Dennis Tuuri

Sermon text today is Deuteronomy 5:19. Please stand for the reading of that word. Deuteronomy 5:19. “And you shall not steal.” Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for your word. We pray that you would bless that word now. Bless us by your Holy Spirit, Lord God, that he might indeed open our hearts and minds to receive this word and through this word to desire your kingdom and to see the means whereby it is manifest. We ask this in Jesus’ name and for the sake of that kingdom. Amen.

Please be seated.

We return today to the series of sermons on the 10 words. Remember that’s not just a funny little thing I’m saying “10 words” instead of “Ten Commandments.” That’s what the text says. The text refers to what we normally call the Ten Commandments as the 10 words, and that’s what we call them. Now they contain ten commandments, and today’s very simple commandment—the eighth commandment—is very short, succinct, and is more command-like than sermonic, although some of the others are more sermonic. But still, there is an important implication to these commandments or words that go far beyond what they simply say. And this particular commandment is of particular relevance for us, I think, in the particular time in which we find ourselves.

A brief note first on the word—the significant word here—which is to steal. This is one of three different terms that we would think of as being translated as steal, take, or rob. And this particular term has as its particular emphasis to take something that belongs to another person, of course, but to do it by stealth or by deceit. And that’s the specific word that’s used here. Although other synonyms talk about it in other ways, this particular one is important.

So you can see this same word is used to “steal somebody’s heart,” which means to deceive them—in other words, without their knowledge. And so it is that kind of theft that is in the first case specifically prohibited by the eighth commandment. But of course all the other thefts would fall under this heading. But this is the one that might particularly tempt a member of the covenant community to do it by stealth.

Not too many people who gather together and hear God’s word are going to be tempted to go rob somebody at gunpoint. But we may be tempted to steal by stealth.

Now, whatever these words—whichever of these words is used—there’s a basic underlying principle involved, and that principle is the establishment of private ownership of property. What underlies this commandment is that this is a commandment about property. You know, the last couple of commandments—don’t murder people, don’t commit adultery. And the next one: don’t lie, don’t bear false witness against your brother in court. These are things that are more personal, but in theft it relates specifically to property—now it’s property of somebody else, but it concerns property. And so underlying this text is what is so significant for our day and age: the importance of property.

We stand here on the verge of the Fourth of July, and the scriptures tell us: where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom, there is liberty. And the implication of that is that when the spirit of the Lord departs, there isn’t liberty. And what we have in our country is an increasing loss of liberty. If you think of liberty in relationship to property—how much control you exercise over the property that God has given to you.

Of course, what’s happened in our day and age is a tremendous increase of state involvement in what you can and can’t do with your property—actually taking more and more of it and also controlling your use of it. And so the intrusion of state control and seizing of property for its purposes makes this commandment particularly relevant to us. How important is it? You know, do we really care about property?

Is property important to Bible-believing Christians? And we would say absolutely. Unfortunately, the spiritual tendency of the church of Jesus Christ in the last 50, 100 years has kind of denigrated property. So you know, it’s sort of like, “Well, material things aren’t that important, and so what happens to them isn’t that important.” But here we have enshrined in God’s word the protection of private property. This is a relevant text for us then, and it’s specifically relevant right now.

Last week our president gave a press conference to talk about the debt limit and all that stuff. And six times he mentioned private property—of corporations and individuals, that are jets. And he mentioned the tax break that they get. I think—I don’t know, I’m not a tax expert—but as I understand it, it’s five-year depreciation instead of seven, or seven instead of five or something. It’s really not that big a tax loophole if you want to call it that.

And what he did was he kept talking about that in relationship to then having money to send kids to college and do this and that social program. Now what he’s doing is he’s ginning up, and he seems to be doing this a lot for the last few months, and I think we’ll see a ton of it going into the election. And it’s important that we understand the significance of these statements in relationship to the eighth word.

What he’s ginning up is the thought in people’s mind that they want to take from somebody else’s property—taxes, okay, through taxation or fees. They want to take some of that and use it for their well-being or the well-being of some other people. So right at the center of where we’re involved right now politically with our country is the idea of private property.

Another case going through the courts, of course, is the health care legislation. And you know, people talk about it in terms of transaction. Well, think about it in terms of the eighth commandment, that establishes private property rights. Your property includes money, and the government has now mandated that you use some of that money to buy a particular product. They’re forcing you to use part of your property in a way that you might not choose to do. Now, it makes sense because the government has intruded itself in health care and so everybody’s going to get medical care, and so what can you do?

There are other private alternatives, right? You could post a bond. You could sign a contract saying you don’t want medical care. But the point is here again: the government is increasing its control over your private property. And of course we know that the last three years this has been what government has increasingly done. And even in the Bush administration there were more and more controls, more and more regulations, more and more different ways to tax people.

So our president actually is encouraging an attitude of coveting what somebody else has and being able to take that thing for what you think it should be used for. He is encouraging an attack on the doctrine—the biblical doctrine of private property. He’s encouraging people to have mindsets that are in opposition to the eighth commandment.

The other reason people steal: one reason people steal is they steal because they want what you have. But sometimes people steal because they can’t get what you have. They don’t want you to have it either. So they’ll steal it. I may not get that money, that portion of that from the private property owner, but I don’t want him to have it either. And even if I’m not going to get a benefit, I would just as soon take it away from him so that he can’t have it. And again, this is the appropriation of property for a purpose—whether destruction or our purpose—from someone else.

So this particular command is increasingly important.

Now, you know, we don’t shoot the messenger. Well, some of us do, but you know, that’s really not our job. The message that God is sending through our political governance today is that the spirit of the Lord is more or less absent from the country, and liberty, freedom, and particularly as it relates to private property, is in decline. And the problem isn’t private property, right? The problem is the country has moved away from the Lord God and from the Lord Jesus Christ. And because of that, God’s judgment begins to fill the land—tyrants and tyrannical forms of government that will steal from people. Well, that won’t steal, but will encourage an attitude of theft.

It’s interesting: the Bible never calls taxation theft. And there’s all kinds of taxation going on. The Bible never says the government is stealing. So I’m being careful in my words, but the Bible certainly says that we’re not to have an attitude of trying to take somebody else’s private property because we think there’s something better that would be done with it. And so that’s happening.

In the words of some famous people of the last 50 years: the chickens are coming home to roost. A country that won’t have Jesus rule over it with liberty and freedom will have other people rule over it, and liberty and freedom will decline, will decline. So this is really judgment against the church for taking an attitude sort of more or less non-committal about private property and the significance and the importance of it to us.

This is another exceedingly important topic because what’s happening in evangelicalism today—and I mentioned this from my comments from the Q gathering a couple of months ago in Portland, but you don’t have to look just there. It’s all over the place. There is a discussion in Christian circles relative to property, private property, of social justice. Social justice.

This is an important enough topic that I will address it separately in its own sermon. The Bible has a lot to say about social justice. But if we don’t keep the eighth commandment in our minds and in our hearts as we evaluate other texts, we’re going to miss what social justice is and what it isn’t, and we may be tempted to violate the eighth commandment in the name of some kind of so-called social justice.

So an exceedingly important piece of God’s commandments to us is found here. We live in a time that because private property has not been used and defended by individuals, by families, by businesses, what happens then is when we fail to exercise dominion over property and protect it, inevitably in the history of the world, the state begins to take private property, control, and exercises dominion over it.

So we live in a time of increasing attack on private property. Now, I should also say that the other main culprit in attacking private property in the last century are what were called robber barons—people who own businesses who can control the political process, can write legislation or help legislation through lobbying that allows them to get more control over your property as well. So the attack doesn’t just come from the government. It can come from monopolistic robber baron sorts of businesses. But in either direction it comes, there is an ongoing attack on this commandment—upon the eighth commandment—and upon private property that God has given to individuals, families, corporations, etc.

So we live in a time where the people of God have to begin to remind themselves of what this eighth commandment is all about. We must be schooled once more, I believe, in the implications of the eighth word and in the importance of property. And then we must transmit this to our children so that they’ll be properly schooled in an understanding of the relationship of the Christian to property.

What I want to do today is talk about property and where it comes from, who owns it, etc. I want—I hope that the first portion of the sermon will create a desire in you for more property and to control the property that God has given you in a godly way. So I want us to desire the kingdom, and in the kingdom, people respect private property and they use private property under the correct purposes that God has given to us. So I would like us to desire more things. How’s that for, you know, materialistic? I want us to want more things, more property—not to spend upon our own pleasures, some of that is good—but to use for the kingdom.

I’m going to be making the point that property is essential to the kingdom, right? I mean, how do you have a kingdom? If you have no property, there’s some kind of gnostic kingdom involved there, but we believe there’s property. God created it, so it’s good. So in the first part of the sermon, I want to hopefully give us a sense of a desire for more property and a desire to use our property for the purposes of the kingdom. And then toward the end of the sermon, I’ll talk more about the “how” of things, but this is the thing: it’s a desire for private property to be used for God’s purposes. And the “how” of the thing we’ll talk about as we move along.

So the first point on your outline then is property and dominion. Who owns the created order? And of course we know that God made all of this. All of this belongs to God, right? We read in Genesis 1:26:

“God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’”

So the entire world—okay, the earth and all things that are on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. Then God blessed them and God said to them:

“Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Now, these are well-known verses to us. But think of the implications. All property is created and owned by God. He can do with it what he will. He has ultimate rights. You know, if he wants to kick you off the land and bring somebody else into the land, you can’t claim, “It’s mine,” because it ultimately belongs to him. He is the owner of all things. So property belongs to God. And it is tied here in this text and others to dominion.

Property—the ability to have property, or property itself—having it means power. Christians are afraid of the dominion word or the power word. You know, we’re so enamored of service, we forget about power. And service and power are not antithetical to one another. Property is the ability to exercise power properly as God has made us. He’s made us in his image. He’s a property owner. Man is to be a property owner, although subsidiary to him, and he’s given property to his people for a particular purpose: to exercise dominion over it according to what he says that dominion is to be.

So private property isn’t totally private. It’s a God-given ownership from God to man for his particular purposes. So the Bible clearly establishes the importance of property and a person’s control over property. The Bible is not anti-wealth. It’s not anti-the accumulation of property. It’s anti-wealth used for one’s particular purposes. But you know, some of the great men of the scriptures, right?—Abraham, David, all kinds of godly men—had a lot of property, a lot of influence, a lot of power. And this is because that’s kind of the purpose of the thing: that long-term men are to exercise control and dominion and power through the accumulation of property. It’s a good thing. It’s not a bad thing.

And property, as I said, is specifically related to power. If you have property, if you have exchangeable property, if you have, you know, a lot of property in a particular community, you exercise a degree of power and authority through the proper use of that property. To be propertyless, you know, means that we’re rejecting the very first gift of God to us, which was property. That property—and that gift was what he said we should be using as his imagebearers to exercise dominion. That property and so man’s first gift from God—well, first gift is life, but the first—man is born as Calvin says, rich, because he’s born specifically for the purposes of exercising stewardship over the entire earth. And so that’s our purpose. That’s what God tells us we’re supposed to do.

Now, those property rights, because they are stewardship, God says you can only do certain things with them. Even though we exercise what we call private property, still that property is controlled by God. I mean, God told man immediately after giving him everything and after giving him the garden, he says, “Well, you see this tree here? You can’t eat from it.” So God is exercising property rights. And very importantly, in terms of this commandment, one could say that this is the first commandment that’s broken, because God says, “This is my property. You are steward over it, but here’s the rule: you can’t eat this one.” So Adam, when he eats of the fruit, is stealing God’s property. He’s like the little boy that goes into the orchard and decides to eat what he wants to eat. And so that’s what Adam does.

So, how important is it that we try to respect property rights? Well, it’s the nature of the fall—a rejection of property rights—and it’s the nature of the restoration of man to respect God-given property rights. But the point is: God puts a limitation upon our use of property.

In Deuteronomy 23:24-25, this is Moses—the section of his sermon in Deuteronomy on the eighth word—we read this. He says: “When you come into your neighbor’s vineyard, you may eat your fill of grapes and your pleasure, but you shall not put any”—sorry, wrong page—”but you shall not put any in your container. And when you come into your neighbor’s standing grain, you may pluck the heads with your hand, but you shall not use a sickle on your neighbor’s standing grain.”

So what does it mean? It means that there are limitations to property rights. At this particular time in redemptive history, if you had a field with grapes, you couldn’t say, “It’s my property, not yours. Don’t walk on it and don’t take grapes off of it.” You couldn’t do that. God is demonstrating here, among other things, the significance that he owns the property and we’re only stewards of that property. And we can talk about it as private property, but only if we remember that it’s God’s property.

In Matthew 21:42-44, Jesus says—look, he says, “I’ve come to exercise property rights.” He says in verse 43: “I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a nation bearing the fruits of it.” And we know the analogy: it’s a vineyard. It’s a kingdom. And as I said, it’s not a gnostic kingdom. It means property. And Jesus is going to take property away from people who aren’t using it for God’s purposes and give it to somebody else.

Is Jesus stealing? No. Because property belongs to God. Now, this is important: it’s not a grant from the state. Okay? It’s not a grant from the state. But both conservative and liberal political philosophies kind of meet together here—secular ones, that is—and say that property is kind of a grant of the state. It’s not. It’s a grant from God. And that grant is shown by his restrictions upon what we might and we might not do with it.

So we’ve got a job. That job is to use property, to try to have property as God’s imagebearer, to exercise proper dominion over that property, and to use that property to exercise power in the context of the world. Power must be brought to God’s harness. It must be channeled under the influence and control of the Holy Spirit. But power in and of itself, strength in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing. In fact, that kind of power is talked about throughout the scriptures.

Indeed, the very word that God gives us—wealth—if we are diligent, God will give us wealth. That same word that’s translated “wealth” can also be translated at other places and is “power” or “authority.” So there’s this relationship between power and wealth and authority and wealth. And this means that we should want more of it as Christians—not for our purposes, but for the purposes of the kingdom.

So to steal from somebody else is not just a sin against a person. It’s a sin against God’s property rights, and it’s similar to the sin of Adam, all right? So it’s God’s land. He gives it to man through varying mechanisms, and we have limitations upon our use of it.

Secondly: dominion and personal ownership. What’s more important: your job or your money?

Now, this flows out of what I just said, and I’m not going to blame David Spears for what I’m going to say here. But I will say that this point is really the result of a conversation with David at family camp. And I may not have understood him correctly. So please don’t say, “This is what David says, and he’s goofy.” If you don’t like what I’m going to say, I’m the one that’s goofy, and I may not have understood him really. So, but the line of thinking that David’s discussion with me led me into was this very question: What’s more important—your work or your property?

So we at this church emphasize properly our dominion work in the world. We transform things, we beautify things, right? So your labor is important. But David was saying that, you know, there’s another thing that’s very important—just as important, maybe more important—and that is what you get for that labor. You go to work, you get a paycheck. Simplest example. And yes, what you do is important, but maybe more important is that money because it fits in with what we’re talking about today. It’s property. And property is part of God’s plan for the exercise of dominion in the world, okay?

Now, in a particular culture like ours, when you go to work, there will be kingdom work that happens. But for most people, they’re going to a place where there is not self-consciously kingdom work going on. Your ability to exercise dominion is somewhat limited over your labor because it’s controlled by someone who may be not committed to the kingdom of Jesus Christ, right? So what you do for work is good. It’s important. We’ve stressed it. But on the other hand, it’s, you know, it’s not as significant as it might be if the owner of your labor—who uses your labor—was using it explicitly for kingdom work.

Now, when you get paid, however, now you have something that you have 100% control of, right? This you have power over. This you have the ability to use 100% for how you think it should be used. And so what I’m saying here is that when we look at the eighth commandment and understand the significance of property, and when we think about the fact that one of our imagebearing capacities as man is to own property the way God owns property and for his purposes, then the owning of that property through labor becomes very significant.

And if all we’re interested in is labor and we’re not interested in the property we get for that labor, we’ve kind of missed the point. One of the main points of what the scriptures talk about—the scriptures commend property to us. So this point’s a good one to ponder. Ask yourself: you know, what do I place more importance on?

When we train our children, I’m saying we’ve got to school the church again in terms of the eighth commandment and property to prevent the incursion of socialism that we see abundantly running all over the place in our country and to roll it back. The only way we can roll it back is if the church wakes up to what’s happening and says: the very imagebearing capacity of God is being diminished by the civil state, who doesn’t let man exercise property rights according to the eighth commandment.

So if we’re going to do that and we’re going to school the culture, we want to school the next generation. And what are we teaching our children? Are we just teaching them that vocation—the labor itself and what they do in that labor—is all that’s important? Or are we teaching them as well that what they want to do is go about that in a godly way, of course, but in a way that produces wealth for them and property that they want to have and control for the purposes of God’s kingdom?

Property owners are the most significant element in the exercise of authority in the country. That’s why the state doesn’t want you to have it. I mean, the state knows that the less property you have direct control of, the more power it has. And the more property you have direct control of, the less power it has. If you don’t like statism, get more property. That means that ownership and authority and dominion flows back to private parties rather than to the state. And so, what’s more important to us? What’s more important? What do we teach our children?

And I think it’s very important that in this series on the eighth commandment, we reemphasize the importance and goodness of material prosperity—the blessings of God. Clearly in his law, it’s tied to the blessings of God in general, the material prosperity of his people, the collection of property and wealth, the exercise of that with power and according to the purposes of God’s kingdom. It’s very important, I think, that we reestablish that very thing.

God tells us that, you know, as we lay for things, will increase the amount of property we have. And he says this is a good thing. Wealth is an aspect of God’s blessing on his faithful ones.

The blessing of God, Proverbs 10:22 says: “It makes rich and he adds no sorrow to it.” Listen to this very familiar verse from Ephesians. St. Paul declares in Ephesians: “Let him that stole”—so he that broke the eighth commandment—”steal no more. Stop breaking it. But that’s not enough. But rather, let him labor, working with his hands. So don’t steal, but work.”

But that’s not the end of the verse, right? Labor isn’t where it stops. Labor with his hands “the thing which is good, so that he will have to give to him that has need.” The end result of repentance for violation of the eighth word is labor resulting in the accumulation of capital. It’s not just the labor. You ought to have wealth, and specifically you want to have it, among other things, to give to people that have need.

The exercise of the body of Christ to be able to give to those in the body that have need is dependent upon other members of the body of Christ laboring—not just so that your labor is blessed in the world and good things happen out there, but so that you will have money, wealth, property, capital by which you can be a blessing to those less fortunate members of the community of Jesus Christ, to those that have need for varying reasons. Do you see what I’m saying?

That text tells us that the eighth commandment is related specifically to labor, but beyond labor to property. And if we’re going to truly repent for violation of the eighth word, it means to embrace not just labor, but to embrace property—the accumulation of wealth by that labor.

Now, this could make a lot of us feel very bad. Do you feel bad yet? Probably should, because most of us don’t have much property. Most of us, our biggest piece of property is our house. And most of us, that’s not ours yet. We may own a little certain percentage of it. Now, I don’t want to make you feel bad. I don’t want to make myself feel bad, but I do want to incite a desire for the accumulation of things. And I know it sounds so unspiritual. I know it does. But I think this is so important. It sounds unspiritual because somehow the church has gone wrong on this whole thing.

We want to accumulate power. And as I said, what I want to do in this first half of the sermon is not make you feel bad—”You haven’t done so well so far”—but rather to say: “Today is the first day of the week. Today’s the first day of the rest of my life. Today’s the first day of the new world for me, at least. And I’m going to see the importance of the eighth commandment in developing in myself, those I influence, children I might have, to help them to see that what we’re about as Christians is the attempt to exercise more and more godly authority over more and more property directly, not through laboring for someone else.”

You know, by the way, I’ve kind of pooh-poohed the idea. There’s a great emphasis in certain homeschool circles on entrepreneurship: “Don’t ever work for anybody else. You should only have your own business.” And I think that’s wrong. I mean, I think that a lot of people should be working for somebody else for lots of reasons. But, you know, the positive instinct in that is the desire to exercise 100%—or exercise, yeah, 100% control of your labor for godly purposes.

When you work for someone else, you’re only, you know, doing X amount. What you’re doing is restricted to some extent by a non-Christian, non-kingdom person or board running the business. Now, it’s okay. I think you’re still supposed to do it a lot of you. But that’s a proper instinct in Vision Forum and some of these other organizations that try to encourage, you know, having your own business. It’s that reason.

Now, you don’t have to have your own business, though, to do what I’m suggesting today: to accumulate property, to take what you get in exchange for your labor for someone else and begin to accumulate more and more property. Lord willing, you know, we don’t leave here with guilt. We leave here with a desire to have more property, to exercise the image of God over, because that’s what dominion is involved with here. And as I said, you know, this is true political action too, okay? This is really my bottom line—kind of fundamental political action.

One response to statism should be the accumulation of property because the accumulation of property is power. We can vote all we want to, but if Christians’ property diminishes over time—and by that I don’t mean just ownership, but control of it—it’s likely going to become not somebody else’s, but become more and more controlled by the government. And that is statism. So one of the best things you can do to combat statism is to have a desire to accumulate more private property and to exercise private property rights over it.

You know, believe you me, one of the things that gets people involved in political action quicker than anything else is owning a home. When you own a home, all of a sudden you think, “Well, like I said, you know, I got these taxes, I got these regulations.” Somehow it makes you a player. And again, I’m not trying to make you feel bad if you rent, but the accumulation of power puts you in the game, and then you begin to realize how much of a loss of power the federal government has established. And the only way to get it back is to take it back—to start accumulating more power, more property, and more power over it.

That’s probably the most significant political action you can engage in to combat socialism, particularly in our day and age when it isn’t overt, when it’s still kind of a cooperative socialism. Everybody’s sort of saying, “Yeah, it’s fine for the government to tell me what to do more and more.” Okay, so it’s very important. What’s more important? What you do, your labor, or what you get for that labor? A question to ponder and to talk about.

Third point: property and life.

In the Bible, property is related to life. On your handouts, there’s an attached sheet with an overview of Moses’ sermon section that I mentioned earlier on the 10th word. And I, you know, I have it today because we’re going to do much with it. But you know this: remember that in Deuteronomy, Moses does the 10 words, and then he preaches a sermon based on those 10 words. And so as we think about the 10 words over the next few weeks, it’s good for you to read through that portion of Moses’ sermon.

And what’s interesting about that portion of Moses’ sermon—if we have the breaks correct here, which is a little difficult—Jim Jordan had some interesting thoughts about this. So we’re coming out of the seventh commandment and moving into the eighth. We’re coming out of adultery and moving into theft. And in a way, the boundaries aren’t quite so clear. And there’s a reason for that.

You know, adultery is a forbidden mixture, right? That’s what “adulteration” means: to mix something. So adultery is a forbidden mixture—by adding two. Theft takes something away and mixes somebody else’s property with your property. It’s also a forbidden mixture. Now you’ve got your stuff that God gave you, and you’ve got stuff that doesn’t belong to you in your home, okay? It’s a forbidden mixture, but it comes about not through, you know, going after, but it comes about through taking—through removing something from somebody else.

So the boundary is a little unclear. But look at the first and one other comment here. There is a sense in which I think these commandments—these 10 aspects of Moses’ sermon here—seem to flow, at least a number of them, in relationship to the 10 words like a restatement of the 10 words. Now, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but you have it here. I’ve given you the bolding that sort of shows you what the thought is on how that works.

And in a way, it wouldn’t be unusual because, as I said, we’re really sort of now starting with the first sin of mankind—stealing property. And again, that tells us the importance and significance of property, right? So the 10 words—well, the first and the 10th word concern men. That’s what’s interesting about this.

In the first word, or the first section of the 10 words in verse 15, it says: “A slave comes to you, and you’re not supposed to send the slave back to his previous master.” Now, we don’t want to get into the whole implications of that, but it involves a person owned by somebody else—a slave. The last statement in this section of Moses matches it, and it’s about the death penalty for stealing people—kidnapping a man, okay? So in the first one, it’s about change of ownership, right? Change of master. The way the first commandment is about who’s our master. And so it seems to relate to that, but it’s about people.

The point is: when Moses begins to explicate or talk about the eighth word, he relates property to people. There is a strong connection between property and life. To steal somebody’s property—now, it isn’t killing them, but it’s like killing them. Remember that in Deuteronomy 5, at least I think the best translation is what we read today, that unlike Exodus 20, after “thou shalt not kill,” we have a series of conjunctions: “and thou shalt not commit adultery and thou shalt not steal.” They flow from killing. And stealing property now is equated—it’s somehow connected to murder. And it is here as well in God’s word. Stealing people’s lives is how he talks about—at least the beginning and end of this section of his sermon on stealing property.

So this doesn’t diminish life yet exalts property. It gives us a better understanding of the significance of property as really being a picture of and essential to the life of man—essential to the life of man. This connection, okay?

Fourth: from Advent to Pentecost and ordinary time—the significance of property.

In Luke 1:46, we have the Magnificat—Mary’s great song of praise. We sang this. Yeah, turn there. Why don’t you go and turn to Luke 1:46, and you know, so we’re coming out of Pentecost time. We’re moving now, in terms of ordinary time. So the first half of the church year begins with Advent, ends with Pentecost—the life of Jesus—and then the life of Jesus through his church—the second half. And Pentecost is about Jesus becoming crowned as king, bringing humanity into the throne room, and then exercising authority through the giving of his spirit so that his disciples will inherit the world, so his disciples will disciple all the nations. The meek will inherit the earth. Jesus comes for that very purpose.

And when we look at the Advent, it’s the same story. Mary sings this great song of praise to God. And the significant part I want you to look at here begins in verse 51:

“He has shown strength with his arm. He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. Jesus is prophet. He says that if you don’t use your intellectual endeavors for him, he’s going to scatter you. So he wants us in our imaginations of our hearts to be submissive to him. He has put down the mighty from their seats or thrones and exalted the lowly. So people that won’t use their dominion aspect, their kingly aspect, for him—he brings down the mighty and he exalts the lowly. And he has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty.”

Jesus came to reassert his property rights. Adam did not acknowledge God’s property rights. He stole from God. And all men in Adam steal from God—use his property, his apples, his fruit, his world for their purposes instead of his. And Jesus says he comes to kick those people off the world, to reestablish his property rights over the kingdom. The rich who get that way and won’t use their richness for the purposes of the kingdom, he sends them away empty. He kicks them out. He takes back the vineyard. He takes back the world.

The Magnificat is the declaration that Jesus has come, among other things, to reassert his property rights over creation. He takes it back, and he takes it back as man as well as God. And in that taking it back, he then says that he’s going to distribute it to his people—to the new humanity in Christ. The meek will indeed inherit the world. So the Advent of Jesus Christ has as one of its most significant aspects the restoration of man from his sin, but specifically the retaking of property rights and the distribution of property amongst his people.

Who are we not to want that? Who are we to say, “Well, property, who cares? It’s not a big deal. It’s just my labor that’s important”? Jesus is in the process of giving possession of the world to those who will be good stewards over it instead of bad stewards. And so, you know, this moves us into eschatology. The world moves in terms of that reality. And therefore the meek shall indeed inherit the earth.

Remember: the meek—they’re not weak. They are those who are broken to harness, those whose strength, power, and the ability to exercise authority is submissive to the king. It doesn’t mean they’re landless. It means they have land. It doesn’t mean they’re powerless. It means they have power. The meek are those who exercise authority and power for God. You know, the most meek man in all time—or at least at his particular period of time—was Moses. Not a weak guy, a very powerful guy. So the meek shall inherit the earth.

Eschatology moves this way: “He who is faithful in little will be given more.” It’s required of stewards to be faithful. That’s who really will be stewards over God’s property, all right?

So hopefully all of that gives you a desire. How do we get that stuff? And here in the conclusion, some brief familiar scriptures about this.

“Wealth gained by dishonesty will be diminished, but he who gathers by labor will increase.” Once more, it’s not just the labor that God is emphasizing. Rather, it’s so that you will gather by that labor.

How do we accumulate that power? We don’t get intelligent enough to steal things away deceitfully from others. The eighth commandment says: “You should labor diligently.”

Proverbs 10:4: “He who has a slack hand becomes poor, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.”

Proverbs 10:22: “The blessing of the Lord makes one rich, and he adds no sorrow to it.” You put those two together, and the blessing of the Lord is on those who are diligent to serve in their work capacity.

So we are—another aspect of this is Romans 13:8: “Owe no man anything.” Diligence, an attempt to live debt-free. Why would you want to have debt? Debt is the negative accumulation of wealth, right? Debt means you owe somebody else wealth that you don’t have yet. It’s the very opposite of what should be our desire: to accumulate property through diligence and hard labor.

And as we said, Ephesians 4:28, the whole purpose of repentance for the eighth word drives us to labor so that we might accumulate property. And once more, it’s diligence, labor, hard work, application of ourselves to a labor that will produce riches. That is the “how” of the thing. That’s the means—the normative means.

The last sheet on your handout, or the next to last sheet apart from the coloring page, is Proverbs 22:28-23:11. These are—not the 10 words or the 30 words of the wise that conclude the book of Proverbs. No, I’m—that’s wrong too. They’re at the center of Proverbs. The center of Proverbs is 30 sayings of the wise. The first 10 of them begin with four. Actually, the first 30 begin with what seems to be a relationship to the fourth word. But in any event, if you look at the text, you’ll see that there is a chiasmus—there’s a repetition from verse 28 down to verse 10. Both of them say the same thing: “Don’t remove the ancient landmark which your fathers have set.”

Verse 10: “Do not remove the ancient landmark nor enter the fields of the fatherless, for their redeemer is mighty. He will plead their cause against you.”

The very beginning of the center of Proverbs: okay, so the center of Proverbs—how, what is wisdom? Wisdom has as its very beginning a section delineated by statements related to this eighth word: “Don’t steal. Don’t steal by deceit by moving the landmark a little bit.”

So that’s what’s given to us here. And in the middle of these things, there are admonitions against gluttony and greed. We don’t want to work so that we can have gluttony and greed. But on the other hand, we do want to work and work hard.

The only positive statement in between these admonitions to not break the 10th word or the eighth word is verse 29: “Do you see a man who excels in his work? He will stand before kings. He will not stand before unknown men.”

As the words of the wise begin, the positive statement that’s given in the first section that tells us, “Don’t violate the eighth word,” is to be diligent and wise in your work—as a way of what? Exercising political authority. You’ll stand before kings.

God says that the eighth commandment is important. It’s always important, of course, but it is particularly important in our day and age when, once more, because of the retreat of the Christian church and its valuing and desiring of property, the state now encroaches and comes against more and more the private property that God has given to us. This is a most important teaching.

We’ll continue into the next few weeks talking about social justice and the proper use of our property. But this is absolutely vital for the Christian church in trying to reverse the situation that we have now.

One commentator said that in the eighth commandment, we have protection which the diligent and prudent men have against the idle and careless: protection of the diligent and prudent man. But only if the diligent and prudent man sees the significance of the property that God has given to us, sees the relationship of the exercise of control over property to the very imagebearing capacity of man, and sees the importance of it in the combating of political tyranny.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we do confess and acknowledge that in our day and age the state has increasingly controlled private property. Bless us, Lord God, by removing the tyranny—the sort of men that now rule over us. But bless us first by repentance—by a desire to once more see the significance of private property, to try to attain it through diligent and godly labor, not through deceit or debt. And help us, Lord God, to be a people that are blessed by you as we commit ourselves to desiring property and through property a righteous and godly power in the world as well. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.