Dennis Tuuri

Our country teeters on the brink of financial disaster and with it the world. Our congressmen have been busy this weekend trying to prevent this from happening. But as I’ll talk about in today’s sermon, to some large extent, they are responsible for the events we’re in the midst of. In a context of such distress in our nation or pending distress, it is a wonderful thing for the Lord to invite us to his house to get our minds straight and to calm our fears.

The songs in the providence of God were not chosen for the particular topic of what’s going on in the country this weekend, but as always, the hymns and psalms of the church are so pastoral in and of themselves. Hopefully, as we sang through the liturgy so far, you would have received comfort. The Lord hear thee in troubled times is what we sang first as we came into the sanctuary. Send us help from his sanctuary.

That’s what we look for. We don’t trust in chariots and horses and congressional decisions. Ultimately, our trust is in the Lord Jesus Christ and his government which reigns over all things. And in the context of that trust, we turn to his word. The law of the Lord is indeed the source of our wisdom, a great blessing to be desired more than many bank accounts and much financial stability—a knowledge of the word of God.

But the psalms also contain a warning to us, of course, as we just sang from Psalm 19. And so, may the Lord God minister his word today in a way that brings us peace, brings us an understanding of the world round about us based upon his word, but also warns us in terms of the conduct of our own lives in the midst of this situation—to what degree we all have brought particular culpability for what’s happened and to what degree we can make peace in the context of our homes and seek the peace of the place where God has placed us.

Sermon text today again in the providence of God. The sermon today is on property in the Bible, part of the series on life in exile—living in exile, seeking the peace of the city through political action and discussion about things that the ballot measures bring to us. And specifically today in the providence of God, the subject is property. So we’re going to focus on the eighth commandment. But to put it in a little bit of context, we’ll begin reading at verse 12 with the fifth commandment of Exodus 20 and read through verse 17, although we’ll focus on verse 15.

Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Exodus 20, beginning at verse 12:

“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for saving us to the end that we might have your law, your word as a standard and guide by which we’re to live and how we can experience the blessings of this relationship that you by your grace through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ alone, not as a result of our obedience, have brought us into. We thank you for saving us and in that saved state, Lord God, giving us an understanding of the world and of your character in your law.

Help us today to understand this commandment not to steal and its broader context, its relationship to the big things going on in our entire world today and to the small things that’ll go on in our homes tomorrow. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated.

Seeking the peace of the city. My basic take is that America is no longer an explicitly Christian nation. We’re now in what could be seen as analogous to the captivity of God’s people in Babylon where Nebuchadnezzar took them, but Jeremiah says God took them there ultimately. And God has placed us in a particular setting today that is no longer explicitly, formally Christian. Well, in Babylon, stuff like this happens that we’re going through. We should expect disruptions until a country turns to Jesus Christ.

Until a country becomes united in its love and commitment to Christ, we should expect a country to go through various judgments and disruptions. Stuff like economic collapse, problems, and distress happen when you live in the context of Babylon. Don’t freak out. It’s what normally happens. And it’s a call to us. It’s an opportunity to us to plant the word of God. Dennis Peacock years ago was here and he said that you look in the newspapers, you see where God is plowing up the soil to the end that you would go along and plant in those furrows that he’s plowed up. Well, he’s plowing up the conversation of property and money and commerce in a major way and this is not going to go away in the short term.

Indications are that while the problems we are in are directly linked right now to the subprime mortgage market—to mortgages made with people that really couldn’t afford them, and we’ll talk about that in a minute—the implications are that there are at least a couple more shoes to fall as this economic situation continues to unravel or continues to be stressed by way too much leverage of money and credit in the context of the world economy. So even if what the Congress does today to help can help things out in the short term, this is a long-term protracted difficulty that we’re in the midst of here. And you should understand, you should discern the times in which you live and make adjustments.

Now is not the time to do a lot of discretionary spending. Now is the time to understand that the judgments of God are abroad financially in the context of our world. And it’s an opportunity for the Christian both to make sure that he’s not heard the siren call of the culture in terms of how he runs his household, how he involves himself in economics. Economics means, the word is from the Greek words oikos and nomos—house and law. Economy is just what everybody, every householder learns to do in terms of how to run his household. And on a broader scale, the household of the country. And so this should be a warning that we not get drawn into the siren song of the sorts of systems we have around about us in a dependent way. But it’s also an opportunity for us to speak peace into the city where God has placed us into the setting.

You know, I think some Christians are happy about all this. I don’t think we’re supposed to be happy. We’re not supposed to be seeking the ruin of the culture in which we live. And if the thing comes down in a heap, that’s not good. Remember, in the peace of the city, you have peace. To the extent that there’s chaos and disorder, your lives will be chaotic and disordered. Seek the peace, God says, not the chaos of the culture that I’ve placed you.

Now, we have to quickly say that Isaiah tells us in Isaiah 48:22 that there is no peace, says the Lord, for the wicked. So to seek the peace is a reminder that there is no peace to the people or country that isn’t explicitly Christian. There’s no peace for the wicked. So we have to seek to insert righteousness, the truth of God’s word, and call men to submit to the gracious government of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And specifically, we’re going to talk today about the relationship of all this to party—or rather, excuse me, to property. Starting with party spirit. We talked about this two weeks ago. One of the most difficult things of living in a non-Christian state is that people tend to divide up into party lines, either class lines, race lines in our day and age, political, philosophical lines. And while I don’t want to draw moral equivalence between the two major parties, it is hard to imagine a more overtly disgusting situation, at least from my perspective, than what we saw unravel this last week.

And I speak here primarily of the Democrats and the way they spoke in the last three or four days with the nation and world teetering on the brink of a complete economic collapse. And don’t you know, don’t be Pollyannaish, don’t whistle past the graveyard—that’s what they’re talking about. In the light of that, to see the politics that were played Thursday and Friday going into the weekend was absolutely astonishing and disgusting. Now the Republicans were nowhere near as bad, but their supposed new concern for the taxpayers—800 billion, 700 billion—seems to be a newfound reality in their lives for the Republican Congress that spent us into the kind of deficit and debt that they did over the last eight years.

So elections are coming up and they’ve kind of seen the light of the heat of the 200 to 1 telephone calls that they’re receiving against the bailout bill that will pass, which they will do. But the point is party spirit is part of the problem. Every bit of information we’re getting—not every bit, but most of the information we get—is now filtered through partisan political lines. And when you’re trying to figure out what’s going on and try to make good decisions about what it is or who you should support or what you shouldn’t do, it’s very difficult because information is coming through a filter of partisan party politics.

And so party spirit is at the core of this thing as well.

Evangelicals. Now this situation is very complicated, but I want to talk for just a couple of minutes about one aspect of it. And that is that the immediate presenting problem of the economy are subprime mortgages. These are mortgages made to people that really couldn’t afford them. Why are they making them then? Because our first evangelical President, Jimmy Carter, began a program. And this program, I think it was called the Community Reinvestment Act, CRA. And this program has been used to set goals for housing urban development, HUD, which oversees the GSEs, so-called the Fannies and the Freddies.

Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae. Goals have been set increasingly since the Carter administration on to achieve greater and greater percentages of minority or low-income people owning homes. Now, there’s a good instinct behind that. And you know, the conservative reaction is they want to use our money to pay other people for homes. Well, that may be what they’re doing. We have to watch for that. But remember, we’re never talking because based on the mutual harmony of interest, we’re never talking about a zero-sum game in economics.

To help somebody else out doesn’t mean somebody else is going to get hurt. That’s not the way biblical economics work. Service to one another builds everybody up. So there’s a good instinct to get people into their own homes. They make better citizens. And I think Carter’s instinct was proper and good. And that policy has continued right up to the second evangelical president we had, who is George W. Bush, and Bush has carried on the same policies with increasing quotas, demands set, or goals set to achieve low-income housing ownership. And to further that, a removal of regulations.

So the evangelical mindset that desires to help people—we’re going to talk about property. Property is a blessing from God. People know that property is a good thing, that home ownership is a good thing, and they want more and more people to have it. Bush wanted to have the highest percentage of home ownership in American history. Clinton wanted the same thing, and they achieved it in the short term. But after 10 million people have had their assets turned upside down on their houses as a result of this, and millions have gone into bankruptcy, we’re now at a lower home ownership rate than before.

The point is that an evangelical consensus that we wanted to help people and we were going to use government—the agency of punishing evildoers—to positively create home ownership on the part of low-income people is much of what’s happened in the context of this crisis. It’s a significant element, not the only element. And what Carter did, then Clinton injected steroids into that system. He appointed a guy named Andrew Cuomo as head of HUD. HUD oversees the two GSEs, Fannie and Freddie, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. And these institutions were quasi-governmental institutions. They were then encouraged to set higher and higher quotas, as I said, for low-income homeownership.

And they did it. So over the course of the last 10, 15 years, more and more of the mortgages in this house in this country have been given to people that really couldn’t afford them. And at the same time, they didn’t want increased regulations on the process because increased regulations would have gotten in the way of the strategic goal to increase home ownership on the part of people that really couldn’t afford it.

What we have at its heart in the midst of all of this is a failure of discipline. It’s a failure of people to discipline their lives, to discipline the financial system, and then everybody else got into the game and wanted to have a bigger house or take out more equity against the rising house costs because the government was artificially inflating the houses. Not intentionally, but that’s what happens when you try to give these—give people who really can’t afford houses. You increase the demand and the—there’s a fairly fixed supply and prices start to go up.

So what we have here is a direct result, at least in one aspect, of a social policy whose goal was good. We think the Bible teaches that home ownership is a good thing. Pragmatically, you can observe that homeowners are more responsible than non-homeowners, generally speaking. So the goal was good, but the mechanism—the civil government’s control of the housing industry, the creation of these two GSEs and then allowing them, because they were government, had the appearance of government financial backing to borrow money at a much lower cost and a lower cost than other mortgage brokers.

All of these things contributed to what we’re in the midst of now. That’s why people were concerned when the congressional bill was first drawn—and who knows what it will look like at the end of the process—they wanted to take 20%. Okay. So what the government wants to do is they want to buy up the bad mortgage debts, these assets that nobody knows the value of them, and then they’re going to turn around and sell them over time and they might make a profit on some of these sales.

Well, the Congress wants to take that. So it’s not really a bailout. It’s a system whereby they’ll buy up home mortgages, bad ones, turn around and sell them and make money. But the profits from those sales, 20% of them were to be directed, according to the bill that the Democrats drew up Thursday and Friday, to pay for low-income housing through agencies and community organizations such as ACORN.

ACORN has pleaded guilty on two different election violations cases in the last few years. There are community organization developments that Senator Obama worked with. On its positive side, they’re trying to help poor people. But see, the helping of the poor people through government mechanism and control of the financial system is what brought this about. And now as part of the fix, the Congress is going to give us 20% of whatever the government makes in the sale of these mortgages to be redirected back into the same sort of thing.

So nobody’s learned the lesson here. And the people that are in charge of writing the legislation are the very ones who have promoted this policy, first begun by the evangelical Carter and continued on into the evangelical administration of Bush, to increase home ownership by people that really couldn’t afford to own homes.

So the goals they set, these targets—you know, 40%, every four years HUD would adjust it, and it went to 44%, went up to 56%, I think was the last goal they set. That 56% of the mortgages that Fannie and Freddie oversaw would be given to low-income homeowners, people that really couldn’t afford it.

To meet those targets, they then began creating Fannie and Freddie backed—through their leverage, Fannie and Freddie backed—zero payment, you know, three, well, first of all reduction of how much money you have down to 3%. They increased the size of houses that FHA could pay for from 125 to 250,000. And they came up with programs to give assistance to people that couldn’t make the 3% down so that they could get into a house with absolutely no money down.

They came up with special ways of financing all this stuff. These ARMs that were based on Fannie and Freddie’s guarantee of the whole thing. And at the end of the process, Fannie and Freddie owned billions upon billions of dollars of mortgages that are worthless because people can’t make their payments.

Now, the regulation side. Then to push the social policy, the regulators allowed things to happen. One of the things they allowed to happen was yield spread premiums to a mortgage broker. So they told the mortgage broker, you get a poor person in there and you know you’re going to get them a great deal, but here’s the deal. You’re going to get a great rate because you’re working back through these government agencies, but we want—whatever you sign those people up for, whatever the interest rate is, the spread between those interest rates, you’ll get part of that back to you.

So one judge called this a kickback mechanism through—this thing that Cuomo and HUD approved—these yield spread premiums back to mortgage brokers. Now the end result of that was that poor people were paying inflated interest, mortgage interest costs on their properties. In other words, the broker was getting it for, let’s say, 5%. But he’d turn around and sign up the deal with them at 6 or 7%.

So it wasn’t as if it’s just good-natured, well-intentioned people. That’s part of it, the evangelical side of it. But on the other side, you’ve got fallen men seeing through this government program to increase home ownership and desire to tear regulations apart and rewrite them so that poor people could get into their own homes. People saw in that an economic advantage, and they used that economic advantage to the detriment of poor people.

Many of these loans that were made over the last 10 years have prepayment penalties built into them. If you pay the mortgage off, you have to pay a big penalty, as much as 10, 15% of the loan. Low-income homeowners now have prepayment penalties built into them. So, you know, the tender mercies of the wicked, you know, are not good. They hurt people. And so, while the intent was to increase home ownership by people with very little means to pay the money back, what they ended up doing was to actually engage in financial practices and the removal of regulations to allow the poor people to actually be exploited in terms of interest rates, prepayment penalties, etc.

Now, you know, poor people generally speaking have less knowledge. They’re not as smart typically, or they haven’t been trained. They haven’t had access to good schools. And so you can imagine in these housing deals that were written for them the advantage that was being taken of them.

The government’s got a program. You don’t have to have any money at all. You’re going to be able to buy your own house. No money down. We’re going to give you this great deal. And all the fine print that tells them there’s a prepayment penalty, you know, that there is—this, you’re actually—they investigated it. It turns out your mortgage broker doesn’t have your best interest at heart. He’s representing his own kickback that he’s going to get from selling you a high rate.

None of that stuff is known to these people. So it really is a disastrous situation. The judgment of God on this is that now these things can’t be paid. These things were packaged in various security groups or sold in bundles with other kinds of assets and nobody knows where the bad debt is. Nobody knows where the bad debt is.

Now the point of all this is that what the nation is bringing—is why the nation is tottering on the brink of collapse—is property and a desire for people to have property and own it. But that desire is mixed with the greed of mortgage brokers and other elements of the financial community, including the people that set up these programs, mixed with that social engineering by Presidents Carter, going through Clinton and then into President Bush. It’s all about property. So we want to talk today about property. And I know I took 10 minutes here, but this is the context for which we approach a discussion of property.

So I want to talk about what the Bible says about property and ownership and then we’ll make some more applications at the end of the sermon.

Now, I preached on this in 2007. Our election day sermon from last year was actually on property explicitly. We looked at, you know, in the Bible, you’ve got this eighth commandment: don’t steal. And then in the law of the covenant that we’re going to look at here in a little bit in Exodus 21 and 22, we have a bunch of cases that describe what that means in terms of stealing.

And in Deuteronomy, the book of Deuteronomy is primarily a sermon preaching through the ten commandments. And last year we took a section out of Deuteronomy that deals with the eighth commandment: chapter 23:15–24:7. And we looked at those case laws as it relates to the eighth commandment. So in order to study and understand the eighth commandment, you really should read the law of the covenant and you should read the section of Deuteronomy.

And then finally, the other place you want to look in the Old Testament is Leviticus 19. Leviticus 19 is a set of 70 commands. Now, they don’t follow the ten commandments the way these other two sections of Scripture do, but they do make reference to them in a theological way. So Leviticus 19 is the third place we want to look anytime we talk about the commandments of God. So we looked last year at Deuteronomy chapter 23.

And one of the things that we saw from Deuteronomy was that the Bible links life, human life, and property. And this doesn’t reduce property. It exalts our understanding of property. In Deuteronomy, the sermon section on the eighth commandment begins and ends with references to kidnapping—stealing people. In other words, as I read through what I just read through here in Exodus, the last six commandments, did you notice that every one of them is about people except the eighth commandment?

Don’t kill a person. Don’t commit adultery with a person. Honor these people. Don’t testify against a person in court. That doesn’t mean just don’t lie. It means don’t bear false witness in a court case. And then don’t covet your neighbor’s wife. They’re all about persons. And in the last hundred years, there’s a growing consensus that the eighth commandment has as its first application that you’re not supposed to steal somebody’s freedom, his liberty, who he is.

You see, in the Bible and in the case laws of Deuteronomy, point this out: life and property are absolutely linked together. Part of what’s happening in the context of our world is we think property is of relative insignificance to us. And the Christian mindset, where we see spiritual and material in two different ways and we’re all about spiritual and we’re not about material, we tend to go toward that error.

The Bible says property is absolutely very important. It puts it on par with your life. In fact, when the Bible talks about land, the land can cry out to God when Abel’s blood is spilt on it. It has a mouth. The land speaks. The land is a person in a way. God wants us to establish this link in our heads between human life and property. Property exalts how much concern and care we should take relative to our property. It’s like treating a person. You see?

So first of all, we saw that last week. We saw the Bible limits our use of so-called private property. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. Now, he’s given the earth to man, but it comes with certain rules and regulations. In Deuteronomy, you had to let a guy come through your field and eat your grain if he was walking through. That’s the way it was.

And it was an indication in a very small way that God says, “It’s not your land. It’s my land that I’m giving to you to exercise stewardship over.” So land is important. It’s linked up with life. It’s—you know, it’s interesting that in the tenth commandment, don’t covet, people get upset about this. People will use this verse against the Bible. Don’t covet your neighbor’s house, your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey.

Well, so in the Bible, you know, women are just property. They’re chattel property. They’re the possessions of the man. You’re not supposed to covet your neighbor’s wife because she belongs to him. She’s his property just like a house or his possessions. Well, the right way to think of that is that in the Bible, first of all, property is not unimportant. And secondly, remember that men are addressed as covenantal heads.

Now, think about it. Can your wife—is it okay for her, or is it a violation of the tenth commandment, to covet the guy, the husband living next door to her. Is that okay? No, of course not. Well, what would she be doing? Well, she would be coveting the neighbor’s husband and she’d be in violation of the tenth commandment. And the implication is that the neighbor’s husband, who’s married to the woman next door, belongs to the woman next door.

And that’s exactly what Paul says in the New Testament. You’re not your own in marriage. Your body is owned, can be controlled, is—your body doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to Christ ultimately. But in terms of marriage, you’re given over to your marriage partner. You can’t withhold yourself from them. Right? They own your body now and you own theirs. So the tenth commandment, it’s just saying that men can’t desire the property of another man, including his wife, and that women can’t desire the property of another wife, including her husband.

Because in the Bible, it places husband and wife relationships as being this possessive kind of a thing with one another. So it’s not patriarchal. It’s not male chauvinistic. It doesn’t treat the wife as some kind of inanimate object. It’s telling us that property is important and there’s an ownership right and responsibility that husbands and wives have one to the other. And it’s using typical male headship covenantal language to tell us that.

So it limits our use of private property. And thirdly, there are God-given limits. These establish the importance of private property. If God places little limits on your property, then that means that you’ve got a lot of other rights over that property. You know, in the tenth commandment, it says, “Don’t covet your neighbor’s house.” Who does the house belong to? It belongs to your neighbor. So explicitly the ten commandments tell us in the tenth commandment that private ownership is what God intends.

You know, in a limited sense, a stewardship sense, but the state doesn’t own it. The collective doesn’t own it. It’s not “don’t covet the state’s property that’s next to yours.” “Don’t covet your neighbor’s house.” Okay? So the Bible affirms, even with some limitations, the overall freedom that men are to exercise in the context of their home. In the Bible, the land prays. It has a mouth. Land is important.

The garden is like a person. So God establishes the importance of these things. And so property is quite important. Now today we want to talk, based on the text before us as well as a couple of others, about property. What are we told about property? Let’s begin in the beginning, in the creation.

And in Genesis 1:26–28, God makes the whole world and then he makes a man to exercise dominion over the world. Property is there before we are. John Calvin said that man was rich before he was even born. Property is first and foremost a gift from God. Property is a gift from God. Adam didn’t do anything to earn it. He just got it as a gift from God. So property is a God-given gift.

And with that God-given gift, man has responsibilities to use the gift for its proper purposes. It’s not a gift that man can do whatever he wants to with it. It is a gift given to man specifically so that he might exercise dominion over it. What does dominion mean? It means that the root of dominion means to make mature. Adam’s calling was to make mature the land that God had given him, to bring it to fruition. Man’s basic—this is what who you are as a person is: a person who’s been created for the purpose of managing, developing God’s property. You’re a property developer. That’s what you are. At your very essence, man is created in relationship to property. It’s not irrelevant to us. In fact, it’s of absolute significance to us. In fact, that’s the command that we have and that’s the reason why marriages are given is so that man might, with the help and assistance of his wife, more effectively exercise dominion over a piece of land. Okay. That’s what we’re here for.

Property is a gift. Property is the blessing of God because he owns it. But he gives it to man. But because he gives it to us, it means he also gives us conditions for it. Property is the first part of man’s image-bearing capacity. Okay? God owns the world. Man is created and immediately told that he now owns the world. Property is the first part of the image of man. And man is to develop that to the second part, where the property becomes a development and a maturation of what God had originally given to him, and then he gives it back to God.

So property is absolutely linked to who we are as people. No wonder a financial crisis would center around property and ownership and all that sort of stuff. In the Bible, every man is supposed to have a house and a garden and a fig tree. You know, he’s supposed to have a garden just like Adam had a garden. People want a garden. They want a house. They want their little place, and that’s what the Bible says we’re supposed to have.

Now, if we’d be content with little places, we wouldn’t have all the greed that leads us into all the debt we’re involved in as a nation. But, you know, the instinct again of President Carter and President Bush is good. People want to have a place. Now, this became political immediately, and you know, the Democratic party saw it as a way to give away houses to people that were their constituents that would vote for them.

And housing was seen more and more as a right. And now we’ve got a president running who says that health insurance is a right and that college education is a right, and so the state pretends it can give us more and more rights. Well, so the instinct is good. Poor people are supposed to work hard, take over the property from rich people who are lazy typically, and that’s the way the world’s supposed to work.

But everybody’s supposed to have property, and property is the core of what it means to exercise dominion in the context of the world. Ownership of the property implies the right to possession. Okay? So ownership and possession go hand in hand. You don’t have to sit on the land you own, but you have a right to possess it whenever you want to. Okay? And ownership is a God-given reality.

Now, in our day and age, ownership is seen as a social fact. Whether you’re a conservative or a communist, for the most part, people today are not theocrats. And they want to say that private property is the result of a societal decision to let people have property or property rights. And in that context, there is no—you know, if the society can grant a right, then the society can take a right away. So we’re involved in a radically different approach to what property is, who gives it to us and who doesn’t.

And the state now claims that by social grant it can give you property. And so when the evangelicals come along and they say how to give people property, well, they see it as a social contract. They don’t see it as a God-given reality that we have to follow God’s rules in terms of how to get people into property. Rather, it’s a social engineering experiment. And we end up with the kind of situation and judgment that we have today.

So man has this job to bring property to maturation. Christ redeems man. Adam falls. He’s kicked out of the garden. Christ redeems man. He is given back his dominion mandate to mature and perfect the created order, which means property. So there is no distinction in the Bible between salvation and the proper use and development of property, read dominion. That’s really important. Because when the Christian church separates salvation as just some sort of personal deal—going to heaven thing—it fails to give people the truth of the matter, which is that God holds us accountable to exercise property properly.

You are saved so that you can fulfill the original calling that God gave you as a human being, which is to bring property to maturation and development. Property is real important. Take away a person’s ability to mature what God has given to him and you take away his very purpose for existence. Okay. So property is a God-given reality that brings responsibilities to it.

Secondly, property and eschatology. The scriptures are quite clear. The verses I cite for you there. The meek will inherit the earth. This isn’t some sort of, you know, eschatology will be worked out slowly until one day finally God—the meek, those who are broken to God’s harness, who exercise dominion using the law not as a method of salvation but as a tool to how to run their lives, over time, God gives them the earth. God is in the process of dispossessing ethical rebels from property. He’s getting rid of fallen Adam’s control over property and giving it to righteous Adam in Jesus Christ.

And so there’s an eschatology. The whole purpose of history, we could say, is for the meek to inherit the earth and make it beautiful for the work and purposes of the Lord Jesus Christ. There’s a purpose. Leviticus 16:10 says that he who’s faithful in a little thing—and he’s talking about money here, our savior is—will be given more. So if you want to exercise this stewardship right, if you want to be meek and inherit the earth, you have to be faithful with the small amounts of property that God gives you before he will give you more property.

It should be your goal to have lots of property. But the way you get to that goal is not through weird financial instruments and the creation of leverages and all that sort of stuff. It’s through diligence and hard work. It’s through applying the law of God to your particular calling, which means being faithful with the very little bit that you’ve got to start with. God says you start by doing that. It’s required of a steward that he be found faithful.

God will not give property stewardship to men and women who are not faithful over the little bits of property that he gives them. So it’s about what we are saved to do: being faithful over little bits of property. And because you’re meek, God is in the process of taking the possession of the property of the world, taking it away from the wicked and putting it into the hands of the righteous.

In God’s economy, there is no class distinction. Now, we turn to the case laws: Exodus 22:1–4. And we won’t read them, but it’s about restitution. If a man steals an ox or a sheep and slaughters it or sells it, he shall restore five oxen for an ox, four oxen for a sheep. Two oxen is the normal method of restitution. Now, what’s interesting about the laws of restitution in Exodus 22 is they’re fleshing out the eighth commandment: don’t steal. And they’re telling us about property and how to exercise proper dominion over property. Right?

The interesting thing about Exodus 22 is that it’s one law for the rich and the poor alike. The Code of Hammurabi also had restitution, but the restitution was dependent upon whose property you stole. So if you stole one guy’s property, you got to make more restitution. You stole another guy’s property, it’s 15-fold. If you stole rich people’s property, they killed you. They killed you. Hammurabi had built into it the sort of antithetical opposition party spirit that the fallen world revels in.

But in the Scriptures, rich and poor alike have one law for them. And your restitution is not contingent upon whether you’ve got a lot of money, you’ve got little money. And your restitution means that if you can’t—don’t have enough money to restitute for something, you’ve got to become a slave. All that means is you’re going to be put to productive work till you can pay what you’re supposed to pay, because God wants you faithful in small things, making restitution, then he’ll give you increased stewardship.

So in the Bible, it says that, you know, contra the cultures around it, property is not a class matter. We’re not supposed to favor, as our federal government has done, putting property into the hands of the poor. Now, that doesn’t mean we can’t think of people as poor and say, “Well, what’s a good way to incentivize them, to cause them to work, and make up ways, private means through families, churches, etc.” There’s nothing wrong with that.

But when the government—this is why, you know, this is what people are mad about in America right now. And it’s not exactly an accurate perception, but here’s what you hear from the common man on the street as I watch these news shows. The phone calls are running 200 to 1 against the bailout. Why? Because people say, “Look, I’m working hard. I’m making my mortgage payment. I’m paying taxes so that somebody else can get their kids into a school, public schools. I’m paying taxes so that somebody else can have health insurance. I’m paying taxes so that they can be fed money through food stamps. And now I got to pay taxes so that they can own a house.”

That’s why people are upset. They see class distinction. And what did the Democrats do with this in this last week? They play the class card. If you watch the debate between McCain and Obama, this is what Obama typically does. It’s what Democratic politicians tend to want to do: get involved in this class warfare. We rob from the rich to give to the poor. We’re going to give tax credit, tax breaks to the middle income.

Well, you know, there are no taxes being paid by over 40% of the population. So what Obama’s going to do is not cut their taxes. He’s going to send them money that he gets out of people who are wealthy in their pocket. The top 10% of the population pays 70% of the taxes. Well, see, so property and God’s case laws on property tell us that kind of class warfare, that kind of stealing from rich people to give to poor people is antithetical to how God says the civil law should operate.

People are ticked off for good reason. People want justice. Whether they’re fallen or not, they have an instinctual desire. You know, people used to—got a heart shaped by a God-shaped vacuum in your heart. Everybody wants God. Well, there’s some truth to that. But what they really want is God’s justice, his beauty, and his community. Everybody wants justice, and they see what’s going on as unjust. And it is, because class warfare is entered in.

God’s property laws insist on the same laws applying to property, whether the person is rich or poor. There are no class distinctions.

Fourth, there’s responsibility related to property. Verses 5 and 6 of Exodus 22 says this: “If a man causes a field or vineyard to be grazed and lets loose his animal and it feeds in another man’s field, he shall make restitution from the best of his own herd and the best of his vineyard. And if fire breaks out and catches in thorns so that the stack of grain, standing grain, or the field is consumed, he who kindled the fire shall surely make restitution.”

What’s he talking about? As you go about—if I’m back there in my backyard and I’ve got a little fire—I am using the property for God’s purpose. I’m enjoying it or I’m burning weeds or whatever it is. But God’s law says that I’m responsible for the actions that I take relative to my private property. And if my fire, if I don’t control it well enough and it gets over to the neighbor’s house and burns it down, that’s my fault.

What we have going on in the context of the financial world today is a total lack of responsibility. Everybody is trying to be shielded. They’re trying to shield people from responsibilities for losing their homes or losing their job or a stock or a brokerage house going bankrupt. All of—now, I know the bailout is much more than that. There is some—if the government created this problem and the problem is one of government measures, which it is, the government probably has an obligation to get involved and fix it. But what we have underlying all of this is a total lack of people being held responsible.

And God’s laws about property says that people are to be held responsible for the use of property. Gary North has written some great stuff on the application of these two little verses to pollution devices, to emissions controls or devices on cars. What do you do? You’ve got a million cars in LA. They’re each putting out a little bit of pollution. And the end result of those million cars putting out that pollution is that the neighbor’s house is burning down. His lungs are getting sick. His quality of life is diminished. He starts having to go to the hospital.

So our actions over our private property—the car in this case—have these consequences of hurting other people’s property. And the Bible says you’re responsible for your actions. And when you have a small effect you’re doing that is multiplied by a million cars, a large effect on the culture. North says, and I think he’s correct, that a proper application of these laws of property and responsibility means a state can preemptively prevent the pollution by making you install an emission control device on your car. That’s what the state is doing. It’s applying the general equity of property—property owners having responsibility over their private properties—to have the cost of whatever they’re doing borne by themselves and not others.

The guy who drives around, you know, it’s the same thing as having a spark suppression device on the back end of your exhaust system. That’s to prevent you from burning down all kinds of people and then not being able to pay for them. So the Bible says property has with it this responsibility—generally speaking, a responsibility to develop the property, but it also means responsibility when you do something wrong with your property, then you’re supposed to make it right for other people. And that means the civil state can control things that you’re going to do that have impact upon the broader community.

Property and loans. Exodus 22:7–15. We won’t go through this, but now we have a series of case laws that says: if your neighbor borrows property from you and it breaks, here’s how you should fix that solution. Here’s the wisdom to bring to that matter. Why do we have a number of verses out of this Bible that gives us eternal truth about what to do if I loan you my lawnmower and it breaks? Because property is important. Because property is important. And it’s about stealing—the application of stealing to property means that we must be responsible in what we borrow or don’t borrow from our neighbors. Property is highly important to man’s well-being.

Sixth, then property and the bailout. Let’s think about some of these things in terms of it. It’s not really a bailout. It’s—the government buying low-value, primarily mortgages with an attempt to resell them. And only the government has the amount of money and the patience over the long term and the ability to enter into this. Whether it’s right or wrong, I’m not saying. I’m just saying: don’t think of it that we’re going to give taxpayer money to people who shouldn’t have it. That’s really not the idea.

The 800 billion won’t come from new taxes in the short term. It will come through the sale of treasury bills, people investing in the government’s ability to do this thing. So it’s not a bailout and it isn’t really the taxpayer so much—although the interest on the debt will eventually be borne by the taxpayer. But let’s think through a little bit of this. And there is, as I kind of pointed this out, but now I make it explicit, there’s a confusion of roles and—on the outline a civil state, the institution of vengeance and standards of currency exchange—is being used to do what the church and the family should do. These are the institutions of benevolence.

So as well-intentioned as the evangelical presidents Carter and Bush were or are, what they’re doing is using the wrong institution for a good goal. A good goal is to want people to become responsible and own property. That’s a biblical goal. It’s why they’re here. But to use the coercive powers of the federal government and its control and entry into mortgage lending systems through HUD, FHA, Freddy and Fanny, etc.—all of this is using, you know, the wrong tool. It’d be like I’m trying to pound a nail into the pulpit and I’m going to use a hacksaw to accomplish it. It doesn’t work.

God says the civil government is an institution of vengeance to punish evildoers. That instead, what the government has done is they’ve let social policy remove regulations and allowed evildoers to flourish because the greater social goal that they had of getting poor people into housing—great goal. But in the Bible, you can’t just decide a good goal means any means or good means to accomplish that end. God says the church and the state, church and the family rather, are the institutions of benevolence to encourage people, train them and get them ultimately to home ownership.

Proper goals and proper means. So the goals are right. You have to have the proper goal. Home ownership is a good goal, but you have to use the proper means. The proper institutions and then the proper means that those institutions employ. If the private sector had done just what the government sector did and the government let them get away with it, it’d be no better. It’s the right mechanism, but they’re using the wrong means. It’s the right institution, but the institution has to use the right means.

God tells families and churches how to help poor people. He says the way you do it is primarily through gleaning, work, it’s through loaning people money, holding them accountable and responsible. Gleaning means that they get their own field—not making as much gleaning as you would with your own job. The Bible tells us how to go about helping poor people and the way not to.

It does not say, you know, to sell them homes that they can’t afford at prepayment penalties and higher interest costs in the hope that they’ll just be okay somehow. So you’ve got to use biblical means to accomplish these societal goals, which may be proper.

Fourth, seeking the peace of the family and the culture. So we’re seeking not the destruction. We don’t want the financial system to collapse. I don’t—I hope you don’t. That will produce chaos. And what God says, we want to seek the peace of the city. So don’t lick your lips over—isn’t this great, God’s judgment’s finally coming. Maybe yes, maybe no. But what we want to do is speak truth into this situation from God’s word relative to property and the roles of government, the family, and the church that will produce a degree of peace that the culture doesn’t have now because it isn’t following God’s laws and using God’s prescription.

Now, we can’t do this. We have nothing to say to the civil government if we’re not going about doing things well in our own little family. If we’re not seeking the peace, the well-being of God’s economics in our family correctly, then really we have no right to go to the broader responsibility of informing the civil government. Here’s what I mean.

Faithful in a little, God gives you more. If you’re not faithful in the running of your household, God hasn’t called you to be the guy to teach the state about how to run their household. What does it mean? What does it mean? How did the Proverbs tell us? Proverbs tells us in Proverbs 13:11, “The wealth gained by dishonesty will be diminished, but he who gathers by labor will increase.” You seek the peace of your family and household by first knowing yourself, teaching your children that the way to get wealth is not through leveraged money. It’s through hard labor. Don’t get rich quick. The simple thing is that God over time gives property to people, people that are diligent. May not happen in the short time for you in the short term, but that’s the big flow of history: God gives wealth to people that are diligent.

Proverbs 10:4 says, “He who has a slack hand becomes poor, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.” And then it’s interesting because verse 22 of Proverbs 10 says, “The blessing of the Lord makes rich.” Which is it? The blessing of God or the diligent work of the person that’s not a sluggard? It’s both. The blessing of God comes to those who arrange their lives in a proper way, specifically in reference to property because that’s why we’re put here: to exercise proper dominion over property.

So it’s diligence that first of all brings peace to our culture. You know, lots of Christians have gotten into the deal of trying to buy things low, sell them high, flip houses, flip various kinds of merchandise, you know. And if you’re not adding value to things in that process, I don’t quite see how it ends up being diligent. The simple truth is we’ve got to turn to a culture where hard work is seen as the basic way—slowly and gradually accumulating income—instead of, in the last 20 years, people trying to make income by riding the property curve up, then the curve busts and now everybody’s caught. And even if you made money in that riding up, you might have gotten gain, but it’s not the sort of gain that lasts long term according to God. We’re supposed to be diligent and work.

Secondly, where to tithe. “Will a man rob God? Yet you have robbed me.” This is Malachi 3:8. If we don’t tithe to God, if we don’t pay the simple 10% tax to God, do we really have any reason to squawk about a 45 or 50% tax by the civil government? If we’re not going to give God the paltry 10% tax that he puts upon us, do we really have anything to say when our economics don’t work out very good?

People say they can’t afford it. You can’t afford not to tithe. You can’t afford to rob God. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills. He’ll give you more if you’re faithful with little. And if you’re not making much money and you’re not faithful in the little things, he’s not going to give you more. So diligence brings peace to our household. Tithing brings peace to our household. A lack of debt brings peace to our households.

Romans 13:8: “Owe no man anything.” How many people in this church are freeholders owning their property outright? I don’t. I’ve messed up somehow. Here I am 58 years old. I don’t own a house. I don’t own property. I have a mortgage. Romans says that we’re to try as much as we can to be debt-free in our living. If you don’t have any debt right now, you probably are going to be in the catbird seat over the next year. Well, Warren Buffett had cash. He stayed out of debt. What’s he going to do? He rushes in now—not because of his patriotic influences, but because he knows it is time to make a ton of money. You can’t make that kind of money if you’re suffering the consequences of debt. It’s quite simple. Work hard. Pay God his tax. Stay out of debt as much as possible.

Every one of us should examine our budget. Not today. Take a break from your work today. Tomorrow, look at your budget. How much discretionary income can you cut back on? Because you better get ready to do it because of these difficult financial times we’re in the midst of. And you ought to do it anyway. You ought to try to live provident lifestyles with a reduction of debt.

1 Timothy 6:8: “Having food and drink”—or food and clothing rather—”therewith we should be content.” Labor, diligence, tithe, not being in debt. And you avoid debt if you’re content with the simple things of life: food and drink. No, you want bigger things. Want better things. Want a bigger car, better car, better house. You know, how can our kids afford houses when the houses that are available are, you know, 2500 square foot houses? Now, when people want that kind of house as their starter house, we don’t have a lot of sympathy for their inability to get a loan, do you? I don’t. Be content with what God gives you.

Might lose everything? Might—you probably, some of you, are losing a ton of money over this last year. That’s okay. You trust God. Content with food and clothing. The Bible says a healthy contentment is part of bringing peace to your household.

1 Timothy 6:17 goes on to talk about those who are rich and what they should do. So there’s commandments in 1 Timothy about contentment, but then there’s commandments about if you do have wealth, what are you supposed to do with that wealth. And essentially what you’re supposed to do is engage in benevolence. You’re supposed to see the money that God gives you in stewardship to help other people. You should want the poor guy to own property. That’s what he’s supposed to do as a dominion man.

Now, you don’t just give him the money or loan him money at no interest or whatever it is, but you should see your assets as blessings from God. For the purposes of which is to help people become responsible over their little house, their little garden, their little piece of property.

Ephesians 4 says, “Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labor, working with his hands, that which is good, that he may have something to give to him who has need.” The purpose of work and the accumulation of profits is to a large extent to be able to share them with other people, to use the property wisely, to build up other people in their use of property.

Fifth, restoring responsibility instead of sensitivity. There’s a great deal of sensitivity in politics for the last 15 years but not much responsibility. The Scriptures, and again the case laws in Exodus 21:28, it talks about: if your ox gores somebody he’s supposed to be killed. A dumb ox, who can’t be told what he should or shouldn’t do, is held responsible for his actions. How about us? Even more so, people who can be told what they’re supposed to do and not do should be held responsible for their actions.

We shouldn’t want—if it is a bailout of people or institutions. That’s not what we want. We do want a way to stabilize the crisis and get money flowing, but we don’t want to do it by holding people not responsible for their actions. So the restoration of responsibility has to be part of bringing peace in terms of our homes and as well as the political economy.

If we don’t hold our children responsible, if our children don’t to some extent hold us responsible, if we’re not bringing penalties to bear for irresponsible behavior in the context of our home, we’ve got nothing to say when people don’t bring responsibility to bear on irresponsible acts in the context of the broader culture. Responsibility.

And then finally, restoring freedom versus slavery. We’re supposed to be freeholders. Freedom is linked to the proper use of property. If you don’t have property and the ability to use it, the Bible says you’re not really free. The Bible says that’s slavery. And that’s as I say here—note the context of the commandment. “Don’t steal” means don’t diminish a man’s ability to use the property that God has given to him. Don’t steal a man, bring him to your house, but also don’t steal what he has because that diminishes his ability to exercise freedom over the property that God has given to him.

And that brings us to Ballot Measure 63. Ballot Measure 63 is real simple. It says, you know, you can go ahead and make improvements to your house if it’s less than $35,000. You want to put on an extra bedroom, do it if it costs less than 35,000. You don’t got to get a permit and all kinds of inspections from the civil state. To me, that’s an exercise of biblical responsibility.

Now, there are exceptions. If it’s electrical work, you have to have a licensed electrical contractor, etc. There’s exceptions in the ballot measure to make sure that you pass this information on in writing to the next owner of the home. So it’s not as if it’s total deregulation of what you can do in your house. But the point is it’s a movement in the right direction. In Oregon we have incredible amounts of permitting requirements—more than a lot of states, most states.

And what they are is they’re a violation, I think, in general, of the eighth commandment because they reduce your freedom over the property that God’s given you to do. Additionally, they reduce your responsibility because we’ve gotten to the place where if we think that if the state says it’s okay, it must be okay, right? I mean, if you’ve got to decide when you put up a house to do it well, to do it in a way that’s not going to hurt the people that live in it, so it won’t fall over or burn down, you have responsibility. But if you can get somebody else to say, “Oh, I’ll tell you how to do that. What’s right and what’s wrong?” it’s a transfer of freedom and it’s a transfer of responsibility.

Now, listen—30 years ago you could rely upon a bank not giving you more money than you were able to pay for. There was an external restraint in the mortgage system that said you can’t afford the house. People got used to the bank as like the building permitter, as the one that tells them what is good and not good. Well, it must be okay that I borrowed this house with no money down, with a prepayment penalty, and an 8% interest that’s going to jump to 10% interest in two years. It must be okay because the bank let me do it. That’s the mentality we have now because we’ve created this kind of nanny state routine where the state tells us what’s okay and not okay, what’s safe and not safe, taking away responsibility for damages from individuals by overseeing all things to the nth degree.

So I believe that Measure 63—it’s a piece of legislation. It can be changed by the legislature and improved. There are, you know, potholes in the road that they try to pave. There’s bad things in it. Yeah, we can—it’s not perfect, but it is a shove, I think, in the right direction of letting people be free to do what God has called them to do and that men bear responsibility for their actions as a result of that freedom. So I think that, applying the laws of property in the context of Measure 63, says yeah, we should support this measure. It’s a push in the right direction.

We’re in the midst of unsettled times, difficult times. Trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. I said today that we come to the sanctuary for help. We look to God for help. We don’t look to horses or the Congress. We don’t look to the congressional bill that’s moving through as our ultimate salvation in terms of our economy. We look to God and that’s good. We rest today in the knowledge that he is sovereign. He is dispossessing the evil and he’s giving the world to faithful people. Be one of them.

Hear the other side of it. Hear the warning that Psalm 19 talked about. By them thy servant is warned. If we’re not diligent, if we don’t pay the tithe, if we don’t accept responsibility and encourage responsibility in the context of our actions, if we don’t look for ways to help other people exercise proper dominion over their property—be warned. There’s no peace that flows from Zion’s Hill to you today.

If you’re not going to commit your life and the use of your property, if you’re not going to see property as an important deal in your life and a deal to be exercised for the dominion of Jesus Christ, if you don’t see property as the basic calling of what you are as a man and woman in Christ, and as a result don’t apply laws of diligence, lack of debt, etc., in your home, there’s no peace that flows to you from Zion Hill today.

May the Lord Jesus Christ enable us as we come forward, offering ourselves and a small reflection of the property God has granted us in his grace, may we do so with a renewed commitment to seek to be proper Christian men and women properly exercising dominion over the property that the Lord God has given us for his purposes. Let’s pray.

Lord God, forgive the sins of this nation. We do pray for our civil leaders that you would bless them, Lord God. We pray that they would look and see and learn from what you’ve told them. We know, Lord God, that you apparently must use a large stick on our congressional politicians these days, and we accept that from your hand. Bless us as well with the knowledge that the stick is wielded against us should we fail to do the simple things of considering our property important, as being given by you, that brings responsibility to mature it.

Bless us, Lord God, as we come forward offering ourselves and all that we have and are to the purposes of Christ the King, and trusting that he will indeed give property to those who are faithful. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.