Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: The Eighth Commandment and Property

Deuteronomy 23:15-24:7. The actual text is on your handouts for today. You can follow along in that or in your own scriptures. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Some people see this as the eighth commandment section of Moses’s sermon on the law here. And some people see in this a kind of restating of all the Ten Commandments. And that’s why they’re laid out the particular way they are on your handout.

So either follow along with that or follow along in your own scriptures. Deuteronomy 23, beginning at verse 15.

“You shall not give back to his master the slave who has escaped from his master to you. He may dwell with you in your midst in the place which he chooses within one of your gates where it seems best to him. You shall not oppress him. There shall be no ritual harlot of the daughters of Israel or a perverted one of the sons of Israel.

“You shall not bring the wages of a harlot or the price of a dog to the house of the Lord your God for any vowed offering. For both of these are an abomination to the Lord your God. You shall not charge interest to your brother, interest on money or food or anything that is lent out at interest. To a foreigner you may charge interest, but to your brother you shall not charge interest, that the Lord your God may bless you in all to which you set your hand in the land which you are entering to possess.

“When you make a vow to the Lord your God, you shall not delay to pay it. For the Lord your God will surely require it of you, and it would be sin to you. But if you abstain from vowing, it shall not be sin to you. That which has gone from your lips, you shall keep and perform. For you voluntarily vowed to the Lord your God what you have promised with your mouth. When you come into your neighbor’s vineyard, you may eat your fill of grapes at your pleasure, but you shall not put any in your container.

“When you come into your neighbor’s standing grain, you may pluck the heads with your hand, but you shall not use a sickle on your neighbor’s standing grain. When a man takes a wife and marries her, and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes, because he has found some uncleanness in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house. When she has departed from his house, and goes and becomes another man’s wife, if the latter husband detests her, and writes her a certificate of a divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house, or if the latter husband dies, who took her as his wife, then her former husband, who divorced her must not take her back to be his wife after she has been defiled.

“For that is an abomination before the Lord, and you shall not bring sin on the land which the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. When a man has taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war or be charged with any business. He shall be free at home one year and bring happiness to his wife whom he has taken. No man shall take the lower or the upper millstone in pledge, for he takes one’s living in pledge.

“If a man is found kidnapping any of his brethren of the children of Israel and mistreats him or sells him, then that kidnapper shall die and you shall put away the evil from among you.”

Let’s pray.

Our God, we thank you for the clarity of your scriptures. We thank you for the wonderful applicability of many of these laws and statutes to our particular day and to our lives. Help us, Father, to understand the relationship to the ballot measures here in Oregon we’ll be voting on. And help us, Father, to commit ourselves afresh to exercising civil government and rule based on your scriptures. In Jesus’s name we ask it, and for the sake of the manifestation of his kingdom of laws and a king. Amen.

Please be seated. I had a wonderful day yesterday. Elijah and I prepared our front lawn of our house for seed, grass seed. Got to use a tiller, till up land. I just love doing it. And today’s sermon is on land and property and the relationship of our two ballot measures here in Oregon to our property and what the scriptures tell us about property and the theft of it.

We have tremendous promises given us in Deuteronomy 4 about the importance and blessing of framing our laws in such a way as to apply to how God has instructed us. And we’re told that when we have laws and statutes and judgments of this sort—that the law that the Lord provides through Moses to the people as they’re to enter into the land—in Deuteronomy, all the nations of the earth shall see it and want the same kind of wonderful way that God treats us. They want their lands to be that same way.

And so a land that frames its civil government according to the law of God is a bright shining light. And of course Israel had a special priestly calling to the rest of the nations, and it was to be the place where these particular laws were made manifest in a very obvious form. But just as applicable, I think in any day today, in any country today rather, the laws of the nation should reflect the laws of God. What other laws would we want to enforce?

And additionally, we’re told that this is part of our evangelism—political evangelism. When you frame the palace, the public place, the laws of the country in relationship to God’s law, which brings blessing upon a people, this evangelizes the nations roundabout who want such blessing in their lands and they convert. That’s the clear implications of Deuteronomy 4.

And so civil rule is important to us as Christians. It’s important to us as evangelists who want to see the discipling of the nations. And certainly that includes the discipling of the nation’s laws. It’s astonishing that so little of Christianity is concerned with civil law today. And when you try to apply the scriptures to civil law in some kind of theocratic way, you’re looked down upon. You’re ridiculed. People are afraid of you.

There is a difference, after all, between a theocracy and an ecclesiocracy. An ecclesiocracy is the rule of the church over a land. The Bible doesn’t put up with that. The Bible clearly distinguishes between the church and the state. But the state must submit itself to God. A theocracy is having rule by being ruled by God’s law. And there’s a sense in which that’s true whether we like it or not. God’s law is always at rule. So the question is: will we be blessed as a nation, or will we be cursed? And we’ll be blessed in relationship to how well the Christian church speaks forth and acts out the implications of God’s word for civil government.

As I’ve said before from this pulpit, chapters 25 to 31 of Proverbs are all about civil rule. The last ten of the thirty sayings of the wise—the center of the book—are about civil rule specifically. In fact, all of Proverbs from one perspective—yes, it has things to say about our vocation and our families, the importance of that—but after all, the book is written to a prince to make a good king out of him. And that’s the way the book concludes: he’s a good king listening to the queen. And it’s a picture, of course, of Jesus and the bride.

But we want to make sure we understand that wisdom for Christians is to culminate in wisdom and civil governance. It’s really very sad, and it’s a judgment of God on us, the fact that we do not take up the scriptures in our attempt to understand civil government. Now, it’s difficult. I write these ballot measures. I sweat blood over them almost. It’s very hard work, and it’s hard to understand the implications of God’s word in some public policy matters. But that’s our job as Christians.

And so every year, well, when there are ballot measures, I write this voters’s guide. And the idea is to start a conversation with those that read it. And for them to start conversations with other people that they know, their friends and neighbors, about what the scriptures have to say about what laws we’re going to put into place either directly or through the election of representatives.

I hope that over the next three or four weeks here in Oregon, as we go through this election cycle, you’ll do that—that you’ll have conversations with your friends, with your family, with your children, and with other members of the community in terms of these ballot measures—and that they’ll be used as an opportunity to talk about the importance of property.

Now, we only have two measures this year: Measure 49 and Measure 50.

Measure 49 changes land use regulations. It’s basically a modification, almost a reversal of Measure 37. Oregon’s had a long history of land use laws going way back to Governor McCall. They were the first state to try the comprehensive state oversight of all land in the state, and it maintains its oversight of all land and zoning regulations, et cetera. Now there is some minimal government involvement. We don’t believe in private property absolutely, and we’ll talk about that as we get into these laws in Deuteronomy.

And the area around the temple, for instance, was zoned. So as people live together in community, you do have to have respect for one another. And it’s not right to put up a missile silo next to a guy who’s got a little cottage, even though it’s your land you’re putting it on. And the scriptures talk about those kinds of things. So we’re not saying that Measure 49 isn’t to be rejected on its face because it maintains some government control.

But what it does is it really attempts to roll back the ability of private citizens who have been successful through Measure 37 in 2004 to get compensated by the government when the government changes the value of their land—of your land—by zoning it differently. You know, if they tell you what to do with your land and it radically changes what you were allowed to do when you bought it and they reduce the value of it, they’ve stolen value from you. And in the Bible, you should have compensation for that. And that’s what Measure 37 did in 2004.

And by the way, we talked about bad news a lot, but this is very good news. We have a very liberal state here, and yet the population of this state has rolled back some of the land use regulations of the last 40 or 50 years in this state. In the last 10 years, Oregonians in Action have been at the front of this. I was at some of the original meetings of Oregonians in Action way back when. Sam Blumenfeld made his first trip, I think, to Oregon to speak to Oregonians in Action. And so I’ve been involved in this for a long time.

But in any event, Measure 49 is an attempt, I believe, on the part of the civil government to restrict private property, to take away value from private property owners, and make it tough for you to regain your value based on Measure 37 claims.

Measure 50 is about children’s health care, but it has a taxing mechanism attached to it. You know, first we want to provide for children’s health care in an expanded way. I don’t believe that on its face. Read my voters’s guide. But the second part of it is a funding mechanism. And the funding mechanism is a tax on cigarette smoke—a smokers tax on tobacco.

Well, your money is part of your property. And in this country, property is seen as a very important thing. Our Thomas Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence that we’re given certain inalienable rights. In other words, inalienable because God has given us these rights. What are they? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The movie got that with happiness spelled wrong: “happiness.” Pursuit of happiness.

Well, Jefferson was simply recasting an earlier phrase written by John Locke, who while a lapsed Calvinist still wrote from a basically a theocratic perspective influenced at least by his family’s Calvinism, which he rejected. But Locke talked about how we have rights to life, liberty, and property—the way Locke put it. And Jefferson recast it into life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And he wasn’t doing that to get away from property. The idea was the pursuit of happiness is tied up with the use of property. If you take away a man’s property, you take away his ability to pursue happiness, you see.

And so our property, whether real in terms of land or our property in terms of our money, are both affected by 49 and 50. And they both then have relevance to the eighth commandment. Is the government trying to steal? Maybe yes, maybe no. But the eighth commandment relative to stealing is relevant to these discussions about property.

So in the scriptures, wisdom is seen in terms of kingly books. The kingly books are wisdom books. The wisdom books are kingly books. Job is about a suffering king. The Song of Songs is about a king. The civil rulers have to love the ones that they rule in the context of—that’s primarily what’s going on there, talking about civil government. It’s not talking about man and woman, although you can make application to that. But it’s the king as lover, we could say, and one who loves his population and seeks to serve them.

Proverbs is about the wise king, specifically the wisdom for the king. Psalms is about the singing king. And so these are all wisdom books, and they tell us the importance of civil governance and acting as good kings under King Jesus in our lives as Christians.

And so we’re told this: now in the Bible, property is kind of interesting. We think of property sort of in somewhat of a gnostic way. We just sang this verse: “Rejoice in glorious hope. Our Lord the judge shall come and take his servants up to their eternal home.” Well, I don’t know what you perceive of as your eternal home, but your eternal home is not a disembodied spirit in heaven. That’s an intermediate state to some kind of life on some kind of earth. And we don’t know a lot about the eternal state, but we know that it’s not disembodied spirits floating around in heaven.

As good as that may be, the presence of God and Jesus, it’s not our eternal state. Christianity has tremendous influences from Greek thought, and Greek thought tended to abstract out ideas and concepts. And Christianity has kind of an abstract way of looking at things. And when the faith is seen as some kind of sweet by-and-by experience, then our bodies, this life, and all this stuff is kind of unimportant.

I guess I’m using the G word—the GN word—gnosticism. Gnosticism separates out physical created reality from ideas and abstract concepts. God’s word doesn’t do that. God’s word says that these things are unified together, and our eternal state is a physical one. Now, it’s a different sort of body, but it’s a body nonetheless. And it has reality and substance to it. And what we do with our bodies here is important—not just avoiding sin, but we’re supposed to use them for the glory of God.

So our bodies are important. This is why we’re supposed to sing. We don’t think thoughts of praise to God. We sing. It’s an incarnated kind of a thing.

Now, in the scripture—years I’ve been teaching on prayer at King’s Academy Chapel, and I was talking to my wife about how pleased I was that the first prayer is men begin to call on God at the end of chapter 4, and then in chapter 5 they call on God through the altar, and then Abram prays for an heir based on the promises of God. And you know, well, she said, “You miss one.”

Oh, what did I miss?

Well, you missed the very first one. And I’d already told my children during King’s Academy Chapel that first use of something is important in the Bible—right, the first time you encounter something, that’s very important.

She said, “Well, Abel’s blood prays from the ground for justice.”

And she’s right. Before it says in chapter 4 that men begin to call on the name of the Lord, chapter 4 recounts the murder of Abel. And here’s what we read in Genesis 4:10. And he said, “What have you done?” God speaking to Cain. “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.” The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.

So now he says, “You are cursed from the earth.” That ground that cries out. “Now you’re cursed from the earth which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. A fugitive and a vagabond you shall be on the earth.”

Now think about that. The land, and we see this throughout the Old Testament, the land summons up justice or vengeance from God. So Abel’s blood cries from the land. The land has a mouth to it. The land can decide to yield its increase or not yield its increase to Cain who’s going to till it. And the land’s going to be stubborn now. It has a mouth. It cries out. You see, the land prays.

So the first prayer is kind of related to the prayer of the land. And what kind of prayer is it, by the way? It’s a prayer for justice. It’s a prayer for vindication. It’s a prayer that God’s justice would be in the earth, you see?

Well, that’s very important. First prayer: a prayer for justice. Well, not to belabor the point. But Job says the same thing. Job 31:38 and 39: “If my land cries out against me and its furrows weep together, if I’ve eaten its fruit without money or caused its owners to lose their lives”—Naboth. That’s what a wicked king did. Called the owner of the land to lose his life. Naboth. That’s why that picture on the front cover today is Naboth’s vineyard. It’s a picture of the unrighteous civil government that tries to take away the land of private citizens who don’t have power.

And I think we could extend it out and say, “Well, that’s not as wicked of a thing. Still, it’s not good for the civil government to try to take value from private land owners and not compensate them,” you see. It’s in that line of sin.

Well, Job didn’t want to be like that. He wanted to be a king who didn’t cause owners to lose their lives. And he was afraid the land would cry out and the furrows would weep because of his oppression.

In verse 40: “If this is true, then let thistles grow instead of wheat and weeds instead of—” The words of Job are ended. The last words of Job. The last words are important too in the scriptures. And what does it end with? It ends with the same kind of thing going on in Genesis 4, the first prayer. He’s afraid the land will pray out against him and the land will refuse to cooperate with him.

Now, what I’m trying to get you to see here is that the land is not to be abstracted out from human life. There’s a connection between human life and the land. Now, that shouldn’t surprise us because that’s all we are. We’re land. We’re dirt. We’re dust. That’s what God made man from. Now, it’s not all we are. God breathed the spirit of life into our nostrils. But that’s what we are: we’re dirt. We’re the Holy Land. As James B. Jordan and others have said, forget Israel. We’re the Holy Land, say we’re land. We’re dust. The land cries out. That’s all we are. We return to the dust.

So the point of this is that God makes a big connection between humanity and property, land specifically—doesn’t abstract it out. At the very end of the scriptures, or toward the end of the scriptures, when we want to hear about what Jesus does on the cross for us, what are we told in Hebrews 12:24? That we come in worship today to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than that of Abel. So the justice has been met through Jesus’s work. The justice will be played out in the context of the world, and Jesus’s blood speaks like Abel’s blood. And Abel’s blood came from the land.

So in the Bible, the land has a mouth. It actually said that in Genesis 4. Its mouth drank up the blood. Its mouth—Job says—cries out to God and weeps and prays to God for judgment. In the Bible, the land prays. The ground is like a person. Property is like people.

Most of Deuteronomy—and opportunity Deuteronomy—you know, in Deuteronomy 5, Deuteronomy is the second giving of the law, and what it is a big long extended sermon on the law. It’s made up—in Deuteronomy 5, the Ten Commandments are restated. Now, they’re different from Exodus 20. And we’ve talked about this before, but it’s important to sort of think about that because even the Ten Commandments change as the situation of God’s people changes.

The eternal law behind them is to love God and love your neighbor. And Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 are not dissimilar in a sense from case laws in that they talk about how to apply it in a particular context.

So in Deuteronomy 5, we have the Ten Commandments restated, and then in most of the rest of the book, that’s what it is—a long sermon by Moses on the Ten Commandments. Dr. Crabtree, Jim B. Jordan, many other modern commentators have seen that this sermon is not a collection of diverse laws. It’s broken up into particular sections with clear border marks and all that sort of stuff. I don’t know if you noticed or not, but the boundary markers to what we think is the eighth commandment section both have to do with runaway slaves and then kidnapping people.

And so, right away, what do we have? We have in the exposition of the eighth commandment—thou shalt not steal—we have a reference to men as property. Okay, men as property and what should be done about that. So this is a ten commandment part of the Ten Commandments sermon. Deuteronomy is a sermon on the Ten Commandments. Today’s text is on the eighth commandment.

Eight—for those of you who are using the children’s outline, which by the way, is a handout sheet rather which has the wrong heading on it, just scratch that out. It was from an older sermon. Eighth commandment.

The eighth commandment tells us not to steal. And so we’ve got this interesting picture for the coloring for the little kids. And you know, I guess if kids can write letters out, “do not steal,” you could write that on there. I tried to find a cartoon with “do not steal” coloring sheet. Couldn’t find it. I always have continuity with finishing the race, I suppose, but he’s running the wrong way—away from finishing correctly. He’s finishing badly. He’s stealing. And the eighth commandment says, “Don’t steal.” And big deal.

And in this commandment, we think—as I said—that we have ten specific commandments and that they sort of track the Ten Commandments themselves. Why would that be? It begins with talking about men as property. And why would it track the Ten Commandments if it does? I think it does. Well, what was man’s fall? Man’s fall was a violation of the eighth commandment.

Now, it was a violation of a lot of the other ones, but in terms of what Adam actually did, he stole God’s property. God says, “Don’t eat the fruit. It’s fenced for you. It’s mine. You can’t have it yet.” And Adam, like the little kid, goes to the cookie jar and mom says, “You can’t have one yet. Wait till after dinner.” He takes it. So Adam’s original sin is theft. It’s stealing from God.

And so it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary here to see that these ten statements sort of track the Ten Commandments. And I’ve got on the outlines—I think I’ve got that on your outlines. The first one has to do with a runaway slave. Well, how does that track the first commandment? Well, the first commandment’s premised on God bringing them out of the land of Egypt and putting, moving them toward the holy land. They’re runaway slaves from Egypt. God had to kill their master to make sure they could run away effectively. They were servants. They ran away. And because of that, when servants run to them from other foreign, oppressing nations, they’re supposed to not return them back to oppression, but they’re supposed to let them live in the land. That’s how they got there.

And to do anything other than that would be a denial of the grace that God has shown upon them.

Now, we can talk about relevance to the Civil War here. And I think that it was wrong, clearly wrong, for the South to have slaves that were kidnapped, which is a death penalty offense. Gary North has pointed out that the Presbyterian Church should have spoken out before the Civil War started against slave trading, that it was a death—it was a death penalty offense according to God’s word—and they didn’t. And as a result we could say this land was plunged into horrible misery, much death and destruction, the devastation lasting for a long time. And I know that the North, you know, were more godless than the South at that time, but I’m telling you the South, according to this eighth commandment sermon, had a bunch of culpability.

We have records of men that are considered by some good, godly Christian men in the South—southern officers—records of them paying to have their runaway slaves returned and then beaten. Now, I think there’s significance here. There’s other significance as well.

World Vision has set up youth hostels or youth areas where girls who are running away from the horrific slave trade in Thailand can go and find sanctuary or asylum. You see, oppression, the girls run away. World Vision set up a sanctuary in Thailand for them to keep them safe from the slave trade in Thailand. There’s lots of applications, but understand that it kind of does work at the first commandment because the first commandment says, “I’ve taken you out. Don’t have any other gods.” This slave, this runaway slave, is changing masters from a bad master to a good master. The people of God now knows who he’s serving. And so it sort of has connection.

We can make connection too, by the way, to Jacob, Israel in the singular. And Jacob comes back from Laban and he’s sort of a runaway slave again there. And we can think a lot of these laws in that same way. And Esau greets him in the land, and Esau could send him back, but he doesn’t do it. So we can make connection to Jacob as well. But the point is, it’s sort of a first commandment sort of a thing.

And for our purposes today, in terms of the eighth commandment, immediately we’re sort of thinking of people in relationship to property—stealing.

The second verse is verse 17: “There should be no ritual harlot.” Now this is interesting because “ritual harlot.” Well, this is a word that’s based in on holiness. Kadesh is the root of it, and it means holy prostitute. And what’s interesting about it is that where this is used prior, it’s only used a few times in the Bible. And one of the uses is Judah speaking about Tamar. You remember the story? Judah wouldn’t fulfill his Levitical responsibilities to Tamar. So Tamar wanted a son real badly. So she pretends she’s a prostitute. Judah, you know, has sex with her. And then Judah comes back and looks for her. And when Judah can’t find her, he asks around: “Where is the—” and he uses this word.

Kind of interesting. And I think it’s interesting because again, many of these—the first six of these, at least—seem to track events going on in Genesis. And those of you who have studied God’s law much in Exodus and the case laws or in Deuteronomy know that’s the case. It’s not as if this law sprung, you know, out of the forehead of Zeus full-born here. These laws were known. Much of the application of these laws we can see going on in Genesis. God was known, and so his laws reflecting his character were known. And they’re articulated for a particular purpose here.

But in any event, the second commandment has to do with mediation between God and men. And the mediator is Jesus Christ. And we’re not supposed to set up idols. Idols and idol adultery are connected in the scriptures. And this is false mediation on the part of prostitution, prostitutes in Israel.

The third structure here—oh, and by the way, in terms of the Judah and Tamar story, you know, he pays for a son. Okay, so Judah pays Tamar. The end result is Tamar has a son who is then added to the people of God, and Judah’s money is kind of, becomes then the wages involved in this. The end result really for Tamar is the son who’s added to the people of God.

And the next law in verse 18: “You shall not bring the wages of a harlot or the price of a dog into the house of the Lord your God for any vowed offering, for both of those are an abomination to the Lord your God.”

Now, when we vow things to God, we own things. And he says here, “Don’t pay me with abominable wages.” That’s theft from me, he says. And he’s going to talk about vowed offerings again here in a little bit. So again, this sort of has relationship to the eighth commandment. And it has relationship to the third commandment in terms of the idea of no vain or empty payment of a vow. You know, don’t have—don’t take the name of the Lord your God in vain, which means emptiness. And there’s an empty payment of a vow going on here.

The next one in verse 19: “You shall not charge interest to your brother. Interest on money, of food, anything that’s of interest to a foreigner, you may charge it.”

Now, here again, we have to understand what’s going on. For many years, the church thought that all interest from brother to brother was forbidden by these laws. But if we look carefully at the scriptures, that’s not what’s going on. What’s going on is the only time a brother would want to borrow money from you is if he’s poor. And you were commanded not to charge interest to a brother who would seek a poor loan. The foreigners who are coming into the land of Israel, these will be businessmen and they’re looking for loans for investment purposes.

So the idea here is: don’t oppress poor people by charging them interest. God has particular concern for the weak. And if we think about this already, the runaway servant, or Tamar, or now the poor man who needs a loan—and you’re going to bite him with interest. God has a concern for the weak.

Don’t steal. Stealing is the exertion of power or authority over someone who has lesser power and authority to take their property, which represents their life. You see, that’s what the eighth commandment is.

And so, by the way, in terms of taxation issues, we read an interesting verse in the book of Amos, which we’re studying. We finished two weeks on at King’s Academy, my Old Testament prophets class. And one of the reasons why God judged Israel, the northern tribe, was they charged taxes on the wheat of the poor. Now, I don’t know, but maybe there’s a justification there for exempting poor people from paying taxes. It probably wasn’t wrong to tax wheat, but it says specifically because they tax the wheat of the poor. God does want us to have concern for those who are weak.

And this fourth commandment—the fourth commandment here—obviously we can see that in relationship to the fourth commandment to give people rest, to not oppress them, to bring the stranger and the widow and the fatherless and the orphan to rest. And so the idea is giving rest to the poor here. But it’s a prohibition against taking property by way of interest. That’s what it would be: money, right—return on investment—stealing, if you take interest from a poor person.

So churches—you know, church here in Oregon City, Prince of Life Lutheran Church, other churches—have been very involved in trying to regulate the payday loan places which tend to be predatory upon poor people.

All right. So anyway, these laws continue to move that way. Esau—when he greeted Jacob coming back from Laban and back into the land after he crossed across the river and became Israel—as Israel comes back into the land, Esau lends people to Jacob to help him. Some of his men help them, and he doesn’t charge him any interest on that. On the other hand, when Israel moves to the promised land, the Edomites, much later, the Edomites, who are the descendants of Esau, when they want to cross across their border, the Edomites say, “No, you can’t do it.” And they treat their brothers poorly, and Israel has to go around them.

So the idea here is: don’t charge interest. And again, we can look back at stories in Genesis and see connections that way.

The next commandment in verse 21: “When you make a vow to the Lord your God, you shall not delay to pay it. The Lord your God will surely require it of it and it to be sin to you. If you abstain from vowing, it shall be sin to you. That which is gone from your lips, you shall keep and perform. For you voluntarily vow to the Lord your God what you have promised with your mouth.”

So here is the idea of paying your vows. And again, what’s going on is you’re stealing from God if you do not do this. You don’t have to make a vow, but if you vow something to God, you must keep your vow. What did Jacob vow? Jacob vowed that if God would take care of him, he’d give him a tithe. And Jacob fulfilled his vow, and the scriptures record that for us.

So again, these stories sort of track the Old Testament.

Let me read a quote here from a commentator, the Word Biblical Commentary, and I just thought this was a good quote. I won’t continue to belabor this Genesis connection, but there is one very clearly and obviously in many of these specific commandments.

And we read in this from the Word Biblical Commentary: “He says that these appear to be a deliberately ambiguous invitation for an able teacher to discuss and amplify each of the words of these commandments relative to Jacob and Israel so as to guide the curious into quote ‘a more fantastic country’—the literary world of the Bible in the book of Genesis in particular.”

I like that. As I’ve studied the scriptures and specifically the law, you are sort of amusing, contemplating certain laws, remembering what happened in Genesis, and you are brought in an ambiguous way. God kind of conceals it, but you can reveal it as a king. You can bring the meaning out in an ambiguous but pointed way. He takes us into a wonderful world of the literary unity of the scriptures and specifically back into the wonderful stories of the book of Genesis, even as we’re reading this—the law codes here.

So vows: Jacob paid a vow to God. And what’s being prohibited here is theft from God. And so the eighth commandment—thou shalt not steal—we could say one of the most important aspects of the eighth commandment is: don’t steal from God by using the wages of a prostitute to bring pay off your vow, or to just simply pay for paying your vow.

So the scriptures, the eighth commandment—we want to talk about you know not stealing from each other. But the beginning point for that is recognizing we shouldn’t steal from God.

In Malachi chapter 3, we read of people that stole from God. And that’s exactly the way he says it. You say, “In what way shall we return?” So what’s the problem? They say to him, and he says, “Well, a man robbed God. Yet you have robbed me.” See, they violated the eighth commandment, stealing from God. “You’ve robbed me. But you say, ‘In what way have we robbed you?’ In tithes, and offerings”—tithes—”and then the offerings, the vows perhaps is being referenced here. You are cursed with the curse, for you have robbed me, even this whole nation.”

And then he tells them, “Bring the tithes into the storehouse that there may be food in my house.”

Now, the implications here is that, well, there’s a couple of things we should say. One: to fail to tithe, God tells a covenanted people—and part of the covenant membership vows of this church is to pay the tithe—God tells his covenanted people that to fail to pay the tithe is to be violating the eighth commandment. It’s to steal and rob from God.

Secondly, he says that he will require a punishment for it. In fact, it’s much worse. There’s no civil sanction against this in this particular law. There’s not a lot of laws, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a sanction. God says you’re cursed with the curse. The sanction is worse than what the civil government can do to you. He’s going to destroy your ability to make money. You’re going to become poor as a result of failing to tithe. And he says, “You’ve been cursed with the curse.” He puts it in the past tense.

And the implications is these people had trouble—now would have trouble—paying their tithe. And God says, “Too bad. Trust me. Believe in me. Pay the tithe first.” It doesn’t say in our covenant statement, you know, “I pledge to give God his tithe when it’s convenient.” It doesn’t say, “I pledge to give God his tithe sometimes.” It doesn’t say, “I pledge to give God his tithe if I’ve made sure all the other bills I have are paid.”

It’s a pledge to give God tithe because it’s the first part. Don’t try to get financial blessing or success or work out financial difficulties by failing to tithe. It’s a violation of the eighth commandment.

Twice in this part of the sermon, God warns—or God through Moses warns—the people not to steal from him. He will bring penalty upon it if they don’t prioritize what they’re obligated to give to God.

So the vow—fulfillment of the vow. The sixth word in verse 24 says: “When you come into your neighbor’s vineyard, you may eat your fill of grapes as your pleasure. You shall not put any in your container. When you come into your neighbor’s standing grain, you may pluck the heads with your hand, but you shall not use a sickle on your neighbor’s standing grain.”

Well, now we have a very specific law relating to the eighth commandment and brother-to-brother activity. But it’s not a law that tells us don’t do something. It’s well, it is, but by implication, it says what we can do with each other’s property. And so there’s no absolute right to your private property. There’s no such thing as private property really. There’s property that’s given in stewardship to individual people or families, but it’s not private. You have to use that property the way God says to use it.

And very specifically, he says: when your brother comes through your land, you can walk through—he can walk through your vineyard. Number one, and number two, you have to let him eat your grapes as he’s walking through. And he can walk through your grain fields. You can’t fence it off, and you’ve got to let him eat the grain as he walks through. He can’t carry any out. That would be stealing. But it’s stealing of you if you don’t share access and some minimal provisions of your crops to your brother who loves you.

Now, as I said, specifically, we’re told in the book of Numbers that when God’s people came out of Egypt and moved toward the promised land, very specifically, Moses said there to the Edomites: “We won’t go through your grain fields or your vineyards. We’ll go on the king’s highway. We won’t even—you won’t even have to worry that we’re going to steal from you.” Even though he knew—just like we should know—that it’s okay. The law hadn’t been given yet, but they knew it. So we’re not going to do that. And still, the Edomites wouldn’t get them access.

And so it shows how horrible the Edomites were here. And this kind of relates back to that. But the point here is that the Bible limits private property, and it limits them in the direct context of the eighth commandment prohibiting stealing. So it’s very interesting and it’s very applicable to our right use of property.

What’s happiness? What’s the pursuit of happiness? It’s property. And our right use of property will not be selfish with it. Will not be absolutely private. We should have laws that allow some movement through our land and partaking of the fruits of the land. So there is no absolute private property rights given here, although clearly if there’s this exception given, the normal course of things is that your land is your land to do with what you want to do with it, as long as it’s under God’s law, you don’t violate his law.

So the minimal control of your private property here establishes the right of private property. Do you understand? Other laws, gleaning laws were also in place. So you didn’t own the corners of your field, and you weren’t supposed to go back and pick it twice. You had to let people glean. So the minimal intrusions on your stewardship of your land that God allowed other people to take really establishes your control of the land. Do you understand?

If I give you one restriction—God told Adam, “Don’t eat the fruit from this tree”—but the implication is that every other fruit is okay. So it establishes his freedom. And the same thing here. We’re free to use the property God gives us, whether it’s the real property of land or the finances that God gives us, given the certain restrictions. We’re supposed to use our money to tithe. If we paid—made offerings, we have to—made vows rather—we have to pay them. We cannot use our land all ultimately—absolutely on our own. But having said all that, private property is established.

Chapter 24:1 begins with the divorce law. And this is long and complicated, and I won’t read it. But it’s an important law to us as Christians. It tells us this is what Jesus, I think, is referring back to in the Gospels. Jesus didn’t say the only reason for divorce is adultery. This law doesn’t say if the man finds the wife has committed adultery. Jesus uses porneia—fornication—in the gospel accounts. This word used in the Old Testament is indecency. It’s not specified. It can’t be adultery because she’d be put to death. That was the requirement for adultery: was death. It can’t be sex in the period of engagement because that also was a death penalty offense.

So the uncleanness has to do with something other than adultery, and it doesn’t specify what it is. It’s not our job today to articulate those things. But I want to show you the consistency of the one word of God. Jesus uses porneia. This text uses indecency. This text provides for divorce, but it refuses to provide for the return of the wife to the first husband after she’s had a second husband. That’s what it prohibits here. And it also insists that the woman be given a bill of divorce—legal protection. God is always wanting to protect the weaker of the culture, and the divorced wife would be weaker here.

So what’s the relationship to the eighth commandment? Well, it says that, you know, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about why, but what it says is if you do this you would bring sin on the land which the Lord your God has given you as an inheritance. So somehow this is wrapped up with laws of inheritance and children and all that stuff, and it is a violation of inheritance laws or land laws that would result if this practice is entered into. So it does have appropriateness in an eighth commandment section dealing with land.

The eighth law is: “When a man has taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war or be charged with any business. He shall be free at home one year and bring happiness to his wife whom he has taken.”

Again, an important law that we have talked about in our church. It establishes the year of exclusion. At our church, you get married for a year. We’re not going to let you do a lot of work around the church. It doesn’t mean you get time off from work, but it says you’re 40 hours a week. That’s it. Don’t go volunteering down at the Elks. Don’t teach Sunday school. Don’t do any of that stuff. Your job, husband, is to make your wife happy and establish it. So it’s like the beginning, the establishment of the marriage in the first year. And God says we’re not supposed to steal away the spouse—to send him off to war for some other purpose—from that relationship that is jelling up in the context of joy and happiness. So you don’t steal the spouse.

The next law says: “That no man shall take the upper, lower, and upper millstone in pledge, where he takes one’s living and pledge.”

Again, this is stealing life from somebody. The millstones were used to grind bread. It was necessary for life. And you couldn’t take both of them, or you’d be stealing his very life.

And then finally, the laws against kidnapping in chapter 10—or verse 10—no, I’m sorry, it’s the 10th rule, but it’s verse 7 of chapter 24. Under certain circumstances, not all kidnapping, but kidnapping that results in the sale of someone or the mistreatment of them, the death penalty is God’s maximum punishment for that offense.

And so we have coveting and stealing. Now what do we have here by way of implication then in terms of property?

Well, life and property, the right valuing of property, is not the debasement of men. Why in the eighth commandment do we have laws about slaves? It’s not because in the Old Testament people were treated as cattle and in the New Testament they’re not. It’s not as if they had a low whole view of mankind. They’re talking about indebted servitude. And actually what it’s talking about is prohibiting the kind of slavery that went on in the South of this country.

But when it talks about the relationship of seeing men as property related to physical property being prohibited from stealing, the eighth commandment—my view is that it’s not debasing men. It’s exalting property. You understand? If the eighth commandment says there are certain things about the other person’s person that we can’t do in order to restore, then we’re treating the person like land. God has no trouble talking about men in the context of a commandment that we always think in terms of property. And it’s not because men are lower in value. We should raise our view of property based on these laws. Do you understand that?

We should have a heightened understanding. This is what we started out trying to say with the land having a mouth and praying and all that stuff. Land is not some sort of ancillary thing to us in the Bible. The Bible is a land-based faith. And God says that we should have a high value of personal property—so high that when we talk about personal property, we can even discuss what we do with other people. So it doesn’t debase man. It exalts private property.

Secondly, there are God-given limits on private property. We’re not saying absolutely that the state should have no right to govern your use of your property. No, there are god-given limits. The eighth commandment prohibits—these this particular sermon that Moses gives will keep us from thinking erroneously in an overly libertarian fashion that somehow our private property is totally our own and nobody can tell us what to do with it. God tells you what to do with it. And he says that people can walk onto it and take your grapes at least in this particular context. Now its application may change. You can talk to me about that if you like. But the point is, there is no absolute right to private property.

When we have zoning laws and stuff, they’re not all of the devil. They’re not all of the devil. We’re to be regulated. But third, God-given limits means the establishment of private property. And this is the real payoff. The eighth commandment prohibits our taking of property. And the way it’s laid out heightens our sense of the value of property, even though it gives us restrictions on our use of it.

And so what it means is, while the government can take your property for certain things, some degree of taxation may be okay, some degree of zoning and stuff may be okay, we must be very careful with other people’s property.

Now, parents, you can teach your children this in the earliest days of their lives. They’re to be careful to acknowledge property of the family, to acknowledge, you know, what’s theirs and what’s not theirs. We don’t want to raise little socialists who think that everything belongs to everybody because then everything belongs to nobody. Nobody has responsibility. So stewardship and ownership are joined together. And we can teach our children from their earliest age to have great care in their use of the private property of others.

And if our kids grow up and some become legislators, they’re not going to willy-nilly take away the private property of other people. They’re going to be very careful about it.

Let me give you an example of how horrible this has become.

In Measure 50, we all want to do a good thing for the kids. It’s always for the kids, right? So the kids need healthcare. Well, we already have programs for the health care for the poor. This program would expand it beyond the income levels that are now in there, et cetera. That’s one thing. But how are we going to do this good deed for the children? Well, we’re going to take those lousy stinking villain smokers, and we’re going to take their money away from them to pay for the healthcare.

So let’s think of, you know, in the state of Oregon, it’s a little tough, but let’s say we’re all here today and a few of us smoke and we smoke cigarettes, and the rest of us say, “You know, our kids need better health. Let’s get them better health. And you two over there that are smoking, you pay for it.”

Now, smokers statistically are low income. And most cigarette smokers are addicted. The cigarette has them. They don’t have the cigarette. Now, if you think of that, can you see the reprehensibility of taking that poor person’s difficulty with trying to break his habit? See, he can’t do it. And you’re going to profit off of his sinfulness by taking that money to do something good so your conscience will feel better.

Okay, if all the citizens of the state of Oregon want to say we’re all going to band together and make better health care available through some sort of state mechanism, I personally would be against it. I think it’s counterproductive. But and I can talk about that at another time perhaps during the question and answer time. But if we’re going to make that decision, then let’s all share in the sacrifice to provide that benefit, you see?

But no, we want to steal the property from some small, villain minority class newly identified in the last 20, 30 years so that we can do a good deed with their money. It stinks. Direct violation, I think, of the premises of the eighth commandment, and it’s, I think, horrendous.

So the funding mechanism alone would make you want to vote no on Measure 50 if you’ve understood what I’ve said here today. God says property is tied to our very life here. We’re treated with property. Property is intensely personal.

May the Lord God grant us as a congregation astuteness in our homes and in our community and then as we interact with others about the taking of property without return of value in Measure 49 and the taking of property from poorer people for us doing a good deed somehow for our kids. May the Lord God grant us wisdom, discernment, and clear tongues to speak with our neighbors about how very careful we should be in our homes, in the community, and then in the civil arena as it relates to private property.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for your laws. We thank you for the beauty of them. I thank you, Father, for the beautiful way that you cite back the Genesis stories for us here and the way you track the Ten Commandments and this commandment not to steal. Forgive us, Lord God, for our Adamic propensity to steal from each other. Help us, Lord God, to control stealing with the official stamp of the government placed upon it. Help us to remember that it is still stealing nonetheless. And help us, Lord God, in our conversations during this political season to speak forth the truth of your word and your eighth commandment into the public arena.

In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.