Dennis Tuuri

Well, we turn to that word now to trust that God might guide us through it. And we’re still working from Hebrews 13:5 and 6. Our topic is much more general than this though and is tied, I think, to the underpinnings of what this verse tells us. So please stand. We’ll read again Hebrews 13:5 and 6.

“Let your conduct be without covetousness. Be content with such things as you have. For he himself has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you. So we may boldly say, the Lord is my helper. I will not fear. What can man do to me?”

Let’s pray. Father, help make this true in our lives. We believe it. We trust you, Father. And yet we know that we are prone to wander, prone to not exercise belief in faith, particularly in terms of monetary things and our reliance upon them and desire for them. We pray, Lord God, that you would help us today to think through what your scriptures tell us about debt and its relationship to contentment or a lack thereof. Guide us Lord God by your spirit through your word and change us by it that we may be those who indeed even in tough times trust you. Suffer you, Lord God, to guide us in Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen. Amen.

Please be seated. We’re talking about the little things of life. That’s what Hebrews gets to—the application of this tremendous beautiful thing that we can live out heavenly realities in earthly community at the end of this wonderful sermon on the beneficence and wondrous exaltation of the Lord Jesus Christ. And it’s the little things that either win the day or lose the day for us.

I mentioned last week how many children we have is a significant factor and Steve Sykes gave me an editorial out of the Wall Street Journal. I think it’s this last week or two that it was written and it basically makes the case that you either win or lose wars based on how many fighting men you have, and you have many fighting men based on how your birth rate is. So as a culture such as Europe declines in birth rate, they also decline in their ability to defend themselves.

And he points out in the midst of this very fascinating look at data of population growth and fighting men in wars that he offers in this editorial, he talks about the fact that this is not the first time in history where these kind of demographic shifts are happening. If the situation continues unabated, the people that are committed to Muhammad will have massive numbers of fighting men compared to those who are devoted to the Lord Jesus Christ or at least were once in their country’s background.

And he says this isn’t the last time it happened. It also happened in the 1400s. Reading now, he says: “This isn’t the first time Europe has found itself teetering on the edge of extinction. Throughout the 1400s, outbreaks of bubonic plague and pressure from conquering Muslim armies reduced Europe’s population from 70 million to 40 million. In 1484, Pope Innocent VI responded to crisis by declaring—decreeing rather—the death penalty for ‘persons of both sexes who by a cursed charm can grasp enormities and horror defenses slay infants yet in their mother’s womb or who hinder women from conceiving.’”

Midwives who were also experts in birth control and abortion were prosecuted and killed if they engaged in these things. Now that decree is primarily known as the anti-witchcraft decree, but he was also aiming it at abortions and failure to have children, for very practical purposes. He needed men to defend the country. The results, the editorial writer says, were immediate, producing family rates as high as in Gaza or Niger today. By 1510, the number of male births in England had almost doubled after 1500 and right up to 1914, Western European women raised on an average about six children, twice as many as during the Middle Ages.

And so a small thing—you know, faithfulness to love kids and to avoid abortion and unions such as same-sex unions that do not produce children. Small thing. And yet it really is very much in the providence of God, of course, determinative in terms of the long-term possession of land on this earth, either for those that love Jesus or not.

So we’re talking about small things. We’ve been talking about the small things trying to teach our children on the one hand to avoid, you know, the love of silvery things, shiny things, the love of money, covetousness, and on the other hand the answer to that is contentment and a lack of fearfulness about who will provide for us.

So we saw that contentment in verse six of the text. We’re to be content knowing that God is our exceeding great reward—to quote Abraham, which is why we sing “The God of Abraham Praise” today. So contentment and a lack of covetousness is something that we very much want to pass on to our children and we do this through various mechanisms.

In last week’s sermon, we ended by talking about some practical ways. The normal worship day, for instance, trains us in this. The Sabbath is a day of hands-off commerce. No buying and selling, all that sort of stuff. And this church—that’s part of the membership requirements—not that’s not good advice to you. It’s requirements of members of Reformation Covenant Church that the Sabbath becomes a day, the Christian Sabbath, the Lord’s Day, is a day to take hands-off from commercial transactions as much as in God’s providence we can do.

Emergencies come up and so this is a way to train our children to properly understand the need to once a week, you know, fast from those kind of commercial transactions, engage in the great transaction of worshiping God and receiving good gifts from him, and then going back and have our transactions which are good and proper, reprioritized by a sense of kingdom priority.

So the Sabbath itself is a way to do this, and as I said, it’s a membership requirement whether you know, people live here or are living as members of our church who go to the church in Moscow where they don’t believe in this. We do. And so if you’re a member of this church and are over there or in any other city you happen to be living into while you’re going to college, you’re required by your membership covenant to not engage in commercial transactions.

And this is a way to teach our children from the very earliest day restraint over what we do in terms of buying and selling and helping us to understand that these things are proper when prioritized with a heavenly perspective.

We have this idea of, you know, going to heaven for a heavenly perspective. And so it helps us every Lord’s Day to get this right—what we do with our economics, our money. What, you know, what do you do with those quarters and dollars and with our money? The Lord’s Prayer as well. John Calvin says that he goes through three petitions in the Lord’s Prayer. Calvin said before he allows us to look after our own interests: “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Yet under this limitation, Calvin said, we seek nothing for ourselves without the intention that whatever benefit he confers upon us may show forth his glory. For nothing is more fitting than that we should live and die to him.

So Calvin says that the Lord’s Prayer is a weekly reminder as it’s recited in churches and if in our homes, if we do it, it’s a daily reminder that the prioritization of God first comes with those petitions. “Our Father which art in heaven”—heavenly perspective, you know—so it and then “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” “Hallowed be thy name.” So we put God’s priority, his glory, first. We get our priorities straight and then what we do to labor for daily bread ultimately is under, has its underpinnings, then in kingdom priorities, and it’s a way to teach our children that our vocation and our money is to be subjugated to the kingship of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Calvin sent a petition who teaches us to be content with what he provides—daily bread—and that what he gives us is his blessing. Indeed, not even an abundance of bread would benefit us in the slightest, Calvin wrote, unless it were divinely turned into nourishment. Bread itself isn’t nourishment unless God blesses it to that end. Eat as much as you want. We rely upon God to give us nurture through dead things, which is what our food typically is.

Accordingly, Calvin said: “This generosity of God is necessary, no less for the rich than for the poor. The rich man prays also, ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ He’s got it in the coffers. He’s got it in his cupboard, but he prays that God would give him the bread in such a way as to empower and strengthen him for labor, with full coffers, cellars, and storehouses.”

Calvin wrote: “Men would faint with thirst and hunger unless they enjoyed their bread through the grace of God.”

So we have this and what we said was that, you know, we need to be content by recognizing that the good things God gives us are tethered to being demonstrations, real symbolic evidences of who he is. And we said that the public school system undermines all of this, you know. So, do your children grow up knowing that the sun is a nuclear furnace and that’s it? Or do they grow up understanding the biblical imagery of the sun and the brightness of God and yet the intense heat that we need shade from—Christ?

Do we think of the sun just in terms of the material operations going on or do we understand those things as well? It’s good to know these things, but to also see them as they relate to the person of God. And so we tie back commercial transactions, gold, the good things that God gives us, money back to the image of God. And so we need to teach our children these things. We need to teach our children the tether, the relationship between the created order and the creator.

And in terms of this, I made this very briefly last week, but I wanted to make it again before we launch into a discussion of debt. You know, there’s two ways to err in this battle in terms of covetousness. You know, one is to just hoard things. But the church has always recognized that the other side of the coin, the other sinful side, the other ditch you can fall into is spending things.

That’s why we had the prodigal son last week on the cover. He sinned also in relationship to money and things because he just spent everything he had to give himself pleasure. So there. Either way is the point. I got into some degree of trouble back in the early days of this church and I preached on gluttony and said that an overoccupation with food is in a sense related to the sin of gluttony. Gluttony is eating too much, but we got a lot of people these days that aren’t eating too much, but man, they think about that food more than the guy that eats too much does.

And if we have our occupation, you know, our time occupied with an undue reliance or an undue set of priorities of looking at food, it’s kind of like the sin of gluttony. Well, the same thing’s true of money. Money is a trailing indicator usually of obedience to God. And if we make it the primary thing we’re going after, we equate gain with godliness and we fall into sin. But also, if all we want is to spend things all the time, that’s the other side of the coin. Hoarders and wasters are either side of really an improper requirement of good stewards of the gifts that God gives us.

And both these things happen as a result of cutting the tether. So we want to teach our children, you know, we want to teach them, you know, good godly Christian stewardship. We’re going to talk today about debt. They shouldn’t want to be in debt. They should want to save money, etc. We want to make sure though they don’t become stingy, you know, on one hand, but we also want to make sure our children don’t become profligates on the other—spendthrifts who just all they can think about is as soon as they get the money in their pocket going and spending it someplace.

So there’s two ditches in this road that we’re trying to avoid as we speak in the daily average things of life, commerce as we seek to glorify God and have kingdom priorities in terms of all these things. So this is what we’ve tried to talk about in terms of setting ourselves up for avoiding the sin of covetousness on the one hand and having godly contentment, which is at the core of the equation on the other hand.

It’s interesting that public school system today is the one that undermines all of this. And they’re also the ones who cannot receive enough of your money. Just this last week, public school, several districts in Oregon have decided to sue the state of Oregon. And apparently there’s been a rather cleverly devised scheme here with the passing of a ballot measure, measure one, several years ago, then several laws so that now the legal basis has been laid for the government schools to now sue the state and try to get an extra 1 to 2 billion over the next year for school funding.

And so this is an end run around the elected representatives of the people of the legislature that has been apparently carefully crafted. And now one more area of how we run ourselves, our government, our public interests is being removed from elected representatives of the people and turned over to a court system. So it’s interesting how those things kind of work together. And of course, “money is the root of all kinds of evil.” The public school system also is the one that has given us state-run gambling and produced a whole—you know, I’m not sure we should make gambling illegal but I do know that the state out there promoting gambling has created tremendous problems with certain people who get addicted to it, who sinfully engage in it obsessively. But of course then the state just wants more money from you to take care of that problem and give them secular treatment.

So it’s a real difficult thing we’ve got going here. In our time, it’s very hard to keep the tether intact between these created things that God gives us and the reflection in them of their relationship to him.

I know it’s controversial—maybe not as controversial as I would hope it would be—but last week I touched briefly on money. You know, we, it is, we’ll look at some Bible text here about debt. And we, what we’re going to have to try to do is figure out what it means in our world because we live in a world that things have gone completely upside down in relationship to debt.

For instance, everybody’s in debt. There’s a debt pyramid that’s been created by our particular culture. And what’s going to happen? I don’t know. And what does it mean in terms of modern economics? Many of these things are difficult to understand and comprehend. Because the Bible describes something doesn’t mean it’s necessarily prescribed something.

The Bible describes covetousness as a love of silver, shiny things. And so it describes that. Well, does it mean that our money should always be gold and silver? I don’t know. But I do know that’s the way it was for most of the 6,000 years of created history. And I do know that’s the way the Bible at least talks about it. And it at least seems to me I think I can make the statement trying to think through this—that gold and silver is more beautiful as a basis for commercial transactions. That was the difficulty. It was so beautiful you wanted to keep hold of it.

But there is something to the fact that our commercial transactions have lost any sense of beauty just through the substitution of electronic blips for gold. You know, Doug Wilson got in trouble several years ago at Auburn Avenue Pastor’s Conference because he thought—well, and he picked this up really from Gary North who got it from James B. Jordan who got it from some Canadians. It’s all Canadian problem. But Doug Wilson talked about—well, the Westminster Confession says there’s the visible church and the invisible church.

But the problem with that is we can tend to think then that the church—this is the visible church and it’s distinct from the invisible church. So this church isn’t really the real church. The real church is invisible and doesn’t really have an organizational presence. So men have thought that a better way to think about it is that there’s a historical church and an eschatological church.

This is the church of Jesus Christ, Reformation Covenant Church, part of this church in Oregon City as it gathers today. You. There’s a reality to that. Well, the same thing’s true of money. We’ve kind of moved past things that gave us hard indicators that there was value to this. If you have to give some piece of shiny heavy cool-looking gold coinage with maybe some beautiful images on it, that’s one thing.

But if all you do is transfer electronic blips that you can’t see, that’s very very abstract. And the more abstract it gets, the tougher it is to remember to place value on it. So I think that what’s happened is—I don’t think there’s an, I think it’s very much connected—the fact that we’ve moved away from hard money. I’m not saying that was sin. I don’t know. But I know the effect of it have paralleled the effects of increasing indebtedness in the world and in our country and probably in this church.

I would bet you—and I don’t know this but I would bet you—that 15, 20 years ago if we took the average per capita debt of this church and compared it to now, I’ll bet you there’s a lot more now. I could be wrong. I don’t know. But I know that in terms of the American population there’s more now. And part of the reason for that is that we don’t have beautiful money. We’ve got invisible money. We have abstract concepts, and it’s tougher to wrap your head around that.

One of the reasons that debt is bad is it takes away the future orientation we’re trying to have. It makes us present-oriented. Debt results primarily from present consumption of things that maybe you should wait for the future to get. And the problem with it is it moves us away from a future orientation to a present orientation. And then you incur debt. And then what you do the next few years is you have an orientation in the past because you’re trying to pay off the debt you incurred.

So it really, it really—I mean it seems sort of innocuous maybe and we can make all kinds of rational explanations and you know what is debt and we can have theoretical discussions—but you know what the end result is that at least in terms of this country it seems like our present orientation has replaced our future orientation and we’re moving increasingly toward an orientation on the past, trying to pay off what happened in the past.

And so it’s a difficult situation. It’s a difficult situation to bring the word of God into in a way that helps us to think about it. There was a movie called Tender Mercies years ago, one of Horton Foote’s movies, all of which I recommend. And Robert Duvall played a country western singer, became a Christian, got baptized, and dealing with the sovereignty of God. A lot of Foote’s movies do that. There’s struggles over the sovereignty of God.

And there was a song that Robert Duvall sung in the movie and the chorus went, “Oh Lord, it hurts so much to face reality.” And it does. We live in kind of a Disney-like setting these days, theme park sort of world, and it’s hard to really look at the reality of what’s happening to us in terms of covetousness particularly and debt. It’s hard to face it. We don’t want to do it. We want to pretend that the world has, you know, gone beyond ideas of debt and whether they’re good ideas or not.

Yeah, sure. You don’t want to have so much debt you can’t service the interest, but beyond that, everything in this culture is telling you to become indebted. Well, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I think the scriptures tell us it’s probably not too good. But all I want to do is go through an overview of these biblical texts. I know I’m taking a long time to get at it and it’s a long list, but I think it’s important for us to understand why we’re doing this.

One other piece of data before we actually get into it: we can thank John Calvin for the mess we’re in. It’s been a while since I’ve actually read about this and did the research, but I don’t think there’s any doubt, but that John Calvin’s understanding, better understanding of the scriptures and the relationship, what scriptures prohibit and allow in terms of debt provided much of the theological or philosophical underpinnings of the modern culture of debt.

We’re in Calvin. Up to the time of Calvin and the Protestant Reformation, all debt, you know, usury was a bad thing. You couldn’t do it. Interest was wrong no matter what it was. Christians couldn’t loan to anybody on interest. So, you know, that’s why we end up with the Shylocks in Shakespeare’s play Merchant of Venice, because, you know, the Jews were allowed to loan money at interest.

And so this created some of the antipathy toward Jews based not on, you know, biblical truth, but based upon a, you know, a hatred of men that have profited monetarily from our inability to enter into that relationship correctly.

And Calvin corrected some of that. He knew the Bible better and he brought the case laws to bear. And he said, “Well, no, the Bible basically says you’re not supposed to loan on interest to somebody who’s poor and you’re supposed to relieve his debt, but it doesn’t prohibit all loaning of interest. Certainly not to people outside of the church.”

We’ll see in a text here in the case laws, it’s explicitly said you can lend at interest to some kinds of people. And this opened the floodgates for the modern world of debt. So, you know, it always reminds you of the thing that, you know, if you’re a big man, a great man, your prayer always should be, “Lord, help me. Protect me from my successors, from those that follow me.” Those that followed Calvin has given us a pyramid, a debt world that he had, I’m sure, would not have thought was a particularly good thing as it’s moved us away from God.

All right, so let’s go through some references and on your handouts, I’ve tried to put most of the references to debt that I could find in the scriptures. And so it’s an overview of what the Bible teaches. And I’m not going to make a lot of assertions in terms of application, but I do want us to let these texts sort of sink into our psyche and into our soul to the end that we would in our homes do a little evaluation. Where are we at?

Now, I don’t want you to feel hopeless by the time we’re done with this. Recognize that the Lord God—this is a day of liberation and freedom. We pray every Lord’s Day that God would forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors. And we can expect God to answer that. So, you know, there’s hope in this. But there’s no hope if all we do is hear the word of God and walk away without it affecting our lives.

You know, that’s bad. That’s building your house on sand and it’ll come down crashing around your head. So, let’s let the word of God sort of penetrate the thick shells that may be somewhat impervious to what the scriptures teach on this particular subject.

All right. The very first instance that I can think, I can find in the scripture—maybe others, I don’t know—but in Genesis 38, we have a pledge given. There’s a debt. And instead of being able to pay for something that the person wants, he has to say, “Well, I’ll pay you later. I’ll glad you pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” which is what a lot of us do because we use our credit cards to pay for hamburgers. It’s sort of interesting. We’ve all become that character.

And I’m not against that necessarily. Credit cards are a wonderful way to systematize budgets, for instance. But there are tremendous temptations not to pay them off at the end of the month. Anyway, so this man wanted a favor from a prostitute, what he thought was a prostitute, couldn’t pay the price and had to give a pledge for his debt and then later he would redeem the pledge. He wanted to—the price was a kid, a goat, and he didn’t have it.

So, as I understand it, this is the first instance that I can see in the Bible of debt.

Now, you know, there’s such a thing as the genetic fallacy because the first thing was like this doesn’t mean that all things coming from that are wrong. But there’s also a principle in the scriptures of interpretation where the first instance of something can sort of set up an awful lot of other things. And so it’s interesting to me that the first instance in the Bible that I can find of indebtedness is linked to sexual sin as well.

And as we’ve seen in the New Testament, there are many references—in Hebrews is one of them—linking the pursuits of bed to the lack of covetousness. And though greed and lust are frequently treated together. And here in the very first instance I think of debt, they’re brought together as well. That’s interesting to me and I would just lay it out for your consideration.

The story of course is Judah and Tamar. And you know Judah has refused to give his third son to Tamar in violation of the biblical law. Tamar is a gentile but she’s due this right because of her first marriage to one of Judah’s sons. And the text reflects very badly on Judah—the one who enters into debt—and you know, it’s eventually his pledge is recognized. She’s not a prostitute. She’s trying to get children which was her right according to the case laws.

Now the way she’d been about it involved deception which isn’t good, but the bad character in this is not Tamar, it’s Judah for seeking out a prostitute and for failing to do his follow through on his word to give his son to her as her husband. So the first instance of debt and a pledge given for debt are not particularly encouraging. It’s kind of a dark foreshadowing of things to come. I think. So that’s given to us in the first instance in Genesis.

Next they have a series of references from the Pentateuch that give us particular laws on debt. And again here you know, you have to be careful of biblical laws. They’re describing a situation coming along of it. The Bible doesn’t clearly—the Bible says long-term slavery is to be gotten rid of, all men should be free in Christ, the world will be converted, and we won’t have servants, slaves in that sense anymore. And yet, the Bible has biblical laws controlling or regulating slavery.

So, just because it describes something, you have to be careful of what you do with it. But having said that, there is a series of case laws that are important.

In Exodus 22:14: “If a man borrows of a neighbor, and it be heard or die, the owner thereof being not with it, he shall surely make it good.” So, if you have a debt of thing—this is not a monetary debt. You borrow. I go to Don’s house and borrow his car and then I drive the car around and it breaks. This law tells me that we should think of that. I don’t see any reason not to do this. I should bring that back fixed to Don.

Now, if Don is with me driving it around, the next law says that no, you don’t have to make it good. What’s the difference? Well, Don clearly sees that you didn’t do anything wrong to the car. He would have stopped you from doing it. And without him being there, he doesn’t know that. So, there’s laws regulating the loaning of things as well. There’s a debt of things that’s talked about here.

And next, in Exodus 22:25: “There’s a prohibition against lending money on interest to any that are poor. If thou lend money to any of thy people, my people,” God says. So, this is not a complete prohibition against lending money on interest. It’s not what’s going on. The church had it wrong, you know, for 1500 years. Calvin was right.

Interest to the poor is prohibited. “Thou shalt not be to him as an usurer. Neither shalt thou lay upon him usury.” Now usury today we think of it as just exorbitantly high interest rates. Usury—the word here means “sting,” and it kind of means any interest charged out of debt. So when you loan something to somebody you can’t charge them interest that has a sting to it.

And so loaning things with interest to people that are borrowing money because they are poor is prohibited by the Bible. Now it gets a little more complicated than that because it’s expected that he’s going to try to pay you back with the same gold or silver coins that you gave to him. And when we have a world, the modern world where we have inflation that’s rampant, you know, to completely eliminate interest may go beyond what this law requires of us loaning to poor people because you would at least want him to pay you back with the same dollars that you gave him, right?

And in our day and age, if he pays you back in six years, he’s paying you back half of what you gave him. See? So the attempt here is not—I don’t think a wooden interpretation would say you can’t charge any interest. I think you can say you’re going to pay me back in dollars equivalent to today’s dollars. So you know, again it’s hard because you take the law like this, try to immediately apply it, and yet the circumstances are far different.

We don’t have fixed weights and measures anymore, biblically determined, and so you have to sort of modify them. But the point here is a pretty clear one and that is that first of all the people that you’re anticipated loaning money to at all are people who are desperately poor and you are to loan to them. And when you do it you’re to have grace in your heart toward them. You’re not to exact interest from them.

Okay. So it tells us several things about debt and it seems like the normal instance—and this runs throughout the scriptures—the reason why people are normally in debt in a godly culture is because they’re desperately poor. And then there are laws governing that debt.

Verse 26 of Exodus 22 says: “If you shall take your neighbor’s raiment to pledge, thou shalt deliver it unto him by the time the sun goes down. It’s his only covering. It’s his raiment for his skin. Wherewith shall he sleep? And it shall come to pass when he cries unto me that I will hear it for I am gracious.”

So if you could take a pledge—it’s not wrong to take something in pledge, a collateral for the loan. In the scriptures, debt is collateralized. All of it is. So it’s not wrong to take collateral loan from a poor person and maybe the sort of situation that’s being described—he’s so desperately poor about all he’s got to give you is his coat but he needs it at night for his covering so you can give it back to him.

Now one of the results of this biblical law would be a prohibition against the desperately poor entering into multiple loans. You see that he’s only got one coat and if you’ve got it and you’re going to return it to him at night, he can’t loan out during the day to other people. So, there’s some grace in this of God assisting the poor by not having them give way to the temptation to obtain multiple loans based on the same collateral.

And again, I don’t know, you know, exactly how to apply this in our day, but it does have application to us. I’m sure of that. And clearly the immediate application is that has to do with loans being normally a result of quite a bit of poverty.

And in Leviticus 25:35: “This case law tells us you have to loan to such a person if you have the means. If thy brother be waxed poor and fallen in decay with thee, then thou shalt relieve him. Yea, though he be a stranger or a sojourner that he may live with thee.”

So here, before we were regulated in how much interest we could charge a poor person, and there’s grace even in the loaning of the money to him. Here we’re absolutely told that if you have the means, you have to loan to him. You got a desperately poor person, you’ve got a loan to him at no interest. And Leviticus makes that clear.

Now, that assumes you have the means to do it. You don’t loan out what’s not yours. This is one of the problems we have. Is if, let’s say in our congregation, 90% of us have debts, money we’re owing people, we’re making monthly payments on some sort of loan. Then our ability to help out the poor person is greatly diminished.

You know, if you go to a child, if I go to Levi, my little grandson, I tell him, “Li, I’ll give you an ice cream cone today. Or if you wait a year, I’ll give you two ice cream cones.” What’s Levi going to do? He’s going to have it now because he doesn’t trust me. He knows I’m forgetful. I’ll forget. No, he doesn’t have the concept. But if I tell Don or one of you folks, “Well, I’ll give you, you know, a hundred bucks today or I’ll give you 200 in a year,” you’re going to say “100% interest on a year? I’ll see you in 365 days. I’ll take that deal” because it’s obvious to you.

But you know what’s what’s happened in our day and age is that we’re all short-term perspective. We’re not used to delaying gratification. And so, the Bible anticipates a culture where most people aren’t in debt. And they most of them have this law given to them to be able to loan to people that are on hard times. Got to do it. Well, who does that law apply to in this congregation? How many of you are debt-free and have resources beyond what you’re borrowing from somebody else to give to a poor person?

So, it seems like just this cursory first set of verses tells us that we’ve got a bit of a problem here. And we got a problem because now our faith community has less of an ability to help out those amongst us who fall in desperately difficult times. Do you see?

Now, you may be disagreeing with me. You say, “Well, I don’t, you know, I may have some debt in my house or whatever, but I can still loan.” Well, okay, maybe so. But again, it just seems like the situation that God says is sort of normative that he’s describing even in an old culture is one where we have means to loan out to poor people and we could take care of ourselves instead of sending them packing down, you know, packing down in the welfare line.

So, seems like we have a little bit of a problem. And it seems like our problem may have something to do with an inability to, you know, to deny gratification of present desires for the sake of long-term goal. We want the ice cream cone today. And there’s lots of people that’ll loan Levi the money to get that ice cream cone if I’m going to sell it to him.

So, that’s the problem we have. And so, the problem we have, we have a culture now that has a difficult time figuring out, well, how do I apply Leviticus 25:35? Doesn’t make sense to me cuz none of us could loan to that guy or very few of us could.

The next verse says: “Take no usury of him or increase.” So, it makes it clear that you’re not supposed to be trying to hurt him with the usury, and you’re not supposed to trying to increase yourself. Doesn’t mean you should take a loss, though. You could probably get back, you know, $2.60 in a year or two.

Leviticus 25:37: “You shall not lend upon him to usury, nor lend him your food for increase. The Lord your God which brought you out of the land of Egypt to give you land of Canaan and to be your God requires of these things of you.”

So God has brought freedom. So now we have another aspect of debt. Debt is seen as in some way related to the oppression of God’s people in Egypt. And so debt has this connotation early on, you know, it has a slavery connotation to it.

And what we find in the other case laws in Leviticus is that just as you were—excuse me—just as you were to make, you were to let a bondservant go free in the seventh year, the year of release. So also these poor loans, which would be a major factor in taking care of people, these poor loans would be relieved in the seventh year as well.

So now, not only do you have money to loan to somebody, but you got money that at the end of six years, you’re supposed to yield the, walk away from and say, “Well, I didn’t really need it anyway for myself.” So, you’re trying to make him pay it back because you’re trying to help him to get financially stable to the place where he can repay his loan. You’re preventing multiple indebtedness. You’re however, you’re well enough off to be able to loan to him and not suffer a loss in that seventh year that’s going to make you desperately poor and go out and look for a loan.

And this is the normal way the community was to live in the context of coming out of bondage to Egypt into the freedom of the promised land. And so there’s this connection.

So, you know, it’s interesting—the Assyrians, when they took over, you know, the Assyrians are the ones that took the northern kingdom into exile. The Babylonians took the southern kingdom into exile and both were military groups. Nebuchadnezzar, you know, sacked the city in the south and all of that. But the primary emphasis, the way Assyrians would control a people would be terror. They would, you know, pile up heads at the gate of the city or flay people alive or whatever it was.

The Babylonians were brighter and they would—thank you, thank you very much. You know, the Babylonians were a little brighter than that. And what they would do is they would go into a country and before they invaded it, they would loan the money. They did debt the country to themselves. And they knew that at that time in history at least that debt produced demoralization. It created a people not oriented to the future, not able to assist each other. It creates essentially, you know, not I’m not using this term directly, but it created a kind of slave mentality in the people that were in debt. It demoralized them and demoralized people is far easier to conquer than people who are strong and fighting and who are free men. Free men, right? Free men.

So the avoidance of debt is linked here in the scriptures to release from bondage. And it’s interesting to me that the Soviet Union was sort of like Assyria. They tried to rule by terror, but the United States won that cold war. And you could make the case that in some ways we are somewhat Babylonian in the way we approach things. It is indebtedness that we do to people and it’s a way to demoralize them and it’s a way to remove them from freedom.

A people who attain to debt-free living are people who pertain to a lifestyle marked by liberty, freedom, the ability to be gracious to other people.

Deuteronomy and the blessings and cursings of Deuteronomy says that it’s a blessing. When you’re blessed, when you’re obeying God, he’ll make you the head and not the tail. You will lend to many nations. Okay, that’s what it’s supposed to be like. But if you disobey God, Deuteronomy 28 says, you’ll be the tail, they’ll be the head and you will borrow from them.

Now, that’s true on a national level, but there’s also some significance to that in terms of our individual lives. We are to be the ones who are controlling pagans who cannot think in a long-term fashion. We’re to be disciplining them through loaning them money and being the master over them to help them not become totally ridiculous in what they do. And yet, the church of Jesus Christ—I’m sure it does better. I’m sure this congregation does better than most churches. And I’m sure the churches in general are maybe a little bit better than the pagan culture. But we’re certainly not in a position where we’re all debt-free and as a result are loaning money to the pagans to bring financial restraint over them.

We’re the ones who want the ice cream cone today. This is why I’ve linked this stuff on debt to a discussion of contentment and being too focused on money. An indebted people becomes too focused on money. They’re always trying to pay the bills. As I said, they’ve moved from being future-oriented to present-oriented. And that in its drift, God turns more to being pastor. They can’t even get to the present. And they’re always trying to pay off what was in the past.

Now, we’ll continue this next week. But I but I hope you know, I hope that you know, you’re letting the shields come down a little bit so we can have this discussion. So, the word of Christ can come to us and start to knock down some of the ways we think about things and correct them. And I’m ready for a lot of discussion about this.

We’ll talk about the rest of these references next week. But please this week, think of yourselves: Are we a provident people? Are we living in, you know, within the means? Provident. A person is provident who relies upon a sovereign God’s providence. Are we relying upon that providence that he has allowed us to live within our means? Or are we not being content? Are we suffering God to guide us in our times of difficulty? Or are we suffering, you know, Wakovia that my son works for or City Bank or Chase to be our guide as we go through difficult times?

Are we focused on the future or are we too drawn into the present and becoming those who are worried about paying off debts? Are we able to loan to people in the context of our church other than the institutional church? We’ve got a benevolence fund. We do some of that and we have given poor loans and we’ve tried to follow these laws. We’re doing this stuff. We’ve tried to in the infrastructure of our church do that. But these texts are not given to an institution known as the church. These texts are given to the individuals within the church.

You should have the ability, you know, you should aspire. Let’s put it that way. You should aspire. You shouldn’t. Some of us will be poor. The Bible—these poor people are not outside of your obedience to God. God in his providence makes some people poor through no fault of their own. But God says a goodly portion of us ought to be significantly enough removed from indebtedness and move toward accumulating assets to be able to help others and extend grace to them so that they can focus on the future and not always be looking to the past.

I believe that God’s word calls us. Jesus said that if he makes us free, the Son makes us free, then we’ll be free indeed. And the scriptures relate debt to servitude. And I know that’s not the way the experience of our country is. But it seems like to me that’s what the word of God, the equation that he wants us to make. And he wants us to be a future-oriented people, a free people, a liberty-loving people, a people of means, a people that can loan to other individuals, and a Christian culture that can loan to the pagans and keep their insatiable attitudes under control and move them toward some degree of future orientation as well.

May the Lord God grant us the grace to move toward the future. I don’t want you to leave feeling hopeless if you’re in debt a lot today. I want you to realize that this is what God intends for you to be able to do something about that. That not today. Don’t want you going home today and working the checkbook and your banking account. This is the day to rest. God gives you victory over this. But tomorrow sit down, do a little analysis: How are you going to move ahead? How are you going to work out of the indebtedness that probably many of us are involved with?

And next week we’ll look at more of these case laws and see that some of the most godly people on the face of the earth are in debt. We’ll look at a text from the times of Elisha when one of the sons of the prophet, his house is mortgaged. He dies and his widow is concerned because they’re going to take the house. So, I’m not saying that all debt is sin, but I’m saying a significant portion of debt comes from a sinful failure of contentment in the present with what God has allowed us.

And may the Lord God grant us grace to move beyond that as a people, to point to the future and the accumulation of assets to be used for the purposes of the kingdom.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for today. We thank you for your love for us. We thank you for the Savior. Indeed, this is a day of release. We thank you that we can pray confidently that you’d forgive us our debts, our sins, because we know that you’ve done it. Help us to be a gracious people, Lord God. And help us to appropriate the freedom and the liberty that the Lord Jesus Christ has bought for us. And help us not to indebt ourselves again to the things of the world.

Help us, Father, to want to aspire at least to the goal of Romans 13:8, to owe no man anything but the continuing debt to love one another. In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.