Dennis Tuuri

Well, we turn to that law. I guess that was a reminder to me that sorry that we ran out of outlines this morning, and I’m sorry the date is one week off. This is the second part of a two-part series on social justice in the Bible. And this is part of our continuing series on the Ten Words referred to in the Bible as the Ten Words, the Ten Commandments, this law that we just sang of. And I note that like many songs, this particular song was heavy on the use of the law to bring us to Christ, to show us our sin.

And it does have one verse, you know, as kind of a reference to the use of the law in showing us the way in which we should walk. And it doesn’t seem to have any reference to another area of the law’s use, which is to inform our civil politics. The law, of course, was given to a saved people at Sinai. And its exposition in Exodus and Deuteronomy was to prepare them for the sorts of personal lives and governments that they were to build.

So we turn again to that law and to a portion of the exposition of the law of God found in Deuteronomy. Our subject is the Eighth Word, and this is the conclusion of a two-part series on social justice. Deuteronomy 24:8-25:3. I know it’s a little long, but I believe it is a particular section, a bounded section with judgments as we’ll see before and after, and then a lot of stuff about so-called social justice in the middle of that.

You can follow along in your outlines if you got one. There is a structure to it that I’ll be alluding to as we proceed in the sermon. And please stand for the reading of God’s word to us, and ask that the Holy Spirit might help us to understand it and apply the equity of it to our day and age.

Deuteronomy 24, beginning at verse 8:

“Take heed in an outbreak of leprosy, that you carefully observe and do according to all that the priests, the Levites, shall teach you; just as I commanded them, so you shall be careful to do. Remember what the LORD your God did to Miriam on the way when you came out of Egypt. When you lend your brother anything, you shall not go into his house to get his pledge. You shall stand outside, and the man to whom you lend shall bring the pledge out to you. And if the man is poor, you shall not keep his pledge overnight. You shall in any case return the pledge to him again when the sun goes down, that he may sleep in his own garment and bless you; and it shall be righteousness to you before the LORD your God.

You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy, whether one of your brethren or one of the aliens who is in your land within your gates. Each day you shall give him his wages, and not let the sun go down on it, for he is poor and has set his heart on it; lest he cry out against you to the LORD, and it be sin to you. Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor shall children be put to death for their fathers. A person shall be put to death for his own sin. You shall not pervert justice due the stranger or the fatherless, nor take a widow’s garment as a pledge. But you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and the LORD your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this thing.

When you reap your harvest in your field, and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be for the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat your olive trees, you shall not go over the boughs again; it shall be for the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow. When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not glean it afterward; it shall be for the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow. And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I command you to do this thing.

If there is a dispute between men, and they come to court, that the judges may judge them, and they justify the righteous and condemn the wicked, then it shall be, if the wicked man deserves to be beaten, that the judge will cause him to lie down and be beaten in his presence, according to his guilt, with a certain number of blows. Forty blows he may give him and no more, lest he should exceed this and beat him with many blows above these, and your brother be humiliated in your sight.”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your word. We bless your holy name for the beauty of it, the structure of it, the meaning of it. Father, help us to understand it based upon the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Help us, Father, to avoid improper definitions of social justice that aren’t based in your scriptures. And help us to embrace true social justice as your scriptures describe it to us here and in other places. Help us to understand your word. Transform us by your Spirit. In Jesus’ name we ask it, and for the sake of his kingdom, not ours. Amen.

Please be seated. It’s a wonderful day. A beautiful day in God’s neighborhood. A day of the proclamation. Yeah. It’s a day for laughter and joy. It’s a day of the proclamation of the release from oppression and from our sins that the Lord Jesus Christ affected. It is a day to proclaim liberty throughout our community, indeed throughout the land, indeed throughout the whole world because of what the Lord Jesus Christ has done.

We say with the Lord, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon us. He has anointed us to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent us to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” Jesus said that of himself in a sermon. And it’s true today that we live in that acceptable year of the Lord. And we live in the times of which Jesus is continuing through the proclamation of the gospel to the poor, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.

Now, the gospel is the good news of the ascension of the Savior King to the throne and his rule now by his Spirit and through his people in the context of the world. That is wonderful news. And it’s a day today for rejoicing for salvation from sins, but more than that, to rejoice for the restoration of all things being effected by the risen Savior who sits at the right hand of God in session, governing the affairs of men, proclaiming this gospel to the poor.

God says that we’re to understand what that means—the gospel to the poor. It sounds strange to us. It’s talked about several times in the scriptures. We’re to understand what social justice really is and how central it is. And we talked about this last week in the first half of the sermon, how central it is to our calling as Christians to do what our Savior began to effect two thousand years ago. And we said that the problem today, and the reason why we’re addressing this topic in the context of the Eighth Word, is one of the largest threats—probably the largest threat—to what the Eighth Word tries to protect: private property. It is a concept in Christian churches today known as social justice, and that then becomes enacted in the laws of the state and in effect kills the golden goose.

I promised you I would give a small list of things you could do practically on this week’s outline, which is on the second page. Please don’t turn there. But several of them had to do with killing the golden goose. The poor are assisted by godly Christian people who exercise diligence, accumulate wealth, build businesses, and then with those businesses, hire people and employ them. It’s essential to what the Eighth Commandment is helping us to protect—to understand what the scriptures say about the poor.

Proverbs 29:7, New King James Version: “The righteous considers the cause of the poor.” Are we the righteous today? Yeah. What are we to do? We’re to consider the cause of the poor. “The wicked does not understand such knowledge.” There’s only two choices. You either understand the cause of the poor and identify yourself with the righteous ones in Christ, or you don’t care about this stuff, and then you’re identified in Proverbs 29:7 as wicked.

The ESV puts it this way—dangerous translation, but an interesting one. The ESV is generally a very good translation. It says this: “A righteous man knows the rights of the poor. A wicked man does not understand such knowledge.” Do you know the rights of the poor? And yes, like the term social justice, the term rights is a much abused term as well. But when the scriptures lay out for us, as we just read in the book of Deuteronomy, certain things we’re supposed to do for the poor, it’s probably not too big a leap to then refer to these as the rights of the poor.

And in Proverbs, this particular verse, the cause of the poor, the rights of the poor, is frequently translated from this Hebrew word that means the judgments—the judgments of God relative to the poor. We’re supposed to know that stuff because it’s not ancillary to our task as Christians. It’s central to it. The proclamation of the gospel to the poor.

If we’re walking in the footsteps and speaking the gospel that Jesus spoke, we don’t want to throw that baby—that precious baby of the new creation that Jesus began, that acceptable year in which we live—out with the filthy bathwater of people that would define social justice in non-biblical terms or use biblical terminology but non-biblical goals to try to meet so-called social justice. Yes, it’s a problem. But may the Lord God use these two sermons to caution us not to react against it as laissez-faire free market people that think too bad for the poor—they’re cursed by God or something.

That is not what the scriptures teach. I mean, it can be sometimes; God does indeed grind people to the dust, and that’s what the poor are. But when the Bible talks about the poor, it is normally speaking of people—this is not a judgment of God upon them. This is a particular social state that’s resulted frequently from sins of other people, but resulted from the Fall. So what we’re doing is manifesting that indeed God’s blessing is going out as far as the curse is found.

And that curse is manifested in the kind of poverty that’s described in the scriptures, that we’re supposed to know about and know what we’re supposed to do about some of these things.

So, the first topic of your outline—this is notes from last week’s sermon. You know, we believe in biblical social justice, but not social justice that comes from some sort of idea of society apart from God’s word defining what justice is. That’s the typical way the term is used these days. Social justice is a result of the social contract. Men have come together to form communities. Those communities then define through majority vote what justice is. And that’s social justice. That’s society’s justice. That’s anathema to a believing Christian.

We say that man doesn’t create justice. God’s justice is what man has to consider as he considers his particular calling. Justice doesn’t follow men’s needs, but man needs justice, and he needs to follow particularly God’s justice. And so that’s the way we approach this topic. What do the scriptures say?

An example I mentioned last week: a bunch of church leaders who met with President Obama about the debt limit bill a couple weeks ago, and they have a thing called the Circle of Protection. Let me read a couple of their specific principles. They have eight principles listed. They say this first principle: “The nation needs to substantially reduce future deficits, but not at the expense of hungry and poor people.”

Okay. Well, yeah, we don’t want hungry and poor people to be diminished somehow. So we could sort of say, yeah, maybe that might be an okay statement. How about this one? “Funding focused on reducing poverty should not be cut. It should be made as effective as possible, but not cut.”

Well, what if a program that’s designed to help the poor is hurting the poor? Should that be cut? I mean, we would agree that the goal is to try to proclaim the gospel to the poor and help people, you know, that are not poor because of their own laziness or whatever it is, but to help people in the name of Christ. But we begin to get a little uneasy with some of the principles because it sounds like all they’re really wanting to do is have state-sponsored benevolences that aren’t really dependent at all upon whether people are going to look for work or not, and that somehow thinking that the state can come up with mechanisms that will actually help the poor.

Remember last week I said that where was the Circle of Protection when the presidents—Clinton, Bush, and Obama—all had these policies, and not so much Obama, but had these policies of trying to extend home ownership to the poor? They had a concern for the poor that no doubt was proper and right. And they instituted, you know, programs to pressure banks into making bad loans to the poor. What’s the result?

Remember I said that the result is the poor got poorer in the last five years. Well, the AP reported this week that white net worth is now twenty times black and brown net worth in this country, whereas in 2009, whereas in 2004 it was seven times. So white net worth has gone up threefold. And of course the reason is because black people and Latinos had the bulk of their investments in those homes that they were being pressured to buy, and the government was trying to help them up and make them homeowners. And all it ended up doing was reducing their net worth down to lower levels than whites, which we’ve seen in a number of years.

So it’s just what I said. If we use unbiblical methodology to try to achieve—if we use empire means to achieve biblical goals, right? If we use whatever political means we think might work to effect an end—proclamation of the gospel to the poor—that’s not good enough. That’s not good enough for us. We want to know the goal, but we want to use biblical means to affect that goal. And so some of these principles found in the Circle of Protection document online, we can agree with, but we don’t agree with other principles that indicate that they think the primary mechanism to affect true social justice—biblical social justice—is the civil state. We say it actually is just the reverse.

So that’s what we want to talk about again today. And we’re going to pick up the handout, the outline, halfway down where the little dotted line is, and return to this topic and pick up the second half of the outline. And we’re going to spend a little bit of time looking at Deuteronomy here in a couple of minutes.

And first I wanted to throw in another example. I provided for you the handout from Amos. Last week I talked about the structure of the book of Amos. How it has these opening and ending chapters—first chapter—they don’t show compassion even to conquered kings. They crush them. They rip open pregnant women, et cetera. And at the end of Amos, God says his judgments are going to come and destroy them. Although there’s restoration at the end, the prophets are all about the death and resurrection of Israel, pointing to Jesus. But those are the bookends. And in the middle, the concentric sections going into the middle, several of them—most of them—have to do with social justice.

And the one thing I wanted to point out today from that diagram I give you—and if you have your outlines, look on, I think it’s page two. It’s a little busy. My wife does these microstructural analyses of texts that are really fascinating and have helped me tremendously. And for instance, with Amos, she took a few days and did her thing on the book of Amos, and it really all of a sudden brought out some important things.

And particularly I wanted you to see today the relationship between the opening section at chapter 2, verse 6, where he says—and again, here the point is that the judgments of God, from Amos’s perspective, are primarily for abuses of social justice. It’s social injustice that he’s going after, and he says, “I will not revoke the punishment because they sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.”

Do you see that? It’s boxed. I’m sorry, the boxes are kind of clunky looking, but that’s a boxed text. And that matches at the bottom with chapter 8, that fourth section. And you see in verse 6, “that we may buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.” So we’ve got an observation.

Okay, first of all, all we need to recognize in the first half is that there are three or four transgressions, and I’ve numbered them for you in that first section of chapter 2. And so the two things—buying the righteous, or selling the righteous and selling the poor—are parallelisms. And that’s enough to show us that he’s talking about the righteous poor. Okay.

But then we’ve got further evidence of that in this matching section that replaces the word righteous with the poor. So in the beginning it’s the righteous for silver. Now it’s the poor for silver. So you see, this is the advantage of looking at a text of scripture and sort of seeing the whole thing in connection, and all of a sudden we recognize that the righteous that they were abusing were the poor who were righteous. It wasn’t just righteous people in general.

It also is interesting in this last section because what Amos is going after them for are violations of the Sabbath and then of commerce. They couldn’t wait for the Lord’s day to be over to get back to buying and selling because they were cheating the poor, and as a result enslaving the poor.

Now, the connection of their desire not to keep Sabbath and injustice to the poor is a telling one as well, because in Isaiah 58, the verses that a lot of us know in this church from our beginning, the last two verses, the importance of keeping the Lord’s Sabbath—the Lord’s day rather—what can be seen as sort of an application of the Old Testament Sabbath. The importance of those verses is put in the context of social justice. “This is the fast I’ve chosen.” The same kind of language that Jesus says he came to proclaim in Luke’s Gospel.

“This is the fast I’ve chosen: to loose the bonds.” And we’ve seen in looking at the Ten Words in Exodus and Deuteronomy, the change in Deuteronomy to the Fourth Commandment is a new stress—not just on taking rest, but on giving rest. So the essence of the Lord’s way that we celebrate in this church is to have a heart that wants to go and extend this kind of joy and delight and good news to the poor. That’s what we’re supposed to be motivated by at the end of this day. And that’s the reverse of these wicked people in Amos who couldn’t wait for the Lord’s day to be out of the way—for the Sabbath to be out of the way—so that they could cheat people in economic transactions.

So it’s really important for us. I was, again, going back to the Q conference, there was a man who spoke, and he has a website. He’s got a book called 58, and the website is called live58.org. And what he’s talking about, the 58, is Isaiah 58. And the idea is to try to get Christians to commit to live in terms of Isaiah 58, which is our thing at this church, right? We’ve loved Isaiah 58 since the opening days, and we want to make sure we don’t abstract out the last two verses of it about the Lord’s day and our doing our pleasure and God’s and stuff without seeing their connection to extending biblical social justice, right?

This man thinks that we will end extreme poverty by the year 2030, or by the year 2038. And the evidence is that we’ve cut extreme poverty—and they’ve got measures for this kind of thing, but extreme poverty, not just poverty—extreme poverty. We’ve cut it in half in the last, let’s see, so 1988 to 2011? Twenty-six years? Cut it in half. And he thinks we can do the rest of the second half in the next twenty-six years if Christians will see the importance of the poor to the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ and live out Isaiah 58. Isn’t that a cool deal?

And you know the statistics, all the extension of life rates and stuff. He challenged us at the Q gathering with the verse that says, “The poor you’ll always have with you.” He said we’re misinterpreting the verse because Jesus says, “You won’t always have me with you.” But then we know that in the Great Commission he says, “I’ll always be with you.” Which is it?

Well, he wouldn’t always be with those particular people for a period of time. He would be absent from them. He was giving a particular statement in a particular time context. He was not making long-term platitudinous comments about what’s going to happen in the future. And yet, that’s the verse that, according to this man who spoke at Q, most pastors—if you ask them what verse they know about poverty—the one they know is that we can’t get rid of it. How motivating is that?

Remember, we’re postmillennial in our eschatology. And it makes a difference. And it makes a difference if we think we can end poverty. If we think we can actually fulfill what our Savior began with the acceptable year of the Lord.

So, excellent. Excellent. Now, I want to quickly throw in another caveat, though. Another man I was privileged to hear was just this last Thursday at an event, an appreciation event for pastors who are involved in city transformation work. There was maybe forty or fifty of us at a place out on the west side of town, put on by the Luis Palau Association. It was fun talking to Luis again after a number of years.

But they had a fellow there. Oh, I can’t remember the guy’s first name. His name is Chan. Some of you may know him. He’s got—for the first time—he’s a Christian author who has three best-selling books in the top ten for the New York Times non-fiction book list. Amazing. And his current book is in the fourth slot. He’s a friend of Rob Bell. He started Cornerstone Church, a huge megachurch. It became that. Him and his wife started with thirty people, became a megachurch, quit doing that. He’s in San Francisco now. Interesting fellow.

He was friends with Rob Bell. Rob Bell is an emerging pastor guy who sometime this last year decided he didn’t believe in hell anymore. And Chan, this friend of his, that appealed to Chan. He said he wanted to believe Rob Bell, and so he wanted to go back over those texts about hell and reinterpret them. But he couldn’t because the texts are quite clear. The number four best-selling book on the New York Times non-fiction bestselling list is a book called Erasing Hell: A Rebuttal to Rob Bell, a book that promotes the fact that the Christian message has hell as part of it.

And Chan told us at the gathering last Thursday afternoon at the barbecue that, you know, he realized as he did his study on the doctrine of hell that he had become kind of a PR agent for God, who was trying to make God look nicer than he was to people. And he said, “I told God, you know, I’m doing this for you. They won’t like you if they know this other stuff in the Old Testament about you.”

He said, “You know, Noah’s Ark, we always see these cute little pictures, and giraffe heads sticking out the window, and everything’s fun. And you don’t see too many cartoons that have millions of people drowned to death.” The holiness of God, the judgment of God, the justice of God is something we’re ashamed of. We don’t think it’ll work PR-wise. And Chan was very upfront about this. It was so encouraging to hear him talk.

Now, why do I bring this up? Because as we talk about ending extreme poverty, and as we talk about biblical social justice, we must not fall into the trap that I think Chan was in for a while—what I would call humanism—that somehow we think human life is the ultimate value, that the ultimate important thing to us is human life. That leads to social justice theories that want to help everybody indiscriminately and doesn’t recognize that God is rightfully angry and will destroy certain people, send them to hell.

So we don’t want to fall into a humanism. We want to avoid that as we go about understanding what the scriptures teach about social justice.

Now, let’s look at Deuteronomy 24, this text, and do a quick overview of it, just touching on some topics. We need to be Bible heads, right? That’s what we need to be. The coloring page today for kids is the Bible because that’s what we need more than anything else. We need to be people that study these scriptures and read about them—good commentaries, good authors—to know what we’re supposed to do.

I remember years ago when our church first started up, Judge Beers was dying of cancer, and one of the men in our church said, “What should I do? What should I do with my life?” “Don’t do anything,” he said. He was very gruff on his deathbed. “Don’t do anything. Read. That’s what you need to do. Read broad. Read wide. Read deep. Don’t do anything.” Because he knew, and he had seen the Christian church people motivated to do something, and they didn’t know what to do, and so they ran off doing something that would actually hurt the very cause they’re trying to help.

So if we’re going to get involved in social justice, and how could we not given the significance of it—biblical social justice—that means we have to think things through. We have to get ourselves out of this culture’s view of life. And I’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes. We need to be Bible heads.

The first three practical suggestions to you on the list of to-dos on the third page, where this Deuteronomy section is: know the word of God. Know the word of God. Know the word of God. There’s only three things important about real estate. Location. Location. Location. The three most important things about biblical counseling: Investigate. Investigate. Investigate. The three most important things about getting involved in biblical social justice: Know the Bible. Know the Bible. Know the Bible. If you don’t have that, you’ve got nothing. You’ve got nothing except something actually that would be negative—kind of a desire to help but not knowing how the scriptures would teach you how to help. And then you end up doing things that hurt.

All right. So let’s look at Deuteronomy 24. And as I said, it’s got those punishment things before and after. First, God’s punishment through leprosy—God’s judgment—and then human judgments. And that’s the flow of history, right? That’s the flow of history: this flow from God’s judgments to man’s judgments. And so I don’t have them on your outline, but that’s why I read them in context. That’s what’s going on there. And then what we have is several statements surrounding a very interesting central text. I actually got to this section of scripture by the central text—that’s the one I was interested in—and then I looked at its context, and lo and behold, it’s very significant for what we’re talking about.

So look at your handout or your Bibles first at verse 10. So this is the first set of instructions. Now remember, we’re not, you know, we don’t cut and paste. This is given in a particular time of redemptive history. This is given in a particular setting—an agrarian setting, right? So you know, we have to kind of understand the truths that undergird these things and how to apply them. This isn’t a cut and paste this into your life, although a lot of the stuff is pretty practical still.

But what do we want to look at? What’s going on? “When you lend your brother anything, you shall not go into his house to get his pledge. You shall stand outside, and the man to whom you lend shall bring the pledge out to you.”

Well, that right away tells us something about the distribution of benevolences, and that in the midst of distributing benevolences, we want to honor the glory of the other man. Another part of your practical handout is glory, knowledge, life—our worship service, right? You give people glory, you share knowledge with one another, and you get to rejoicing life. You give the poor man glory. You don’t go into his house to get that pledge, right? And you then will bring him to rejoicing life.

But something else is going on here that’s interesting. Verse 12: “If the man is poor, you can’t keep the pledge overnight.” Well, then what that means is the first guy isn’t poor, right? “You lend your brother anything, you shall not go in his house to get the pledge. If he’s poor, you can’t keep that pledge overnight.”

Okay? If it. The Bible here says you’re going to be helping people that aren’t desperately poor, so they only got one blanket left to keep themselves warm. That’s one degree of poverty. But there are other degrees of not quite so poor, becoming poor, that you’re also going to be helping and assisting. Okay?

So right away, the text tells us something very interesting: that according to the Bible, our benevolences and helping the poor involves not just extreme poverty, where people the only thing they’ve got to give you for pledge is the only coat they have to keep them warm. But other sorts of people as well. And in both cases, the text commands us to give them glory. “You want to let him sleep in his own garment and bless you, and it shall be righteousness to you.”

Now, that’s a fascinating verse, too, is it not? Those of you that are pondering some of the whole Federal Vision controversy and righteousness—and what does it mean and what doesn’t it mean?—it’s really interesting because what this says is that in our benevolences, there’s to be an exchange going on. And this is spelled out in more detail in the New Testament, but there’s an exchange. We’re helping someone, and they’re blessing us.

Calvin writes about this quite a bit: that the rich are to help the poor, and the poor are to bless the rich. There’s an exchange principle going on. Ultimately, it’s we’re all poor here at God’s feast, and he’s helping us, and we’re blessing God for the help he’s given to us. That’s what worship is, right? But this exchange goes on, and what’s interesting is this exchange isn’t just a humanistic liturgy. There is a divine liturgical aspect to this, as we mentioned in that book Desiring the Kingdom.

These liturgies are interesting. This was an interesting liturgy this morning—naming is a social liturgy that has great significance, and praise God for the names we see going on in this church. Hey, wonderful. But in this little liturgical back and forth thing, something else is going on. It says, “It shall be righteousness to you before the Lord your God.”

Now, that’s a fascinating statement. We can’t really get into it in depth, but understand the connection—again, to showing grace not just to the extreme poor, but to people that don’t have as much in the community that you live in, your church, whatever—helping them, right, through loans. In this particular case, there’s some relationship of that to you being righteous before the Lord your God. Now, the term righteous can mean being faithful covenantally. There’s nuances to the thing that we could talk about, but whatever it is, whatever the nuances are, the verse says this is righteousness to you before the Lord your God.

Now, the next section’s interesting too, because it’s got a different kind of exchange. So first of all, the whole idea of loaning people at no interest. Then, in verse 14: “You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy, whether one of your brethren or one of the aliens who is in your land within your gates. Each day you shall give him his wages, and not let the sun go down on it, for he is poor and has set his heart on it.”

Now, there’s a movement amongst the social gospel—more liberal Christians—to get rid of payday loan companies or max out the interest rate on them. And there’s something to be said biblically on it, right? Charging interest to the poor. Payday loans—you can’t get by till your next paycheck comes. So you go to a payday loan company, they charge you some incredible interest rate—twenty-four percent, whatever it is—and then you pay them back when you get paid. But in the meantime, you’ve paid a tremendous big bite of interest.

And in general, you know, in general, we don’t like that kind of stuff because probably it’s poor people that are taking advantage of that. And so we’re not really to charge interest to poor people at all according to the Bible. But usurious interest, big interest, is really tough. On the other hand, it’s a function of the market, and the poor people are telling some of the people lobbying for them, “Hey, we need these payday loan stores, otherwise we’re going to be hungry for the next two weeks.”

Okay, so what’s the solution? Well, this is one possible solution. People who are impoverished and who need money before the next paycheck comes in—two weeks or a month. The Bible says be sensitive to that. See their need for it, and pay them at the end of the day. Don’t wait two weeks. Pay them daily. Very practical suggestion here for Christian businessmen. We were talking at Jonathan and Joanna’s house last night about a possible idea for helping the homeless through establishment of a business. There’s a place in Illinois, I guess, that has done this. People go there and work and get food, et cetera.

And you know, if you have a place that’s trying to economically hire the poor and get them out of their poverty, this is what you should do. Be sensitive to their daily needs. Now, maybe you just want to give them the money up front, but the point is be sensitive to people who live at a level of subsistence that you probably don’t get because you don’t live at that particular place.

So it’s another very practical suggestion of what to do. But look at what the exchange here is. If you don’t do this, if you don’t provide for him his wages that are due to him, it says he then might cry out against you to the Lord. If you help people, they’re going to bless you in exchange. If you don’t help people the way God says to help people, they’re going to cry out to the Lord against you, and it’s not going to be for your blessing. So either way, what you’re doing in terms of biblical social justice is in this exchange thing.

And look at this one now. Just as if you do it right, that’s the righteousness of yours to the Lord your God. And here it will be sin to you. He cries out to God, and it’s sin to you. This thing. So now the imputation of what you do for the poor is affecting either your righteousness standing or your sin standing in the sight of God. That’s very interesting. That’s very interesting.

Okay, dropping down past the center verse. We’ll come back to that. Verse 17: “Don’t pervert the justice suit of the stranger, nor take a widow’s garment as a pledge. You shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt.” And so that’s the next thing, and next practical suggestion in terms of what biblical social justice is. And then the last one of these suggestions begins in verse 19: “When you reap your harvest in your field, forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it.”

And if you—again, here, now God will bless you in all your work if you do this. “When you beat your olive trees, you know, don’t take all of the boughs from the upper branches. The olives upper branches—that’s for the poor, the classes of people who are in a vulnerable state.” And then finally, your vineyard. So here, gleaning is another thing.

So we got poor loans, we’ve got timely payments to people on a daily basis who need it. Now we’ve got gleaning capability to people and the maintaining of their justice in the court. These are the major themes in Deuteronomy 24 in terms of the rights, the cause of the poor. And this one also ends by saying remember that you’re a slave in the land of Egypt. So these last two sections each connect at the end with remembering that we were slaves in the land of Egypt—we were mistreated, in other words.

Now, of central importance, I want to return now to the center section. So we got these, you know, you can see it, right? There’s all these lists about what you do to help people out. And then you have this odd middle to it. Right in the center of all that is verse 16: “Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor shall children be put to death for their fathers. A person shall be put to death for his own sin.”

What does that have to do with the rest of these verses? Well, in our day and age, it has a tremendous amount to do with the rest of the verses. As you get to know your Bible. Get to know your Bible. Get to know your Bible. This principle articulated in Ezekiel 18. And we won’t take the time to read Ezekiel 18, but I would encourage you to read it. God goes on and on and on. If you got a good father who’s done everything right and his kid turns out to be a loser, the kid dies for his sin, not the dad. It’s not the dad’s fault.

We particularly as a congregation need to hear this. Somehow we think that dad’s responsibility equates to his fault. Some people in our circles who we love think that if the dads just do everything right, the kids will turn out great. Ezekiel 18 is an absolute, in my mind, reputation of that. It says you can have cases where the dad is perfectly good, son is bad, he dies for his sin. And just the reverse goes to the other case. Dad’s bad, kid’s good, kid stands or falls on his own.

And by the way, the definition of who’s good and who’s bad in Ezekiel 18, in terms of the dad, has to do—one of the major sections—with how they treat the poor and specifically whether they loan to the poor at interest or not. So some people abstract that little section out of Ezekiel 18 and think the Bible prohibits all interest. That’s not true. You look at it in context. Read Ezekiel 18 today, and you’ll see that again, a person’s righteousness before God is described in part by his relationship to the poor and is pegged to not charging them interest.

But the point is that Ezekiel goes on and on and on about this, saying in many words what is simply said here: that the father can’t be put to death for the son’s sin, and the son can’t be put to death for the father’s sin. They’re individuals before God. Okay, there’s no great ultimate family setting in all of this stuff. There are family responsibilities, but a person’s responsibility before God is individual.

Now, why is that significant for social justice? Because if you believe in a world that is environmentally determined—if you believe in evolution, let’s say—and you believe that man is a product of his environment, the question is: who do you blame for his particular situation? Who’s responsible first of all? And then who’s he responsible to? And when our culture pushes social justice in the loose sense of the term—moving from social contract to social justice to men determining what justice is—what they’re saying is that really, ultimately, the one who’s responsible is not the individual. It’s the society, or it’s the rich, in the case of America right now.

And they’ve got to pay their fair share. They’ve got to sacrifice. You see, because ultimately they deny this basic principle of biblical justice: that everyone is responsible for themselves and their sin. They deny that. And when you deny that basic principle of biblical justice that everyone is responsible for themselves and their action, then you fall into these ideas of social justice that really are quite anti-Christian—that are a denial of this center.

And I don’t know why God put this in the center of efforts to help the poor. Maybe because of situations just like ours, when Christians need to know their Bibles well enough to believe in the principle of individual responsibility. I’ve seen this in church issues, pastoral issues: in the churches might have problems between two people, and all of a sudden the families aren’t getting along. That’s bad. That’s really bad. God says that, you know, we’re not to be the Hatfields and the McCoys when these things break out.

Rushdoony uses that example in his Institutes of Biblical Law, which by the way was declared by Harold O.J. Brown in 1973 to be the most important Christian book of the year in the pages of Christianity Today. If you don’t know who he is, that’s okay. Big wig. That’s an important book. Institutes of Biblical Law—that’s something you should all read. And Rushdoony talks about this verse and talks about the relationship to blood feuds. It’s the way to put blood feuds to an end. It’s a way to get social justice back into the context of biblical thinking.

We live in a world where people think that through evolution and the environment, everybody has just sort of fallen out. And so if you’re wealthy, it’s not because you were diligent. It’s just the way things turned out. Or if you’re wealthy, it’s suspect, and therefore you have responsibilities that we’re going to take away your wealth and give it to other people. That’s evolutionary, environmentalistic thinking.

And this verse at the center of Deuteronomy 24 instructs us that we have to put—that’s the sea in which we live, folks—is social responsibility for people that are impoverished as opposed to direct responsibility of the people themselves. And then the benevolent actions of private parties, coming alongside of those people, is described in Deuteronomy 24.

So the central text of Deuteronomy 24—how do we help the poor? How do we put a circle of protection around the poor in our present situation in America? It’s to make sure that we’re not holding the rich responsible for the poor’s state. That we’re not blaming other people for the situation they find themselves in. That we each are responsible to God for our own state.

Now, we’ve got community responsibilities to help them. As I just said, that truth is placed in the immediate context of our responsibilities to help people in that state, right? So it cuts off both ditches of the road. It cuts off the ditch of blaming others and holding the rich responsible for helping the poor indiscriminately and through state manipulation. It cuts that ditch off. But it also cuts off the ditch that means the poor are the poor, and that’s that. Who cares?

So it’s a central verse. It’s the heart of the thing. The heart in Deuteronomy 24 of how to help the poor is to understand God’s system of justice: that men are responsible themselves, and they’re not responsible to the state ultimately. They’re responsible to God. Man has to follow God’s justice, not man’s justice following what man decides it to be.

So this is biblical social justice. This prevents us from falling into different ditches. I would encourage you as well in Leviticus 25:35-38—these notes are on your outline. It considers the case of what happens when people get poor in your community. They fall into poverty. They start to have hard times. That’s addressed in the scriptures as well. And so the Bible has a number of things to talk to us about in terms of biblical social justice. And Deuteronomy 24 is a tremendous help to us to understand the central aspect of responsibility.

Who’s responsible and to whom? And as a result of that, also then to engage in biblical social justice.

Maybe just a quick word about the end: Pleasing God. All we’re trying to do ultimately is please God with our actions in this area. And we please the Father when we know his word and can apply that word in the context of our world.

I might just mention there’s a women’s Bible study this Wednesday at Leann M.’s house. I wish that there were more Bible studies in this church. I wish that we were digging into the scriptures more. Folks, if you understand the way the country is going, the only way to gird our loins against the pressures and tides of our age is to know the Bible, to know it well, and to build our relationships around that knowledge of the Bible.

All right, I’ll leave the practical list for you to go through. I think most of it is self-explanatory. I’ve explained glory, knowledge, and life, and I’ve given you here a series of steps you could do to practically today make commitments to follow through and be part of this great proclamation of the year of our Lord, where he produces, pronounces, and then brings to pass liberty. He preaches the gospel to the poor.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you that every Lord’s day here, we pray that your will might be done on earth as it is in heaven. We thank you, Father, for revealing your will in heaven through your scriptures. Now, enable us each in our own small yet significant ways to take part in this great effort to preach the gospel to the poor and to set at liberty those that are held captive. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.