God's Compassion for the Vulnerable

Verse 14, when you open the Bible at any particular place, it always has something to say that has to do with what we believe, the doctrines that we believe. And when you read the stories about what God does and how people react to it, you begin to find the things that are true about the Christian faith, what God says is right and real and true. And that's true of all these things. And many people get the Old Testament, they start reading that and they start thinking, well, this is just a bunch of rules and regulations. But really, in these passages, God is teaching us a lot about who he is. He's teaching us a lot about who we are, the problems we run into and the difficulties we face. And our own lives and lifestyle. And this one, I want you to read this verse with me. And I want to ask if you would to respond to some to think about some questions I'm going to ask you. And then I want you to reflect back to me what you see in these passages that we're reading. Chapter 24, beginning with verse 14. Do not take advantage of a hired man who is poor and needy, whether he's a brother Israelite or an alien living in one of your towns. Pay him his wages each day before sunset because he is poor and is counting on it. Otherwise, he may cry to the Lord against you and you will be guilty of sin. Now, I want to indicate to you, show you that in this passage, there is something a little different than most of us would find when you get a job. Most of us don't receive the pay for our work every day. But here he's talking about a class of worker that we don't have in our culture. We think of a person who's a late day laborer, as a person who works for themselves. We would see them as a notch above a slave. The reverse is true in the Bible. A slave was owned by someone and they had the responsibility to take care of the slave. So the slave had no worry about their future situation. Their owner was responsible for caring for them. The owner had to provide a place for them to live and food that they might eat and provide the necessities of life. In that culture, just below the slave was the daily worker. This person would be someone who had no ground of their own, maybe. They had no way to make an income and so they would go downtown and wait around the square for someone to employ them for the day. Remember the parable Jesus gave about the man with the vineyard. He went down to find people to help him with his work and he hired them to go out in the vineyard. That's what the day laborer was. Oftentimes they were destitute people. They had no ground of their own. They had no way to make a living. And they were entirely dependent on someone hiring them for a day's work. Now, this story is about how people deal with the day laborer, the lowest person on the economic totem pole in their culture. So what he's giving instructions about are how these people are to be treated and how they are to be handled. Now, the word that's used here, do not take advantage, the whole phrase, do not take advantage, can be translated in different ways. If you pick up a different Bible, you might find the translation a little different than that. It might say, don't exploit someone who's your worker. That means to take advantage of them. Don't use them so that you get benefit from them and they don't get anything. It might use the word rob. Don't rob your employee, which would mean something a little bit different. It's still kind of exploiting, but I agreed to pay you and I don't pay you what I promised I would pay you. It sometimes is also used for the word to defraud. Don't defraud someone who is working for you. So you get a picture here. It's not simply someone that does something a little different, but he's talking about how you treat an employee who is completely dependent on the money that you pay them day by day for their work. Now, what I want you to think about is who God is trying to protect in this story. When you see this description about what God is doing, who do you think the point of this story is really all about? Okay. What is God trying to tell his people to do? Treat them fairly. Now, if you say that that's what he's saying to them, what does it say about God? How is this let us see the heart and the nature and character of God? Compassion on people in a situation of need. Okay. Treat everybody the same. The story Jesus gave about the people that went to the vineyard, he went down the morning and got someone and said, I'll pay you a denario and denarii. And he went back at noon and found someone and went back at four o'clock and found someone or five and then paid them the same, everybody the same. For us, that sounds like not good business. But it's kind of an example of what he's talking about here, about compassion and about making sure that you respond to that. So God has compassion. He has concern and care for people and treats everybody as if they were valuable or the same. Anything else that strike you about God in this story? His nature and character? Okay. Oftentimes the day laborers worked and they got the money that night to buy food the next day. That's how close they lived to the edge. If they didn't have money that day, they couldn't eat the next day. So you're right, he's looking at someone who's financially vulnerable, we would say. Just right on the edge of that. Anything else that strikes you about the character of God who would write something like this? I'm at Deuteronomy. You can get a Bible over there if you don't have one. Deuteronomy 24, 14 and 15. It's a good point. And what God is saying is, now whenever you look at this, there's a tendency to see you're an Israelite or you're an alien. We would call them an immigrant. Maybe even an immigrant who is in the country without any proper reason to be there. Now what he's saying for us, you're not talking, see our tendency is to think of this in terms of, are you a citizen of this country or are you an immigrant, an illegal immigrant? But what he's talking about here is spiritually, whether he's an Israelite, that is, he's your spiritual brother, we would say, whether he's a member of your church or a pagan. See, that's the way this language would be described. So he's demanding of us that we treat pagans with the same way we would treat people in our church. A requirement that causes us to see God identifying the fact that a person made by him is valuable, whether they are in the church, born-again believers, or whether they're pagans. All of them have value to God. And he does say, as you were talking about, we treat even those people who are pagans away from us in the same way. I think there is a kind of tendency in the part of the church to look at the church and say, we've committed our lives to Christ and therefore he loves us and cares for us. And we have kind of a special standing with him. There is a special relationship, but it doesn't mean he values us more than he values other people. His death on the cross, for example, was a death for pagans as well as those who came to know him. So we see here in this story a powerful picture of God's love for the world. Now, when he describes for us what he wants, he wants us to understand how he sees people and how he sees folks in the world. Anything else about the story that strikes you? Yeah. He's looking at it so severely that it's not just treating somebody that way, but treating them that way. Yeah. And that's a really important ingredient. He considers, let's talk about sin, what sin is. Sometimes I hear people talk about sin and they say, well, I made bad choices. Sin is not necessarily just a bad choice. I mean, a bad choice is when you go out to shop for a car and you buy a Ford or Chevy and you didn't get a good one. You know, that's a bad choice. But sin is a choice that you make that defies the authority of God over your life. You know what God wants you to do, how he wants you to act, and how he wants you to live. But you make a choice that says to God, I know what you want, but I am going to do what I want to do. I'm going to do what I think is fun or right or good or enjoyable. So sin is an act of conscious rebellion against the authority of God. Now, if you do something to this employee, you don't treat them fairly. You rob from them. You take advantage of them. You have chosen to reject or rebel against God. So he takes this failure to treat this other person fairly as if you have done this to him. Remember the story when Jesus talked about the judgment, when you've done it unto the least of these, you've done it unto me. That's what he's talking about here. How you treat the people you employ reflects how you think of me and how you are treating me. OK, now let's stop just a moment and look at this a different way. What is it that he's talking here about that would be close to us? In other words, we're saying to ourselves, I don't employ anybody. What does this say about the demand that God has on our life? It's saying something to me about not being judgmental. In God's view, that poor person is just as valuable as anybody else. So we tend to judge somebody that's homeless or poor as being lazy or not being willing to work. It's talking to me about not being judgmental. OK, yeah, good. Anybody else have an insight? OK. OK, good. What does it say about finances and economics? It says if you can hire anybody for X amount of dollars, it says about it you can hire for less. It doesn't mean that you can do it. It's God's will. What is he getting at here with that idea? What is he saying about people who have a power and authority financially? He's telling you how to use the power. In this story, which side is God on? The guy that is owning the business or the worker? In what way is he on the worker's side? OK. And what does he say to the guy that hired him about this? Yeah. Warning about what? In this story, who has the power here? The employer. Who is the person that's vulnerable? The employee. So that God is saying, I am protecting the weaker, the most vulnerable person in this story. In this instance, he's saying to the owner of the business, I hold you accountable for how you treat this man who has no authority or power to resist you. Now, it would look like, if you were talking about this in terms of economics or politics, that you might say, well, he's on the side of the worker against the businessman. But what if the circumstance changed and the business and the employee organized his other friends and they formed a powerful group, a union or whatever, and they forced the man who owned the business out of business by their power and authority? How would this story change? Pardon? Yeah. It's not that God is in favor of the businessman as opposed to the laborer. He's opposed to using our power and authority to the abuse of another person, whichever way it goes. Now, that tells us something very important about God. When God looks out in the world and he sees people, he's always careful to make sure that the people who have power and authority are held accountable for how they use it. Now, how can this work for you? Who do you have power and authority over? Children. Okay. What does it say about that? Tim works for the KVI, and he works in this division where they deal with the, I don't know what you call it. What did you say? Child Victims Unit. And there you have situations where it's used their authority over the child to exploit and to take advantage of and misuse. So it says something to parents about how you deal with children. Now, it also says something about how children treat their parents. A guy told me he went to court, was observing one time, and a boy was going to court and his mother was there, and she had to testify in the case and told the truth about what happened. And he jumped up from his seat where he was and started cussing his mother and said, blankety-blank-blank, if I could get my hands on you, I'd kill you. This is a child who is using the fact that his mother is vulnerable to his criticism to control the parents. Why would God be concerned about this? The issue that you raised is important here. All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth, Jesus said. I am the one in charge of this. I expect each of you to fill the role that I have for you with the awareness that you're accountable to me for how you live. If you're the boss, you're accountable to me for how you treat your employees. If you're an employee, you're accountable to me as to how you work for your boss. And if the power switches from the employer to the employee, God's hand moves to protect the person who's most vulnerable. Now, here's a very important thing for us. Sometimes, in the circumstances we're in, we find ourselves on the vulnerable end with other people. It can be when you're in business and people don't treat you right. I remember you telling a story about a guy coming into the store where you were working and he's mad and cussing you out and all nasty things. It's awfully hard when you're in that situation, very vulnerable, to feel that you're helpless. It's what you have to remember. In that circumstance, God is keeping score. He does not take the side of the person with power who misuses it. Instead, he stands to favor the vulnerable person who's being abused, exploited, robbed, or defrauded. Our defender is God. What God says to us in this story is the person that takes advantage of you, I consider that an act toward me. It's like, you know, you have a child and someone takes advantage of your child. The parent would step in and say, When you do this kind of thing for my child, you're doing it to me. And so I step in here to stand between the child and the person who's trying to hurt them. What God says to us is, Anytime you're in a situation where you're vulnerable and people are taking advantage of it, I am there with you. You can look at the person who's taking advantage of you and you can say, They are doing this to me. And then when you realize that, you realize the great power that is available to you to be protected and defended. So it tells us something about God and how he stands in the world, and where he stands in the world, and how we can count on him. We don't necessarily have the ability to defend ourselves from everything that happens, but God does. If in weakness, something happens and people take advantage of you, God settles those scores for us. He just takes care of it. What oftentimes happens to us in those circumstances, though, is we're in a place where somebody's taking advantage of us, misusing us, or mistreating us, and it happens to us, and we see it not stopped in the middle of it, and we suddenly think God is not with us, and then we turn around and do the same thing back to the other person. That is, we get angry with them. We lose our temper. We say things we shouldn't say. We do things we shouldn't do. And while God has suddenly started taking our side in this deal, when we turn around and act in such a sinful way to the others, he's standing there saying, Well, I've got two people who are in bad spots here. I don't know which one I can help. Neither one of them have depended on me to take care of them. That's where you have to watch out. When you lose your temper, you get mad. You do and say things you shouldn't say. You remove yourself from the protection that God can give you, because all of a sudden, you become the oppressor. You become the person who is in power and trying to force that other person or bring your pressure on them. What the Bible is helping us understand is that God does choose sides and circumstances. Whenever the person in power takes advantage of their power to use and hurt another person, automatically God steps in that situation. He says to us, This person has committed a sin. Do not bring sin upon the land of the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. Don't do that. It will be detestable in the eyes of God. God has made sure that when we do that, it is a sin that we commit in the same way that the person before us has committed. Now, whenever that happens, he says, This person may cry to the Lord against you and you will be guilty of sin. So, whenever we are taken advantage of, the key ingredient for us is to stop and say to God, This person has taken advantage of me. I call on you for help. One of the greatest stories about this was Moses. Whenever the people of Israel rebelled against his leadership and authority, and they accused Moses of being unfair to them and not being a good leader and taking a position of greater authority and power than he should have. And Moses just prayed to the Lord and said, The Lord, you vindicate me. You vindicate me. He didn't try to fight back. He didn't try to strike out. He didn't try to hurt anybody. He just stepped back and said to the Lord, You are the only one who can tattle this issue. And immediately in the story, God stepped in and the people who attacked Moses became God's enemy and the score was settled. Now, what God is helping us understand is something about him. He also helps us understand something about human nature. And that is that when people have power, there is a great temptation to use it to control other people around you. Our culture thinks of power as a position of winning. So if I can have power over someone else, I win. This is the source of so many arguments among us in our homes, husbands and wives, parents and children, in our workplaces. But what the Bible helps us understand in God's nature is that he doesn't always win the battles as a result of pure, brute force. For what Christ did on the cross was to show us that yielding to the power of the enemy, letting the enemy do everything they want to you, sometimes is the path God has for us to win. So he says to you, whenever you get in trouble and someone hits you in the face, you have two choices. You can hit them back. And when he described this to Peter at the last days of his life, he said, if you live by force, you will die by force. He used the word sword. If you live by the sword, you die by the sword. But what he was talking about with Peter is, if you start a fight right now with your own strength and power, somebody is going to strike back at you. So whenever you try to use force and power to be able to win, you always generate force and power from the other side to attack you back. Jesus' remedy for this was to say to his followers, if somebody strikes you in the face to insult you or hurt you, just turn the other cheek. His method of dealing with conflict was to stop it without retaliation, so that you might have the ability to strike back, but you give it up. Now, when you give it up, God is not saying, okay, I want you to be beat to a pulp. What he's really saying is, trust me to resolve this issue. That person may think they have force over you, but I have force greater than theirs. Trust me. What God asked from his people all the way along was to believe that he's always on the side of the person who is in the most vulnerable position. And if you are his child, he will stand between you and your enemy. His covenant promise was, I will protect you. Your enemy will be my enemy. That's what his promise was to Abraham, and it is to us. Anybody who makes you their enemy, they have made God their enemy, because you're his child. Now, you can hold on to that, but you can only hold on to it if you live in submission to what God asks of you, which is to return good for evil, pray for your enemy, pray for those who despitefully use you, and trust the power and the hand of God to give you the victory. God's method of dealing with brute force is to return good for evil, to love in the middle of hate, to forgive in the presence of anger and resentment and bitterness. So, what he's talking about in the Old Testament is a principle that goes all the way through the Bible. God takes the side of his people who belong to him and will stand between them and their oppressor. It is the message that God gives us, and it is a lifestyle contrary to the wisdom of the world. And if you live this, people will not say you're wise or you're smart. They will think instead that you're weak. We give up our strength to depend on the strength of God. You're trading your own human wisdom and strength for the power of Almighty God. And in this story, what he's telling us is I am always on the side of the person who needs me most. And you can count on it. Let's pray. I want to ask you if there are circumstances in your own life in which you've been mistreated or abused or cheated even, and you've tried to get even. You've said words you shouldn't say. You've done things you shouldn't have done. You've acted as you weren't supposed to. And you had a good reason because someone tried to take advantage of you or to hurt you or to cheat you or to steal from you. Apologize to God for thinking that you have to settle every score. Ask him to give you strength and wisdom if it happens again to say, Okay, God, I'll turn the other cheek. I trust you to settle this. And when you hire somebody to work for you, whether it's at a restaurant or wherever it is, remember they're at your mercy. The clerk can't say anything back to you. The waiter or waitress can't say anything back to you. They depend on you to be fair with them. And God really notices how we handle our finances. And so we ask, Father, that you would help us to be conscious of treating people financially fair, making sure that we treat them with respect, making sure we won't take advantage of our position to control or to take advantage of others. Make us conscious always that the spirit that you have toward us we should have toward others. In the name of Christ we ask this. Amen.