Dennis Tuuri

This morning, our consideration continues on the series and messages we’ve been going through on the biblical teaching on the Sabbath. By the way, I wanted to mention that it would be good for us to recognize and to thank occasionally, and maybe frequently, the people that play the piano for the service. It’s a joy to us, I know, to sit and sing songs with our families, and those women that take time off once a month.

Well, we’re altering now every third month to do that up here. We really appreciate that. And if you thank Susan and Jane and Valerie for that sometime, it would be a good thing to do. So we go back to the Sabbath this morning to conclude our series of messages. And we have stressed that the Sabbath is to be a day of joy. We talked last week about the correct attitude toward the Sabbath being one of joy and delight in it, and not an idea of despising it or trampling of the Sabbath underfoot.

And it should be accompanied by correct actions as well as a good attitude. We’ve talked about how this Sabbath is indeed a redemption ordinance and it’s a creation ordinance, and it speaks to the new creation in Jesus Christ and the redemption accomplished by his work on the cross and his resurrection. He said that Sabbath keeping is a blessing, that it is a joy to man, and it’s a delight to us, and it has value for us as well.

And I wanted to just before we get into the specific topic this morning, I wanted to just bring out one other aspect of the Sabbath that’s of course very important. Benjamin Warfield, in writing an article on the law on the Sabbath, speaks in that article on the joy of the Sabbath and the value of the Sabbath. But he said there’s a third aspect of the Sabbath, and that’s the duty of Sabbath observance.

And we’ve touched on that, of course, throughout these series of messages, but it’d be good to just read this short quote from his article on the foundations of the Sabbath and the word of God, which is from an address he delivered in 1915. He says this:

“I am to recall to your minds, it may seem somewhat briskly, to the contemplation of the duty of the Sabbath, having talked previously in the beginning paragraph of this article on the joy and value of the Sabbath and to ask you to let them rest for a moment on the bald notion of authority. I do not admit that in so doing I am asking you to lower your eyes. Rather I conceive myself to be inviting you to raise them, to raise them to the very pinnacle, the pinnacle. After all is said, there is no greater word than ‘ought.’ And there is no higher reason for keeping the Sabbath than I ought to keep it, that I owe it to God the Lord to keep it in accordance with his command.”

That’s true. And it’s important for us when we talk about the delightfulness of the Sabbath, the value of the Sabbath to us, to remember that it is a command of God. And it’s one of the ten commandments, of course. And those ten commandments epitomize the very character of God, express his holy and righteous character, and then direct practice of the creatures that he has created to glorify him and to enjoy him forever.

It was interesting to me to be sent a quote by my parents relative to the importance of the Ten Commandments. A rather unusual source: Ted Koppel, from ABC TV’s Nightline, moderator of that show, in a very interesting talk at Duke University, said the following. This is a portion of his address:

“We have actually convinced ourselves that slogans will save us. Shoot up if you must, but use a clean needle. Enjoy sex whenever and with whomever you wish, but wear a condom. No,” Ted Koppel said. “The answer is no. Not because it isn’t cool or smart, or because you might end up in jail or dying in an AIDS ward, but because it’s wrong. Because we have spent 5,000 years as a race of rational human beings trying to drag ourselves out of the primeval slime by searching for truth and moral absolutes.

In its purest form, truth is not a polite tap of the shoulder. It is a howling reproach. When Moses brought down from Mount Sinai, we were not the 10 suggestions.”

It should be somewhat sobering, I think, to the people of God to be instructed in the correct attitude toward God’s law, and the holy approach to truth by Ted Koppel.

Well, today we want to speak on one aspect of the law of the Sabbath, a command of God in relationship to economics. The subject for this morning’s talk then is on the Sabbath and debt. And I apologize for not having outlines for you. My talk doesn’t really fit itself into an outline format very well. And by the time I concluded, it was quite late last night. It’s been a very busy week. But we want to talk about an aspect of God’s law. We should keep that attitude of “ought” or duty to God’s law behind it all. After all, the Sabbath is a created day by God.

It’s a creation of God. It’s to be used for the purposes that he says that creation is to be used for. He gives us created things in the universe to use for his purposes. And he gives us time, and his mark over his ownership of time is the Sabbath day itself. And so, as a creation itself, it needs to be obeyed.

Now, before we get talking about the implications of the passage we just read, I want to talk a little bit about the importance of words. Words are important things to us. We’re made in the image of God. God gives us a written word. He tells us that our words are quite important. And we have to be very careful when we listen to God’s words, but other words as well.

An example of this came to me in the mail this week. I got a postcard from a cat every Wednesday program. I don’t know if you got this card, but this is quite an amazing little card. It says, “Thank goodness I was able to reach you! Exclamation point. I have your cash every Wednesday game card here with your name on it in capital letters. Please rush—in capital letters—this official notice back to us with $4.77 to me and release your card and get first class mail delivery to your address. The prize is $77.77. Then you have to check your: I prefer my prize money in cash and check your money order.”

It goes: check and then send this back with $4.77. And I suppose most people who get this immediately assume, as I immediately assumed, that they’re trying to say, “I won something here.” That’s what the implication is. But, you know, it doesn’t really say that if you look at it real carefully. It says that they’re going to give you first class mail delivery to your address. Period. The prize is $77.77. It doesn’t say you’re going to get first class mail to your address, so the prize. What it says is you’re going to get first class mail delivery of these game cards, and maybe you’ll win the $77.77.

This is as close to mail fraud as you can possibly get without being thrown in jail. Anyway, that shows to us the importance of words. I remember the tape of Judge Beers’s talk, I think at Gonzaga, and he opened with a joke which I guess a lot of people have heard before. I’d never heard it before. He talked about a man who went to a lumber store and how he told the man at the counter how he wanted some 4x2s. And the guy said, “Well, you must mean 2x4s.” He says, “No, 4x2s.” The guy said, “Fine. How long do you need them?” He says, “Wait a minute. I got to go back and talk to my brother-in-law of the truck.” So he goes out to the truck. He comes back. He says, “We’re going to need them a long time. We’re going to build a house with them.”

That shows the importance of words and the correct usage of them. Now, God doesn’t try to trick us the way this thing does. And God’s words aren’t as imprecise as the conversation I described in the lumber store. But our problem with God’s word is that we bring presuppositions to it. We bring first of all lack of understanding of biblical truth. And we also bring a moral rebellion to God, in light of our sin nature, to God’s word. And because of that, we have to be very careful when we look at God’s word, not to just read into it what we want to see.

Now, many people have used the passage I talked about—I read this morning that we’re going to talk about now. They see in this passage a debt provision, a provision for debt. And now that’s true. There is certainly a provision for debt in this passage, but they see the debt provision much like the Jews of Jesus’s time saw the divorce provision. And we’ve talked jokingly in the past about how they saw divorce as legitimate for burnt toast or any kind of dissatisfaction with one’s wife. And there are actually recorded cases in Judaism of divorcing your wife because you see a better-looking woman.

Now, there’s a divorce provision in the scriptures. I want to stress that divorce is not illegitimate. Divorce is certainly legitimate in the scriptures because of the fall of man. Jesus said that originally it wasn’t so prior to the fall, but after the fall it was necessary. You could compare it to excommunication. Excommunication prior to the fall was not necessary, but after the fall becomes absolutely essential. It’s not to be seen as the same. Divorce is not to be seen like polygamy.

Polygamy is always wrong. Always has been wrong. Always will be wrong. It’s a denial of the marriage covenant that God has instituted for man. It’s not to be seen that way. There are biblical provisions for divorce that are legitimate and indeed in some cases absolutely necessary. And so the debt provision here is not to be likened to one of burnt toast in terms of divorce. It doesn’t mean we can go off willy-nilly into debt.

What does this passage teach? I’m going to start with four statements of what the passage teaches and then we’ll deal with some objections to those four statements that are fairly typically heard when we talk about debt.

First of all, this passage teaches that our lives are to be characterized by no debt normatively. Okay, this passage teaches that we’re not supposed to have debt as a matter of course, I mean, as a normal thing for the Christian or for the covenant member in the Old Testament.

Now, the objection people would say is, “Well, now look at Dennis. It says here that if your brother has this debt, you’re supposed to release it the seventh year. I’m a brother of this guy. Certainly, I can have a debt.” But if you look at the rest of the passage in verse four, for instance, it talks about the first part of verse four says, “Save when there shall be no poor among you.” That’s a qualifying statement to what his injunctions have just been.

And so if we’re going to read verse the second half of verse three, “that which is with thy brother, thine hand shall release,” and then read the first half of verse four, “save and there shall be no poor among you,” it’s rather obvious from the immediate context of the verses themselves that he’s talking about poor brothers here.

Now, if you don’t buy that connection, the second portion of this portion of Deuteronomy in verses 7-11 make provisions for poor loans specifically, and it says that when your brother is poor and comes to you and wants to loan, even though the sabbatical year of release is close at hand, you can’t let your heart be hardened. You have to loan to your brother if you’re able to do that, of course. So that’s another connection to the poor.

The third section of this book of Deuteronomy, the 15th chapter and verses 12-18, talk about the release of poor slaves who are indebted because of their poverty, and again these things are all related together. They’re a whole chunk of scripture. This chunk of scripture, Deuteronomy 15:1-18, immediately follows laws relating to the tithe and the use of your first fruits and the firstborn of your cattle. And then after this parenthesis, as it were, to talk about the necessity—and he’s talked in Deuteronomy 14 about the necessity of including the widow, the alien, the stranger within your rejoicing before God in use of your tithe—he then goes off into this parenthesis about other provisions for poor brothers. And then he returns at the end of Deuteronomy 15, beginning in verse 19, to the proper use of the firstborn in terms of your cattle.

And so this is a parenthesis between two other passages of scripture that deals specifically now with people who are poor. And so Deuteronomy 15 is not a carte blanche provision for debt. It says that typically if we’re not poor, we’re not supposed to be. These provisions don’t apply to us. And these provisions only apply to people who have become indebted for poverty reasons.

By the way, this passage also teaches that it’s our lives that are normally characterized by no debt. It doesn’t say that about the pagans. It says specifically, for instance, the pagan that you’ve loaned to, he does not get release of debt in that seventh year. We’ll talk more about that in a minute.

Now, the second observation I have on this passage, the passage teaches, is that even the poor, there is a provision for debt. It’s not for the people that aren’t poor, though. It’s for the poor. And even the poor, the second observation is that even the poor are to be debt-free at a minimum every seventh year.

Even the poor of the land who are in dire need of provision from help from other people to survive were to be remitted of their debt in the seventh year and so were to spend at least one year out of seven free from debt. So there’s no provision here for some sort of carte blanche life characterized by debt.

Now there are provisions for that indebtedness of the poor. First of all, there was to be a true need. There’s to be a really poor person we were dealing with in order to allow himself to get into the provision of debt. Secondly, though, if you’re thinking, well, I’m kind of poor in relationship to the people around me—I guess I should to get a loan then—if I’m poor. Secondly, the other provision was that his debt had to be secured from a covenant member. His debt, he was not to go to the foreigner or to the stranger or to the pagan to get that money. He was to go to a fellow Israelite.

If he was going to subject himself to somebody, he certainly shouldn’t subject himself back to the Egyptians. He was going to subject himself to the covenant people of God. So his debt had to be secured from a, in our case, a Christian or a covenant believer. And third, that covenant believer had to agree contractually to release that debt in the seventh year. The lender had to know that going into it. The law of God doesn’t spring surprises on people. And if you think that I’m poor and that I can find a Christian who will owe me the money, you make sure that Christian understands that if that debt exceeds seven years, there’s a problem with it. You make sure that Christian agrees to release your debt at least in the seventh year. Okay?

Now, if you can find somebody who go along with those conditions, you know, I suppose if you’re really poor and you find a believer who’s willing to loan you the money and acknowledge that your need is real, and if that believer is willing then to remit your debt in the seventh year, well then I suppose there is a biblical provision for debt here. But that of course is very rare in the context of our country.

Now that release from debt by the way is based upon a couple of things that I’ll just mention briefly. We have no future knowledge. We cannot control the future. We cannot mortgage our futures because we don’t know what God is going to bring into our lives. What I’m saying there is it is illegitimate to enter into debt by saying to yourself, I can of myself relieve this debt by the seventh year. Now, you may think that and you may have a good economic plan of attack to accomplish that, but the scriptures say that you don’t know what tomorrow brings. And you don’t know, for instance, that if you buy a house and think you can sell it in the sixth year and get the money from that and pay off another house you might have, you don’t know what the price of houses is going to do.

Just I brought up the question of houses and I just like to mention briefly one thing there about houses. Some people see homes and investment in homes as an investment and not a debt. They think that houses always appreciate. Well, of course, if you think about a house and you think about this building for instance, they had to paint it last week. That happens to houses. They run down. They don’t get stronger and better. They don’t cure like cement or something. They get older. They deteriorate. Their value and what’s gone into them goes down because we’re in a world that’s characterized by sin, and so things tend to decay as a result of that once Adam introduced sin into the world.

And so a house is not in and of itself an appreciating item. Why do houses normally appreciate? Well, there’s two reasons. One, of course, is supply and demand. And if you have more people wanting houses than are available, house prices go up. And that was certainly true a number of years ago. Most of us 10 years ago or so saw that economic cycle take place. But remember that supply and demand is a cycle. When smart people, free people, see that there’s more demand for houses than there is supply, they then build houses and supply tends to meet the demand and usually tends to overshoot it, and you then have a surfeit. You have an overabundance of the item that at one time was in short supply, and so the prices would drop. In other words, you can’t peg that supply and demand will not always indicate that houses will always increase in value.

The other factor why houses increase in value in our country is inflation. And we’ll have more to say about that in a few minutes, but that’s really not increasing in value. That’s simply an increase in the number of pieces of currency required to pay for that house. It’s not a true reflection of value.

We’ll get more about that in a couple of minutes here. But point I’m trying to make is that the release in the seventh year was not contingent in the passage before us. If we look at it very carefully, upon the borrower’s ability to pay off that loan in the seventh year. It was contingent upon the grace that was going to be demonstrated to him by the person that lent the money if he is not able to relieve it by the seventh year. That’s one of the provisions for biblical debt.

One other thing about the release of debt. As I said earlier, the pagans were not released in the seventh year. One of the current presidential candidates has said repeatedly in years past that the way out of our economic situation is to proclaim a year of jubilee. You know, all debts are remitted for everybody. Well, that’s not biblical. The release of debts in the Jubilee or in the seventh year were not for the pagan. That debt was continued to be exacted upon them. The release was for those people who were free because of God’s freedom. We’ll talk more about that in a minute. But it’s an illegitimate use of this provision for release of debt to apply it to a pagan and unregenerate culture. There should be no year of jubilee declared on the basis of the scriptures anyway. It may be someone may think it’s a good biblical principle apart from the scriptures, but the scriptures don’t teach it for a pagan nation. Okay?

So, there were provisions for poor debt. Those provisions include a true need. The debt had to come from a covenant member and the debt had to be releasable in the seventh year as agreed to by the lender.

The third observation on this text is that we have obligations to lend to the poor and needy regardless of the possible loss that might occur to us if we’re able. If you were going to lend money to a poor person who had a true need, you had to be able to do it. You couldn’t indebt yourself, of course, because that would violate the principle. And you had to be able to, in the seventh year, release that debt and not bankrupt your family.

Now, God promises that if you do that, he’ll bless you. But the point I’m trying to make is that there were a certain class of people here that would have been sought after in terms of loans. Those people who had more money who could afford to lose that money if the money was not paid back to them.

If we’re in a situation like that, and probably most of us are, depending on the amount of money required to loan to somebody, then we have an obligation according to this text of scripture. If a poor brother comes to us who is truly needy, we have an obligation to loan to that money. Even if the year of release is at hand, the seven-year cycle that was spoken of here, it might have been in the fifth or sixth year. A poor man might have come to a person and said, “I need money. I need a loan.” The guy would say, “Well, now if I give you the loan, you know, it’s so the sabbatical year is one year off here, or six months off—it’ll be forgiven then.” And he wasn’t to harden his heart because of that. He was to recognize that he had been extended grace by God, and so he was to extend that grace to the poor person in the land as well.

Additionally, of course, later on in the text it talks about the release of the slaves in the seventh year—the people that indebted themselves for poor, for poverty—and that release also was to be accomplished in the seventh year. Okay.

So we have an obligation to lend to the poor and needy regardless of the possible loss to us if we are able. Additionally, loans to the poor people in the land, scripture says repeatedly, were to be made without interest. You were not to charge usury to your brother who was poor. And so, right away, you lose the ability to use that money to gain profit. And so we don’t have, in that sense here, we don’t have a strict total free market economy at work. God controls the use of our funds. And in this specific instance, he commands people that are able to lose money by loaning it to poor people—maybe lose a lot because the debt might be remitted, certainly lose a little because you cannot use that same capital to invest and get increase on.

And so there is a recognition here that God intrudes into the free market economy, as it were, by telling people that they have to loan to the poor of the land.

A fourth observation I want to make is that the basic truth, the theological truth involved in all this is one of freedom. You know, we’ve said here that our lives should be characterized by no debt, that it is legitimate for poor people to be in debt, but only at a maximum of six years out of seven. And there is provision for that in the scriptures. And we said that we have an obligation to lend to the poor and needy. And the principle behind all this, the theological truth behind it is one of freedom.

Hmm. Now, God himself alone is absolutely free in the sense of full-blown understanding of that word. God is free. Our freedom in relationship to God is analogical. Our freedom is derivative from God and is always limited. But God, remember, makes us in his image. And we prayed earlier that we’d understand something about God to understand something about ourselves and our obligations to serve him. And what this scripture is based upon is God’s absolute freedom. And God redeems people that are his creatures made in his creation, made in his image, to serve him freely in freedom.

God transmits that, as it were, to man. He calls man to be free because he’s free. Our freedom is derivative. Our freedom is seen in the scriptures as involved in our participation in the covenant. It’s the covenant of grace whereby God makes himself known to man and wherein God gives man freedom to serve him and freedom to live his life out.

Now these verses, later on, let’s see verse 15: “Thou shalt remember that thou was a bondsman, and that thing he was commanding was the release of the servants in the seventh year.” God reminds them that the principle behind all this is that God redeemed them out of the land of Egypt out of slavery, made them free. And so in the seventh year they are made free, the poor of the land. They were to make free those people that were their servants for six years.

Our freedom is seen as participation in the covenant itself in terms of God’s redemptive work. Now, that’s important to keep in mind because as I said earlier, freedom can only be understood in the context of the covenant. We spoke recently about our constitution and the origins of the constitution and what the constitution did and couldn’t do. The constitution cannot give people freedom. The constitution can guarantee civil freedoms for people that have been freed by God, by the covenant of grace. You understand the difference?

The Constitution of itself cannot grant freedom to people. It cannot change their bondage to sin, which is the basis of all their slavery. It can’t give them the freedom that God can give through his covenant. It can secure civil liberties for men who are free in Christ. However, now that freedom also has an economic aspect to it.

In the portion of scripture we just read in verse six, we read: “For the Lord thy God bless thee as he promised thee. And thou shalt lend unto many nations, thou shalt not borrow. Thou shalt reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over thee.” You see, he puts those two things in direct correlation. You’re going to lend to many nations, not borrow. You’re going to reign over other nations, they won’t reign over thee. He says that freedom has an economic aspect to it. If one is indebted economically, he’s not really free. He is serving another master.

Scriptures tell us in Proverbs 22:7 that the borrower is servant to the lender. Okay, freedom has an economic aspect to it. Man’s economic status though, in terms of freedom—freedom from debt in this case or freedom from slavery is what it implies—man’s economic status also has civil implications.

Now, it’s important here to recognize that the household in the scriptures was represented civilly in terms of the congregation now by the men of the household. They represented the household rather in the congregation. Section three, as I said before, of this Deuteronomy 15, verses 12-18, talks about slavery and it says in essence that you are not a full man, as it were, in terms of covenant participation if you’ve enslaved yourself to another man in a slave relationship. If you live within his household as a slave, you’re represented civilly then, in the Old Covenant, through the head of the household and not by yourself anymore.

Now God has called you to represent your own household, but you’ve denied that civil freedom because you’ve denied economic freedom. You’ve become enslaved. Okay? So economic status has civil implications.

Now I think, and I haven’t done a lot of research on this, I think that’s probably behind the biblical, or the constitutional rather, provision for three-fifths representation of people who are not free at the time of the writing of the constitution. In other words, they had to deal with the fact that there was slavery in the land at that time. And they said slaves do not count in terms of the census for the number of representatives for each state as a whole person. They count as three-fifths of a person. And I think that’s based upon this biblical truth taught here that the person who enslaves himself to another man’s household has somehow restricted himself in terms of civil liberties.

Voting is after all not a right, rather, a privilege. It is after all a privilege to be earned. Now that’s one thing that has radically changed in our country. Voting was always seen as a privilege, and now it’s been transferred to a right of every adult person, one who is not trained in the governance of his own household, okay? And who has not therefore become released from indebtedness and slavery is not ready to exercise the civil franchise—voting.

Okay? His economic status has civil implications. If he has demonstrated that he’s not free enough to run his own household well, to stay out of debt and to stay out of slavery, he no longer has the ability to exercise the civil franchise.

Now, the qualifications for office that we talked about in terms of eldership—that I passed out and deacon church officers in the paper we passed out—made a reference to managing his own household in terms of debt as well. And certainly, it’s true that a man whose life is characterized by inordinate debt and not by freedom, which the opposite of that is, should be disqualified from office. It’s perhaps also correct to begin to think about the right of individuals to vote in some of these meetings in terms of people who are inordinately in debt or in slavery as well. But certainly it’s a minimum qualification that our officers for church—the people we elect for church officers—not be in a position of bondage or inordinate debt.

So we said four things then: We’ve said that our life is normally characterized by no debt; that there is provision for poor debt but not in the seventh but at least every seventh year has to be debt-free. We said further that we have an obligation to lend to the poor in our country, and we said that the fourth thing we said was that the principle behind all this is one of freedom. God’s free. He calls us to be free. He creates, he redeems us, makes us free, and he calls us therefore not to indebt ourselves, which is seen as slavery in the scriptures.

Therefore we should not involve ourselves in debt.

Now, there are some objections to the implications that I’ve drawn from these texts that I want to deal with now. And when we deal with these objections, it’ll help to make clear more of the basis behind all this.

Now, the first objection that people can raise is that this portion of scripture talks about a sabbatical year. And so it doesn’t apply to us anymore, right? Because we’re not exercising every—we don’t have a sabbatical year. We don’t have a year of jubilee. And therefore we don’t have to be bound by this portion of scripture.

And so that’s okay. Now, there’s some truth to this. Jesus, after all, as we talked before, in his first sermon in the synagogue, announced an end to the Jubilee cycle by declaring that it had come in the person of the Messiah, that the Jubilee had been brought to completion and fulfillment in him. And that’s certainly true. The Jubilee cycle has been put out of joint, as it were, because it’s been completed in the total release and freedom that was accomplished by Messiah’s coming.

But this factor—the fact that the Jubilee has been brought into full force—instead of helping the man who desires to be in debt, in instead is another nail in his coffin. The fact that Jesus puts an end to that sabbatical cycle merely intensifies the thrust of this command.

Now, it does that for two reasons. First of all, with the coming of the full provision of the new covenant, there’s greater freedom called for. Jesus Christ has set us free, and we should not be enslaved again if he has set us free. In the book of Nehemiah, the fifth chapter, Nehemiah gets mad at some Israelites who were selling other Israelites for debt. People couldn’t eat. They sold their children for to gather food to themselves, the rights of their children anyway. And Israelites were selling those people to other people. Nehemiah gets real mad at him, as he should.

And he says, “Look, we ransom back from other countries these brothers of yours.” And what he’s talking about is that they ransom back people that have been taken into captivity. They had to pay a price to these guys. They paid them x amount of money for every Israelite to come back to the land. He said, “We ransom these people back and now you’re going to sell them into bondage again.” Okay?

See, it’s a denial of the principle. Well, we know that Jesus Christ came and made full ransom, of which the ransom in the Old Covenant was simply a shadowy element or a forerunner of the ransom that was to be paid by Jesus Christ with his coming. 1 Corinthians 7:23 says, “You are bought with a price. Be not ye servants of men.” That price of course was not the price of money that Nehemiah was talking about. It’s the precious blood of our Lord Jesus Christ that provides atonement and ransom for our sins.

Jesus Christ’s precious blood then is what has ransomed us into freedom. And we now despise that blood by enslaving ourselves back to other people through debt. No, freedom has been intensified with the coming of the new covenant because freedom has been accomplished once for all. The full ransom of Christ’s blood has been paid to set his people free. And so we’re not to enslave ourselves back to men.

Secondly, though, in addition to the greater freedom we have in the new covenant, we also have a greater slavery in a sense in the new covenant. We are said to be slaves. Paul said he was a doulos, a slave, a servant of Jesus Christ. And so, while we’ve been set free by Jesus Christ, we’ve been set free for the purpose of serving him in that freedom. And so there’s a greater freedom, but there’s also a greater slavery in the New Testament as well. And that slavery is to our Lord Jesus Christ.

Should we then deny the coming of Jesus Christ by saying that our only need to be free is in the seventh year? No. The fact that Christ has come and accomplished his work means the intensification of this command, and it means at least that we should be debt-free every seventh year. It probably means that we should be debt-free the rest of our lives. We should pray to God for such blessings that he would give us so that we might also have the financial freedom that his word describes herein under the beggarly shadows of the Old Covenant.

We stand in the full light of the gospel, the administration of the new covenant. We stand in greater freedom and a greater sense of obligation to Jesus Christ. He says we can’t serve two masters, and so we shouldn’t see that as an excuse to indebt ourselves.

The second objection to this interpretation of scripture may be that the bank’s been solvent. You say Dennis that the borrower is servant to the lender, but it seems the reverse in our country. It seems that in this case the lender is servant to the borrower. And there’s some truth to that as well. I remember many years ago reading—I don’t remember where I read, I don’t know why it stuck in my mind—but I read about Aristotle Onassis’s formula for prosperity, and it was OPM: other people’s money. That was his whole basis of his economic well-being. And I worked for a fella a number of years ago told me the same thing.

He said, “Look, if the bank is into the—if I’m into the bank for $200,000, they have a vested interest in keeping me afloat, keeping me solvent. I don’t got to worry about it. He said, “As much money as they’ll give me increases my leverage and power over the bank,” which is the reverse the biblical thing we’ve just talked about. So there’s some truth to that. But first of all, let us consider a couple of things here.

Such provision for debt that people would read into our economy then, on the basis of the reversal of the roles that our society seems to have accomplished, represents a house built on sand, if not quicksand. Now why do I say that? I say that because the increase of debt that would cause us to enter into moves us one step closer toward financial collapse.

Now just think about this. One of the ways this has been accomplished, of course, is by the creation of fiat money. And so what you’re doing is—when you say that you have more power than the bank, is the bank is loan money to you and you have more money than they do. You, they have a vested interest on keeping you afloat. What you’re saying is that you’re pegging your well-being on, first of all, their ability to follow through and keep you afloat. But beyond that, you’re pegging your well-being on the confidence of the American people in that system of financial transactions in that currency.

Remember, that currency is no longer backed by anything substantial. It’s backed by the trust and confidence of the people. Now, right now, the people have confidence in the dollar and they’ll take those dollars, and so they represent some form of wealth to them. But do you really want to peg the financial well-being of your family to the American people? Next time you go to the mall to go shopping, look around at the people. Just observe their activity. Or the next time you know you go to a movie, for instance, see the people that you’re in the midst of. The next time you go to the state fair or a county fair, look at the people that are there and ask yourself, do I really want to peg my financial wellbeing and the health of my children unto these people. You see, it’s foolishness. Those people at the slightest hint of panic will run and run quickly.

So there’s a practical reason for abstention of this type of debt. But there’s also a moral reason attached to this idea that now the lender is servant to the borrower. The moral reason is based on this fact that the lender is servant to the borrower demonstrates the immorality of the present practice of debt by the rejection specifically of two biblical principles of debt.

One, we’ve just talked about: fiat money. Biblical debt was seen as a weight, something of value—gold, silver—but it was referred to as a weight and not a coinage.

Secondly, this scripture that we had before us teaches, I believe, that there should not be an improper level of loans. In other words, we said that you’re only to loan to your poor brother if you could afford it. Right? And if you can’t afford it, you shouldn’t make the loan. That’s a biblical command to you now. Okay? And what this society has done has denied that. This society has moved into greater sin against God by denying that principle through the fractional reserve banking system.

These verses say we should be able to release the debt that we have created for the other person if necessary in the sabbatical year of release. Okay. There’s a built-in discipline to this then—to hard money instead of paper credits. There’s a built-in discipline to only lending out enough money as you can afford to be without. And that biblical discipline has been shoved off by the banks of our country when they lend out more money than they can really afford to have out.

They believe that not everybody will panic like we talked about earlier. They have confidence in the American people that they’re not going to all of a sudden want all their money back at the same time. They trust those people in the street. And maybe they have reason to because their eyes are blinded to the truth. They rejected the truth of God. It suppresses truth and unrighteousness. But we know better than that. We know that the people out there who are unregenerate are driven by all kind of evil desires, and we shouldn’t trust our financial wellbeing to them.

I believe that fractional reserve banking, fiat money, and its accompanying inflation have hastened the moral demise of America. Why do I say that? I say that because it’s removed the system of checks and balances of ability to loan and a stable currency base from the economic climate of our nation. The Federal Reserve prints more money. The same amount of dollars then chase a fixed amount of goods and services. Inflation is the obvious result. And the very people that are being protected by the checks of this passage—no inordinate loaning of money—and then other passages dealing with hard currency, those very people are eaten up by that system of inflation.

The poor, widows on fixed incomes, for instance, can have their life savings deteriorate in a matter of months. When you’re in a period of rapid inflation, their money no longer has the buying power that it once had. And so when they shove off those two checks and balances upon their own sinful economic activities, the oppression of the poor is the direct result. And the Federal Reserve prints more money. That money is loaned out multiple number of times. The bank is now servant to the one who takes the loan, and a third-world pagan nation can then dictate economic policy to the United States. They reverse. They put the thing on its head. Now that’s a direct effect then of throwing off these disciplines of loaning out only as much money as you can afford to loan out in a hard currency.

But I’m concerned this morning primarily really about the indirect consequences, the indirect effects of such a policy. Why do people borrow inordinately to begin with? Why do we want to see in this passage some sort of provision for us to go out and incur consumer debt? People borrow because they cannot afford something they want, rather obviously, and because they refuse to acknowledge that God may just be telling them by their economic condition that they shouldn’t have that thing, at least not right now, and they buy it anyway.

Now, one illustration that Tom Rose uses in a book is real simple. He says, “Think about your own children. Let’s say you take one of your kids and you tell them, ‘I’ll give you either an ice cream cone today or I’ll give you two ice cream cones a year from now.’ Now, what’s your child going to do?” My children, I tested them yesterday, said, “I want the ice cream cone now.” And I said, “It’s just an illustration.” But they will turn down 100% return, won’t they? 100% interest on that ice cream cone. They won’t do it. That’s foolish, right? I mean, economically speaking, that’s a real poor stewardship.

Why do they do that though? Because the child is innately unable, or at least fails repeatedly, in the ability to defer present gratification for future benefit. Okay? He wants to be. He wants to have it. He wants to have it now. He wants to be gratified right now at the ice cream cone. He doesn’t want to defer that, even though the deferment of it would lead to greater blessing and more ice cream cones in the future. He doesn’t want to do that. Why doesn’t he want to do that? He doesn’t want to do that because he’s immature. That’s one word we use for it, right? He’s immature. He hasn’t grown up into a biblical picture of manhood, which manhood is to be characterized by self-discipline under God’s law and acceptance of God’s providence and the circumstances he’s brought into our lives.

To reject God’s commandment—which this specifically is, restated in the book of Romans: to owe no man anything—and to move instead toward the acquisition of what you cannot today afford for anything but a necessity is called in scripture covetousness. You want that thing. You’re not willing to do without it. It’s not a necessity. You want it anyway. You deny God’s command on it. You deny the providence that he’s put upon your own system in terms of your economic abilities to get it, and you go after it anyway. That’s covetousness.

Now, men covet automobiles, homes, new suits, sporting goods, rifles, all kinds of things. And they then move from that covetousness into debt for those items. Colossians 3:5 is an important passage of scripture to help us understand the dangers of this sort of covetousness. Colossians 3:5 says that we—our body now—should be considered dead unto a number of things. First of all, it says that we should be considered dead unto pornography, or to fornication. He said we should be considered dead unto sexual impurity. We should consider the elements of our body dead unto passion, to evil longing. And then finally, the way one translator has translated this: that chief vice, covetousness, which is idolatry.

He lists things here starting at fornication, sexual impurity, passion, evil longing, and he traces them back to covetousness, which is idolatry. The Scriptures say covetousness is idolatry. Okay. Now there’s lots of admonitions that we hear from pulpit and amongst people that talk lots of admonitions relative to fornication. But what about the chief of vices according to this passage, which is specifically said to be a manifestation of idolatry, and the wellspring then of the rest of this horrendous list?

The ten commandment does say not to covet your neighbor’s wife. Does say that, doesn’t it? But it also goes on to say you’re not to covet anything that your neighbor owns. His rifle, his car, his house, any of his possessions. Now, it disturbs me that we speak lightly somehow of coveting somebody else’s rifle or car or something else. We kind of make jokes about it in this church. I’ve heard them occasionally. I’ve probably done it myself. But think to yourself, would we speak so lightly about coveting our neighbor’s wife? Oh, we wouldn’t, would we? Nobody would joke around about that. You see, but we haven’t understood that the basis behind both those things are a violation of the ten commandment and the scriptures say it’s idolatry.

Ephesians 5:5 gives another list of those who have no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ. It says specifically those who have no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ: again, it says no whoremongers, no unclean person, nor a covetous man who is an idolator—same sort of list. And those lists throughout the New Testament are very similar, and they usually end with covetousness and idolatry is the basis to all these things. Covetousness is the basis for debt. Covetousness is the basis for the other horrendous sins that those passages talk about. And so we shouldn’t simply concentrate on one and avoid the other.

Our society breathes the sins of covetousness, idolatry, and immaturity with ease of credit. And we who are supposed to sound the clarion call of holy scripture and to raise high the standard of God’s word to the nations around us do that word harm and we deny our service to Christ and enter into service to First Interstate or Key Bank or another pagan financial institution when our actions are not motivated by an obedience to God, but instead by an obedience to the God of Mammon and to a fulfillment of our covetous desires.

We take down the flag that we’re supposed to raise high and we mute the clarion call of God’s holy word.

Now, our society also tempts men, of course, into acts of fornication, which we’ve talked about here, with the ease of access to the purveyors of that sort of sin. But when you think about that and the horrendousness of that sin in our nation, and it’s hard to ignore—if you watch TV or if you open a newspaper or open a magazine, you see many ads that obviously play upon sexuality. And so our society is guilty because it tends to increase men’s and women’s falling into that sin.

But what I want you to understand here is when you see ads for easy credit and to entice you into fulfilling the covetous desires you have for an automobile or some other consumer good, it’s the same sin here. Don’t see one as somehow worse than the other. They both stem forth from covetousness, which the scriptures say is idolatry, and both of them characterize our society. Ads based upon sex and ads based upon ease of credit.

Is it any wonder then that we suffer a crisis of masculinity in our country today when the men who should be the epitome of strength, stability, and true biblical freedom—the men who confess Jesus Christ as Lord, or Master, which is what that term means, of course—when these same men then allow themselves to be fettered by consumer and long-term debt, that we become a slave nation and we become a slavish, infantile, immature church.

And a necessary element of recovery, as we said last week, will be a correct understanding of and obedience to the Sabbath of God. We said last week that we shall ride upon the high places. We shall rule over the nations if we understand that the sabbatical release purchased with the ransom price of Christ’s precious blood calls for us to serve him and him alone as true men under Jesus Christ.

But that—