the test of grace and of compassion for those who are less
fortunate.
Sometimes people may be less fortunate
because they have made bad decisions, they have been lazy, irresponsible. Is
that a reason not to extend grace to them? Sometimes we talk like it means
that. That wasn’t a reason for God not to extend grace to any of us! There is a
line that we have to draw between what we see in the Scripture and being
responsibly helping people and irresponsibly helping people. But helping people
who will still abuse our help is not a reason to not help them. That is clear
from Scripture.
2 Corinthians 12:14 NASB “Here
for this third time I am ready to come to you, and I will not be a burden to
you; for I do not seek what is yours, but you; for children are not responsible
to save up for {their} parents, but parents for {their} children.” The economic
principle there is that it is the responsibility of the parents to set aside
wealth that is later passed on to the children. It is not the responsibility of
the children to go out there and have a good job so that they can take care of
you in your senior years. It is great when that happens but that is not the
standard of Scripture. The standard of Scripture is that we should so
responsibly use what God gives us and save that we are not a burden to our
children but, in fact, when it is all over with they have been blessed with
extra.
Tithing, the
limited safety net. When we look at how culture was in
biblical times, when we look at the Mosaic Law at that time there was a certain
vulnerability that widows and orphans had that men did not have. So God provides
for them, and He does this through the tithe. There were three different tithes
in the Old Testament. The tithe was basically a tax system in the Mosaic Law to
provide for the needs of the nation. So it recognizes the legitimacy of a
nation to tax the citizens a certain amount. But a tithe was a flat tax, ten
per cent for everybody whether a person was poor or filthy rich. That is
righteous by God’s standard.
If we say we need to have a progressive
tax system and the rich should pay more percentage-wise than the poor, that is
unrighteous according to the Word of God, foolish, and it is destructive to a
nation, the poor in the nation and the people in the nation. Because it teaches
people who have less to be dependent upon those who have more and it destroys their
pride, their self-esteem and their desire to labor
and work for that which is theirs. But God did recognize that there was a need
to have a minimal safety net.
Deuteronomy 26:12 NASB “When
you have finished paying all the tithe of your increase in the third year, the
year of tithing, then you shall give it to the Levite, to the stranger, to the
orphan and to the widow, that they may eat in your towns and be satisfied.” This
was a tithe that was taken up every third year. It was a tithe that was to be
given to the Levite because he had no possession in the land. The stranger is
the alien, the immigrant, the non-Jewish resident within the land; the orphans,
those whose fathers had been killed in war or had died from disease. In that
culture the father provided everything, the women did not necessarily produce. The
widow was sometimes left destitute. Sometimes they had property, but notice it
is not making a distinction here between the fatherless that have property, the
widow that had property and those who didn’t. The assumption from the text is
that without this they wouldn’t eat, so this is distributed to those who
otherwise would not eat. So there is a minimal safety net there.
Deuteronomy
The next two tithes were taken every year.
Numbers
In today’s governmental world the role of
the Levites was that they were the government workers. They were the ones who
took care of the theocracy. God was the ultimate authority over the nation and
the place from which He administered His rule was the tabernacle. Those who
took care of the tabernacle and who stood as the intermediaries between God and
the people were the Levites, and so they were worthy of pay and earning an
income from their work. That was the purpose of this tithe.
Deuteronomy
Party time! Every year they were going to
take ten per cent of their gross national product. Think about this. One year
you are having a party: the finest wine, the finest prime beef that money could
buy. Everything is cooked by the finest chefs. Ten yeas later you are eating
stringy old chicken, the vegetables are overcooked, the cooks that are there
haven’t done it much, and the wine is a little flat. This is a visual example
that something has changed. What has happened? What caused that? This is the
real concrete example that when the Israelites were obedient to God, God would
bless them and they would have this enormous party and were not going into debt
for it. They weren’t spending money they didn’t have.
So one tithe went to support the theocracy
or the bureaucracy, one tithe went to have a party every year, and then one
tithe was taken every third year to take care of the widows, the orphans, the stranger
and the Levites. One principle we learn about taxation is that for taxation to
be fair or to be righteous it had to be an equal percentage; it was a flat-rate
tax.
Does that mean that today it would be
wrong to have a consumption tax, like a sales tax, instead of other things?
That is not necessarily the right conclusion, but it is the right conclusion
that a progressive income tax where the more money you make the higher percentage
of tax you pay is unjust and unfair. And to turn it around and say that it is
unjust for the rich, or those who are so-called rich, should pay the same as a
poor person pays and say that is unrighteous is exactly the condemnation that
the later prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel—came long and said would happen.
People were coming along and calling good bad and bad good. They reversed the
polarities of what is right and wrong. And that is exactly what we see in this
nation—people at government level and all over, demagogues saying that we need
to tax the rich more. On the basis of what the Hebrew Scripture says that is
unrighteous and it is evil, and it will lead to the
destruction of a nation.
So we see that God had a minimal safety
net in terms of the tithe, but the primary safety net is personal
responsibility and personal compassion. The basic principle for this is laid
down in Leviticus 19:18. They were to love their neighbour as themselves. It
was the responsibility of each citizen in
Deuteronomy 15:7 recognizes this
principle. NASB “If there is a poor man with you, one of your
brothers, in any of your towns in your land which the LORD
your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart, nor close your hand
from your poor brother;
What is the principle? It is not a free handout. They have to get up, go out and work for it. They are still working for what they are given. So the principle in Deuteronomy 15:7, 8 doesn’t mean you can’t put some stipulations on the gift that you are giving to help somebody.