Dennis Tuuri

Deuteronomy 25:13-16. Please stand for reading of God’s word. You shall not have in your bag differing weights, a heavy and a light. You shall not have in your house differing measures, a large and a small. You shall have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just measure, that your days may be lengthened in the land which the Lord your God is giving you. For all who do such things, all who behave unrighteously are an abomination to the Lord your God.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the law. We thank you for the Holy Spirit that enables us now to use this law to change ourselves and this world. We thank you for the maturation of mankind in the person and work of Jesus Christ, the change of state that we have relative to this law through him. Enable us today, Lord God, by that Holy Spirit to understand this law and its proper context and its application to our life to the end that we may be indeed those world changers by changing ourselves first, our homes, our places of business and commerce and thus extend out the righteousness of Jesus Christ in Jesus name we ask and for the sake of his kingdom. Amen.

Please be seated. Now the topic today is just weights and the cross of life. Cross of life is an expression used by Oen Rosenthal who’s dead now but who came to America as Hitler was coming to the rise in Germany and Peter Leithart at this year’s ministerial conference spoke on this cross of life. I’ve heard about it before. I have his collected works and what I want to talk about today is a specific law found in Deuteronomy and its application to our world.

But first, I want to talk a little bit about the cross of life. You young children, the coloring sheet on the back page for you, that’s it. It’s hard to see even on the front cover of our order of worship. But if it was in color, you can more clearly see it’s the Celtic cross. So there’s a cross there with both members of the same length. So we have this cross. And on the children’s coloring sheet, we have what Hoekstra talks about in terms of living on the cross maturely which is having a proper balance to the past and the future to the inside of our communities and to the outside as well.

So those are the four dimensions that Hoekstra talks about and we can see these for instance in Ephesians 4 we have a description of the four offices of the church that God gives to her as gifts. There are apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers and evangelists. We are to hold the apostolic traditions, the apostles, you know, remind us of the past. And so we have an emphasis on apostolic teaching, an emphasis on the past.

At the same time, God gives prophets to the church to focus on the future, to take the apostolic traditions and the things of the scriptures that we’ve learned from the past and apply them into our day today, to speak that word into contemporary situations and create a new future. There’s a sense in which we’re always living in the past and future. There’s no present, right? Soon as we say present, it’s past and we’re moving on into the future.

So this movement in the church, a balance, we could say, a proper balance, a proper emphasis on apostolic traditions and what’s been handed down to us and applying that in new ways into the future. And then, interestingly, we have pastor teachers and evangelists. Pastor teachers are there for the well-being of the inner community, the life of the church, the people that are at the church. Now, so pastors and teachers teach people. They pastor people of a present flock. Evangelists on the other hand, their focus is outside into the world to bring more people into the household of God. And so, a church has to have a proper emphasis on inner community life and also on the desire not to become so much into our own community that we raise big roadblocks as the evangelists in our church and as God’s spirit brings new people in. So, this tension is what’s talked about.

I was teaching in from Micah this week to my Kings Academy class, and it’s interesting. There’s a description of the priests and the prophets, the rulers, and the heads. They’ve all gone south. They’ve all sinned in Micah. So judgment has come. Priests perform ritual actions handed down from the past. Their ties to the past. Prophets, on the other hand, again, are focused toward the future. Now, rulers are like managers or pastor teachers. They rule in the context of the people of God. And heads, ro in the Hebrew is a more emphatic description of the one at the head of the army. So it’s kind of like evangelists. So throughout the scriptures we have this emphasis on the past, the future, the inner group and the outer group. And maturity is not overbalancing one way or the other.

Hoekstra, when he talked about this, talked about businesses in a typical business that produces a product on an assembly line. The assembly line is apostolic tradition, right? The procedures have been lined out. Nobody messes with them. They just do them. So that’s focused on the past. If you’re an assembly line worker, you’re focused on past procedures that have been established. On the other hand, a good company will also have engineers who are trying to develop new products and new ways of accomplishing the construction of the old products.

So engineers are looking to the future and their future changes will affect what the production line people do. So an emphasis on the past emphasis on the future. Good businesses will have managers of the business making sure that the community or family of the business is maintained well, but they’ll also have a sales force trying to go out and bring people into this relationship of customer and sellers that really the household the business is.

So a good business will have a proper focus inward, a proper focus outward, a proper relationship to the past and a proper relationship to the future. So that’s what I want to talk about and I think that Rebecca Anger, I won’t mention the same cartoon I’ve mentioned it before little drawing she made, but we can think about the subcultures that exist in the context of Reformation Covenant Church in the same way some of these subcultures focus a little more on the past some focus more on the future some focus more on the interior of families some focus more on exterior and in relationship to impacting the world around us and what I want to see here is that immaturity is going one direction nor the other.

Right? So a church that’s always about the past and has no vision for the future. Well, this is not a mature church. And a church on the other hand that wants to be emergent and cool and fancy and ignores apostolic traditions, that’s not a mature church either. And a mature church is not one that’s so tightly bound together in community that nobody can get in or that people feel frustrated when they come because they’re not part of the in-group. That’s not good.

On the other hand, a church can be all outward oriented, have no community life whatsoever. So these are aspects that I’m going to be talking about for the next five or six weeks. I’ll probably end up doing, pray about it please, but four advent sermons on these four specific directions. My task today is to take an example of something from the past. How do we apply it into the future and in a way that is both conducive of strong families and strong church, but is not so interior oriented that we don’t look at the outside.

So I’m trying to apply this idea, this truth that God gives us in the four offices of the church, for instance, and in other places. I’m trying to apply this then to this particular case law, and I want to talk about it. Now, it’s an important case law. We’ll look at Leviticus 19 here in a little bit, but you’ll remember, some of you will remember that I’ve told you in the past that Leviticus 19 is a whole chapter of, I think, 70 commands. It’s a commentary on the Ten Commandments. And the parallel law to this one from Deuteronomy is found at the end of those 70 commandments. It’s the capstone. And so this law is not unimportant or not just like any other law. It’s given prominence at the end of 19.

Remember 19 is one that starts with relationship to authorities and parents and the Sabbath. And so hierarchical relationships and it concludes with our relationships on a horizontal level. Commerce, trade, you know, the fellowship and sharing that true Christian economies and business transactions are to be a relationship to one another of love and service. All right?

So we live between the past and the future. For you young kids on the handout that you’re to fill in the older kids. We live between the past and the future. We have houses, but they have doors to let others in. In Revelation, the new Jerusalem, the church is described as having walls that define it. It has an interior and it has doors and the doors are always open. So you see in the new temple in Jerusalem, the church, you see this relationship between an inner demarcated group but easy access to let others in and for us to go out and gather them. So in and out. And our homes are the same way. If our homes are always interior and never we never exercise hospitality and we never reach out to the communities we live in, then you see we’ve balanced too much on the inner and not emphasizing our homes as an outer and evangelistic mechanism as well.

So our homes have doors to let others in. The church must be tied to the past, but it also must go forward into the future. The Sabbath teaches us this. What was the problem with the Sabbath? That was the big point of controversy in John’s gospel and in the New Testament and in the other gospels. Well, Jesus was here to bring about the new world. He just sang this wonderful song, a hymn of glory. Let us sing new song throughout the world shall ring. Alleluia. Christ by a road before untrod ascendeth to the throne of God. Well, that’s what happened. The whole world changed. John 1 tells us that in the beginning, new creation and it’s not culminated yet. We have kind of a foot in the old world, but the new world is coming and is being manifest. It’s here definitively in Christ. That’s what the Sabbath was.

And so Jesus used the Sabbath tied to the past but moving into the new future. And he used it to heal and bring about new world, new man on the Sabbath. So the Christian Sabbath, the Lord’s day, is this day of transition, building upon the past, not forgetting it, but also moving forward into the future. And that’s what a sermon should do. It should preach the gospel of the past and apply that gospel into our lives today into the future.

The church is a growing family. Okay, the church is the family, but it should be growing. Growing, okay? It wants to expand. It wants to have doors to the outside. We want to bring other people. When we had the feast, it’s a family meal, but it’s a family meal that, as we saw in the Gospels, is a call for everyone to come in. The doors are to be open, and we’re to invite in everyone to the feast of God. We are in the world, but not of the world. We are impacting the world. It is our job to make manifest the garden of God that we see in worship in the whole world. The way Adam was supposed to go downstream with the garden image and change the world. That’s our job. And if we are if we are too retreatist from the world, then we fail in our task to be emissaries of the Lord Jesus Christ to that world.

On the other hand, if we’re all exterior oriented and future oriented, then we become of the world and we lose what we have to offer that world. And so this is the balance. All right, let’s turn to Deuteronomy 25:13-16. And on the outlines, I begin by giving you the context. You know, you as good Christians trained in this church, you know that it’s important to look at the context of a particular text. Without the context, it is a pretext for something else. And what I’ve given you here is a brief outline of the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 25:13-16 is in the section that is the 10th word section, chapter 25:4 to 26:15.

And you’ll see that interestingly as the commandment, the bulk of Deuteronomy is the sermon on the ten commandments. And I’ve given you summation words. The first commandment is about loyalty to God. The second commandment is about proper mediation. The third commandment is about witness to others. The fourth commandment in Deuteronomy starts with the kid law, which is an odd thing. And the seventh commandment starts with a vineyard law, which seems odd, but the wife is a vineyard.

And the kid, if we trace what it’s supposed to be about, the idea is you’re not supposed to boil a kid in its mother’s milk. You’re not supposed to use what is nurturing to the kid to kill the kid. And we do that when we either one ignore the Sabbath. We don’t give them the means of nurture. So we kill them with the ignorance of the Sabbath. Or if we make the Sabbath into a day of drudgery and no recreation and no fun.

The day Sabbath the Christian Sabbath the Lord’s day is a day that you know we sing this wonderful songs and our lives are lived out in joyous celebration of what we hear in the morning that the new world has arrived in Christ and we’re part of that world now and our essential identity is now in the Lord Jesus Christ. So the kid law relation it gives us a little image of the Sabbath. I bring this up because the 10th commandment section you’ll see 25:4 to 26:19 starts with don’t muzzle the ox.

Several of these commandment sections in Deuteronomy begin with a little picture or image and the idea is to set up a little drawing of what’s going to happen here as a way to remember what’s in it. Now, Paul tells us very explicitly that don’t muzzle the ox is not given for the ox’s sake. Does God care about oxen? Not oxen. Not at all. Paul says now he cares about them, but in relationship to the purpose of the law, Paul says they’re of complete unimportance.

The law was given, Paul said in its original giving, the law was given as an illustration of tithing, of paying the ministers of the church. That’s what Paul says. And so, if we have this even if we couldn’t have figured it out from Deuteronomy which I think we maybe should have been able to in fact Paul says we should have when Paul talks about this law he says well you know that this isn’t about oxen right and we say no we didn’t know that actually thought it was about oxen but because we don’t know our Bibles very well and if we looked at this ten commandment section it begins and ends the last thing it talks about is tithing and then after that it gives a summation statement keep the commandments the statutes and judgments and we’re done with the ten commandment sermon.

So the last thing in the coveting section is tithing. And so if we know that God uses bookends frequently, we’ll recognize that muzzling the ox is this reference to using the tithe properly. And this is a how you combat covetousness and theft and cheating. You tithe. And by tithing, you recognize the control of God over all finances and all arrangements. So the tenth commandment section is where these particular verses are found.

Deuteronomy is a sermon on the ten commandments. Today’s text is on the 10th commandment. And number eight on your handout sheet, young children, this commandment tells us not to covet. The 10th commandment, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors ox, lamb, etc. So we’re not supposed to covet. You know what it means is don’t covet and then as a result cheat people to get what you want.

So that’s what this is on. And as I said, the book ends of this text are the muzzling of the ox and then proper relationship of God’s people to tithe. And there’s this great declaration at the end of these ten commandments conclude with this commandment to tithe which is the antidote to covetousness. And it’s set in a beautiful context where the people of God acknowledge in the third year the year of tithing when all the tithing cycle was complete.

My father was a wandering Aramean and the Lord God saved me. So we recognize the grace of God. Tithing is about the grace of God. Why wouldn’t we want to give him 10% of all the blessings he’s given to us since we had no claim to any of them apart from his grace? And why wouldn’t we trust him if he took us you know away from our father’s wandering Aramean ways and out of Egypt and out of slavery and all that stuff? That’s a reference to Abraham. But to the rest of the deliverances, you know, if God has done this for us and he calls on us to give him 10% of the money we earn. Surely he will as Jacob acknowledged provide what I need for life. So this is this keeps us from coveting. This reminds us that our hands the god we are rather in the god’s hands and our lives will be provided for by him if we use our money correctly to support his ministers not muzzling the ox who does the spiritual work and tithing to accomplish that.

All right. Now, let’s talk about the text itself and then look at some related texts. Okay. So, in Deuteronomy 25:13, if you open your Bible to that verse, please. Deuteronomy 25 verse 13, our actual scripture text. You shall not have in your bag, well, that’s a purse, thing you’d carry around, differing weights. The King James says, well, literally the Hebrew says, “You shall not have in your bag stones, stones, a heavy and a light.” So it doesn’t say differing weights, it says weights and weights.

And actually, more literally, it says stones and stones. So you’ve got stones to measure things. And if you’ve got a heavy stone and a light stone, then when you are selling something, you’ll use one of the other. When you’re buying something, you use the other stone. So they look pretty close. Nobody can see that you’re cheating them by using this weight to measure out how much wheat you’re going to give them or how much of your silver coin you’re going to give them. They can’t see the difference, but you know it is different. Maybe you’ve drilled a hole in the middle of one. So the idea here is to prevent you from using a standard of commerce in transactions in the town or in your community. It prohibits you not just from cheating, it prohibits you from having the means by which you may be tempted to cheat. It doesn’t say don’t use differing stones. It says don’t have them. Don’t have stone and stone heavy and light.

Now, by the way, this is a measure as it say literally means stone. And you know, for instance, if you had iron weights, one may rust if you got it close to water and it’s going to weigh differently than a stone is an inert substance. It basically stays what it is unless you try to chip it or do something to it. So they would have to have these not sandstones. They would have to have some heavy polished stone as a weight. And the idea was they all should be certified that they weigh the same. Don’t by covetousness, don’t covet your neighbors things and then use improper or cheating or deceitful measures or stones in your transactions.

And then it says, you shall not have in your house measures and measures or ephas and ephas. So these are capacity measures and now it’s in your house. So this law against coveting addresses the beautiful ways which written your commercial transactions outside but also the things that go on in the context of your house. You may have transactions with ephas but it’s in your house now. And so whether you’re talking about domestically or in terms of exterior it’s governing your commerce in every area of your life by using first bag and then house.

And here you can’t cheat by having two different bushel measures we could think of it as. So you know, when I buy wheat, I’m going to use the one that’s smaller and claim that it’s different or vice versa. So the idea is I’ll cheat somebody if I have two different kinds of measures. Now, you know, there’s lots of ways to do this to cheat people in this way that this law covers. This law doesn’t mean as long as you don’t do it in this way, you can cheat your neighbor. No.

I was listening to Pastor Van Dyken when I was in Moscow and he was talking about evangelism and he said, you know, People always say, “Well, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. You know, so you can give him the gospel, but you can’t make him drink the gospel.” He said, “Well, that’s true, but I can sure put salt in his feet. So, I can, you know, prepare him, if I’m doing my job as an evangelist correctly, to desire the water. I can make him know his thirst by putting salt in his feet. He eats it. Now he’s salty.”

Well, this is another way to actually, it’s a wonderful illustration of how we’re to evangelize. It’s not simple. It’s not as simple as you can lead him to water but now make him drink. We have an obligation to increase his thirst. But this is also a common way that men in the past and probably presently would use to cheat. Before they were going to sell a cow, get the cow away. You give me two bucks a pound for this cow. Well, I’m going to put a bunch of salt in his feed rather. He’ll get thirsty. He’ll drink a ton. And as a result, his weight will be increased because he’s got all that water in him. You see?

On the other hand, some men would buy a cow but agree that the weight would the weight when it arrived and they would ship the cow and not give them any water and the cow would dehydrate. So men, you know, are ingenious in their theft. There’s all kinds of ways to cheat somebody, making a cow heavy or a cow light. Apples, you know, you can put water on them and increase the weight of the crop or you can water them a bunch just before harvest and they’ll weigh more, but of course they’ll taste a lot worse.

And so there’s different ways that people can misrepresent things. You can have in a bushel basket, you can take the grain and puff it up artificially and make it look like it’s actually a full measure when it really isn’t. A puffed ephah, I think, is what the Bible calls that. So you’re not supposed to puff up one thing and represent its value as something greater than it is. Okay, this is what this law prohibits. So the idea of transactions and commerce, this law prohibits these things.

Now, I said that the parallel here in Leviticus 19 caps off the sermon in Leviticus 19 on the ten commandments and listen to the blessings and cursings attached to this law. Oh, by the way, you shall have a perfect and just weight. Perfect is shalom. You shall have a peaceable weight, a good weight. They shall be equal. It’ll bring peace. If you have differing weights, it’s going to bring war. Okay? And justice in your weights is what’s being described here. You have to have just evaluations of transactions. And if you do this, it’ll produce peace. Why?

So that your days may be lengthened in the land which the Lord your God has given you. Now I mentioned before that in Leviticus 19 it starts with honoring your parents. And it ends 70th command is one which we’ll read in a moment parallel to this law. And you’ll remember that Paul says the fifth commandment is the first with first with promise. Honor your parents long your your days and be long in the land the Lord God has given you.

Well here that concluding one according to Leviticus 19 is given and in Leviticus 19 it’s given equal weight a relationship to our horizontal relationships as well as our vertical relationships parents equal weight for and after and here this law is also we created with the fifth commandment because the same blessing is attached so how do you live long in the land and you know most Christians would say well you honor your parents well there’s more to it than that and also to in order to have lengthened lives you have to be just cost in your commercial transactions.

That’s a big deal. I mean, think about it. Commerce, filthy commerce, filthy transactions, economics, which you know, oh no, that’s no good. Well, no, it’s very important. It’s very good. It’s a blessing from God. It’s the way love is traditionally shown one to the other is in equal transactions, just transactions. And it is absolutely significant for the Christian life. I mean, we can talk about this and we will in relationship to paper money, but let’s understand that the Lord God, you know, okay, so Christian church is lots of sermons on family and relationship to the parents and what you’re going to do to your kids, but in two ways in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, God, I think, is telling us that our economic transactions are just as important.

And yet, we don’t have as many sermons on those. I don’t do as many sermons on economic transactions, but I think we should. So, God is saying that you businessmen what you do tomorrow morning is exceedingly important for the kingdom. It’s as important as raising children or your response to your parents. By the way, the inner and outer is also a description of the family life. The man focuses outward of the family. The woman focuses inward. Now, if we don’t know that, and most of us don’t know that, we’re not trained well in what the Bible says about these things about this relationship of inner and outer. People enter into marriage and then they’re pretty ticked off. The house, the wife is wondering why the guy isn’t focused toward the family more. The dad is wondering why she’s always complaining about that and why she isn’t interested in the things outside of the family at work.

Well, it’s different callings. You see, maturity is that you’re one body equally kind of focusing on the past or the inside rather and equally focusing on the outside. So this is what it is. And this text tells us that this is quite an important area that we’re talking about today, commercial transactions. So I think hope you’ve gotten that. If you haven’t, then read the next verse. For all who do such things, all who behave unjustly, unrighteously, are an abomination to the Lord your God.

Now again, we talk about the abomination of sodomy or homosexuality, right? Yeah, we can talk about that abomination of abortion. But here, God uses the strongest word possible, an abomination to describe what you do when you pour some kind of stuff in your engine so that the guy you’re going to sell it to tomorrow won’t hear the You understand those transactions these verses tell us done unrighteously are an abomination to the Lord like homosexuality like abortion.

And on the other hand, if you faithfully represent what your car is to the person you’re going to sell it to, well, now your days will be lengthened. Now, that involves a lot of trust, friends, loved ones here, doesn’t it? I’ve smelled cars that are not in good shape. That involves a great deal of trust in the father. But that’s what we’re called to do. That’s what the law says. That’s what this law is about.

This law is about in the first place commercial transactions, equity, and justice in them. And it’s quite important. Let’s look at some other related texts. Leviticus 19:35-37. You don’t have to turn there. I’ll just read this. And as I said, this is the conclusion of that chapter. You shall do no injustice in judgment in measure or length, weight or volume. So now he covers more than just weight or volume. Now we’re involving length as well. You shall have honest scales, honest weights, honest ephah, honest hin. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt. So here the preface is this is why you’ve been delivered so that you do things justly in terms of commercial transactions.

Therefore you shall observe my statutes, all my judgments, and perform them I am the Lord because he’s summing up the ten commandment sermon in Leviticus. So same basic thing but here added to it is the idea of length not just weight or measure and he uses specific terms and ephah and hin in terms of the particular measure that he’s talking about there. Another place parallel text is Proverbs 20. Turn to Proverbs 20. I want to spend a little bit of time here. The wisdom literature will instruct us about this verse 10. No, there’s other proverbs. Proverbs 11:1 says, “Dishonest scales are an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight.”

Proverbs 16:10 to 12, “Divinations on the lips of the king. His mouth must not transgress in judgment. Honest weights and scales are the lords and all the weights in the bag are his. It is an abomination for kings to commit wickedness for a throne is established by righteousness.” Now there those proverbs taken together about ruling tells us that the king has a role to play in this matter. The king is to ensure that in his kingdom in his city, county or state people are using honest ways. That is a function of the civil magistrate. Okay, that’s what he’s supposed to do. And so, Proverbs tells us that.

But also, as I say, I wanted to look at Proverbs 20 at a little more length, beginning at verse 10. Now, this whole chapter, Proverbs 20 talks about avoiding certain things and discernment, things that are difficult to discern. And we won’t take the time, but the verses leading up to verse 10 talks about things that are difficult to discern. And then verse 10 says, “Diverse weights and diverse measures. They are both like an abomination to the Lord.”

And now scan down to verse 23. Verse 23. Diverse weights are an abomination to the Lord. Dishonest scales are not good. So here we have this repeated twice. I think this gives us I think a section. These are bookends delimiters of this pericope and the text. It’s just a section of scripture marked off by these two references. And interior to this we would expect to find discerning sort of things going on. Verse 11, even a child is known by his deeds. How does that relate? Well, God is not just interested in economic transactions. What Proverbs 20 will talk about is discernment in general. And to have just weights means to discern correctly what’s equal and what’s not equal and to desire that.

So here you can discern a child by evaluating his deeds whether they’re done right or purely. Verse 12, the hearing ear and the seeing eye, the Lord has made them both. The vessels of discernment or evaluation, we can say, are the ear and the eye. They’re used to evaluate things. God is calling us not just to have good economic transactions that are just weights, but he’s saying that we’re to have proper evaluations, proper discernments, using our ear and eye properly to discern things from him.

Verse 13, do not love sleep, lest you come to poverty. Open your eyes, you’ll be satisfied with bread. Verse 14, it is good for nothing, says the buyer, but when he has gone his way, then he boasts. Look, this is what I just talked about, right? I mean, the other side of it is you want to buy a car, you know, man, this is a hot deal. If I can buy it for the price the guy’s asking for, it’s a good deal. And what do you do? You kick the tires. You look around. Oh, it’s really bad. And you lie. You give an improper evaluation of that transaction. I think this is a piece of junk and you know in your heart this is a jewel. That’s what he’s talking about here.

And it’s in this section you see discernments, evaluations, how to evaluate, make proper judgments about things and how to represent things properly as well. There’s gold and a multitude of rubies. Verse 15, the lips of knowledge are precious jewel. Your lips know the truth should speak the truth, enter into these evaluations and discernments. Verse 17. Bread gained by deceit is sweet to a man, but afterwards his mouth be filled with gravel. Another illustration like the buying and selling one here. You gain bread by deceit. But God will not allow you to eat that kind of bread very long at least sweetly. It’ll turn to gravel in your mouth. So it’s pointless. It involves trust in God to be honest in our commercial transactions. Then it is pointless to ignore God because he’s going to bring judgment upon you if you use deceit to purchase bread.

We can’t go over all this. But the next verse 19 is a warning against those that flatter with the lips. Puffed up, improper evaluation. They’re flattering you more than what you really know you’re worth. And be careful because this is a person that is not using or at least does not represent proper valuations. If you’re going to go into economic transaction with this kind of a man, count the money. Make sure it’s all there. Trust but verify. And then it’s interesting in verse 20, whoever curses his father, his mother, the lamp will be put out in deep darkness. So proper evaluation of superiors. And again, this ties the honest weights measure to the fifth commandment. Again, an inheritance gained hastily at the beginning will not be blessed at the end. So again, you’d gain it hastily, usually through deceit, through something other than hard work.

So we could go on. And interestingly enough, after this, at the end of chapter 20, moving into chapter 21, there’s a reference to Yahweh and the king for the first time in the Proverbs. And again, all this is set building up to the transition in the proverbs in this section of the Proverbs to the rule of kings. And so, it’s King’s jobs to ensure that proper evaluations are going on, that there are just weights and measures. That’s Proverbs 20.

Amos 8 Verses 4 to 8 is a related text. Hear this, you who swallow up the needy and make the poor of the land fail, saying, when will the new moon be passed that we may sell grain and the Sabbath that we may trade wheat? Making the ephah and the shekel large. So changing weights and measures dishonestly to swallow up the needy. Falsifying the scales by deceit. You know, the butcher with his thumb on the weight. Falsifying the scales by various much more complicated ways of deceit that we may buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals even sell the bad wheat so I can sell bad wheat and represent his good wheat.

The Lord is sworn by the pride of Jacob, surely I will never forget any of their works. Shall the land not tremble for this and everyone mourn who dwells in it. All of it shall swell like the river heave and sub heave and subside like the river of Egypt. So they’re going to go into a reverse exile. Amos is about why you’re going to go into exile to the Assyrians. And the reason why you’re going to go into exile to the Assyrians, the reason why Bin Laden will be able to conquer your nation, the reason why the Russians will take over, he’s saying, is because you used improper standards in your commercial transactions.

And worse than that, you did it to rob the poor. We’re supposed to have a special place in our hearts to protect those that need grace because that’s what we were in Egypt. So here the general warning of abomination takes particular form. Those who falsify these scales are those who incur the most radical judgment of God being taken into captivity to the Assyrians. Isaiah 1:22 is a related text. Your silver has become dross. Your wine mixed with water. This is Isaiah speaking to the southern kingdom.

Understand that the north fell first and 100 years later the south. And the north fell though Assyrian control extended within 10 miles of the southern kingdom and at one point Sennacherib surrounds Jerusalem in the temple and Hezekiah prays in the temple and it’s turned back and eventually the Babylonians will take the south into captivity. The point is all kinds of people have flooded into Jerusalem from the north because they’ve been conquered by the Assyrians and you know the way it works it’s like so many places around the world today the refugees flee as the wars the fighting starts and it’s probably as to do with what’s going on in Isaiah 1 and why the silver has become dross in the wine water.

Now what he means here is that you have let’s say a 100 silver coins in a little community and you want 200 and so what you do is you cut the silver you put embedded in it maybe or somehow you mix dross with it. Now you got 200 silver coins. Now you didn’t change what was being produced. You still have the same amount of wine that people are making. The price of wine in such a situation will double and people in our church don’t like to pay more than 10 or 15 or 20 bucks a bottle for wine. There’s a resistance point in the price of wine. And so the the marketer of wine, he can’t sell his wine for twice as much money. It’s the same thing. And what will he do? Well, he’ll water it down. This is a traditional economic cycle. When inflation, for whatever reason it’s caused, is followed by product devaluation.

So when inflation rages in a culture, what manufacturers have to do to compete, try to sell things at close to the old price is they have to water the product down. They have to find ways to cut costs. And that’s what’s happening here. So a representation of the silver in a way that it wasn’t produces this economic problem of product devaluation. Inflation, product devaluation are tied. So it’s not just bad for the particular person you’re transacting business with. It can be bad for a whole economy and it can cause the economy to collapse when inflation results from having improper weights and measures.

All right. Well, I’ve gone on and on. Children nine. The text begins and ends talking about tithes. Tithes. Law says we shouldn’t lie about what we sell to others. It is great sin number 11, to cheat others. Horrible sin to cheat somebody. Remember that, boys? When you’re, you know, trading your baseball cards or whatever it is you do or your marbles or whatever it is these days, it’s a great sin to cheat others. Marbles? What’s he talking about? He’s lost his marbles when I was a boy.

Well, 12. Marbles were stones, too, when I was a boy. Okay, so 12. The sin makes God, this sin, cheating, lying, deceiving, makes God very angry. Abomination, send you back to Egypt, kick you into the Assyrian lap. Bin Laden will have what he wants to do with you. He’ll chop your head off if he wants to. Russians will control you. They’ll send you to the gulag if you break this law. The Bible says that such sin starts in the heart. After all, it’s his tenth commandment. Don’t covet. Don’t get inordinate desires for something that God has not allowed you to have because if you let it get a hold of you in that way, you’re going to end up cheating, lying, and deceiving.

All right. Application now. And now we’re coming back to in and out past and future. One of the issues that generates discussion in our church and like other churches like us is do these laws mean that it’s an abomination to use paper money to have money that’s not backed by silver or gold? Well, and some people point to verses. I’ve got a couple of references. Genesis 23, 1 Chronicles 21. Abraham buys a field with so much weight of shekels of silver, I believe. And David buys the land for the temple in 1 Chronicles 21 with so much weight of gold. And so they point to these texts. They combine this case law and say, “See, the problem we have in America is we don’t have hard money anymore.”

Well, I’m not going to say whether I think it’s a problem or not that we have hard money definitively. But what I think I can say definitively is that’s an if that’s all the argument is, it’s not an argument from the Bible. Genesis and 1 Chronicles describes something. Now, it’s really important when you read your Bibles, just because the Bible describes something doesn’t mean it’s a good thing to do or even if it’s a good thing, it doesn’t mean it’s something you have to do. A description is different from a prescription.

Okay? They’re both writings. Describe tells about something. God describes a transaction. A prescription, God says, “You got to do this. You got to be kind. You got to let people glean your fields.” That’s a prescription. Tells you what you must do. And then a third category would be proscriptions. To proscribe something means you can’t go inside that area that you’ve proscribed. And the law we just have been referencing in Deuteronomy 25 is a proscription. It says what you can’t do. Okay?

Well, to mix that, which is all about evaluations, I saw I think I demonstrated in Proverbs 20. It’s much broader than just commercial transactions, but that’s what it’s about. The specific law says nothing about gold or silver. It talks about measures, but even there it’s talking about stones. You see, now, in my way of thinking to say that this means we have to have gold money, well, you run into some problems because we do have descriptions that aren’t negatively spoken about in terms of silver.

So then people say, well, it can be gold or silver. Well, if God has opened the door to gold and silver, how about tin? How about copper? Well, okay, as long as it’s something metal. But you see, you’re dying the death of a thousand qualifications. God never says your money has to be X metal. And in fact, the weight here is not metal, it’s stone. What he’s what he what God is telling us to do is when we enter into a commercial transaction to have something evaluating the transaction that both parties agree to at the beginning and when you use paper money today to transact business at a particular point in time that money is the agreed upon standard.

So I don’t see where that transaction is a violation of the law here before us. And as I said I think that people get into this because they’re looking at what God describes. R.J. Rushdoony, right? I have great appreciation for this man. Let me read you what he says about this. He says, “Third fraud and weights is essentially fraudulent money.” Well, of course, it may include fraudulent money, but that’s not what the text says. It’s the measure of transactions. I mean is it’s stones. It talks about ephahs. It talks about length. So it doesn’t really apply first and foremost to fraudulent money. But anyway, he goes on.

“Very obviously biblical money was by weight, a weight of silver or of gold. And every form of coinage in later times was by weight.” So he uses a descriptive analysis. He doesn’t say the Bible said you had to have money by weight, but he’s saying that when the Bible was written, money was by weight and was gold or silver or some other kind of thing you could weigh. Well, that’s an argument from description. Neither prescribing that nor proscribing paper money. You see, he just well, obviously they were using paper money or they were using gold money. Well, obviously the Old Testament was written with privileging agrarian economies. It was written in a time of agriculture. Does that mean that we should the best life for a Christian is to be a farmer. Well, no, it doesn’t. That’s describing something. But the Bible never says, and in fact, the Bible says explicitly you’re going to move from garden to city that cities are good things.

So he uses a descriptive argument. Secondly, he says this fractional reserve banking unbacked or partially backed paper currency, paper money, and inflation of money by debt and credit is thus a violation of this law. So he says paper money is a violation because, you know, I just use gold. They all use silver. That’s an argument from description. It’s not what the text says. At least that’s my estimation of it. And I’m very confident of this particular point. I’m not confident as to the wisdom of using hard money or not. This is kind of a new deal in the history of the world from what I can tell. Now, I may be wrong, but I am confident that this law says nothing such as R.G. Rushdoony is taking from the text.

And in fact, the argument could be made that the Federal Reserve system was the king saying we need to obey Deuteronomy 25 and Leviticus 19. We need not to have inflation. We need to have a mechanism of currency exchange that’s quicker than a barter system. Right? I mean, in an agrarian economy, you trade things for things. Trade you a couple of cows for 10 chickens. That’s okay to do. Would anybody who doesn’t like paper hard money disagree with that? Well, if you’re falling into that now, we’ve moved from metal to stone to animals to all kinds of things. And in an agrarian economy, you can do that. In an industrial economy, in a city, means of economic transaction must be much quicker than hauling around things that you’re going to barter.

And so some people think that’s why we have the sorts of currency we have now, for ease of exchange. Now, here’s the point. United States government is I don’t know what it is. Trillions of dollars in debt. Now, you’re a king, man. You’ve got a bunch of debt. What are you going to be tempted to do? You’re going to inflate the currency because then you can pay off 2 trillion in debt now with money that’s only worth half as much a year from now if you inflate the currency by 100%. And you pay off debts in cheap money. You understand? You need to put it back in silver. You got 100 shekels of silver owed to somebody. You’re going to make the coin half silver and half lead and represent that as paying off your debt. It’s to the government’s advantage to create inflation. And as Rushdoony says correctly, the Bible says inflation is wrong and usually results from some sort of larceny. Not always as in Israel maybe or Jerusalem influx of immigrants.

The point is the Federal Reserve system was created to try to not let inflation take hold. Their job, one of their prime jobs, well, they provide currency exchange at rapid rates so that modern economies can work. And secondly, they try to do this in a way that doesn’t increase inflation. Now, you can argue, I’m not saying the Federal Reserve is a good thing. I’m saying it’s a mechanism that I think I can see could have been an attempt to follow what these laws say, don’t inflate money and they base it on a standard that’s now based on productivity and business yada yada. It’s hard to understand. You can also say, well, if that was their job to control inflation, they’re not doing too good because since 1913, we’ve had a ton of inflation, which is also true. But just because the thing was is not working like it should work necessarily. It doesn’t mean the idea is bad to have a group of people representing different parts of the economy, bankers and commerce people, the government etc. so that there’s checks and balances against sinful men. This is the idea of the fractional reserve system. They may be doing it good or bad. But the point is the creation of such an entity is, from my perspective, one of the ways that good men try to take care of the problem of inflated currency and try to apply the equity of these laws.

Now you can tell me well but I know how it started the Federal Reserve system. It started with larceny. It started with the bankers. Well, it could be. I don’t know. I’m not an expert in the Federal Reserve by any stretch of the imagination, but I do know a few things about logic. And I do know that the Bible tells us that the ungodly line got to musical instruments, metallurgy, city building, and agriculture first. And I know that it was a logical fallacy and a foolish one obviously to not use musical instruments, not use metal, not use animal husbandry and not have cities because it was started by bad people. It’s called the genetic fallacy. Just because something’s origin was bad doesn’t mean the thing the argument itself or what’s happening is also bad. That’s to infer that is the genetic fallacy and we don’t need the laws of logic. We’ve got Genesis telling us that God lets the descendants of Enoch, the bad Enoch, get to things first.

So it may well be that the Federal Reserve system was put into effect by godless men. That doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean it can’t be a proper force for good. If Christian men control the Federal Reserve, what will they do? They will try to use it for the specific purposes of keeping just weights that no inflation going on in the context of the world. So Rushdoony’s arguments, you know, I don’t find convincing and in fact I find counterconvincing. He bases it on description and he then says that the Federal Reserve system is bad because it creates inflation where in reality it was an attempt to control inflation.

And then third, he says, “Thus the law clearly requires the condemnation of all fraudulent money.” As I said, I don’t see that the law of the gold of the guilty bystander thus clearly condemns all ministers, priests, and teachers who do not declare the sentence of the law against fraudulent money. So Rushdoony goes on in this article to say, not only am I going to argue from description and then sort of be not quite honest with what the Federal Reserve is trying to do. I’m then going to based on those inferences say that any pastor that doesn’t call for hard money from the pulpit and it says that paper money might be okay, this is a violation of the idea of requirement to witness and this is great sin. So he would say that I’m in great sin.

Now I can only say these things about Rushdoony because you all know how much I loved him. You all know how much of what this church has done is based a lot on his understanding of the scriptures. We love him, but in this particular area, I cannot agree with him. What about paper money? Well, I think paper money is not I’m not saying it should be done, but it’s not prohibited, I don’t think, by these laws. Just because the Bible describes something does not mean we have to do that thing. Clearly, this is not the meaning of this law because as Rushdoony points out, they were using gold and silver currency at the time it couldn’t have been the purpose of the law because what he wanted was actually in place. Gold and silver was the basic exchange of money. So the law wasn’t about that. The law was about using unjust weights and so you know use the goal was to refrain from larceny by improper transactions.

Secondly, this law refers to methods of transactions. Okay. Okay, just a particular method in time and clearly it assumes bartering and I don’t think that anybody would say that we have to barter based on these standards. Third, if we’re going to have gold or silver is the only mechanism, then we have to have measures that are ephahs and not bushels. And it seems like we’d be bound to the standards of length as well since Leviticus said standards of length have to be fair. So now we’re stuck with cubits and spans, etc. And I don’t I just don’t think the Bible says that or implies it.

So I do believe that we have liberty in God’s law. And the in-n-out thing works like this. We have family rules in our home, and that’s okay. You know, I wish I had more of them, but we’ve got a few in our house. And so, is it legitimate to take the family rules for my home and impose them upon everybody else. No, that’s legalism. Legalism is to take what I think is best, what I’ve come up with, and imposed upon other people when God’s law doesn’t clearly state it. That’s legalism. And that is too much of a focus on our family rules and our own personal decisions.

You know, hopefully I’ll spend another sermon talking about the same thing relative to education. We have family rules, how we’re going to educate our kids. Well, if that education is contrary to the word of God. If you’re not basing it on Christian education, no matter what your rule is, no matter what your procedure is, I’ve got a problem with it. But if it is based upon biblical education, then I’m not going to use a method as a way to criticize other people.

So the extension of family rules, our own personal decisions about these things, and forcing that upon others is, I think the scriptures quite clearly tell us this is legalism. We live in anomy and on your outline, you know, anomy the Christian era. And I won’t bother to read these texts, but the world has changed. In the past, we were Galatians says, and Paul says in Romans 7, we were in subjection or bondage to angels, the law, and the created order. Animals, we were under dominion to them. We were like princes, but who are little and are held under slavery to tutors. The animals taught us things. The angels delivered the law to enslave us, to get us to do what’s right proper in the old creation. But in the new creation, in the coming of Jesus Christ, things have changed and now we’re not under subjection to the elementary principles of the world the way we were in the past.

We don’t meet in a specific representation of the temple. And the temple was a representation of the world. We’re not bound to those same exterior rites. Now, we have the law still. We’re not under the law, but we are over the law using it properly under understanding it and applying it to our world. The point is, you know, we were held in bondage to elementary created things, gold, silver, etc. But it wouldn’t be at all out of the ordinary that, as I understand, the progression of humanity under Jesus Christ, to move away from those elementary objects that were used as market transaction indicators and move to other things.

Now, whether we’re doing it good or bad or I’m not saying, but I’m just saying that paper money is not proscribed by these laws. Federal Reserve, we talked about that a little bit already. The Enoch factor, who knows? I don’t know a lot about the Federal Reserve. But I do know that it’s wrong to say that because it was started by evil men, or because it’s not functioning as well as we would like it to function, we got 3% inflation instead of no inflation, that means it’s necessarily wrong.

On the face of it, it seems like we could see it in relationship to the obligations of the civil magistrate. So you know, you can take these laws and you can look around us and look through, I think, false lenses and say, “Boy, things sure are bad.” But I think if we look at them correctly, we’ll have great thanksgiving for our post-Christian culture. We’d rather it was Christian. But our post-Christian culture, we still maintain government entities that crack down on fraud and consumer transactions. We still have a government that insists on actually evaluating you know, weights used in a butcher shop, measures and standards used throughout the country. The king is doing his job for the most part. We should be thankful for that. Not upset because the king isn’t using the method of transaction that we want to use in our family.

We should be thankful that even in post-Christian America, there’s a tremendous blessing when we read these verses and we say, “That’s what we do in this country. You go to Europe or Eastern Europe, deceit and fraud are everywhere.” Not so here. Not so here. Secondly, we should repent for our own larcenous old man. You know, and the way to move away from coveting and improper if you do these things improperly as I said are the bookends of tithing, trusting God. And third, thanksgiving for our true identity in Romans 7. You know, we are those now who rule the world to take the law of God, this specific law, use it to transform our world and creation and as a result be blessed by God.

If we tithe, it’ll help us not to covet. God’s law gives us liberty. We have been Romans 8 says we have the glorious liberty as sons of God and we should understand that liberty allows us to do all kinds of things within the constraints of God’s law. And this law says be honest in your economic transactions. And as I said finally we see in this text and the other things I brought out the importance of commerce. The importance of commerce. All right let’s pray. Father we thank you.