Dennis Tuuri

Deuteronomy 15:1-18. Deuteronomy 15 verses 1-8. If you’re taking notes, other passages which we will allude to but not look at specifically will be Exodus 21 verse 2 and following, Exodus 22:25 and following, and Leviticus 25:36 and following. We’ll now read Deuteronomy 15:1-18.

At the end of every seven years, you shall grant a remission of debts. And this is the manner of remission. Every creditor shall release what he has loaned to his neighbor. He shall not exact it of his neighbor and his brother because the Lord’s remission has been proclaimed. From a foreigner you may exact it, but your hand shall release whatever of yours is with your brother.

However, there shall be no poor among you, since the Lord will surely bless you in the land which the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, if only you listen obediently to the voice of the Lord your God, to carefully observe all the commandments which I am commanding you today. For the Lord your God shall bless you as he has promised you, and you will lend to many nations, which you will not borrow, and you will rule over many nations, but they will not rule over you.

If there is a poor man among you, with you, one of your brothers, in any of your towns, in your land, which the Lord your God has given you, you shall not harden your heart, nor close your hand from your poor brother. But you shall freely open your hand to him, and shall generously lend him sufficient for his need in whatever he lacks.

Beware, lest there is a base thought in your heart, saying, “The seventh year, the year of remission, is near, and your eye is hostile toward your poor brother and you give him nothing. Then he may cry to the Lord against you and it will be a sin in you. You shall generously give to him, and your heart shall not be grieved when you give to him. Because for this thing the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all your undertakings.

For the poor will never cease to be in the land. Therefore I command you, saying, you shall freely open your hand to your brother, to your needy, and poor in your land. If your kinsman, a Hebrew man or woman is sold to you, then he shall serve you six years, but in the seventh year you shall set him free. When you set him free, you shall not send him away empty-handed.

You shall furnish him liberally from your flock and from your threshing floor and from your wine vat. You shall give to him as the Lord your God has blessed you. And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you. Therefore, I command you this day.

And it shall come about if he says to you, I will not go out from you because he loves you and your household since he fares well with you. Then you shall take an awl and pierce it through his ear into the door and he shall be your servant forever. And also you shall do likewise to your maidservant. It shall not seem hard to you when you set him free, for he has given you six years with double the service of a hired man. So the Lord your God will bless you in whatever you do.

Let’s pray. Almighty God, we thank you for your scriptures. We thank you for the gift of the Holy Spirit given to us in the basis of Christ’s doings of which this day is the memorial. We pray now Lord God that we would be sensitive to the spirit as he teaches us from your scriptures things of you. Help us, Father, to have open hearts to your scriptures, open minds to understand those things and open hands to act in obedience to them. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

Today’s message will conclude the series of messages we began some months back, several months ago, dealing with the poor and God’s provision for the poor as discovered in the scriptures. I thought it appropriate on this last Sunday of that series of messages to sing “Bringing in the Sheaves,” which of course is the title of George Grant’s book that really kind of got us going to a certain degree on some of this thinking several months ago with the publication of that book.

We’ve attempted for the last few weeks to several months actually to understand what’s taught in our relationship to the poor, to understand that these are covenantal truths we’re putting into practice. We have covenant grace given to us, and we’re to extend covenant grace and life-giving grace to those around us who are destitute and to certain groups such as the widow, the fatherless, and the strangers that we’ve talked about in months past.

Hopefully, at this point in time, you’re beginning to implement some of the things we’ve talked about in terms of a tithe box perhaps in your home or some method of utilizing that portion of your tithe which is to be used for the fatherless, the widow, and the stranger. Hopefully, you’re thinking of inviting in people to our love feast, our communion table after the preaching service on Sunday, who again meet those qualifications of fatherless, widow, stranger, and the poor that they may rejoice with us in the gifts of God and his plenty.

And hopefully last week you were encouraged to begin to think through what gleanable resources you have around your home or perhaps in your workplace that you could put to use for those people who are poor in the land and again widows, fatherless, and strangers to work—working charity as it were. Gleanable resources that would have us reduce our level of profit and yet be a means of providing other people work that they can eat.

Now today we conclude the discussion of the poor loan as it’s called. And before we do that, I thought of one comment on last week when we talked about gleaning. We talked about the principle of gleaning, what is involved in it and God’s law, what’s required of us, and then we compared gleaning to Hands Across America and we saw the benefits of gleaning as opposed to a humanistic program such as Hands Across America.

Remember I tried to point out there that there are several fallacies in Hands Across America that are going to be real problems for us as this thing gets worked out. The whole aim, I think, is consciousness raising. That’s the whole purpose—a rising consciousness toward the end that people would lobby politically for more federal involvement in charity programs. Ninety billion a year which we spend on those sort of transfer payments isn’t enough apparently. We need more money to be spent on those things—money that has been taken coercively with the sword from people who are hardworking to give to people who may not want to work at all and yet supposedly have a right to food.

We talked about that. That’s one of the things you want to watch for with this whole development of Hands Across America—the political ramifications of it. We talked about the fact that government egalitarian poverty programs are geared around the fact that everybody has a right to food. And we warned you last week about the term “right to life,” correlating that with what could be said about “right to food” because food is a necessary component of life.

We quoted from an interview with John Lofton and Gene Kruppert about that, where she said that she’d be a good conservative, yet she says that in America, we shouldn’t let anybody go hungry even if they don’t want to work. Well, Howard L. brought an editorial out of the Oregonian, Wednesday, May 28th, a couple of days after Hands Across America, written by David Sarasone, “Hands Across Reagan, a Better Idea.” And he stresses just what we talked about. He says we’ve got to get the federal government involved more. That’s the proper purview. We’ve got to spend more money on these programs, more egalitarian charity programs.

And he says, not only is private giving not really enough and can’t take care of the job, he says it shouldn’t even be in the hands of private charity groups to begin with. And why? He says the problem with relying on private actions against hunger is not simply that it doesn’t work, but that it shouldn’t be necessary. It shouldn’t even be necessary to have private charity involved in helping the poor.

Why? He says feeding people—private charity can do certain things such as supporting churches, buying a museum, buying Oregon State a fullback. But feeding people is something else. Eating is generally considered a basic right. And for the protection of that kind, the Declaration of Independence pointed out governments are instituted among men. So the transfer from private charity, which this country began with—voluntary associations to help poor people—over to the hands of the monopolistic state, the egalitarian state welfare program, he sees as being completed in terms of his political process.

He takes the idea of a right to food and says the basis of that is that the government’s supposed to provide, make sure everybody’s rights are met, right? Therefore, the government has to take money from you and give to people who don’t want to work.

So I think if you go back over that tape, you’ll find that all those things are really happening and are going to be a real problem for us in the future. But in any event, today we want to talk about the poor loan quickly. Basically two things we’re going to discuss today. The first is the poor loan, our obligation to the poor in that regard. The second thing we’re going to talk about as a corollary to the poor loan is debt.

The passage in Deuteronomy 15 we just read speaks to both of these things. We’ll talk about both of them.

If you’re taking notes under the poor loan, we’ll discuss five points. First, the poor loan involves an awareness of our gift from God. The poor loan involves a soft heart to our brother in need. The poor loan involves an open hand to our brother in need. The poor loan involves a Sabbath rest for our brother in need. And finally, the poor loan is a covenantal fact and therefore has blessings and cursings associated with it.

Under the heading of debt, we’ll talk about five points. Indebtedness is abnormal and a result of the curse. Secondly, debt is normatively seen for covenant breakers, not for covenant keepers. Third, debt involves a denial of dominion on the part of God to the person involved in debt. Fourth, debt involves a denial of dominion on the part of the person who voluntarily indebts himself. And fifth, debt involves a denial of the gift that we’ve been given from God in our salvation.

First, on the poor loan itself: the poor loan involves a call for an awareness of our gift from God. And by now, we’ve seen this pattern throughout these special programs that God has called us to be involved with in terms of the widow and the fatherless and the stranger. We’ve seen this same principle at work: that God has given us a father. We were fatherless. God has adopted us. We were strangers. God has given us a land, a whole earth to live in. That’s his land after all.

We were widowed as it were. So we have the bride—we are the bride of Christ who is the bridegroom. And so God takes care of our widowedness. We were poor in spirit. We recognize our poorness in spirit being in relationship to the fall and to the sin that we have, personal sin and to our lack of salvation with God. And God moves to meet that poverty of spirit by giving us the riches of Jesus Christ and salvation.

And these things are all taught in relationship to these other groups. And just to stress again, that doesn’t mean we want to understand these things totally allegorically or symbolically. These things are real requirements on us. And the scriptures say that if we understand the covenant of grace, if we understand the grace we receive from God, we will exhibit it to these other groups in society. It’s not just a teaching device. It’s real people we’re talking about and real concern by God for these particular groups of people.

In Deuteronomy 15 verse 4, he says in the context of issuing these obligations or laws to us in relationship to giving loans to those who are truly in need. He says there should be no poor among you. The Lord will surely bless you in the land which your God has given you as an inheritance to possess. So the context of the laws to us to provide loans—no interest loans to the poor among us—he says, he reminds us that we have been brought into the land that God has promised us.

The specific reference obviously is to Egypt and looking forward to salvation in Jesus Christ. So God reminds us of our salvation, of our position in relationship to him and of his grace extended to us in the context of the laws that he gives us.

Now I mentioned that we’d be talking about Leviticus 25 a little bit. Leviticus 25 issues these same commandments in terms of no interest loans to the poor of the land. And in the context of that also we see the same thing being taught. In Leviticus 25 he says, “Do not take serious interest from him, the poor man, in other words. But fear your God that your countrymen may live with you. You shall not give him your silver and interest, nor your food for gain. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan and to be your God.”

So the commandment to have this kind of open heart to the poor in our land and to issue these no interest loans to them is in the context of God’s deliverance of us. And as I said, that’s the pattern we’ve seen throughout the scriptures in relationship to these special requirements that God has put upon us in terms of the poor.

So in order to understand the poor loan, we have to understand that we’ve been given the things that we have graciously by God and we therefore should open our hands to those around us who are in a position of poverty.

Secondly, the scriptures tell us God tells us in this same chapter in Deuteronomy 15, he says, “If there’s a poor man among you, Verse 7, in any of your towns, you shall not harden your heart, nor close your hand from your poor brother.” God says, I want you to have an open heart toward those people in your land who are poor. And talking about believers here, by the way—these are covenant obligations to us. Those members of the covenant community who have come upon hard times and as a result of an extreme emergency have requirements for immediate capital or immediate funds and therefore come to us looking for a no-interest loan.

Scripture tells us, God tells us as a direct command not to harden our hearts toward that person. Now, it’s easy in the context of the social welfare programs we have in our country to harden our hearts toward poor people because we know that a lot of those poor people aren’t poor at all. They won’t work. Some of them are poor for other reasons, worshiping false gods or whatnot. It’s easy to begin to develop a hardened attitude and not demonstrate the compassion we want to have.

Last week, we talked about Hands Across America. The last thing we want to do is say the scriptures mediate or dictate against having a heart of compassion toward people who have problems in terms of getting food and shelter. That’s not what the scriptures say. The scripture says we do want to have a heart of compassion. God says you want to open your heart to your brother in need. You don’t want to harden your heart.

He says specifically that you have to give this person a no interest loan. And then he says in verse 9, “Beware lest there’s a base thought in your heart saying, ‘The seventh year, the year of remission, is at hand.’” The year of remission meant that the no interest loan that you gave to the covenant keeper in the midst of you who had emergency needs—that loan that you were given was to not have any interest and it was to be remitted at the end of seven years, in the seventh year. That loan is totally forgiven.

And he says if he’s coming to you and it’s one year before the Sabbath year is to occur, don’t let a base thought come into your heart, okay? That would be hardening your heart against the poor in your midst.

Now, it’s interesting just in passing here that this indicates that our heart attitude—our compassion toward other people—is volitional. He says don’t harden your heart. Open your heart. Don’t let a base thought get into your heart. Well, that means that we’re not just supposed to wait for some kind of sentimental feeling to come over us. We’re to move volitionally to correct the wrong attitudes and the wrong feelings we may be having toward those people who are truly poor through no fault of their own and through an emergency. You understand that? It’s not just a feeling. It’s a volitional act of the will. We’re to soften our heart to them. We’re not to harden it.

Third, as a direct result of that and demonstrating that our heart is indeed softened toward them, we’re to open our hand to those people. And it goes on right in verse 7 that we talked about: “You’ll not harden your heart nor close your hands from your poor brother.” If we think that we haven’t hardened our heart and we have compassion, we keep our hand enclosed. When a person in true need comes to us, we haven’t softened our heart yet. We’ve hardened it volitionally as a sin against the requirements that God has given us.

He says, “Open your hand to your poor brother in need.” He commands us to give these no interest loans, these loans that are going to be remitted in the Sabbath year to the poor in our land who are covenant keepers, who are members of the covenant community. So we’re to have a soft heart understanding, as we do, that we’ve been given grace by God and we’re to open our hand as a result of that freely and generously.

The scriptures tell us that God loves a hilarious or cheerful giver. The Greek word there is a word for hilarious in the scriptures. God loves a cheerful giver. And we read in Psalm 126, “They go forth weeping, sowing with tears will reap again. Or rather planting in tears will come back and reap in gladness and joy.” God loves a hilarious giver.

Well, this isn’t really giving is it? It’s a charity loan. But remember when we talked about this several months back that this involves—since it’s no interest—a cost to us, a real cost. We could take that same money that we loan to a person in need and invest it or make it productive or buy a tool with it so we can be more productive. There’s an opportunity cost to money which God is telling us we’re not going to be able to take. So it does involve charity. It involves a gift, as it were, of that money to the poor in our land and perhaps even a total giving of that money to them if they can’t repay in the Sabbath year.

So there is an idea of charity involved here. We’re to open our hand freely, generously demonstrating that we understand what God is requiring us to do.

The poor loan also involves Sabbath rest. As we said here, the Sabbath rest is mandated in terms of the seventh year, the debt being remitted. The context in Deuteronomy 15 or one of the other passages that we read has to do with indebtedness. It says that the no interest loan you give a person in need is to be remitted in the seventh year. And he also says that if you have a brother of yours who indebts himself to you, you will release him in the Sabbath year.

Now, as far as I can tell, there are only two reasons in scripture why a brother, a covenant keeper, would become your slave, would sell himself into slavery. One reason is because of criminal activity and a failure to be able to make restitution. God says that if the person cannot make restitution, he—the thief will be sold for his restitution to the person. Okay? So a person would sell himself into slavery to have the capital to make restitution for a crime. That’s one way.

The other way is through indebtedness. The scriptures tell us that if a man is extremely in debt, has no way out—it’s not a one-time shot where a poor loan would help him—he can sell himself into slavery to another covenant member as a direct result of indebtedness. There’s a linkage in scripture between debt and slavery or servitude. And so we see in this passage that both the short-term debt, the emergency loans that we give to those in need, is to be remitted in the seventh year.

And those believers—covenant keepers who have sold themselves into slavery for that debt—they’re to be released in the seventh year. You see, those two things are parallel. They teach the same truth: that debt slavery are not good. And because they’re covenant keepers, because they didn’t enter into this as a necessary direct result of God’s curse, there’s to be a Sabbath rest given to them.

The Sabbath rest is in a sense a reminder of God’s rest and his finished work in the creation before the fall. And it reminds us also of the rest that Jesus Christ has bought which will be future manifested to us in a greater degree than it is now. When we get together on Sundays, we think about heaven. We think about what God’s plan is throughout history to create a people to himself who no longer will be indebted, no longer enslaved because they’ve been set free by Jesus Christ.

The Sabbath teaches these things. And so the Sabbath was commanded to have this remission of debt, remission of slavery, so that everybody would once again—in the Sabbath year—meditate upon those things that God had set them free. Additionally, the Sabbath, we’ve talked about this a lot, is a time of covenant renewal. The Sabbath is a covenant sign after all. We’ve been reading throughout the scriptures all the references to the Sabbath.

And God equates the Sabbath, his priority in terms of time, to our obedience to his covenant relationship to us. And so it’s a reminder to us of the deliverance from Egypt. We’re delivered out of slavery. And so we have Sabbath rest in Jesus Christ. So for that reason also debts and slavery were remitted in the seventh year.

Just in passing since we brought up the thorny issue of slavery, we’re going to touch on it throughout the talk. We won’t be able to spend a great deal of time on it, but it’s important to recognize here that slavery as practiced in the South denied the central principle. Dabney, who I have spoken of very favorably and quoted from in this church many times—a great Southern Presbyterian theologian who lived at the time of the Civil War—wrote a book called “Defense of Virginia” in which he gave a biblical basis for slavery.

And that was pretty good. But then he went on to say that the case law application in the Old Testament in terms of remission of slavery in the seventh year for covenant keepers, for the believers, was no longer binding on us. He was inconsistent. And that was a primary problem in the South—that they did not deal with their slaves the way God told them to. They treated them as property and continued to treat them as property even when they converted to Christianity.

They didn’t give them remission of slavery in the seventh year. They could have given them remission before the seventh year as well. Of course, Paul when he talks about Onesimus, the slave of the New Testament, says that this man could be remitted and let free. But in any event, the South suffered from this problem where they wanted their cake and eat it too, as it were. They wanted to say that slavery is biblical, but slavery doesn’t have to be remitted. So it’s not that all the laws regarding biblical use of slavery have to be abided by.

Also, of course, the slave taking that led to the problem of slavery in the South was a direct result of kidnapping which is against biblical law and calls for the death penalty. So there were a lot of problems with Southern slavery. But in any event, it was permissible under the old covenant and I believe also the new covenant for a person to sell himself into slavery to another believer if he had debts or had to make restitution. But that slavery has to be remitted in the seventh year.

And finally, in relation to the poor loan, verses 9 and 10 tells us there are blessings and cursings associated with us if we obey or disobey this commandment from God. Verse 9, the seventh year is the year of remission. It says that if you harden your heart, have a base thought against your brother and you give him nothing, then he may cry to the Lord against you and it will be a sin in you.

So if we don’t obey the law of God which commands us—if we have resources—to give no interest, six-year maximum loans to people who have emergency needs who are members of the covenant community, if we don’t do that, then he may cry out to God and God says it’ll be sin in you. And we know we’ve talked about many verses about God’s concern for the poor in the land. And God’s concern for the poor is also shown to these covenant members who have fallen on hard times.

Conversely, in verse 10, it follows up with the blessings rather. “You shall generously give it to him. Your heart shall not be grieved when you give it to him because for this thing the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all your undertakings.” And I can mention other verses as well in the context of specific case law applications of this law from God where he says that if you do these things you’ll be blessed in everything that you put your hand to do.

So the commandment to have these poor loans available for people is a very real one that involves covenantal fact because they are to be given to covenant keepers. They’re not to be given to the unbeliever. The unbeliever may be indebted to you, but you have no obligation to give it to him interest free. You can charge him as much interest as you want to a pagan. You have no obligation to remit in the seventh year since he is in slavery anyway.

But to the believer, to the covenant keeper—those we can visibly say are in the church—those people we are commanded to make poor loans available to because we are commanded of it. It’s a covenantal fact that involves blessings and cursings. If we don’t do it, God will curse us. If we do it, God will bless us. Very simply.

Now, these verses talk a lot in the context of debt. It teaches us a lot of things about debt itself, apart from the poor loan provisions that it talks about. And I want us to spend a couple of minutes now talking about debt and looking at these same verses and seeing what they teach us about debt itself.

I think that in our land today and the situation we’re in, gleaning will take care of most of the problems that we’re going to have in this country in terms of those people who are poor and particularly those people in the covenant community. The poor loan is applicable of course, but it won’t be something you’ll be involved with every week. On the other hand, the idea of indebtedness and the consequences of indebtedness that are talked about in this passage are with us continually in this country.

And so I want to spend the rest of the time this morning talking about indebtedness and what God has to say about it.

First of all, this passage of scripture as well as many others says that debt is abnormal and a curse. Okay? Verses 4 and 5 of Deuteronomy 15—the normative, what God desires for his people, is to have no poor among us at all. And he says why? Because you’re going to obey me. If you obey me, there’ll be no poor in the land at all. Poverty or poorness, which led to debt, was non-normative. It wasn’t supposed to be the modus operandi, the standard principle we have in terms of covenant life. We’re to be walking in obedience to God’s laws and as a result keeping out of poverty, okay? So poverty is not normative.

Verse 5 says the condition of this is: “If you listen obediently to the voice of your God, obey all his commandments,” he says as a direct result of that in verse 6, “The Lord will bless you and all he has promised. You will lend to many nations. You will not borrow.” So we know that the scriptures tell us that what God thinks is normative for the covenant keeper today—what he tells us is normative—is a life of obedience to the law of God resulting in blessing from God and us loaning to other people and not borrowing.

So if we borrow money, if we’re involved in indebtedness, it’s not normal. It’s a direct result of disobedience. Deuteronomy 28:12-13 says the same thing. The list of curses and blessings primarily there talks about the fact that one of the curses from God against covenant breakers will be that you will have to borrow from many nations. They’ll be over you. You’re not over them.

Now, that’s strange for us today. I’m not going to make anybody put up hands, but I would think that there’d be very few people in this room who aren’t involved in some kind of indebtedness, okay? Now, it’s important to say that for a couple of reasons. One, it’s important to say it because the things I’m going to say for the next couple of minutes here are going to be kind of hard on us. I think they’re right. I think that God’s word teaches it. But I think it can be really difficult for us to sit under these sort of requirements of God’s law in terms of indebtedness and keeping away from it and be comfortable.

So don’t think I’m singling out anybody here is what I’m saying. We’re all probably—most of us at least in this room—are involved in indebtedness to some degree. So don’t think I’m picking on you and don’t think that you’re in a situation that the guy next to you in the pew isn’t in. We don’t have financial disclosure statements in this church. We won’t have them, but believe me, if we were to have them, a lot of us would be in debt.