Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Malachi 3:6-12 – Desire and Robbing God

Probably not one of our cars, but if it is your car and we have two different license plate numbers, so they’re multiplying. If it is your car, please move it. And also, let’s pray that, you know, this little thing not create a problem for our reputation in the area. Okay, let’s pray real quick. Lord God, we do pray that you’d get the owner of this silver Chevy to move it out of the way so that these folks can attend to their emergency. And we pray for peace with our neighbors, Lord God, that there be no trouble and that this not be an occasion for stumbling. In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.

All right. The sermon text for today is found in the book of Malachi. Our text is on desire as opposed to robbing God—proper desires. Malachi 3:6 to 12. Please stand for the reading of God’s word to us.

Malachi 3 beginning at verse 6: For I am the Lord. I do not change. Therefore, you are not consumed, oh sons of Jacob. Yet from the days of your fathers, you have gone away from my ordinances and have not kept them. Return to me and I will return to you, says the Lord of Hosts. But you said, “In what way shall we return?” Will a man rob God? Yet you have robbed me. But you say, “In what way have we robbed you?” In tithes and offerings. You are cursed with a curse, for you have robbed me, even this whole nation.

Bring all the tithes into the storehouse that there may be food in my house. And try me now in this, says the Lord of Hosts, if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you such blessing that there will not be room enough to receive it. And I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, so that he will not destroy the fruit of your ground, nor shall the vine fail to bear fruit for you in the field, says the Lord of Hosts. And all nations will call you blessed, for you will be a delightful land, says the Lord of Hosts.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we desire for your church to be seen by the nations in its various locations, and seen and called blessed, and be a community of people that draws men to call you blessed through blessing your church. Help us, Lord God, to desire that above all things in our work today. Help us to attend to your scriptures. Help us by your Holy Spirit to be transformed by them, to come into fuller obedience to them and joy in them. In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Our subject today is the tithe. And before I forget, there are handouts from James B. Jordan’s book *Law of the Covenant*. One of his appendices is on the tithes with a lot of specific information. It’s in the literature rack at back, and I also would commend to you an article available on the internet by Rich Lusk. I think it’s seven or eight theses on tithing—also a very good article on tithes and probably a better overview of the tithe than Jim’s. Jim is quite specific in terms of what he’s dealing with. So the tithe is our concern today.

Moving on with the application of the eighth word to our setting: we spoke last week about desiring property, and the eighth commandment is intended to protect property, to protect the diligent against the slothful, and to protect the proper use of property. Now property can be a real big problem for us as well. You know, there are admonitions and rebukes to God’s people that wanted to add field to field in the time of the minor prophets. And our Savior tells us that our life doesn’t consist in our possessions. So there’s the other ditch we could fall into: becoming so enamored of property that we don’t use it properly.

I think the key to a proper use of property, and we might say also a proper use of the tithe, is desire. I mean, the Pharisees tithed every little thing, and yet they were in severe rebellion against God and ended up killing our Savior. So tithing doesn’t cut it. Desiring property doesn’t cut it. These are both good things. Our Savior didn’t rebuke the Pharisees for tithing. He said, “Yeah, you should have done that, but you should have also attended to mercy and justice.” At the heart, I think, of a proper understanding and obedience to the eighth word is desiring the one who gave us property and who gives us wealth. That’s desiring God. That has to be at the core of our being.

If the desire for God is at the core of our being, then when we try to accumulate property and wealth, if that’s what he has in his providence for us, we’ll use it for his purposes, right? We won’t use it for selfish purposes or for purposes of social injustice. We’ll use it for him. Our Savior said, “Seek first the kingdom and all these things shall be added unto you.” Not only is desire the proper sense of what we’re going to use property for, it actually comes before the accumulation of things according to our Savior. If we’re seeking God by seeking his kingdom, if that’s at the heart of who we are—a desire for relationship with God, to know him more and to be more fully convinced of his love for us—and if at the heart of who we are is a desire for his kingdom, if we hunger and thirst ultimately for righteousness, for the kingdom of God to be made manifest in a world of injustice, for healing to come to a world that’s broken—if we seek first his kingdom, then God gives us things because he knows that what we’ll do is use them properly for him.

So while we want to talk about accumulation of things and the proper use of them today, we want to talk about it directly in the context of desire and motivation. Now, there’s some negative motivations in today’s text. There’s some positive ones. But underlying all motivation is this desire for God and for his kingdom in our lives—to be totally sold out to the Lord Jesus Christ as the only true source of happiness and blessing to us. And then we’re in a position to properly apply the eighth word.

Failure to do that—as we mentioned last week—failure to seek the kingdom, which is not a gnostic kingdom but a real kingdom—a failure to seek that means that we estrange ourselves, we don’t want anything to do with physical property. That’s one manifestation of a failure to seek Christ’s kingdom. And when we do that, the state is more than happy to move in and control more and more property and more and more decisions.

This very day, you know, our government leaders are meeting this afternoon to continue to work on this deal about the debt limit, et cetera. You know, I thought about it. It’s kind of like a guy who has continued to get more and more credit cards, and every time he can’t make the payments, he borrows another ten or twenty thousand bucks so he can make the payments for a year, and then he can’t make them again. And so now he’s got to get another credit card. That’s what our government seems to be doing to me. It’s that simple. And the answer for such a man is not to keep getting more credit cards. The answer is to live within your means. It seems real simple to me. I don’t know. I think maybe I wouldn’t vote for any kind of debt increase. I think I’d say, “Well, you know, it’s like I’d be counseling a man who does this with credit.” And what I would tell him is: look, just stop this cycle. Stop right now. Cut your expenditures as much as you can to begin to pay off your debt.

So this subject of property and state control of property is at the center of huge government negotiations today. I want to read a quote. I know quotes are bad to read. My wife always tells me they’re hard to listen to. But I want to read a quote from R.G. Rushdoony’s *Institutes of Biblical Law* on the tenth word. And you know, having related last week property and statism, the same thing is true in spades regarding reverend Rushdoony’s beliefs in terms of the tithe.

The modern social order robs God by stripping virtually every area from his jurisdiction, from his ordained government and care. Within a generation, now he doesn’t list the facts for this, but listen to this: within a generation after the abolition of the legally required tithe in the United States, I didn’t know there was such a thing, but history was his deal. Within a generation afterwards, state-supported and controlled schools came into existence because revivalism and antinomianism led to the decline of the tithe, denounced as legalism and bondage to law.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, welfare came to be a state function. A new social order came with the abandonment of the tithe, and the rapid increase of taxes ensued, or statist ensued, or status double and triple tithes and more to further the new order. Foundations, once an instrument of the Christian tithe, religious foundations became humanistic social agencies with statist ideals. The city of God was progressively replaced with the city of man. The effective lord of an order is always the essential taxing and tax-collecting power.

Now I don’t know, but that’s interesting—if you can track the diminishment of the tithe directly to the rise first of statist education and then of statist social programs, and in our day and age statist healthcare as well. It shows us again what we said last week: that the beginning of the reversal is not voting. It is, as important as voting might be, not the beginning of the reversal. But the beginning of the reversal is doing what God says builds a godly society and seeks his kingdom, which is to obey the commandment to tithe.

Again, quoting Rushdoony: The decline of tithing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to a variety of devices for raising funds for churches, Protestant and Catholic, and to a decline in Christian social financing. The result was a shift in power to the state and also the growth of taxation to remedy the lack of social financing. Without the restoration of the tithe, there can be no restoration of Christian social order, nor can power be restored to the Christian man under God.

Now, these are comments that essentially just sort of restate what God tells us in a simple way in 1 Samuel, right? Most of you are familiar with this. When we want a king like the nations around us—the problem is not a king, but a king like the nations around us who doesn’t represent the King of Kings Jesus, or Yahweh—then what we do is we transfer allegiance to the state, a statist king, a secular king. And he then replaces God’s tithe with his tithe. 1 Samuel 8 says in such a case the king will take a tenth of your produce, a tenth of your bread, tenth of your grapes. He’ll take your sons and daughters to fight his wars overseas, et cetera. So that’s the problem we have today in our culture: Christians have failed to tithe. And because they failed to tithe, various social agencies that took care of education and godly welfare, et cetera, have been replaced now by statist ones, and charities have been replaced by so-called entitlements.

So today we turn to one of the more—probably the most—well-known texts about tithing, and we’ll just move through it linearly. It’s quite simple in its presentation, and we’ll just move right through those steps.

First, a couple of words about the context. Malachi is a post-exilic book. Okay, so it’s written to the nation after they’ve returned from exile, and that’s significant. The call for them to return to him and he’ll return to them, for instance, is kind of a post-exilic idea because when you’re in exile there’s almost nothing you can do. And it seems like in those sorts of books the initiative of God is stressed more. And in post-exilic books, the initiative of the individual to respond to God’s bringing them out of exile is what’s stressed. It also makes it a little closer to us, right? So they’re in a post-exilic situation. There’s no apparent big problem on the horizon. There’s no political difficulties or anything. But what they do have is what we might call apparently, at least, kind of a moral malaise, right?

What difference does it make? Well, things just sort of go on. We don’t know, you know. I mean, is it really important if we bring our best offerings? Is it important if we tithe? You know, what’s the big deal here? And so today in the modern church, I think this is a text that’s pretty applicable to us as well.

You know, they ask a series of questions in the book of Malachi. How has God loved us? Well, a lot of us today don’t necessarily think we experience the love of God. What do you mean you love us, God? How has that worked? How have we despised God’s name? We come to church, we try to be fairly moral. If we don’t go to church, we’re still conservative morally. You know, what do you mean we’ve despised God’s name? How have we, the people, broken covenant? Broken covenant? Wait a minute. We bear your name. We do the sacrifices. We give you some money. We don’t give you ten percent. We don’t bring our best for the offerings anymore. But, you know, hey, we haven’t broken covenant. We’re just, you know, we’re not perfect. Who’s perfect? Be patient with us. Jesus isn’t done with us yet. Please, God. How have we robbed God?—another question that’s asked in another section of the book. And how have we spoken against God?

On your handouts, I’ve given you a brief outline from our Sunday school curriculum of the book of Malachi. And you know what? The section we’re dealing with today is the B-prime section, bolded: People have robbed Yahweh of tithes and offerings. And it matches: priests and people have cheated Yahweh in offerings. So in the earlier section that matches this one, he really was going after the priests primarily, but of course the people are culpable as well because they’ve brought improper offerings, right? Lame animals instead of ones that represent health.

That at the very center of this text, according to this outline, is unfaithfulness to Yahweh being evidenced by unfaithfulness to wives. So in this post-exilic book, you know, the problems are: they’re not tithing. They’re not really doing what they should in terms of the worship center of the nation, church. And they’re not being faithful to their wives. And it’s interesting that in Nehemiah 13, the conclusion of that book, the same problems exist. He tells them it’s a problem of faithfulness to godly wives. It’s a problem of tithing. And because they don’t tithe, the Levites haven’t and aren’t teaching anybody anymore. They can’t afford to be supported by the local synagogue, et cetera. And they’re not really focusing properly on worship, and they’re buying and selling on the Sabbath.

So it’s the same kind of problems. And what this shows us is that tithing is not one out of a whole bunch of deals. It’s a very significant deal. It’s as significant in the context of this presentation as infidelity to one’s wife. And we’ll see as we go on in the text that it actually brings God’s curse to us.

Now I said that motivation is important here, and significantly in Malachi 1:6 we read this: A son honors his father and a servant his master. If then I am the father, where is my honor? God begins in the first chapter of Malachi by reminding people that he is their father. Now, father is a loving personage in our homes, right? He begins by telling them of his fatherliness. And we frequently, you know, kind of skip right by these kinds of texts. We want to get to Jesus the Son. But the Son comes to reflect the character of the Father according to the Gospel of John. And in terms of an underlying motivation for these people to be obedient in the tithe and obedient in their offerings and to seek first his kingdom, right?—the underlying motivation for that is he is our Father. He has brought us into being. He cares for us. He loves us and provides for us. That’s the underlying motivation.

You see, we’ll get to the curse stuff in this text, but the underlying motivation is the Father’s love for his son. And the way the son is supposed to respond to that is to honor the Father. We live in pragmatic times. In today’s text, I’ve already given you some pragmatic reasons to tithe and some moral reasons, right? So your motivation is pragmatic—we want blessings, not cursings. Your motivation is moral—we want to be good moral people. But I guess what I’m saying is from the get-go of this book, what God calls them to do and what the Spirit of God is calling us to do today is to honor our Father. You know, we’re not seeking our own well-being first and foremost. What we’re seeking is to honor God. And I think this is a message that is simply pretty much not heard very often: to honor God. Is that what you seek in your life first and foremost? To honor God in everything that you do. Are you seeking his kingdom? Well, we can make that a theocratic kind of thing and you know, we kind of want this, this, and this. But are you honoring your heavenly Father?

That’s what I think is the underlying motivation for what we’re talking about here. You can go into obedience in the tithe without a desire to honor your Father in heaven and it does you no good. Because ultimately what God is concerned about is that a son give his father honor.

All right, let’s go to the text itself. And as I said, it really lays itself out quite nicely. It’s kind of a linear—a very linear argument being made. And it begins with a summons in verse 7. He says, “Return to me and I will return to you.” You know, this is sort of the basis for some of those phantom texts like you know, “God helps those that help themselves.” You know, those kind of texts that aren’t in the Bible. But this is sort of the basis for it, right? Go with God and he’ll go with you. And we say, well, no, that’s legalism. That’s not right. It’s got to be God first taking the initiative. But here, in a post-exilic situation, and they don’t have any great big social pressures going on. They don’t have any huge problems going on. And God says, “Hey, return to me and I’ll return to you.” He stresses personal responsibility as setting up what he’s going to say from here on. He stresses personal responsibility, not divine grace and the initiative of divine grace. He stresses works. Okay? He stresses what we should do.

And what we’re going to do here again is underlaid—not by, he’s not concerned about, well he is—but the details of the thing are not the primary thing. The primary thing is returning to God. Now what this means is that without those details that we’re going to talk about here, you haven’t returned to God. Don’t tell me you’re a disciple of Jesus Christ if you haven’t heard this command to return and tithe and haven’t done it. I mean, it comes down to that, doesn’t it? This is what he’s laying out as something that is kind of emblematic of whether someone is actually walking with the Lord or not.

Return to me and I’ll return to you.

He then brings the charge. So he summons them: Return to me. I’ll return to you. And then he brings a charge to them. He says, you have been robbing me. So return to me and I will return to you, says the Lord of Hosts. But you said, “In what way shall we return?” Okay, so why are you summoning us? What’s the problem? Why do you think we’ve gone astray? In verse 8 he says, “Will a man rob God? Yet you have robbed me.”

So this is charge and specification. In Presbyterian circles, for instance, if you’re going to bring somebody to church court—and we used to do this kind of formally. We don’t do it as formally anymore—but there’s a charge. Your charge is you’ve robbed God. Well, what are the details that substantiate the charge? But before we move on to that, this word “rob” is quite a powerful word. It’s an unusual word. It’s only used in two places: here in Malachi 3 and also in Proverbs 22.

Let me read the New King James version of Proverbs 22:22 and 23. Do not rob the poor because he is poor. Now, that’s not our word, “rob.” That’s the normal word for rob. Do not rob the poor because he is poor, nor oppress the afflicted at the gate. For the Lord will plead their cause and plunder the soul of those who plunder them. There’s our word, “plunder.”

This word “rob” or “plunder” in Proverbs 22 is a stronger, more intensive, grasping kind of thing than just simple robbery. So this is the kind of robbery that seeks to plunder something or ends up plundering them. Now it is synonymous with theft. So “rob” isn’t a bad translation. And that’s what Proverbs 22 tells us as well—that this Hebrew word that’s here in Malachi 3 is synonymous. It’s in parallel fashion with the word for rob, the normal word. But it’s an intensified term. And the New King James does a good job translating the difference between the two different Hebrew words by referring to the one in our text when it’s seen in Proverbs 22 as “plunder.”

So God says you’re plundering me. And you know, you’re plundering the poor in Proverbs 22, and God will plunder you. To plunder God is quite an image. It’s quite a sharp image for us, and it is a strong statement. And don’t miss this: we’re going to get to the specification of what we should be doing, but the charge that the specification is proof of you. And if you’re sitting in this congregation today and have heard about the tithe and its requirements and don’t do it, you—I believe properly applying the text—are plundering God. You’re robbing from God. Your violation of the eighth word is about as big a violation as it could possibly get because you’re not stealing from man. You’re stealing from God. And it’s worse than that. You’re plundering God violently, keeping back what belongs to him.

Okay. Then we get to the specifications: tithes and offerings. And so we’re going to focus on tithes, and we’ll talk a little bit here about this phrase “tithes and offerings” in a minute.

I have a brief overview of the tithe on your handout today. And probably many of you know this material, but it’s good to remind ourselves. First of all, there’s pre-Mosaic tithing going on. Okay? So tithing is not restricted to the Mosaic covenant. If it was, then we’d have a stronger reason to say, well, is it really New Testament or not? But no, it precedes Mosaic law.

And the very first reference to tithing is Abram and Melchizedek in Genesis 14. Now, this is very significant because as believers we are children of Abraham. So when we read about what Abraham was doing, this is significant. It’s not Mosaic law. It’s not the details of everything that the Levitical order had to do for God’s people in distinction from the nations. No, this is father Abraham, the beginning of the new creation after the destruction of the tower of Babel. This is us. We’re of the faith of Abraham and we should be of the practice of Abraham. So tithing begins—its first mention at least—in terms of the life of Abraham. And you know the story: after he’s successful at war, the king of Melchizedek meets him. He gives Abram bread and wine, and Abram gives him a tenth of all that he’s taken.

And so it represents—I mean, every time we come to the Lord’s table, it’s what’s going on, right? God gives us spiritual grace from on high—bread and wine—because we are also then in that transaction honoring him. We’re honoring our Father. We’re seeking first the kingdom. We’re desiring God, and we tell him by tithing that all that we have belongs to him. Tithing is ten percent, but it represents all of it. The word “tithe” means “tenth,” but it represents all of what we have. It doesn’t mean that if you give ten percent to God then you can do what you want with the rest. No, it’s a declaration that when we give that ten percent we’re telling God that we’re going to use the ninety percent for his purposes of the kingdom.

Now that includes, you know, rejoicing. It includes all kinds of different things that we can do. It includes, you know, a nice house, a silver Chevy, you know, includes some of those things, right? But it’s all for the purposes of the kingdom. Underneath it all should be a desire for God made manifest in how we end up using the property that he’s given us stewardship over.

So the first reference to tithe really brings us immediately into that situation because we’re of the faith. We’re children of Abram. And he does this with Melchizedek.

The second use is in Jacob at Bethel. And Jacob also—because God demonstrates—Sees—the ladder to heaven, which we are then told in the gospels is Jesus, right? So a response to a revelation of the person of Jesus being the mediator between heaven and earth is a declaration that since God is providing everything for me, I’ll give him a tenth. So he tithes as well. So we have the covenant people tithing.

One other thing about the reference to Abraham I should have mentioned: in Hebrews 7:9 and 10. Listen now. Even Levi, who receives tithes, paid tithes through Abraham, so to speak. For he was still in the loins of his father when Melchizedek met him. Okay? So it’s not just pre-Mosaic. Levi—the Levitical order who had received the tithes, or should have been receiving them in the time of Malachi—was in the loins, so to speak. He was, you know, in Abraham’s body. The genetic material was there that would eventually become Levi, right? So the author of the book of Hebrews makes the point that while we tithe to the Levitical order, they were already in Abraham before there was a Levitical order. In reference to Abraham and Melchizedek, they were already tithing to Melchizedek. And so the tithe, the purpose of that in Hebrews is to say that Jesus is not a Levitical priest. He’s a Melchizedekian priest. And we, being children of Abraham, should tithe to Jesus. That’s what it’s all about.

So it ties it in to contemporary use for us.

So we have those first two references, and then we have the Mosaic tithe. And I’m getting ready to go down to family camp in Sacramento, and I’m going to be talking about the Lord’s Day. And you know, in all of these things that we talk about—the Lord’s Day, the tithe, the worship service, the offerings of Leviticus—the way I think about them is that the Mosaic covenant, the Mosaic word, is a prism. And so there’s one offering, the offering of Abel that’s prismed out for us. It’ll become one offering of Christ. But it says these are all the things that he did. There’s one Lord’s Day in the old covenant—one day of rest. And in Mosaic covenant, it prisms it out into multiple Sabbaths, a lunar and solar cycle. It does all these things because it wants us to understand the full implications of what the Lord’s Day is. It refocuses back in Jesus, what the single Lord’s Day is all about.

So it’s a way to describe it. And with the tithe, it’s the same thing. There’s these single tithe of Abram and Jacob, but in the Mosaic order, it’s fractured out into multiple tithes, multiple aspects of the same tithe, to help us understand a fuller dimension of what it is.

In Numbers 18, we’re specifically told the tithe is for the support of ministers. That’s what it’s all about. And that’s what it says. In Deuteronomy 12 and 14, the Mosaic prism of the tithe shows us some other things. And these are, I hope, verses that are familiar to you. Deuteronomy 14:23, for instance: You shall eat in the presence of Yahweh your God at the place where he chooses to establish his name, the tithe of your grain, your new wine, your oil, and the firstborn of the herd and your flock, in order that you may learn to fear Yahweh your God always. And then later: and you may spend the money for whatever your heart desires.

So God says that, you know, in the prisming effect, one aspect of the tithe is what we might call a rejoicing aspect. The tithe is used properly to finance some degree of rejoicing together in community. And so by applying that today, we think the single tithe—the ten percent—part of that can be used, should be used, for financing your agape meal here if you stick around for the meal. And it can be used to finance our family camp gathering. This is why. But the point is the tithe has this rejoicing aspect to it.

Another aspect in Deuteronomy 12 and 14 is to help the poor, the disadvantaged. There’s an aspect of your tithe that some people refer to as the poor tithe. Some people say it’s a whole other tithe. It’s not. It’s an aspect of the tithe, and it helps inform us what we’re to use our tithe for. And Jim Jordan’s article will be helpful for you in that.

In Deuteronomy 26, the tithe is seen as central to covenant ratification. So now we’re talking about in Deuteronomy, at the end of the book—the person is supposed to make a declaration once a year: I had a wandering Aramean father, but you’ve saved me. You’ve established me as part of the people of God, and I haven’t stolen any of the tithe. I’ve stored it up in my house. I’ve distributed it correctly according to your plan as given to us through Moses. And what that tells us is, in that prisming effect, that the tithe is central to covenant ratification. Again, it’s not one of various duties we have as Christians. It is central to the ratification of the covenant. And this comes from Deuteronomy 26.

So there’s rejoicing. There’s helping people. The primary purpose is, however, the Levitical ministry, and it is central to covenant ratification.

Third: the tithe and covenant reconstruction. We see in the times of Hezekiah and Nehemiah that when the tithe diminishes, just like Rushdoony talked about, the culture diminishes. The Levitical ministers can no longer be supported in what they’re doing. They go get other jobs. They start working at McDonald’s or at Boeing or whatever it is. And so what we need, when we turn things around in a culture and begin to work for godly Christian reconstruction, is what we need are Levitical ministers receiving those tithes.

What we need is a people that see the tithe as essential to covenant ratification. What we need is a people who’ll be blessed by God to give in and give that tithe, and then as a result of that, we’ll see the flourishing once more and a retaking of lost ground to statism. And this happens in the book of Hezekiah and in Nehemiah. And as I have on your outline, worship, marriage, and the tithe are what’s listed in chapter 13 as the whole gig of all of Nehemiah’s reform. So again, the tithe is central to reforms and reconstruction.

Fourth: the tithe and Abraham’s children—that’s us. Galatians 3:9. So then those who are of faith are blessed with believing Abraham. So we’re related to believing Abraham. Then in verse 29: And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise. We look at Abraham’s faith. We look at his practice. And we see ourselves then as those who, like Abraham, tithe.

Romans 4:11: He received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while still uncircumcised, that he might be the father of all those who believe, though they are uncircumcised, that he might be the father of circumcision to those who not only are of the circumcision but who also walk in the steps of the faith which our father Abraham had while still uncircumcised. So we walk in the faith of our father Abraham, and tithing is one of the ways we do that.

1 Corinthians 9:13 and 14: Do you not know that those who minister the holy things eat of the things of the temple, and those who serve at the altar partake of the offerings of the altar? Even so the Lord has commanded that those who preach the gospel should live from the gospel. Paul’s making a one-for-one association between the New Testament ministers in the church and the Old Testament Levitical order. And that one-for-one association says they should be supported to do that. And the support mechanism is the tithe.

1 Corinthians 16:1 and 2: Now concerning the collection for the saints, as I have given orders for the churches of Galatia, so you must do also. On the first day of the week—that’s the Lord’s Day—let each of you lay something aside, storing up as he may prosper. Storing up—that’s a reference back to our text today. God’s going to tell him to bring the tithe into the storehouse. They’re to store it up as they prosper. In other words, as a percentage of what they make is what’s being said there. That there be no collections when I come. So in all these texts, we see that tithing is certainly a New Testament obligation, joy, responsibility.

And so we see that the words here, the specification of the charge, apply to us. If we don’t tithe, if we don’t give God his ten percent, if we don’t follow through with a desire for him and his kingdom that leads us to consecrate all our money through the application of ten percent to the work that God tells us to support, then what’s said here in Malachi is true of us also.

So what does he go on to say next? He’s given the summons, the charge, the specification, and now he tells them that they have a penalty that’s already being delivered upon them. You’ve robbed God in tithes and offerings. And as a result, he says, “You are cursed with a curse. For you have robbed me, even this whole nation.”

Notice that, by the way: even this whole nation. I think that there’s an obligation upon us to help other people tithe because a failure to tithe. I think there certainly were some people in the time of Malachi that were tithing. I find it hard to believe there was nobody tithing. And what God’s word tells us—we’ll read the curses of Deuteronomy 28 in a minute—is that there are national curses and blessings that are applied to covenantal units. When the covenantal unit is primarily sinning in an area, curses come upon the whole unit. The whole nation, okay, is cursed by God.

Well, we see a nation cursed by God today in some ways, do we not? We see a nation that doesn’t acknowledge King Jesus, but King President, whoever it might be at the time, and King State. And they are the ones we look to for health, education, and welfare. And yeah, there’s some difference between the Rs and the Ds, right? The Rs keep wanting to cut it back a little bit. But there’s no basic difference. We’ve got a problem with our whole nation. And so the church has an obligation, I think. Each of us has an obligation to not just fulfill the tithe ourselves, but to encourage and exhort other people to desire God enough to desire him with our money.

So a nation is under a curse. And again, okay, plundering God if you don’t tithe. And the end result is your curse by God.

Now, curse is a strong word, and it is over and over again in the scriptures placed in distinction to blessing. Either you get blessed or you get cursed. And in this case, you’re not blessed. You’re cursed when you fail to tithe. Now, you say, “Well, that’s works righteousness.” Nope. It means whether you believe in Jesus enough to make him lord of your money. Have you had that second conversion that Spurgeon talked about? Your soul’s converted. How about your pocketbook? And of course, it isn’t a second conversion. It’s part of the first, but it demonstrates the first, right?

So, you know, God says, if you don’t do this, you’re cursed. You’re cursed. And this is precisely what God says about us. And I want to read now. Turn to Deuteronomy 28. This is going to take a while, but you know what? I think it’s worth it. I hope you do. So wake yourself up. Listen to what happens when God says you’re cursed with the curse. That’s a double statement. It means you’re really cursed. And it means that we then turn to what he means by “cursed” and what typically accompanies this and will accompany it to a nation that refuses to obey God.

Deuteronomy 28 beginning at verse 16. Here we go:

Cursed shall you be in the city. Now listen. If you don’t tithe, okay, I think this applies to you. Cursed shall you be in the city. Cursed shall you be in the country. Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Cursed shall be the fruit of your body and the produce of your land, the increase of your cattle and the offspring of your flocks. Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out. The Lord will send on you cursing, confusion, and rebuke in all that you set your hand to do until you are destroyed and until you perish quickly because of the wickedness of your doings in which you have forsaken me.

The Lord will make the plague cling to you until he has consumed you from the land which you are going to possess. The Lord will strike you with consumption, with fever, with inflammation, with severe burning fever, with the sword, with scorching, with mildew. They shall pursue you until you perish. Your heavens which are over your head shall be bronze, and the earth which is under you shall be iron. The Lord will change the rain of your land to powder and dust—not because of global warming, but because he’s cursing you—from the heavens. It shall come down on you until you are destroyed.

The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You shall go out one way against them and flee seven ways before them, and you shall become troublesome to all the kingdoms of the earth. Your carcasses shall be food for all the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and no one shall frighten them away. The Lord will strike you with the boils of Egypt, with tumors and the scab, and with the itch from which you cannot be healed. The Lord will strike you with madness and blindness and confusion of heart. And you shall grope at noonday as a blind man gropes in darkness. You shall not prosper in your ways. You shall be only oppressed and plundered continually, and no one shall save you.

You shall betroth a wife, but another man shall lie with her. You shall build a house, but you shall not dwell in it. You shall plant a vineyard, but you shall not gather the grapes. Your ox shall be slaughtered before your eyes, but you shall not eat of it. Your donkey shall be violently taken away from before you, and shall not be restored to you. Your sheep shall be given to your enemies, and you shall have no one to rescue them. Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people, and your eyes shall look and fail with longing for them all day long, and there shall be no strength in your hand.

A nation which you have not known shall eat the fruit of your land and the produce of your labor, and you shall be only oppressed and crushed continually. So you shall be driven mad because of the sight which your eyes see. The Lord will strike you in the knees and on the legs with severe boils which cannot be healed and from the sole of your foot to the tops of your head. The Lord will bring you and the king whom you sent over you to a nation which neither you nor your fathers have known. And there you shall serve other gods, wood and stone. And you shall become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword among all nations where the Lord will drive you.

You shall carry much seed out to the field but gather little in, for the locust shall consume it. You shall plant vineyards and tend them, but you shall neither drink of the wine nor gather the grapes, for the worms shall eat them. You shall have olive trees throughout all your territory, but you shall not anoint yourself with the oil, for your olives shall drop off. You shall beget sons and daughters, but they shall not be yours, for they shall go into captivity. Locusts shall consume all your trees and the produce of your land. And the alien who is among you shall rise higher and higher above you, and you shall come down lower and lower. He shall lend to you, but you shall not lend to him. He shall be the head, and you shall be the tail.

Moreover, all these curses shall come upon you and pursue and overtake you until you are destroyed because you did not obey the voice of the Lord your God to keep his commandments and his statutes which he commanded you.

The Lord is enacting the curse. We can read various aspects of what we just saw in God’s word and say, “Yeah, that’s happening right now to this country. The whole nation is cursed with the curse.” The church will be cursed with the curse should we fail as a community to honor our Father as his true children.

The correction: bring all the tithes in. Don’t hold anything back. It’s quite simple. Repentance is simple. Well, it’s hard because you have to humble yourself. But the action itself is not difficult. You’re having trouble with your budget? We’ll work with you. We’ll help you. We’ll help you with money if we need to get it going. You need to tithe, my friend. You need to tithe. And you need just simply to correct, to repent, and say, “Lord God, I’m going to honor you with the tenth—with ten percent of my increase. I’m honoring you.”

Tremendous reward. Heaven gets opened for these people, right? What does it say? Bring them all in. Try me now. If I will not open for you the windows of heaven—earlier in the matching section, he said, you know, why don’t you just close the doors of the temple? Close them. You’re going to bring this crud into my temple. No good. Close the doors. Now he says, “The windows of heaven will be opened.”

What does it mean? Well, you know, the only place I know of windows of heaven being opened is in the flood, which is sort of a curse. But what God is saying is that that flood which was too much water—but there’ll be enough water so that all their produce will spring forth abundantly. The windows of heaven will be opened for you, right? God will bless your work supernaturally, as he cursed your work supernaturally before. Now he’ll bless you. I’ll open the windows of heaven. I’ll pour out for you such blessing that there will not be room enough to receive it.

Now, these are pragmatic reasons that God gives us. Now, the core reason has to be to honor him. But he motivates us by telling us: look, do you like that stuff in Deuteronomy 28? I hope not. You want to turn it around? Simple. Honor me by paying your tithe. He says, it’s that simple. I’ll open for you the windows of heaven and I’ll pour out for you such blessings that there will not be room enough to receive it.

And I will rebuke the devourer for your sake. Agricultural context, locust—he’ll rebuke bad things to our agriculture. But I think generally this term is used of all kinds of things that he has allowed to eat away at our wealth. We can’t afford to tithe because we’re not tithing—not the other way around, okay? We can’t afford to tithe because—and we don’t tithe—God says the devourer is at work, right? He says you’ll put your money in your pocket and there’ll be a hole in that pocket if you don’t obey him and tithe. That’s what he says. There’ll be a hole there. Nothing you can do to prevent it. God’s in control. Run away from things outside, lean against a wall, and get bit by a spider. That’s the way it works. God’s in total control of the whole thing.

And he says he’ll rebuke this devourer for our sake if we tithe. He will not destroy the fruit of your ground, nor shall the vine fail to bear fruit for you in the field.

And all the nations will call you blessed, for you will be a delightful land, says the Lord your God. Now, I don’t know. You know, here this text is specific to their time, right? But in general it still applies to us. God tells us: look, return to me. I’m your daddy. I love you. Return to me. And you say, “Well, what’s the problem?” And he says, “Well, you’ve been robbing me. What do you mean? We’ve been robbing you? You haven’t given me ten percent of your increase.”

And what you got to do—because of that, you’re cursed with the curse because of that. Your whole nation is now—look, I’m your daddy, okay? You do this. You honor me as your Father. And I will do wondrous things for you. I will bless you beyond your imagination. I will bring peace to your home, to your church, eventually to the culture that honors me. I will rebuke that devouring IRS mechanism that eats up forty-five percent of what you produce.

Now, I’ll rebuke the devourer for your sake. But right now, he’s my agent of judgment against you. He’s doing that because you won’t pay me the tithe. And you know, I started by taking away ten percent for your king. I’ve made it twenty, thirty, now forty-five percent. Will you listen now? Will you listen now when that devourer is abroad in the land? And if you’ll listen, he says, I’m going to open the windows of heaven. I’m going to move dramatically in your lives and the life of your country to bring blessing. And then the best blessing of all—the nations will be impacted by this.

Earlier in Malachi, he says, “I’m the great king of all the nations. My plan is international, and your plan can be part of that plan when you do the simple thing of giving—not fifty percent, not forty-five percent, not forty percent—a simple ten percent to God for the purposes explicitly of his kingdom. And then pledge to use the rest for it. Then he says, you know, that great King of nations will indeed be manifest, and the nations will call you blessed, and the nations will be influenced, and the world will be evangelized for the Lord Jesus Christ. Tremendous rewards for simple obedience.”

Eighth commandment, do it. Practice it. Have a motivation to honor your Father in heaven. Honor the God who created you. And don’t engage in your own trying to take care of yourself, but rather in him.

The day of the Lord—he says, well, at the end of the book, day of the Lord’s coming. Well, today is the day of the Lord for us. Jesus has come to meet with us. The Father has come to help us. There’s one last verse: Malachi 1:8 and 9. When you offer the blind as a sacrifice, is it not evil? And when you offer the lame and sick, is it not evil? Offer it then to your governor. Would he be pleased with you? When we’re more afraid of the government, of the IRS, than we are the Lord God, can we expect blessings? No.

May we turn? May we return to God so that he might heal us? That we might see his blessings. Ultimately, the greatest blessings of seeing the nations call his people and him blessed forever.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for the simplicity of what this text tells us, for the simple way it instructs us in what to do. Forgive us, Father, for not using all that we have for the purposes of your kingdom. We desire you. We desire your kingdom and its manifestation in our world. Now help us as we come forward to offer ourselves afresh to you, to commit our financial resources to the kingdom. In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen. Amen. Amen.