Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

Sermon scripture is found in Deuteronomy 15:1-6. Deuteronomy 15:1-6. Deuteronomy 15:1-6. At the end of every seven years, thou shalt make a release. And this is the manner of the release. Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbor shall release it. He shall not exact of his neighbor, or of his brother, because it is called the Lord’s release. Of a foreigner, thou mayest exact it again. But that which is thine with thy brother, thine hand shall release.

Say when there shall be no poor among you. For the Lord shall greatly bless thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, for an inheritance to possess it. Only if thou carefully hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all these commandments which I command thee to say. For the Lord thy God bless thee, as he promised thee, and thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow, and thou shalt reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over thee.

Okay. The children may be dismissed now to go to their Sabbath schools. Their parents desire that. We are going to take a small divergence from our series and it is really a total divergence from our series on the seven deadly sins this week, next week, probably two weeks. If you don’t have both outlines, there are two outlines for this morning’s talk that go together. So if you don’t have both those, go get both of them or get the one you don’t have yet.

We’re going to take a small divergence here. I was going to go ahead and go after these two sermons we’ve had on the fifth deadly sin, greed. I was going to go into gluttony. But I thought that it’d be good before we move on from greed to discuss debt. There is a strong relationship between greed and debt in most cases which we’re trying to bring out this week and next week. In order to do that though, I thought it would be best to kind of go through a biblical overview of debt.

So I provided on one of your two outlines there just a series of scriptures sequentially going through the scriptures of most of the prominent scriptures that I believe refer to debt and associated subjects. And so that’s the purpose of the real long detailed outline. And we’ll be making reference to that while we go through the other outline which is the outline for today and next week’s talk. And we’re just going to go through point one of the short outline.

That’s sufficiently confusing. And you’ll notice under the short outline that there are four sub points A, B, C, and D. Under the normal root of debt which is sin, and each of those subpoints does not have scripture verses after them. They have odd numbers like, uh, 1a the normal root of sin or debt is sin. The exception, the desperately poor, and then you show underneath that BD 2B through E, G through I. BD means biblical debt and it means that longer outline that is the one you’ll have to have to kind of correlate these things or portions of it. This long outline goes through seven points beginning with a shadowing of things to come, verse and then Pentateuch, specifically Pentateuch laws on debt. The third point is Pentateuch commentary on debt, historical pictures of debt, the Psalms in debt, Proverbs and debt, prophets in debt, and then the New Testament in debt. And so what I’m saying is, in order for instance to figure out what I’m going to be talking about under point number 1a, you’ve got to go to BD.2 which is the Pentateuch laws on debt, points B through E to begin with, and there list several scriptures there.

So these two work together. You’ve got to have both of them to understand what we’re doing or at least sort of keep track of what verses we’re talking on. Now I think that I wanted to—I think it’s a good idea to spend a couple of weeks here because of this relationship that we’re going to be getting to. And I almost this morning—or this afternoon—used the central text, the Lord’s Prayer. And we’ll probably go to that next week as we get to the other couple of points on the short outline.

In other words, after we talk about this normal root of debt, which is sin today, next week we’ll stress—we’ll touch on it this week—the sting of debt in the scriptures, which is slavery, and then the cure for debt in our own lives individually, in the lives of this congregation, and then eventually in the life of the community. And when we get to that next week, we discuss all those things together.

We’ll probably go to the Lord’s Prayer. Now, the Lord’s Prayer is an interesting use of the term debt. You know, there are two versions of the Lord’s Prayer in two different gospels—in Matthew and in Luke. And the term used for sin, “forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us” is not really what the text says. In one of the two versions, it says, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” And the word really is more of a monetary or an obligation term, not strictly monetary, an obligation term, and is translated many times in the New Testament as monetary debt. The other version of the Lord’s Prayer says, “Forgive us our sins.” And there the typical word for a believer’s sin falling short of God’s mark in the scriptures is given as “we forgive those who are in debt to us.” And it uses the monetary or obligation general term of obligation. And that’s a very interesting point we’re going to be discussing really today and next week.

This relationship of debt to sin. And I guess what I want you to sort of do as we work through these scriptures is to see debt—to use a Jim B. Jordan term—through new eyes. To see debt through the eyes of the scriptures and what God is telling us with monetary debt. The same way that we’ve been stressing for the last two weeks to see silver and gold through the eyes of scripture in terms of what God is telling us to value through those things.

We can get hung up in greed by focusing on silver and gold and not realizing that the value comes from the throne of God, comes from his presence. He gives these things value. Idolatry is to stop at the images as it were, the symbols he gives us that are pictures of various aspects of his character that we’re to rejoice in him in. And the same thing’s true of debt. If we perceive debt as simply something out here without telling us something in terms of spiritual realities, we’ve missed the point.

The basic reason I’m going to try to convince you to get out of debt in your own lives is not an economic reason. Now, it has economic benefits usually in the long term, not always in the short term. But the reason we want to get out of debt is not primarily for economic blessings from God. It’s because of obedience. And it’s to get our value system corrected through the new glasses of the scriptures. As we look at this problem of debt and its relationship to greed.

If you could turn to Habakkuk 2:7 and 8 just briefly, we’ll see kind of an interesting verse. And if you’ll turn there for now, and I’d also like to point out that in terms of the long outline, the biblical overview of debt in the scriptures, I essentially have two texts that talk about the prophets, the prophetic books, and debt. The first is point A where I list various messages from Ezekiel. We’ll be looking at them hopefully some today and next week.

Those messages from Ezekiel tell the covenant community, tell us that if we loan on interest to believers, if we ignore God’s laws of debt relative to the covenant community, his judgment comes upon us. Jerusalem, her judgment was that her people were exacting usury or interest from the poor and from other believers that we loan money to. Okay, in Jerusalem and so they were judged in the book of Ezekiel.

The other book I chose, the other reference I chose was this Habakkuk 2:6-8 reference. We read in Habakkuk 2, “Shall not all these take up a parable against him and a taunting proverb against him and say, Woe to him that increaseth that which is not his. How long and to him that ladeth himself with thick clay. Shall they not rise up suddenly that shall bite thee and awake that shall vex thee and thou shalt be for booties unto them because thou hast spoiled many nations. All the remnant of the people shall spoil thee because of men’s blood and for the violence of the land of the city and of all that dwell therein.” Now these three verses from the book of Habakkuk are prophecy of God’s judgment not against the covenant community of Israel but against the pagan nation I believe of Babylon and so you have the pagans here also being condemned. And I think the references here are primarily to financial violation of God’s law relative to usury and debt. In verse six we read, “Woe to him that increaseth that which is not his”—that is, I think at least by way of application very applicable to America today.

America today has created a market economy that rewards debt and stresses what Aristotle Onassis called OPM—other people’s money. It is the basis for wealth, not your money, using somebody else’s money to increase your own goods, who pile up wages to themselves on the basis of what is not ours to take. Debt capital, leverage it and make increase for yourself. That’s what Babylon was incredibly adept at doing. And in very many ways, as I pointed out before, we are very much like Babylon today in America. Additionally, these verses also, I think, talk about in verse 7, “Shall they not rise up suddenly that shall bite thee.” Now, the term used there for “bite” is very important—you understand this? The term for usury in the Old Testament, it’s essentially the same term as this term for bite. Other verses in the Old Testament as well—for instance, when the Bible talks about how wine can be a mocker and strong drink is a brawler. It can bite you. It will have a sting to it. Well, the term for usury is this biting thing. I don’t know if that’s where the term “lone shark” came from, but it’s a good picture for us to remember what debt does. It bites you. It hurts you. And because Babylon had indebted many nations to herself and had leveraged up this pyramid of debt capital, she was now in God’s normal way of judgment. You get judged according to the way you’ve dished it out. You get it dished back to you, and they will now bite you because you have bitten other people by gathering up these riches to yourself on the basis of usury and debt.

Now, I bring those verses out not to really essentially simply to draw correlation to the judgment on Babylon to what’s going on in our country today. What we are headed for is very important to recognize. What’s going on in our country, most of us do, but I think that a quotation I read this last week from Rushdoony in “The Roots of Inflation” is very appropriate. Rushdoony said that when people, individuals complain about the federal debt, when they themselves are in debt, it’s like one devil complaining about another devil’s love of sin. One devil complaining about another devil’s love of sin.

When we’re in debt and we complain about the federal government being in debt, that’s ridiculous. The federal government reflects the population. The answer to curing the federal, the national debt is for us to cure our household debt. And we’re not going to have one without the other. Again, God does these things as a feedback mechanism, as so to speak, to show us the judgment against us for violating his law.

God’s hand in history is upon his people. Everything being done, I’m convinced from the scriptures, has Jesus at the center of it. And Jesus’s bride, the church, is the flow of history. All history moves in terms of the maturation of her and her growth. And so when God brings us into a situation in this country where we’re like Babylon, it’s because the church has apostatized and the church has entered into massive personal indebtedness. And so the country has as well. It’s said that when FDR tried to inflate the economy by getting people to indebt themselves, let’s face it, you cannot really get very far with inflation if people aren’t willing to have debt—personal debt—and then try to monetize that debt through government currency, fiat currency. When FDR tried to do that, he had a hard time originally because this country used to live providently. People, it used to be a regular matter of course to pay off a house cash or to take six years to pay it off. And then once you had the house paid off, the house would then be furnished. It might take a number of years to end up with a furnished house, but today we want it all immediately. We want the full corn in the ear instead of waiting for first the blade and then the ear and then the full corn in the ear. We want everything now.

As a result of that, we are all very much in debt in this country either individually or as part of our corporate communities in terms of the civil state. I have mentioned to some of you that Japan now has a 100-year mortgage for apartment purchases in Japan. A 100-year mortgage. Very incredible thing. And it has legal ramifications to it that I don’t know how they’ve worked out. That is, that normally your offspring are not responsible for your debt. Any good lawyer, I guess, can get you according to—I heard a talk by Herb Titus last Friday night in Seattle, and he made the point that you can’t really go after a child for the parent’s debt because he didn’t incur it. The parent did. Now in Japan in order to get these 100-year mortgages you have to certify you have children that will be able to take over that debt. And so I don’t know how they passed that on.

Titus’s point, by the way, in bringing that analogy up last week in Seattle, was this: that the federal debt of America—$3 trillion, I guess now, something like that—that’s going to have to be paid off by future generations, is in effect taxation without representation. The federal government has indebted itself to creditors, cannot pay it off in the lifetime of the people that voted to put that government in office. So our children come along who didn’t elect those representatives and they’re being taxed now to pay off a debt that they never incurred. And so it’s taxation without representation. And that’s why the United States Constitution, according to Mr. Titus, had in it a prohibition against issuing letters of credit.

Okay. Point of all that is this: that it’s very important we recognize that if we look at the problem of debt in our nation, it’s a personal problem. It comes back to us and it comes back to conforming our lives to God’s standard of debt. And it fits in very well with discussion of greed as we’ll see as we go through these next two weeks’ worth of talks.

I was thinking today as we were reading responsively Psalm 63, this is really the answer to the sin of greed and it’s really the answer to the sin of debt when debt is sinful. We read responsively a couple of minutes ago, “Oh God, thou art my God. Early will I seek thee. So we’re seeking after God. My soul thirsteth for thee. My flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land where no water is to see thy power and thy glory. So as I have seen thee in the sanctuary, because thy loving kindness is better than life. Better than our physical lives is God’s loving kindness in terms of our value system. My lips shall praise thee. Thus will I bless thee while I live. I’ll lift up my hands in thy name. My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness. My mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips.”

And I’m getting a little ahead of myself, but the cure to gluttony as well is to recognize value in God. And he gives us a land flowing with milk and honey. It’s good stuff. Food is good. But behind that, our soul should be thirsting and longing. And our mouth should be satisfied ultimately with God’s word as with marrow and fatness and with his person.

And so what we do is we take God’s value, transfer it to things. We want more of those things for more pleasure to ourselves. We don’t can’t afford it in God’s providence because he’s trying to direct us back to him. “Trying” doesn’t mean that—if he couldn’t do it, he could—he obviously is all powerful. But the purpose of not having enough money for things is to drive us to the ultimate source of value, which is God. We deny that and so we indebt ourselves instead, trying to get these capital goods to us to satisfy our longing, which is idolatrous. That’s the basic thing we’re going to be talking about today and next week.

But to do that, we’ve got to go through understanding and thinking through what biblical debt is all about. And so we deal now with the normal root of debt, which is sin. And I guess that I, as I was thinking through this, it’s very much like the normal root of illness is sin. Remember we’ve talked before about how when we get sick according to the scriptures, we should seek out God and we should try to examine our lives for possible areas of sin that have brought God’s chastisement upon us. And so the same thing is true of debt. We should seek out our lives for the sin that’s brought us into a condition of debt.

Now, it doesn’t mean that every time we’re in debt, it’s sin. And we’re going to look at now the exceptions to this basic principle that the normal root of debt is sin. And the exception is the desperately poor in our land. The desperately poor in our land.

And now most of the Pentateuch laws on debt from your outline have reference actually to poor loans. I think out of the seven or eight verses I’ve listed on your long outline, the biblical outline of what is debt, points A through I on that outline, almost all of those A through E and G through I really do have primary reference to laws regarding how we treat the desperately poor in the context of our covenant communities who need sustenance to get by. And some of those laws have to do with debt and others have to do with bondage. Exodus 22:14 and 15 are somewhat different and I should have included that in that list right now. We’ll talk about those in a couple of minutes.

So actually it’s B through E on that outline and G through I beginning with Exodus 22. In Exodus 22, we read that to the poor to whom we are—and we’ll see this in a couple of minutes—who are actually commanded to loan to if we have the means to loan money to. To those poor, we are not to charge interest. Exodus 22:25 says, “If thou lend money to any of thy people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be unto him as a usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury.”

So it says that first of all, our conduct toward him is not to be usurious or injurious to his person and we are not to charge him usury for the loan that we give to him. And now that’s the purpose of that law, of course, is to govern this exception. The exception is when you have a person who’s poor in your country through circumstances that may be no fault of his own. The providence of God has caused, for instance, the death of a householder who didn’t provide a diary. The providence of God has brought sickness or calamity or some sort of accidental injury to a family that has incurred great amounts of debt to them, great amounts of obligations, and so they need money to get by. That person is to be given a loan, and that loan is to be interest free. And so there is this exception called for in scripture.

Exodus 22:26 and 27 govern the pledges that we’re to—that we are to give or receive rather from the poor person. After it says we shall—we shall up into him as a user, shall not lay upon the poor person usury—”If thou shalt at all thy neighbor’s raiment to pledge, thou shalt deliver it unto him by the time the sun goeth down, for that is his covering only. It is his raiment for his skin, wherein shall he sleep. And it shall come to pass when he crieth unto me that I will hear, for I am gracious.”

And so there we have a specific law in scripture again governing the use of pledges for poor people to whom we loan money that is appropriate for us to loan to them. Moving on, Leviticus 25 says that there are supposed to be no interest loans for very poor brothers. And you’re probably mostly familiar with this, but I’ll read it anyway. Leviticus 25: “And if thy brother be waxen poor and fallen in decay with thee, thou shalt relieve him. Yea, though he be a stranger or sojourner that he may live with thee. Take thou no usury of him or increase. But fear thy God that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase. I am the Lord your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt.”

And so the point of that case law from Leviticus is that when a brother is waxen poor and the word says when he’s fallen into decay—in other words, when he is desperately poor—you are under, not only do you have laws governing money if you do loan it to him, but you are actually obligated to assist that fellow or that family or that person with the funds that God in his providence has given you. And so if you have means whereby you’re to help, where you can help somebody who is desperately poor in the context of the covenant community, you’re under obligation to share those funds with that person in this loan arrangement which is to have no interest put onto it. But you can take a pledge from the man in terms of the debt, but you must abide by the certain laws of pledges that we just read.

One of them—there are several others in scripture as well. You can’t keep his cloak overnight. So there are various laws in the scriptures that govern the use of these so-called poor loans.

Leviticus 25:39 talks about non-grievous bondage for very poor brothers. And there the situation no longer talks about debt. It’s not talking about actually a person being a bondservant to you to pay off, to get money to pay off whatever debt he might owe you or whatever his needs are. He may agree to sell himself to you as your servant for a particular period of time for x amount of dollars so he then can take care of medical expenses, whatever other exigencies he may require in terms of money. And that particular law from Leviticus 25:39 says that his bondage condition to you is different than the bondage condition of a fellow who is not a brother. And so both in terms of bondage and in terms of debt, we are commanded to not treat them—people outside the covenant community. We’re to charge no interest to the brother. We’re not to keep a pledge overnight. And in terms of his bond service, it’s not to be grievous. And there are various laws governing how that’s to be different from the person that is not a believer and may be a bondservant to us.

So these exception laws tell us that there is debt that is not always directly a result of sin. Debt can be legitimate, and so there’s no judgment placed upon it, and in fact God goes out of his way to give us a number of laws to protect the poor who need to go into debt.

Deuteronomy 15:1-6—we read verses 1-6 a couple of minutes ago about the sabbatical year of release. Going on from there, we read after that—in spite of that sabbatical year of release—we won’t I won’t turn to it now. Poor brothers must be loaned to cheerfully. After the year of release that we just read about—the sabbatical year—it goes on to say, “Now, in spite of this year of release coming, and you know that there’s a brother who’s you’re going to loan money to, and he’s going to have that debt released at the end of that time, don’t let that constrict you from giving and loaning money to that brother. In other words, let’s say you know that next year is the sabbatical year that’s been set up and this year a poor brother comes to you, he needs money. You give it to him. You know that if you give it to him, that debt’s got to be forgiven if he can’t pay it back by the seventh year. And so you may not want to loan it to him. So after the year of sabbatical release that we read in the sermon text a couple of minutes ago, there’s this admonition that in spite of that, you still have to be cheerfully giving to the one who requires money of your hand if he meets the conditions of being desperately poor and needing that money in a very bad way.”

And again there, God’s mercy is being demonstrated to the desperately poor. Again in Deuteronomy 23:19 and 20, there are texts in scripture there that prohibit not just usury on money loaned but they also prohibit usury on things loaned. For instance, if you say “I want to loan you, uh, I don’t know, a car or something. But when I get that car back from you, I want some increase for it, for the thing I’ve loaned to you. I want something more back instead of it. I want you to fix, for instance, the friend underway for me as interest on the loan of my car to you.” Deuteronomy 23—or yeah, 23—says specifically you can’t do that. You can’t charge usury or get back more value than what you loan to the brother who is desperately poor among you. And so it governs not just the loaning of money but colonial property as well.

And then Deuteronomy 24 has various laws governing pledges. And again, pledges are part of a debt transaction. So there is this exception in the scriptures that talk about the desperately poor. And if you go to those words, that’s what’s going on there. The brother has to be quite poor. And those exceptions require us to loan money to him at no interest. And that money is to be forgiven in the sabbatical year. Okay?

So that’s the exception. We want to acknowledge that upfront, and there are other places I point—other parts in the outline as well—that acknowledge that. For instance, in Job 22, one of the false accusations of Job’s miserable comforters was that he had broken these laws that we just mentioned. These laws are quite important. And Job 22 equates the breaking of those laws with desperate wickedness in the land.

Psalm 15, which is a psalm, as we all know, of the entrance requirements to worship, similar to what we were singing about as we came before God this afternoon in worship. Similar to the call to worship in Jeremiah, Psalm 15 says what it takes to get into the doors to God’s presence to worship him and essentially to have communion and fellowship with him in our lives. And one of the requirements is that you loan not your money out at usury to your brother.

Ezekiel, as I mentioned earlier, the passage from Ezekiel says that one of the reasons God judged Jerusalem so severely was because people had loaned money to covenant members of the church at interest, or with usury. And so these laws that govern the desperately poor are very important and they are repeated in the Psalms—that the gracious person will loan his money out if the desperately poor are among him. It’s repeated in the prohibition of interest charged against covenant members of the covenant community. It’s repeated in God’s judgment of people that do charge interest to covenant community people. All of these things pile up a strong picture that some debt in the covenant community is legitimate but it has very severe restrictions placed upon it.

Now some people take these laws governing the use of usury, and I’ll tell you what I believe are two errors in talking about these laws of usury and the prohibition of usury. One error is to say that God prohibits all forms of usury. That’s common in the far right or real conservative economic groups—some of them—to say that God, that we should not have any type of usury at all, that interest on loans is always inflationary. And some people make the mistake of assuming that we only have x amount of value here and so if I demand back more from you than I gave you that it’s going to cause inflation in the economy because we only have x amount of goods and services and we always only will have that amount.

Well, that’s wrong. Because the scriptures say that the diligent man adds value to what God has given to him. And so we have a community and a culture and we’ve got a land that is to be added value to through our diligence. And God does that—we don’t create anything. We take what he has created. We dig it out of the ground and it becomes more valuable. And so we add value to our culture. And so it is not always true that interest creates inflation.

Interest in the scriptures is prohibited when we loan a brother money. Now the other error that I think that some people make here—and I’ll have to deal with this probably more at length next week—the other error in the context of Christians specifically is in saying that we can only—we cannot charge interest on a loan, a personal loan to a brother, but we can charge interest on a commercial loan to a brother. And the idea there is that if you’re going to have a business and I’m going to loan you money and you’re a believer, I can charge you interest because it’s a business loan as opposed to a personal loan.

Now, I know of no text that explicitly teaches that in scripture. And I know of lots of texts—the ones that we’ve listed on the outline here—this specifically this first part of the outline that says it’s wrong to charge a brother interest or usury. Period. Now, the point is that normally according to these verses in this first part of the outline, a loan would normally be given only to somebody who was desperately poor. Why else would you loan him money? Scriptures don’t see any other reason to loan people money. And so the loan would be prohibited in terms of interest because you’re loaning to a poor person.

Now the question becomes, what about business loans? There’s a parable. There’s a couple of parables in the New Testament that people use to say that business loans are appropriate, and I’ll deal with those more at length next week. But the basic principle I want you to keep in mind is this: When you start a business, the only way to capitalize that business is not debt. That’s not the only method you have to capitalize a business. Debt guarantees a rate of interest to the person who is borrowing the money. You say, “I’m going to give you $100 for your business and I’m going to demand back $100 if it’s no interest or $110 if it’s 10% at the end of the year.” And you are demanding back x amount of dollars regardless of what happens to his business.

Now, I think that the biblical way of funding business, and actually the normal way in America up until recently, has been investment. You invest money into a business and you say, “If that business is profitable, I’ll get X amount of profit back on this thing and if it isn’t then I’m going to lose money in your business.” It’s very similar to buying stock in a company. Although you don’t actually have to have ownership in the business, your return on your investment could be pegged to the success or failure of the business you’re investing in. And so we don’t need debt capital to fund businesses. And there’s lots of reasons why it’s a bad idea. One reason is because debt capital has a guaranteed rate of return. And so you don’t really worry so much about who you’re going to loan money to. But if you invest in a business and the only way you’re getting money back is if that business is profitable, you’re going to be very careful who you invest that money with because now your rate of return or your potential rate of loss is pegged to the success or failure of that business.

Okay. Won’t get into that in any more detail, but the point is this: The point is some debts are legitimate according to scriptures, but debts within the covenant community cannot have interest attached to them. And the debts must be released in the sabbatical year of release as well. Everybody in the covenant community, the idea was that everybody in the covenant community, the sabbatical year of release was supposed to be released from all debt.

And that gets to the second point in the outline, and that is the goal of the covenant community is a debt-free life. A debt-free life. As I said in Deuteronomy 15, the verses we read talked about the sabbatical year of release. And at that point in time, all members of the covenant community were no longer in debt. Every debt was released. Now, the sabbatical year of release pictured the goal of covenant life. The year of Jubilee—the seventh sabbatical year as it were—pictured the coming of Messiah to usher in his reign. You remember when Jesus came, he said, “These things are now happening. I am the fulfillment. I am the culmination of all these pictures of what the goal is to be for covenant life.” And so Jesus brought us into that.

The point is that the sabbatical year is the goal that all people should be striving for. And so the goal of covenant life is not to be in debt. Additionally, we read in Deuteronomy 15:6 correlated to this. So first of all the goal is shown to be a debt-free life based on the sabbatical year. Secondly, the goal is shown to be a debt-free life because of the relationship of debt to slavery. We read in verse 6 of Deuteronomy 15, “For the Lord thy God bless thee as he promised thee, and thou shalt lend to many nations and thou shalt not borrow and thou shalt reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over thee.”

You’ve got a parallel two sets of things happening there. The blessings of God are that you individually and corporately loan to many nations. That’s the blessing of God. And the corollary to that is that you reign, then you exercise control. You are the master in a master-servant relationship. You are the functional superior to a functional inferior. You reign. You exercise control economically, politically, morally over many nations. That goes with this goal of a debt-free life.

On the other side of that is that whoever is loaned money becomes servant to the one who loans the money according to the scriptures. And so God gives us this picture of what he wants to do, what he intends to do, and what he will do with the covenant community over a period of time. And that goal clearly pointed out in verse six as well as other scriptures is for that covenant community, for the Christian community and a Christian nation to loan to other communities and as a way of influencing them for righteousness. They assume mastery over nations through being in a position not of being in debt but a position of being able to loan and control and teach pagan nations financial responsibility and spiritual responsibility.

So the goal is clearly pointed out and as a result of pointing out that goal, it couples a debt life with a servant life in Deuteronomy 15:6. Now, additionally, Proverbs 22:7 essentially says the same thing. It says, “The borrower is servant to the lender.” Statement of fact from Proverbs 22:7. And that is again showing us that the goal of our of our of our lives economically should be debt-free living.

Proverbs 22:26 and 27—why don’t you turn to that? Proverbs 22:26 and 27. We read there of the dangers of going surety for somebody. “Be not thou one of them that strike hands or of them that are sureties for debts. If thou hast nothing to pay, why should he take away the bed from under thee?”

Now, this is one scripture among many scriptures in the Proverbs particularly that warn not against debt so much as they warn against being surety for another person going into debt. And so the concept is you’ve got somebody who wants to borrow somebody money from somebody else. They—the person who wants to loan them the money says—”I don’t believe you can pay it back. I want somebody else to be surety for you so that if you default they’ll pay your loan.” And of course the Christian wants to help his brother out, his neighbor out, and may be tempted to go into a surety position for his debt.

And what these scriptures tell us about is don’t do that. Don’t do that. It’s a bad deal because if the thing can’t be paid off and you can’t pay it off, they’re going to come after your goods and services. Okay? And again, there it shows us not only is our goal to be out of debt individually, our goal is to be sure that we don’t encourage other people in debt by becoming surety for them.

Remember, we talked about Proverbs 6. We talked about sloth. Remember in Proverbs 6, the end of the first twelve verses, I believe, it says that the slothful man—it describes it as “a little sleep, a little slumber, little folding of the hands to rest and your destruction, your want will come upon you like an armed man.” Very vivid picture of the destruction to the man who is slothful. And remember we pointed out the context for that statement is the first five or six verses of Proverbs 6 which warn of the same thing that these verses we just read warn of—going surety for a neighbor.

And so Proverbs 6, the first ten or twelve verses tells us again the same thing. And it tells us an even heightened, stronger terms. If you find through ignorance of God’s word or through moral lapse in terms of obeying God’s word that you’ve become surety for your neighbor and you’ve guaranteed his debt and now have a second term relationship to the debt itself by yourself, you are told and instructed to get out there immediately and to be diligent to get yourself released from that surety arrangement.

And if you don’t, destruction is what God pictures for you at the end of your course. And so the goal of debt-free living is pointed out for us by the sabbatical year. It’s pointed out by the relationship to dominion that’s pointed out in verse 6 of Deuteronomy 15—that dominion means that we’re going to be the head and not the tail and we’re going to loan to other nations and not borrow. And it’s also pointed out with strong injunctions from scripture, and there are a whole host of them, not to be surety for another person’s debt.

Debt-free living is the goal of our lives. And finally, Romans 13:8. Romans 13:8 is a summary statement, I believe, and this will be more apparent as we go through the rest of these verses today and next week in terms of putting all this into a larger context, but I think that Romans 13:8 is a summary statement of our lives, of all of our existence essentially.

We read in Romans 13:7, put it in context: “Render therefore to all their dues, tribute to whom tribute is due, custom to whom custom, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor. Owe no man anything but to love one another. For he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.”

So what he does there is he moves from the specific thing that’s being discussed in Romans 13, which is the honor we have and should give to civil magistrates—is the first instance in Romans 13. He’s talking about the doctrine of the civil magistrate as a power ordained by God. And in verse 7 he says, “Render therefore to all their dues, tribute to whom tribute, custom to whom”—he’s still talking from the specific case of the civil magistrate primarily there, and he’s beginning to broaden it out. And in verse 8 he broadens out to a general principle of how Christians are supposed to live, and that principle is: “Owe no man anything but to love one another.”

The term used for “owe” there is not restricted to monetary debt but it includes monetary debt, I believe, and it’s translated monetary debt only—it’s the only way to translate it in various other scriptures where that same Greek term is used. And so the concept is owing—to be obligation to another man—we should pay those obligations off and get out of obligations to whatever degree we can. And part of the subset of that is the goal for Christian living is a debt-free life.

Even more than a debt-free life. That isn’t even our goal. Our goal is to have enough material to have been faithful over little—enough little—to be faithful over little so that God will in his grace grant us larger amounts of money and capital and goods and services so that we then can turn around and loan those to the pagans and begin to correct them in righteousness and help them discipline themselves financially, economically, politically, and so socially and morally.

And so our goal isn’t even a debt-free life. It’s to get beyond that to the place where we have reserves to loan to other people and certainly to loan to our brothers in need as well as emergencies come upon them. And Romans 13:8 gives us a summary statement that we’re to owe no man anything except the continuing debt to love one another.

By the way, you know, in Ephesians 5 where it says that the husband ought to love his wife as his own body, lays down himself for his wife, and then it tells us specifically what that means—he guards and nourishes his wife the same way he guards and nourishes his own flesh. And there in Ephesians 5, it says, “So the husband ought to love his wife as he loves his own body.” That term “ought” is the same Greek term. You have an obligation. You have a debt, a continuing debt to perform those services for your wife. And then there are other scriptures about how we have an obligation one to another to submit to one another in Jesus Christ and lay down our lives for each other.

So the summary statement in Romans 13 also tells us that our goal in living is monetarily to live in such a state that we owe no man anything. So that’s our goal in our Christian walk.

The norm, however—so there are exceptions, legitimate exceptions. There are case laws governing those exceptions that are very important to us because they’re part of the entrance requirements. We do those things correctly. We don’t charge interest to the poor person. We don’t turn our back on them, et cetera. We show grace to them the way God has shown grace to us. There are exceptions, but our goal is debt-free life and then the norm, however, is the relationship of debt to sin.

That’s our goal: debt-free living. But the norm that we’re going to find in life is not the exception but the norm is that debt is a result of sin in our lives.

Now I used Genesis 38:18-20 there as the first reference. I just want to explain that it doesn’t really talk about a long-term debt there at all but, as far as I could tell, and I might well be wrong here, but in my studies, it was the first reference I came up to the use of a pledge. And what we’ve got going on there is that Judah is off fooling around with a prostitute. And God’s providence is in this whole thing, but he obviously is in moral rebellion against God when he does this.

And in verse 18 of Genesis 38, he—the prostitute is asking for a pledge. And he says, “What pledge shall I give thee?” And she said, “Thy signet, thy bracelets, and thy staff.” See, this is really a case of God working to fulfill Judah’s responsibility to provide seed to this woman, because she wasn’t really a prostitute. But in any event, the point of all this, without getting into the story too deeply, is that the first use of a debt pledge—because the man Judah promised to send a kid to the prostitute, or who he thought was a prostitute—the first use of a pledge in terms of a debt in the scriptures that I know of is in an immoral situation. And so it’s kind of like a prefigure of things to come. The first use in the scriptures of that seems to be not an emergency loan at all, but rather…