Dennis Tuuri

# Reformation Covenant Church Sermon Transcript
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Once more to Exodus 22, verses 21-27 for the sermon text. We’ll focus on verses 25-27. We’ll read the entire passage for context. Exodus 22:21-27. Please stand.

“You shall neither mistreat a stranger nor oppress them, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child. If you afflict them in any way, and they cry at all to me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath will become hot, and I will kill you with the sword. Your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless. If you lend money to any of my people who are poor among you, you shall not be like a money lender to him. You shall not charge him interest. If you ever take your neighbor his garment as a pledge. You shall return it to him before the sun goes down. For that is his only covering. It is his garment for his skin. What will he sleep in? And it will be that when he cries to me, I will hear, for I am gracious.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you that you are gracious. We admit and acknowledge and confess before you that in our Adamic nature, we are not gracious. We are mean-spirited and in rebellion against you and our fellow man. But we thank you for the transforming work of the Lord Jesus Christ, the great things we’ve sung of so far in this worship service to you that with his incarnation, he has provided for our salvation and given us a new nature and we have been born again to a lively hope and indeed in this nature we are gracious reflecting you, Father, as Jesus reflected you.

We pray now that your spirit would take this word and illuminate our understanding. We pray that he would not only help us to understand this text intellectually, but he would transform us that we might indeed go from glory to glory. And we might indeed see our lives becoming more and more gracious in the context of those that you have said we should be gracious to. We ask this by the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

I was shopping yesterday and as is common now in most shopping places, there was a Salvation Army person there gathering alms. And as we came out of the store, my youngest daughter said, “I want to give to the poor, daddy.” So I said, “Okay, let’s do that.” And I gave her some money and she then put it in the bucket. We had a week before and we went to the post office, I think, saw another person, the Salvation Army person had given some money there.

I guess it was at the Thriftway store in the area. Salvation Army doing good works of proclaiming the gospel of Christ in various ways. And it’s a time of year when our hearts normally are sort of turned to consideration of those less fortunate than ourselves. I think it’s a good thing that we train our children to want to give to the poor.

The text tells us that we have a special relationship in the context of the poor who are poor in the context of our lives. And the scriptures really have a great emphasis on this work toward the poor that we’re supposed to be doing.

Now in our particular culture, as we’ll see as we look at this text a little bit, I’m not sure how many poor people we really have left in America. With the great prosperity that’s come to our country in the last 5 or 10 years it seems like the amount of poor people is certainly much diminished.

If we look at biblical criteria for the poor at least in this text it’s a guy who only has a garment to lend as a pledge on a loan that he receives. He’s that impoverished. Now there are parts of the world when this goes on but so we have to make a little bit different application. We have to recognize that our application might be different.

I’m also not necessarily advocating all the work that the Salvation Army does in terms of what they do with that money and where to give in an understanding sort of a way. But I do think that the only point I’m trying to make by way of introduction here is that this is a time of season at which it is quite easy to begin to inculcate in our children a sense of responsibility toward the poor in our land. That the scriptures seem here and in other places of them to give us.

I want my children to be raised up with the desire to assist the poor. I want them to know that this is an important part of their work as Christians. I want them to think of this time of the year, the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and the implications that it has on the various nature, the three-part nature that we have in Christ as prophet, priest, and king. I want them to think of the Magnificat during Christmas season.

“My soul doth magnify the Lord,” Mary said. “And my spirit hath rejoiced in God, my savior. He has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden. For behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. He that is mighty hath done to me great things, and holy is his name. His mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation. He hath shown strength with his arm. He has scattered the proud and the imagination of their hearts. He takes those who in their intellectual capacity and their prophetic capacity have used their knowledge and their understanding improperly and he scatters the proud who used their intellect in the wrong way.

He has put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree. He has taken those who use their dominical aspect of kingdom reign in an improper way and he puts them down from their seats and he exalts those who are humble before him and who are going to be consecrated to ruling in every portion of their lives in relationship to the great king. He affects a reversal in the prophetic realm and in the kingly realm.

And verse 53 talks about the reversal in the priestly realm. He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he hath sent empty away. By the rich here we must understand not the rich who are godly but the rich who do not consecrate all that they have to the purposes of the king both in joy and in service to others and to the Lord Jesus Christ, but rather the rich who use their priestly capacity to consecrate all their wealth to themselves as opposed to the kingdom of Christ.

And Mary sings in this Magnificat the great reversal that Jesus now will affect with his incarnation and the gospel. There will be a change in the world and all those who are false prophets, false kings and false priests will be put down in the course of history and those who are true prophets, priests and kings in Christ will be exalted.

This has a great implication for our economic affairs of course which we’ve been talking about for a couple of weeks now. Christmas is the time of the year when we consider the needs of the poor. We have the great story of Scrooge to remind us of our responsibilities to assist others. And we have that obligation put before us in the text that God and his providence has brought us to in the laws of the covenant.

So today we want to look at how the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ changes who we are and how we’re to be changed in the context of how we work relative to the poor in the context of our world.

This is an advent sermon in a sense. We sung about the coming of Jesus to reverse the effects of sin and then the coming of Jesus affects the coming round of the glorious golden age of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ being made more and more manifest. And it’s made more and more manifest by this great reversal. The Magnificat preaches this great reversal of rulers and of priests and of prophets, the intellectual, the ruling capacity of man and his commercial aspect, so to speak, as priests consecrating what we have.

This great reversal was banned from being read in medieval Europe at various points in time because it was seen with such important implications for the civil rulers of their day who might be ungodly men.

Next week I’ll be preaching on the Feast of Purim and Hitler and one of the things he did was to outlaw the celebration of the Feast of Purim. And that on the Feast of Purim in Poland after he occupied Poland, he hung a number of Jews in kind of a mockery of the Feast of Purim described in the book of Esther. More on that next week.

But the Magnificat properly understood calls us for a full consecration of what we do in terms of our financial assets. And here this text tells us that to some degree we have obligations to the poor who are financially poor in our context.

Now the other reason why this determination is I think important is that it’s toward the end of the year and we do evaluations. The beginning of the year we sort of set priorities for the year to come. Here at RCC that happens with the budgeting process of the church and last year for the first time in our general fund budgeting the use of tithes we included a set amount of money, $3,000 for alms purposes. Now we didn’t use that money but it sets a priority for the church.

You’ll remember that beginning of this year one of the priorities was to focus on the children of the church, to get them to know the Bible. We had James B. Jordan talk about how to read the Bible at our family camp. By the Providence of God, I actually began at my home this year a school and there are six or seven children now who have a much better understanding of the book of Leviticus than they did four or five months ago. And they have much—13 or 14 children who have a much better understanding of world history from a biblical perspective than they did four or five months ago.

So God is moving us ahead in small incremental steps. We like to see in the providence of God get into a permanent structure with classrooms so we could expand the idea of these classes to prepare our young people in terms of their knowledge of the scriptures, the application of the scriptures to their lives. So I think that we can look back at this last year and say praise God that there’s been advances in these areas. I think the children of this church know the Bible better this year than they did a year ago. Much more needs to be done.

Brad Hangardner has helped by beginning a set of questions at least for a catechism that could teach our children about the distinctives of the theology that we have come to appreciate and we haven’t written answers for those yet, but it’s incremental steps forward.

Well, this whole area of almsgiving and of how to assist the poor and how to engage in compassionate actions toward the poor is an area that we think is very important for our development as a church because the scriptures place a great deal of emphasis on it.

Let’s look at this passage in its broader context. This is the third sermon on this particular set of verses. You remember the verse starts with talking about the stranger and then the admonition is not to oppress them because you are a stranger in the land of Egypt. And then it says to do particular things or not to oppress the fatherless or the widows because if you do I will kill you and make your wives widows and your children fatherless.

And now we have the admonition to assist the poor by loaning them money at no interest and to not take their garments by way of pledge.

I think one way to remember this little section is that we begin with the theological implications that we were strangers as the basis for God’s command to treat strangers compassionately. And then we moved to an eschatological stress with the verses on the widows and the fatherless because the end point of one action is blessing and the end point of the wrong action in terms of the widow and the fatherless is curse. An eschatological emphasis is found in those verses dealing with the widows and the fatherless.

And here with the verse concluding this section on the poor, we now move to some practical ways that we are to assist the poor in the context of a Christian worldview. We’re to give them loans at no interest and we’re not to take their garments and pledge. So we move in this third sermon to kind of a practical theology and outworking in terms of ethics of what we understand theologically.

We receive grace, we should dispense grace and what we understand eschatologically that those who indeed use their resources to assist particular peoples are blessed by God. And if we oppress these members of the bride of Christ in a sinful way, then we’re cursed by God. So we take the theological and eschatological stresses of these first couple of verses and now work out practically by way of ethics what we’re to do and what we’re to see as a result of our changed life in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We move from creation as it were to judgment to providence. We have to know where we came from, where we’re going to, and then what do we do in the meantime? My world history students will be hopefully making some connections now to an old song by Steppenwolf. “Don’t know where we came from. Don’t know where we’re going to. And if all of this should have a reason, we’d be the last to know.” That’s the pagan worldview. The Christian worldview—God graciously gives us life, brings us into life in Adam and gives us new life in Christ. He’s moving us towards salvation. There’s an eschatology to this.

And that means that in the meantime, we have obligations in terms of God’s providence working in our lives by means of his law. His law dictates to us what we’re supposed to do in terms of living, understanding that he is gracious to us. And yet he judges us if we sin. Then we apply practically speaking the knowledge of his word to bring us to an understanding of what we’re supposed to do in terms of our ethics toward these particular groups.

When we preached on the stranger, I gave you a strong exhortation to compassionate actions to the stranger on the basis of the theology of justification. We’ve been justified graciously by God and brought into salvation. And because we’re the gracious recipients of God’s mercy, we’re the thankful recipients rather of God’s grace and mercy, we should be gracious in mercy. He brought us out of Egypt. We were strangers in Egypt. We should in terms of an understanding of our justification assist and have a desire to assist the stranger.

Last week when we spoke on the widows and the fatherless, I gave you a strong exhortation to compassionate actions to the widows and the fatherless on the basis of the theology of sanctification. We correlated these case laws to the laws of uncleanness. Just as the laws of uncleanness and cleanness in Leviticus 11-16 says that the manifestations of the effects of the fall are being rolled back through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We’re becoming less unclean and more clean, correlating Genesis 3 and Leviticus 11.

Remember the judgments on the serpent, the woman and Adam, and then the uncleanness of certain animals, the uncleanness of childbirth, the uncleanness of the sweat of our brow and leprosy. God is rolling back the effects of the curse ritualistically in Leviticus 11-16. And correlating to that, he’s rolling back the ethical forwardness we have in Adam to give us an ethical uprightness in Christ on the basis of these case laws. They tell us how we’re not to be.

We’re not to ignore at best and oppress at worst the widow, the fatherless, the stranger, and the poor. And God says that’s not the end of the story. The good news is he’s sanctifying us. He has brought us out of Egypt so that we’ll minister in a compassionate way toward these same groups that we would at best ignore and at worst oppress. So sanctification—God is causing us to grow in ethical uprightness and replacing our ethical forwardness.

So this is the essence of the gospel. We’ve been justified on the basis of grace. And the good news is God is rolling back the effects of the curse in our lives. And the law is seen in the context of that, not as a set of dos and don’ts that we in the flesh can keep, but rather as a set of dos and don’ts that describe who we are in Adam and who we’re becoming in Christ and what the spirit will lead us to in terms of our maturation in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now this verse specifically talks about the poor. “When you loan to the poor”—in the King James version “if you lend money to any of my people who are poor among you” is what the text tells us. Well, what does the word poor mean? The word poor in the Bible can mean several different things, and I think this is very important for a proper application in terms of the financial area.

Here in this verse, the obvious first nexus of what the word poor means is that all they have is a garment to give you as a pledge on a loan that you give to them. They have no other resources. So here the word poor is an obvious reference to those who are financially distressed in a great way. And probably by this definition, very few people in the United States of America would meet the definition of what this poor person is.

But here it has a financial implication. Notice that this is again God’s people that are being talked about. “If you lend money to any of my people, my people who are poor among you”—in your immediate context, in other words—”then you shall charge them no interest. And you also can’t take their garment for pledge. You’ve got to return it to them at the end of the day so they can sleep in it if you take it for pledge. It’s the thick outer coat.

So in this verse it has a financial implication but many other verses have different implications for this word—this Hebrew word that’s translated poor. Specifically it seems to refer to any kind of disability or distress, any disability or distress. It’s related to the word we saw earlier for humbled and it has the same kind of connotation. It has the connotation of loneliness, distress, reduced circumstances—could be through poverty, could be through affliction of illness, could be through various circumstances a person could be considered poor without necessarily being poor in a financial sense.

The basic idea is to be broken down to a humbled state by one state and in this particular setting by the financial state. What that means is that automatically here we can eliminate the proud poor as those who are recipients of this action. They’re not to be receiving the alms of the church, the proud poor. And by that I mean a poor person who is prideful in his poverty and who doesn’t recognize the humbling state to which God has brought him. He is not singled out here as the recipient of this term because the term is used to describe those who are humbled as a result of the exterior external conditions that God brings into their lives.

So the poor here has this connotation of financial humility, but also a humbleness toward God evidenced in them being his people.

Now, we’ve talked before about how in Deuteronomy, the end of Deuteronomy, the giving of the grace aspect of the tithe, the poor tithe, so to speak, is the picture of the completion of all our covenantal duties. This same truth that it is the core of being a believer in God, of being one of God’s people, is how we interact with the poor is pointed out in Ezekiel 18.

In Ezekiel 18:7, the description of the just man. “He is one who has not oppressed anyone. He has restored to the debtor his pledge. He has robbed no one by violence. He has given his bread to the hungry and covered the naked with clothing. He has not exacted usury, nor taken any increase, but has withdrawn his hand from iniquity, and executed true judgment between man and man. He has walked in my statutes and kept my judgments faithfully. He is just, he shall surely live.”

So again in Ezekiel 18 and the several descriptions there of the righteous man, the righteous man is described in summary as one who lends food or gives food to the hungry and provides clothing for those who need clothing. His interaction with the poor.

“He who has mercy on the poor,” Proverbs tells us, “happy is he.”

Again in Isaiah 58:7, “The true Sabbath of God is to share your bread with the hungry, and that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out.” These general obligations of the poor are summed up in as the essence of what it means to be in right relationship to God.

Well, all that’s fine and good. We’ve had this justification and sanctification stress. We’ve understood the theology of compassionate actions to these groups. We’ve understood the eschatology, the blessings or cursings that come to us on the basis of whether we do them or not. But what do we practically do in terms of compassionate actions to the poor? That’s what we want to talk about today.

And what we want to remember is that Isaiah 8:19 and 20 tells us to not go to the dead as living people for advice or counsel, but rather we’re to go to the law and to the testimony. “If we speak not according to this word, it’s because there’s no light in us.” So we don’t know how to correctly work in terms of the poor. The spirit is going to lead us into an understanding of how we engage in compassionate actions to the poor. But the spirit always speaks by means of his word.

You know, the tender mercies of the wicked are not tender mercies at all. They’re works that bring illness to other people. You can put a fish in a fishbowl and if all you do is feed him food, ever, he’s going to eat food, he’s gonna die because he’s going to eat too much food. So we want to look to the word of God in terms of how we actually go about doing compassionate actions to the poor. And the scriptures give us a great deal of assistance in what we do.

So let’s turn now to the biblical and spiritual specifics of compassionate actions to the poor.

Biblical and spiritual. We tend to think of the spirit in isolation from the word. The spirit speaks through the word. The word comes to us by means of the spirit. The spirit brings us things of Christ. All the scriptures witness to Christ. There is no distinction in the Bible between spiritual and biblical. We want to think of those things together.

So, what does the word of God tell us in terms of how we’re to assist the poor? And I’ve used several I think they’re called acronyms, right? Abbreviations here. AID is the first one I want to talk about. AID. A—acquire the means; I—identify the recipients; and then D—do the work. It goes without saying that if the scriptures say that you’re to give money to the poor by way of alms or if you’re to give an aspect of your tithe to the poor or if you’re to be able to loan money to the poor as this text seems to indicate then you have to have the means to carry that out.

The commandment to be insistent or to be continually about the work of almsgiving assumes that we have acquired the means by which we can give alms and therefore accumulation of goods and services is a positive thing in the scriptures not just because it’s a way to glorify God and not just because we enjoy the pleasures of our labor but also because it gives us the means whereby we can carry out compassionate actions to the poor.

But then we have to identify the recipients of the poor. And what we want to do is use biblical criteria here. Again, we said last week from Galatians that the scriptures say to do good to all men but especially to those of the household of faith. So we want to identify first of all recipients who are poor, widows, fatherless or strangers in the context of the local church. But it doesn’t just say do good to those of the household of faith. It says to all men. So there’s also an application of this beyond the walls of the church in the context of our communities.

We have to identify who should be the subjects of their compassionate actions. We have to—if you’re going to be able to minister to the fatherless and the widows, then you have to know who are the fatherless and widows. You’ve got to know who are poor. And again, here the term poor means really pretty desperately poor.

So what I want to mention here briefly is what’s going on in Moscow, Idaho. They’re implementing a parish system of church governance. All the families that attend their church, and there’s a lot of people in their church at this point in time in a fairly small city, are now being overseen by elders in particular geographic regions. And that, you know, a parish is a group of people in a region who are pastored by a particular person. So this parish model of identification of people in neighborhoods assists in the identification of the poor.

In other words, if we want to know who the poor are in the context of our world, we can look at our immediate neighborhood as the context of trying to identify people that we may want to engage in charitable actions toward as opposed to the anonymous giving in the tin to the Salvation Army that goes out and then we don’t know what they end up doing with that money necessarily. Still a good thing to do by way of symbol and by way of a little bit of substance but better yet to think in terms of your community.

I love the idea of moving toward a parish system of church governance combined with a sense of postmillennial victory because one way to look at that is wherever God has planted you in the context of the greater Portland area or in Washington state or wherever you are the way to think of it is that area is going to be changed by the Christians who dwell in that area long-term. Those neighborhoods are going to be evangelized and those that are the elect of God will penetrate that neighborhood and those who are not will be seen under the judgments of God. And eventually these will be Christian neighborhoods that we’re in the context of.

So to think long term in terms of our communities and to look in the context of our geographic areas for identification of who the poor are. The poor in this text are the poor by you—poor by thee in the King James version—the poor among you in the New King James version. The idea you have immediate knowledge of those who are in your immediate context. So this identification process happens in the context of the church first and secondly in the context of the neighborhood.

Job is an excellent example of doing the work of almsgiving in his life. And in Job 31 we read this. Job says:

“If I have withheld the poor from their desire or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail. Or if I have eaten my morsel myself alone, and the fatherless have not eaten thereof. For from my youth he was brought up with me, as with a father, and I have guided her, the widow, from my mother’s womb. If I have seen any perish for want of clothing, or any poor without covering. If his loins have not blessed me, and if you were not warmed at the fleece of my sheep. If I have lifted up my hand against the fatherless when I saw my help in the gate, then may God curse me.”

He goes on to say Job lists all these actions that he did in identifying the fatherless, the widow, the stranger, and the poor in the context of his immediate vicinity and then moving in terms of actions toward them.

Now, we’re in the process of changing the prayer groups here at Reformation Covenant Church. They began as regional efforts and over the years they’ve kind of slid around to various groupings, but we’re now in the process of re-regionalizing the prayer group. And this idea of trying to develop a neighborhood sense of an outpost of the church, so to speak, an embassy of the church in your neighborhood is what’s behind all of this.

Now, I know that we have very few people in each of these neighborhoods. But again, to try to provide some sort of sense of identification of the particular needs of that neighborhood where ministry can go on is one of the many factors that lead us to want to move toward more of a geographic identification of the prayer groups. I hope you’ll be patient. I hope you will be understanding that this is our thrust. I hope you’ll see what we’re trying to take is the sense of community we have together and then build a sense of community in the context of our particular geographic areas so that we can take one of many of the central action of almsgiving and benevolence actions in the context of our neighborhoods that we can do that as a group of people in a particular parish or area.

All right. So once we’ve acquired the means and identified the recipients we then do the work. And outline point B, SIDE is one way of doing the work. First, you have to evaluate needs. You have to evaluate the needs of those you’re going to serve. And SIDE is an acronym standing for Spiritual, Intellectual, Dominical, and then Economic. And what this represents is that people are a total unit.

People are in a particular spiritual state. But that spiritual state can be discerned by way again of their role as prophet, priest, and king. The prophetic or intellectual side of man, the dominical or kingly side of man and the economic or priestly nature to man. So this three-fold nature of who we are, we have knowledge bases as prophets. We rule in a particular way or don’t rule on the basis of our being kings created as kings under Christ. And then we have economic activity as priests that consecrate our goods and services to the work of the kingdom. And all of those things come together in describing our spiritual state.

So we want to evaluate a poor person in relationship to their spiritual state. We want to say are they poor because of the curse of God. Deuteronomy 28 gives us various curses for disobedience to God that come upon a people covenantally but also individually. And those curses can include dire poverty to the point of not having anything to eat and having no covering.

We ought to identify whether the poverty comes about as a result of rebellion against God. And if it does, then it changes the way we minister to that person. We may still give them alms, but now we want to focus upon the work of compassion and bringing them to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

When we began this several weeks ago, God said that he had compassion upon those evil, wicked Assyrians in Nineveh, the guys who ruled by terror, who were just mean, nasty, idolatrous, fertility cult people. And Jonah is sent there by God to preach to them and to exercise compassion toward the Ninevites. But God prioritizing the need of the Ninevites does not send Jonah to Assyria with Christmas baskets or with Thanksgiving meals.

The Assyrians need to know. They need to know that if they don’t repent within 40 days, they will all be wiped out. That’s the compassion of God working to assist compassionate action toward those that God has called us to minister to. Jonah moved in terms of compassionate actions, albeit reluctantly, to preach the gospel to the Ninevites who were perishing. It is compassion of God to warn those who are under the severe curses of him for radical disobedience and rebellion that if they don’t turn, they’re going straight to hell and maybe right soon.

That there is no contradiction between the work that Jonah was called to do of evangelism and the compassion of God. And in fact, God at the end of Jonah says, “I had compassion on these guys. You should have had compassion on them.”

So evaluation of the recipients—intellectual. You know, the alms work that was at Geneva, a model for churches since then or should be one of the models to us today. The diaconal ministry was greatly revived at Geneva to carry on alms work. But they didn’t just give out food and clothing. What they did is they would train people in language skills. They would train them in a knowledge base so that they could become—if they were poor and people that could work, not the widows or not the young fatherless children, but the strangers so to speak, the ones new to their city and those who were poor without work—they would train so that they could move toward vocation.

So one of the things the church should do individually and corporately is what Steve Schlissel’s church is doing in New York. They train people in English as a second language to train them in their intellectual capacity to be able to work in the context of New York City.

So intellectual, we need to think about people’s intellectual attainment and their knowledge base in attempt to help them.

Dominical. The scriptures are replete with references in the Proverbs to people that are hungry because they’re lazy. The slothful man becomes hungry. His hunger is a God-given tool to prod him to work. And it’s not good to give a slothful man food to eat. It is not compassionate. It is the opposite of compassion. It’s unloving to give somebody who will not work food because the hunger that they experience is the grace of God moving them to work.

So when we evaluate a person as a possible recipient of aid we want to evaluate their dominical state. Are they ruling? Are they exercising authority in their lives by exercising vocation? If they’re not, would they like to? Do they need training for vocation? Do they need encouragement to vocation?

Now, you may give them short-term help if they’re on the verge of starvation or something. Certainly you’d give them short-term help. But the idea is to evaluate their need. Are they do they have intellectual attainments they need to have? Do they not need to know the language. Do they need to know a trade? And then will they exercise dominical oversight as kings under Christ in the exercise of their vocation?

And if they don’t, then the scriptures say that person really should be hungry. It’s a grace of God to them to move them to repentance.

And then finally in their economic capacity, we have to evaluate their economic needs. Are they consecrating what they have to Christ? Do they have particular economic needs? And then we have to prioritize these actions. As I said with Jonah, the prioritization said the first thing the Ninevites need is repentance. After that, we can work on the other stuff. So when we identify recipients in our neighborhoods or in the church, we want to identify them as prophets, priests, and kings under Christ and say which do we need to work on first in the context of this person’s life.

Having done that, we then can move to the practical implications of the economic ways that God tells us to help the poor.

So now we’ve identified the means, we identified the recipients, we’ve done some evaluation, and now we found out that this person is poor. They have an economic necessity. So they’re the direct recipients of the aid required in this text from Exodus 22. They’re poor. They’re not in overt rebellion to God. They have need economically and God has prescribed—again here he doesn’t leave it to our own what we think might be good in terms of trying to help people—he gives us a series of specific actions by which people are brought help and I’ve used the acronym GLAD for this portion of the outline.

GLAD. Gleaning, Loans, Alms, and Dues.

Gleaning, loans, alms and dues. So we’re to aid the poor—we’re to acquire means, we’re to identify the poor. And then we’re to do the work. In doing the work, we have to begin with evaluation. We want to SIDE with the poor by evaluating their spiritual state, their intellectual state, their dominical state, and their economic state as prophets, priests, and kings. And now we want to make them GLAD by using the God-given means of assisting and showing compassionate action to the poor.

Gleaning. And this is the major way the poor were provided for in the context of the Old Testament. I’ve listed a few verses there. We won’t take the time to go over them. But gleaning, of course, is that if you have grape vines and you leave the top of the vines, you wouldn’t pick those. You’d let the poor, the widows, the fatherless, or the strangers come in and pick those grapes at the corners of your field. You wouldn’t harvest those corners. You would leave them for the gleaners. And so, both with our bread crops and our wine crops, we show grace to these people that need compassionate actions shown to them.

And of course, it’s a picture of the table of the Lord.

So gleaning is the primary way in which the poor were provided for in the context of a godly culture. Well, you don’t have a farm today, but you have some sort of resource. You have work you can do at your home that you could do for yourself. You could glean the corners of your home and you can take care of all those tasks. Or you could, in the providence of God, say, “No, I’m going to pay somebody who needs help, money to come in and do things at the corners of my house, so to speak, on the edges that aren’t central to what I’m doing, and yet they’re things that the poor can do.

Or if you have a business, you can have peripheral actions in your business that yeah, you could do more profitably yourself, but God says, “Hey, leave some exterior portion of your business to the poor, to someone who is identified by you and comes in and needs help. You can help him to provide for himself and his family if he has one by making gleanable resources available. This is the work of Salvation Army and of Goodwill. They you have things that you might be able to sell at a garage sale, but instead it’s a corner of your field. You’re going to let the poor glean. So you give it to Goodwill or you give it to the Salvation Army that employs people to go ahead and sell those to other people.

So really, it’s a practical modern-day very useful application of the laws of agricultural gleaning in a non-agricultural setting.

So gleaning is the primary means by which God assists the poor. Now think of the advantages of gleaning over a welfare check either from the church or from the state. The advantages of gleaning is there’s one-on-one contact between you and the poor person. Church just doesn’t have a role that you don’t know about. You’re you know this person and you’re going to see whether they really want to work or not.

Additionally, it provides incentive for the person to correlate work and food. And because it’s usually work that’s less, you know, the corners were tougher to go all around the field going to the corners. It’s low-paying work. And the idea that it’s low-paying is compassionate because it moves the poor to want to get their own field, to want to get their own job, full paying job in the middle of the field of your business. They want to get training, which again you would help them find training to meet their intellectual and dominical needs.

So gleaning has all kinds of benefits over welfare either by the church or by the state. It puts everything into the context of work.

I was speaking with Dan Dillard a couple weeks ago about benevolence ministries that they were doing. And he said they’ve done a ton of work over the years with almost no fruit, almost no changed lives, and really almost no takers for much of the benevolent work they make available to people. Because he said the first time you mention work to someone who’s looking for help, you don’t hear from them anymore.

Our culture has big problems because we built in an entitlement mindset. And if we’re not careful, we could take these same biblical texts and think somehow that the poor are entitled to our money, that they’re entitled to our help regardless of their spiritual state. The scriptures say, “No, the Ninevites aren’t entitled to anything. What they need to hear first is repent.”

The man who won’t provide, who won’t work, Paul tells us in the New Testament, the age of grace, should not eat. That’s what he’s entitled to. Starvation and poverty and hunger.

So, you know, this entitlement mindset has permeated our culture and really biblical charity is working charity for the most part—gleaning.

Secondly, though, there are these loans that are provided for here in the context of the case law from Exodus 22. And I’ve listed several other verses for you.

If you had acquired the means to loan people money and they were waxed poor—if they were really in dire straits—you were required to loan them money at no interest and you were required to let that loan go unpaid. If the Sabbath year comes up, all debts were remitted. It’s a sixth year. Next year, you know that the year of remission of debts is coming up and you’ve got someone you’ve identified in your region and next living door to you who needs a loan and you’ve got the means to loan them the money. You’re required to do that.

And if he can’t pay you back by the next year, then you’re required to say, “So be it.” God gives, God takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. God be blessed that I could lend to the poor.

Now, I’d quickly want to add that if the poor man squanders your money and if he accumulates a bunch of resources and doesn’t pay you back, then the church courts are available to you for redress there because this is a guy who’s living in the context of the covenant community. And the law courts would take care of a person who’s not paying their debt. That’s correct.

So anyway, this second—the primary means is gleaning. The secondary means are what are called poor loans—loans to the poor that demonstrate the grace of God to those who are truly needy.

The next assistance to the poor that we can give are alms directly. The giving of money to people to assist them by the giving of alms themselves. And that’s what the scriptures from one end of the scriptures to the other talks about the importance of almsgiving.

So in other words, it’s not just gleaning or loans. You can give people money and are expected to as well. Matthew 6:1-4 says, “Take heed that you do not do your alms before men to be seen of them. Otherwise, you have no reward of your father which is in heaven. Therefore, when you do your alms, do not sound a trumpet before them as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets.”

Now, the assumption there is that God’s people are doing alms. It doesn’t say do alms because the assumption is you’re doing alms and it just says when you do your alms don’t be hypocritical in the context of the doing of them.

Luke 11:41 give alms of such things as you have—direct commandment. Zacchaeus in Luke 19 gives half of his goods to feed the poor. In Acts 9 Dorcas or Tabatha was a woman who was full of good works and alms deeds which she did. She gave alms to the poor.

2 Corinthians 9:7, “Every man according as he purposed in his heart, so let him give, not grudgingly or of necessity, for God loves a cheerful giver.” It is expected that you would give alms to people that have needs. It’s expected that occasionally you’d put money in the Salvation Army tin. Maybe not directly that, but in some way demonstrate to your children that you’re using the excess resources that God may have provided you for the poor.

Gleaning, loans, alms, and finally dues. The last portion of how to make the poor glad. Gleaning, loans, alms, and dues. By dues, I mean that you are required to give God tithes. It is the dues you pay as members of the kingdom. It’s the kingdom tax. It’s the tribute you give to the king. It is not Levitical in nature. It precedes the Levitical action. Abraham gave a tithe to Melchizedek. And we’re to give of a tithe to God in the context of the church as well.

And in the context of how that those dues or tithes are administered, Leviticus tells us how they’re administered in the context of that particular setting in the promised land. And one of the things these texts that I’ve listed for you on the outline tell us is that every third year you were to give a portion of those tithes to the poor, to the fatherless, to the widow, to the stranger, and to the Levites.

Now, the implication is these are all nonpropertied people. Nonpropertied people. Remember, when they go into the land that the tribes are a portion—they’re part of the land—but the land is held by them. And so the strangers don’t have land. The fatherless and widow probably would have lost access to their land. The poor might have put their land up for a loan against their land. So they don’t have the produce coming out of it. And the Levites were not given any land in the context of the people at all. So the idea is nonpropertied means poor which probably means that there’s a sense in which nearly all of us here today are poor because none of us own property as freeholders.

But in any event, a portion of your tithe was to be given to these particular classes of people. And I call it rather than the poor tithe as a separate tithe, the grace aspect of the tithe. An aspect of the tithe that demonstrates grace. You’re to use a portion of your tithe to find at your feast in Jerusalem—your feast here, the Lord’s day—you’re going to family camp. That’s the rejoicing aspect of the tithe. And this other aspect is the grace aspect of the tithe.

So God tells us that a portion of our tithes are to be used to assist the poor. And indeed, as I said before at the end of Deuteronomy, whether or not you did that is indication of whether or not you kept the laws of the tithe. And whether or not you tithe is an indicator of whether or not you’re a member of the kingdom. We can say it’s an indicator of whether or not you truly have saving faith in Christ if you give the king his tax and a part of that tax is to be given to those who need grace because you’ve received grace from Christ.

The theology is you pass it along. So the scriptures tell us that there is a theology to our compassionate actions. We’ve received grace. We should dispense grace. The scriptures tell us that there’s an eschatology of our compassionate actions. If we give grace to those that God has commanded us to give grace to, we will receive grace. We will receive blessings from God. And if we oppress the widow, the fatherless, the stranger, or the poor by way of extension, God curses us.

And God says that there’s a practical working out of this theology in the ethical standard.