God's Concern for Justice and Compassion

If you find that in your Bibles, Deuteronomy chapter 24, I want to begin with verse 6. And one of the things that is really important to get when you read the Old Testament and all the laws that are here, is that every single part of a person's life God feels is important. And He has rules about how He wants us to live all the parts of our lives. And He doesn't separate religious things from business things, from personal things, from marriage or relationships. All of those are part of what God demands of everyone. When Amos is writing about God's judgment on the people of Israel, he said, I saw the Lord standing by the altar, and He said, strike the tops of the pillars so that the thresholds shake. Cut off the heads of all the people. Those who are left I will kill with a sword. No one will get away. No one will escape. Though they dig down to the depths of the grave, from there My hand will take them. Though they climb to the heavens, from there I will bring them down. Though they hide themselves on top of Mount Carmel, there I will hunt them down and seize them. Though they hide from Me at the bottom of the sea, there I will command the serpent to bite them. Though they are driven into exile by their enemies, there I will command the sword to slay them. I will fix My eyes upon them for evil and not for good. The Lord Almighty, who touches the earth and it melts, who lives in it and it mourns, the whole land rises like the Nile, then sinks like the river of Egypt, who builds His lofty palace in heaven, He who sets His foundations on the earth, who calls the waters of the sea. In all of this He said, because the people of Israel were not treating people correctly. Those things that He talks about, because He sees in the life of the people of Israel the failure to live in obedience to the things that He has taught them to do. All of these things. He says He does this because the people trample the needy, do away with the poor of the land, saying when the new moon is over, that we may sell grain and the Sabbath be ended, that we may market wheat, skimping the measure and boosting the price, and cheating with dishonest scales, buying the poor with silver and the needy with a pair of sandals, selling even the sweeps with the wheat. The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob, I will never forget anything that they have done. He was mad because they were cheating in their business dealings. He was angry because they were treating the poor, taking advantage of the poor and cheating them and dealing with them fraudulently. It wasn't that they didn't believe in God, and it wasn't that they didn't go to the temple. It wasn't that they didn't make sacrifices. It was the everyday things that they did that made God say, I will cut their heads off. That's pretty vicious language. What God is trying to teach us is that every part of our lives is under His control. And if it is outside of His control, we become enemies of His. In chapter 24, He's dealing with a lot of the issues that are everyday kind of experiences for the people of Israel, and they are for us too. Here's a situation in which a person is very poor. Poverty in the biblical times was not an issue about simply giving people things. Poverty is a result of what happened to them that put people in a position where they're unable to care for themselves, and they needed help. Now the Bible didn't, in the Old Testament, God didn't instruct or forbid people to borrow money. I know there are some thoughts in Christian circles, you should never, ever borrow money. In the Old Testament, there's not a condemnation against borrowing money. It does say that when you borrow money, then you become a servant to the people who you borrow from. And what borrowing is, is pledging your future income to pay for something you have today. So you have to work for another person until you get that paid off, and that's what the Bible means by that. But the Bible didn't see it as an evil, but as something that needed to be managed and used only as a necessity. Now, when the Bible talks about people who are poor, it seldom ever talks about taking up an offering and giving it to the poor people. The Bible prefers that people in poverty would borrow money as opposed to simply giving them money because it causes a person who's poor to feel like they're taking care of themselves. They make a debt, and they pay it off. Now, in this debt arrangement, the poor person is likely to feel irresponsible and less valuable than the person who is loaning them the money. So God's concern is always for the weaker of these relationships. So his focus is on the poor person. Do not take a pair of millstones, or even the upper one, as security for a debt, because that would be taking a man's livelihood as security. Every home in the Bible and the Old Testament would have a mill set. It's like we would have a mixer in our house, and there were two stones they would put together with a hole in the middle. They would turn it around and around and around, and as the weight of the millstone would come down, it would grind the meal, whatever they were eating, barley or wheat or whatever it was. So every family had one of those, and every day, the wife would get up and grind the grain that was going to be used to bake the bread for that day. If you took the top of the millstone off, there were two pieces with a hole in the middle, you put the grain down there and turn it around and around and around. If you took the top off of it, no bread could be made. If you took the whole millstone, no bread could be cooked. So you were taking away the primary ingredient of their livelihood, the food that they would eat. So if a person came to you and you had adequate money to loan them money, you were not to take something that was valuable to them that they had to depend on for their livelihood. Now he talks about here a millstone, not even the upper one, so that they can't grind their grain, but there were many other things that they might find as absolutely necessity. For example, if they had one cow, and they had children that needed milk, if you took the cow then as a pledge for the loan, and they would have no milk, then you would take away the livelihood for the family. What God is saying is, when you make a financial arrangement if someone is poor, don't use the position of power that you have to ruin their lives. You must instead see this as a matter of caring for them. There are two elements to this. First of all, the person who is poor needs to have the integrity of making their own way. When you take money and you give it to someone, then they become dependent on you. They're not independent, that is making their own life, earning their own way, paying for themselves. So the Bible never encourages that. You have the integrity as a person to say, I need help financially. You go to someone else and you ask to borrow money, and then you pledge something of your own that is a necessity for that loan. So that if you don't pay the loan, then you forfeit something of value to you. But, the person who's making the loan is not allowed to take something that would ruin your livelihood or your life. So the first step is that the person who's poor maintains their dignity by making a business arrangement for what they need. Not an act of charity, but a business arrangement. The Bible commanded that loaning money to your brother who's in desperate circumstances, this is not talking about for an investment, or buying a TV, or buying a car, or doing something frivolous. It's talking about money necessary to live on. So you can make that arrangement. You have the dignity of going to someone and say, if you loan me money, I'll give you this as a pledge that I'll pay it back. But the person who makes the loan is not allowed to take something that would be a part of their life, necessary to their life. So there is dignity on the part of the poor person, compassion on the part of the one who lends the money, and a restraint on the person with power so that they don't do something to damage the life of the person who's poor and is not able to protect themselves. Verse 7 says, if a man caught kidnapping one of his brother Israelites and treating him as a slave or sells him, the kidnapper must die. You must purge the evil from among you. Now here he's talking about a person who has the ability or the power to take another person and sell them into slavery. That's what he's talking about. Remember the story of Joseph in the Bible, where Joseph's brothers didn't like him. So what they did was they took him and sold him to people who were slave traders who took him to Egypt and sold him to someone else. Now very seldom is there any account in the Old Testament for the death penalty. And usually it's for something that takes the life of another person. But here the life of a person has not been taken, but instead the life of the person has been torn away from the community of Israel. Now here's why that's important. God made a covenant with all the people of Israel. I will give you this land. This is your land to live on. This is my provision for you. So if you find someone who's vulnerable to you and you take that person and sell him to slave traders, he has lost the place that God has placed him in. He no longer has the land that God has given him. He's now a slave somewhere else in the world, the situation that Joseph was in. So you have destroyed or you have killed what I read somewhere, someone called it a social death, so that the person is now dead to his community and to his nation and to his family. He's not physically dead, but carried off somewhere to be lost to the promise God made him and to the people who are part of his life. So he's destroyed the work of God. He's destroyed the place the person is to be in. So his kidnapping is seen as a kind of death and not allowed and God does not allow it. Now, when you look at the Bible, when it talks about the Eighth Commandment, that you're not to steal, there are some ways in which that, especially in the book of Leviticus, where that Eighth Commandment, you're not to steal, is some ways in which that implies you're not to steal a person and to sell them as a slave. And so this reading in Deuteronomy is emphasizing that the commandment, we're not to steal, really focuses on everything, including people. You're never to take someone and to ruin their life by selling them into slavery. Now what God is doing is saying, you're not to use the power you have to take advantage of someone who's weaker to take their life and livelihood away from them. That's his demand. And here he places it as an ultimate punishment, the death penalty. Now in chapter 8, in verse 8 of chapter 24, in cases of leprosy, diseases, be very careful to do exactly as the priests who are Levites instruct you. You must follow carefully what I've commanded them. Remember what the Lord your God did to Miriam along the way after you came out of Egypt. Now this is a little bit of a difficulty for us because the word that's used for leprosy here is not what we think of in terms of leprosy. The word in the Bible in the Old Testament really was a word that was used to describe almost any kind of skin disease. The psoriasis, rash breaks out on your body. Any kind of skin disease was included in this word leprosy. The Greek word is lepra. So anything that was included, any kind of skin disease was included. Now in the 1800s, a man named Hansen discovered a very viral form of skin disease we call in our language leprosy. It's where a fungus gets under the skin and is infected and it deadens the skin so you don't feel anything about it. And then it finally ends up your part of your limbs fall off or your foot or your arm and that's what we see as leprosy. But when the Bible uses the word leprosy, it usually is talking about all kinds of it. When you go back to look at the instructions given to the priests about this, there are certain rules they have. If you have a breakout on your arm, you go to the priest and he looks at it and he sees certain things that are symptoms of different kinds of diseases. If it's like we would call psoriasis, he looks at it and says, okay, you go home, you come back in a week and I'll see what's happened. And if the skin's turned dark or if it's turned white or the hair on your arm or leg has turned a different color. All of those were signs to determine whether it was one kind of skin disease or another. All of them were called leprosy. But the one that we call leprosy, if that was discovered, then the person was to be banished from any community because it was a very contagious disease or it's seen as a disease that they thought would be contagious. Here he's simply talking about the general case of skin diseases. So if you think of it that way, in case of skin diseases, be very careful to do exactly as the priests who are Levites instruct you. You must follow carefully what I've commanded them. Remember what the Lord your God did to Miriam along the way after you came out of Egypt. Now leprosy, what we call leprosy, was one of the categories of this and what he's warning them about is be careful about your physical health. If you have something that's contagious, you go to the priest and he will go through the rituals that are laid out in the book of Leviticus to determine, in our language, whether you have a skin rash or leprosy, whether you have psoriasis and you're just having, whenever it's dry weather, your skin gets dry and it gets itchy and flakes off, if that's what you have or if you have leprosy. Don't take a chance that what you have will be contagious with the people around you. That's what he's talking about. If you have a disease that is serious and could be contracted by someone else, do not take the risk of harming another person with your disease. Now that could do a lot of things for us. For example, if it's a time when flu is going around, if you have cough, you be careful about your cough until you know exactly what it is. Don't be around babies, don't be around people who are sick, don't be around anyone who could be contracting something that would be dangerous for them. The obligation on the sick person is to think of others ahead of themselves. Does that ring for you, New Testament-like? You think of other people's interests more than yourself? I hate to miss work because I need the money. But when you go into work and you're sick and you make other people around you who might not be able to throw off your disease, it might be more dangerous to them because of their weakened condition or some circumstance they have, you're thoughtless and careless and God commands you to be sure that whatever illness you have, you're never in a position to give it to someone else. Now I'm not sure that we ever thought that it mattered to God whether you sneezed in your arm or not, but see that's what He's talking about. Be careful because you have an obligation to the people around you to make sure that whatever you have does not affect their health. God is concerned about every single part of our lives. I have to admit, I have never thought when I got up and I was coughing or doing something like that of saying, God, should I go in to work and be around people today? But I realize when I look at this that this is an important ingredient in what God does. Because what it does is it puts the interest of other people ahead of your own. It's the very nature of love. So take care and make sure that you get checked out. When He says go to the Levites, the Levites were the doctors. They could examine the skin. They knew all the symptoms to tell whether it was a psoriasis or whether it was something more contagious or more deadly. So go to your doctor. Find out if what you have is going to be contagious and make sure that you don't do anything to endanger the life of another person. This is a spiritual command of God, even about your health with regard to that. Verse 10 He says, When you make a loan of any kind to your neighbor, do not go into his house to get what he is offering as a pledge. Stay outside and let the man to whom you are making the loan bring the pledge out to you. If the man is poor, do not go to sleep with his pledge in your possession. Turn his cloak to him by sunset so that he may sleep in it. Then he will thank you and it will be regarded as a righteous act in the sight of the Lord your God. I remember when I was a boy growing up, I went to the bank. I was going to buy some hogs and I was going to feed those hogs out. I was a senior in high school, going into senior year in high school, and I thought if I bought a bunch of hogs, I would end up buying 24 of them, and if I thought if I could buy those hogs and buy a truckload of corn, I could really make some money. So I had to go to the bank to borrow money. When I went into the bank to sit down with a banker, I felt like I was a beggar. He was sitting there at his desk, like, okay son, what do you want, and it was a condescending attitude toward me. It was like, I am a good guy, and you are some kind of bum coming in here to borrow money from me. It was a very difficult thing for me to do. Now what he is talking about here is that when a person is in a position of weakness, they are poor, and they have to borrow money, they feel less worthy than a person who has sufficient money. So if someone is like that, and you are in a position to loan them money, you might come to their house and say, well, I would like to come in your house and look around and see what I would like to have as a pledge for this loan. We call it collateral. Whenever a loan was made in the Bible times, God required or allowed for collateral to be given. But when the person who was making the loan went to the person's house, he had to respect the integrity of that person's home. He couldn't go inside the home because it belonged to the person who was borrowing the money. He could come to the front door and he could say, would you bring me the collateral? And then the person could select whatever they want and bring it. If it wasn't satisfactory, then he could go back in and continue to bring until something satisfactory for the collateral was made. But the person who made the loan had to respect the integrity of the person who was borrowing the money. There was not to be any sense of I am better than you and you are not as good as I am. And I think a lot of people who go to borrow money in financial institutions sometimes feel as if those institutions look down on you because you have to come in and borrow money. The Bible wants everybody to feel that they are people of respect and integrity because all of us are made in God's image. And one person, just because they have money, is not to look down on another person because they don't. So the requirement was placed on the person who makes the loan to make sure that they don't take advantage of the power that they have and use it to diminish the borrower's sense of respect and dignity. He is to treat the person who is borrowing the money with respect and dignity. Stay outside. Let the man to whom you are making the loan bring the pledge out to you. If the man is poor, do not go to sleep with his pledge in your possession. He talks about this in terms of a robe or a coat that a person would wear. And sometimes a coat was made as a pledge because people didn't have a whole bunch of them. They usually just had one. And the coat they used, they'd use it to wear it outside when it was cold. They would also use it at night to cover themselves in the cold of the night. And if you had his only coat, which would be normally the case, most people just had one. And he went to sleep at night, he might sleep cold and not sleep well. And that was not acceptable to God. So you can go to his house in the morning, and when he gets up, he can come out and give you the pledge, his coat. And you can keep it all day long, but your obligation as the lender is to have it back at his house before sundown. Now, we're not exactly sure why they would take the risk of doing that except to remind the man every day that this loan that you have, this money that you borrowed, is tied up with this collateral and you are to pay it. It's also to mean that the collateral can't be used for several different loans. You have heard of people who have borrowed money on things two or three times. It is a crime in our country, and it's a crime in God's eyes because it's fraud. So if you borrow money on your coat and you then give it to the person you borrowed from, it's impossible for you to go to another person and borrow money on the same things. It kept your borrowing at a small amount, one person at a time. It encouraged you to pay your bills and make sure you get your collateral back. It was a check of integrity on both the borrower and the lender so that the borrower could have their dignity and have some sense in which they had responsibility to pay that loan off. And the lender had to look at the borrower with respect and accept their responsibility to be careful to treat the person with dignity and respect. All the way through this story, how God gives instructions, you see that he makes sure that whether you're a person of power and strength, financial or otherwise, or a person of weakness, that there is mutual protection and respect on both sides. Now what he's talking to us about here is whenever you borrow money, you must make sure that you pay it back. It is an obligation that you have. He also gives us some idea about what borrowing money really is about. If you have a coat that is worth $20 and you borrow $20, you're not bankrupt. You can take the coat worth $20 and sell it and you can pay off your debt. The Bible does not encourage us to borrow money beyond the ability that we have to pay that debt, which would put us in bankruptcy. You can borrow money, but you have to have some kind of collateral to back that loan up because it is financially required of you in Scripture. Nowhere does it indicate that a person is to borrow money if they don't have some way of making sure that it can be paid back. A lot of the discussion about never borrowing money in our culture, especially in the religious circles, focuses on the fact that you should never ever have debt. Well the Bible means by that, when it talks about that, that if you borrow $50 and you have $50 worth of assets, you're not really over your head in debt. But you must make sure that you don't move beyond that line. That's what the Bible requires. Now this is respect and care for both the lender and the borrower. God is concerned about both sides of this dimension. He's concerned that the borrower is not fraudulent, making two or three loans without enough to pay it back. He's concerned that the person who's making the loan has a good opportunity to be able to recover the money that he has loaned and be able to make sure that he's not cheated himself or loses in that process. So what God is interested in are fair dealings, fair trading, opportunities for both people to be able to do something good and to be able to help each other. Of course the person who's making the loan at no interest is helping the person who's poor without any financial gain for himself, but he is doing what God has instructed him to do. Why would a person loan money at no interest? Only one reason, because the person who has money is recognizing that the money they have is really God's, and God's care for the poor Israelite is done through the person who's been blessed. You see, God sees our blessings, our material blessings, as a way by which he's enabled us to do his work with it, to help those who are needy, to support the kingdom of God, to support the work that God is doing in the world. God could do everything he wanted to without that. For example, the poor man could get up in the morning and say, Lord, I have no money. I have no money to feed my family, no money to buy grain, to plant, to fur crop, and God could just put enough money on his front porch automatically by his own power so he could make it through the day. God's plan is, I will give someone assets, and they will do the work of loaning for me. So the loan is really God's money. The collateral is allowing this person who's borrowed the money to understand there's a responsibility to pay it back. God is at work in the house of Israel to help both those who have plenty and those who are needy. This is God's plan for dealing with people who have financial needs. Much better than what we have where we just give money to people and there is no sense of obligation on their part or no sense that it's a spiritual thing that's happened to them and no sense of how they're going to take care of that obligation to God either. Oftentimes there gets to be a spirit of, you owe me this. I had a guy come into the church one time and he wanted me to give him $10. He talked about how good a Christian he was, how wonderful a guy he was, and how he went to church, and all these spiritual and religious things, and he wanted me to give him $10. He was riding a motorcycle. He wanted a gas to get back to Greensburg because he was mad and he got his motorcycle and just rode off and got way up here and didn't realize he didn't have enough gas to get back. I said, well, I'll go down and fill your gas up with you, your tank up. No, he just wanted $10. Well, he said, you know, I need also to eat. I said, well, I'll go down and fill your gas tank up and I'll give you some money to buy you a meal. No, I said, I want $10, and when he realized that I wasn't going to give him $10, he cussed me out. He started out telling me how wonderful a Christian he was, but what I was trying to do was to let him know that God was going to provide his need, but nothing more than that. That's what the scripture is talking about. In this way, a person doesn't profit from this, but if there's genuine need, they have some help for it. What God wants us to do is to realize we have an obligation to the people around us to try to help those who need help, but it's not necessarily simply giving them money. It's helping them regain their sense of responsibility and to take care of the needs that they have around them too. What these passages talk about with us is every part of our life, whether it's skin rashes or finances or loans, every part of our life, God sees as a way by which a righteous person acts or whether or not a person's actions are unrighteous. God sees what's happening in our lives, and all of these things let him know whether he controls us or our culture controls us or our pocketbook controls us or the people around us control us. For the Bible describes a follower of God as a person who makes their choices and decisions based on what God has told them to do and nothing else. Let's pray. Father, we ask in the way that we live, we come across a lot of people who are in need, and sometimes we ourselves are in need. We sometimes are faced with situations to decide about whether we're going to go to work or not or whether we're going to be in church or not. It's because we're sick, and sometimes we're pressured because of the finances to make choices that might endanger other people. Sometimes we see people who are needy, we turn our hearts off. Sometimes we're emotional, we don't help them, we just create dependent people. We know that you have wisdom in all these things. Help us know how to treat the people around us that they might know that we care for them. We don't want their approval, but we want yours. In the name of Christ, we ask for this wisdom, amen.