Thou Shall Not Steal

Introduction:

What do we make of the relative agreement across cultures time and space on the 2nd tablet? That the world is built on universal moral laws that are as fixed and unbreakable as the physical laws.

The second table (commandments 5-10) is simply the codification of the nature of reality. This is the way the world works — there is no other sustainable way…

There are two types of laws: “stop sign” laws and “fire” laws, as explained by Dorothy Sayers. “Stop sign” laws are arbitrary rules created by humans for various purposes. Examples include traffic regulations, curfews, and minimum wage laws. These laws can be negotiated and changed with the agreement of relevant parties. Individuals may choose to disregard them if they disagree with them.

In contrast, “fire” laws are inherent laws of nature that are discovered rather than created. These laws, like gravity and inertia, cannot be altered by human intervention. Attempts to defy them will inevitably result in consequences. For example, touching fire will burn you, stepping off a roof will make you fall, and trying to stop a moving car with bare hands will be futile. These laws operate independently of human desires or opinions.

The 5th commandment — honor your father and mother that you may live long in the land — that promise is implicitly extended to all the commandments. For later God will command the parents to teach their children these laws. And if the children obey them, they will live long in the land.

Today we’re going to look at theft in three directions:

Stealing from Yourself
Stealing from Others
Stealing from God

I. Stealing from Yourself

Here’s a category I wouldn’t have thought of. Listen to the WLC:

The sins forbidden in the Eighth Commandment, besides the neglect of the duties required, are, theft, robbery, man-stealing, and receiving anything that is stolen; fraudulent dealing, false weights and measures, removing land marks, injustice and unfaithfulness in contracts between man and man, or in matters of trust; oppression, extortion, usury, bribery, vexatious lawsuits, unjust enclosures and depopulations; engrossing commodities to enhance the price; unlawful callings, and all other unjust or sinful ways of taking or withholding from our neighbor: What belongs to him, or of enriching ourselves; covetousness; inordinate prizing and affecting worldly goods; distrustful and distracting cares and studies in getting, keeping, and using them; envying at the prosperity of others; as likewise idleness, prodigality, wasteful gaming; and all other ways whereby we do unduly prejudice our own outward estate, and defrauding ourselves of the due use and comfort of that estate which God has given us.

I was surprised to find that in the older literature, stealing from oneself came up time and time again. How do we do that? The WLC lists various ways but for the most part, it all falls into the category of wastefulness.

Buying stuff you don’t need
Not taking care of the stuff you already have.

“…we must render to every man his due. In substance, then, the commandment forbids us to long after other men's goods, and, accordingly, requires every man to exert himself honestly in preserving his own.” — Calvin

And the primary expression of wastefulness in the old world was laziness — which is wasting of your life.

“He is a thief to himself, by idleness, when he misspends his time. He who spends his hours in pleasure and vanity robs himself of that precious time which God has given him…” — Watson

Proverbs 25:28 says, “A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.”

Explain

Proverbs 18:9 says, “Whoever is slack in his work is a brother to him who destroys.”

You have one life (picture)

Protestant work ethic… Puritan work ethic.

It boiled down to seeing time like CS Lewis saw people. Some of you may remember that statement from Lewis, that there are no ordinary people.

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

Just as Lewis saw that are no ordinary people. No unimportant people, the Puritans realized there were no unimportant moments. Every moment of every day was pregnant with possibility. They sought to live each one of those moments with a kind of happy sobriety. They sought to do what Kipling described — “to fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds run.”

So in order to obey the 8th commandment, we must stop stealing from ourselves. And almost all self-theft comes down to waste. And the most common kind of waste is expressed in various kinds of laziness.

It is in this way that the sluggard becomes a companion to him who destroys.

II. Stealing from Others

From there we move on to the more traditional form of theft. Namely stealing from others. This is wrong, in part, because there are no ordinary people.

Our sister church in Sioux Falls is going through the book of Judges right now. I was listening to the sermon on Gideon. The preacher brought out something I had never noticed — the similarities between the call of Moses and Gideon.

Both were in pretty low positions. Moses is out in the middle of nowhere. Gideon is hiding from the bad guys in the land. God appears to both and speaks to them. He promises both that he will be with them. They both ask for signs.

But most importantly (for our purposes today) both of these men are called to be instruments of judgment against a people who were committing systemic theft against another people.

That is of course with the slavery we see in Egypt is. It is the theft of a man’s life energy. In his 2nd Inaugural address, Lincoln describes slavery as “wringing your bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.”

And then in Judges, we might forget the context in which Gideon was called…

For whenever the Israelites planted crops, the Midianites and the Amalekites and the people of the East would come up against them. They would encamp against them and devour the produce of the land, as far as Gaza, and leave no sustenance in Israel and no sheep or ox or donkey. For they would come up with their livestock and their tents; they would come like locusts in number—both they and their camels could not be counted—so that they laid waste the land as they came in. And Israel was brought very low because of Midian. And the people of Israel cried out for help to the Lord. — Judges 6:6

And it was in this context that the Lord was aroused to bring the Midianites into utter ruin.

I bring this up for two reasons. Firstly because I’m not sure we understand how much God hates theft.

Proverbs 11:1 — God abhors a dishonest scale
Proverbs 23:10-11 — Do not move an ancient landmark or enter the fields of the fatherless, for their Redeemer is strong; he will plead their cause against you.

God isn’t playing. Very few things stir his anger like theft.

In his second inaugural, Lincoln understood that divine judgment had fallen on America —

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Why? Because when we steal from others, we indicate a sense of superiority over them. And not only them but also God.

“For we must consider, that what each individual possesses has not fallen to him by chance, but by the distribution of the sovereign Lord of all, that no one can pervert his means to bad purposes without committing a fraud on a divine dispensation.” — Calvin

Theft in all forms is committing fraud on divine dispensation. And sometimes, like in the case of slavery, society legalizes it — which changes absolutely nothing. Write the law however you want, “wringing your bread from the sweat of other men’s faces” is always wrong.

And of course, it is quite easy for us to be against something in our distant past that absolutely everybody disagrees with. But there’s a modern issue that bears many similarities…

Benjamin Franklin wrote, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”

How exactly to they vote themselves money? By electing politicians who promise to give them stuff. And where does the stuff come from? It either comes from selecting one part of the population and forcing them to pay more — or it comes from indebting our children.

I won’t go into all of this in detail. But I’m against “taxing the rich” for the same reason I’m against slavery. That’s not my stuff. I don’t have a right to it simply because a majority of my fellow citizens have decided it is so.

The founders foresaw this kind of thing quite clearly. This is a primary theme of Madison’s thinking in Federalist #10.

III. Stealing from God

The most obvious application has to do with generosity. Where Jesus says, “if you’ve done it to the least of these, you’ve done it unto me.” But also, if you haven’t done it to the lest of these, you haven’t done it unto me.

In Luke 12:16–21

16 And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, 17 and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ 18 And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” ’ 20 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ 21 So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”

The basic idea here is that God owns everything you have. He owns it, you’re just borrowing it. And while it is in your possession, he commands you to be generous.

Any plan to accumulate meaningful wealth that does not include meaningful generosity is a plan destined to fail.

Proverbs 13:22, “A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children, And the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous.”

Though he heap up silver like dust, and pile up clothing like clay, he may pile it up, but the righteous will wear it, and the innocent will divide the silver. — Job 27:16

Proverbs 28:8, “Whoever multiplies his wealth by interest and profit gathers it for him who is generous to the poor.”

“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.”

Any plan to accumulate meaningful wealth that does not include meaningful generosity is a plan destined to fail.

And let me be clear, this is not a law of the stop sign kind of thing. This isn’t the kind of law you can break. This is the kind of law you break yourself against.

What does that look like? Well, I would point you to something else Lewis said, “I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.”
But I don’t want to camp out on this subject too long. The truth is that financial generosity is just a subset of a larger thing. Just like laziness is a subset of wastefulness, generosity is a subset of the broader concept called stewardship.

We owe God our lives. He is our creator, sustainer, and redeemer. Our lives are not strictly our own. They belong to God. Same with our bodies. Same with our brains. Same with our time, talents, and treasure.

In 1 Corinthians 4:7, the apostle Paul provides three simple questions wind up being absolutely devastating to human pride and human stinginess toward God.

For who sees anything different in you?
What do you have that you did not receive?
If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?

The rhetorical questions in verse 7 are meant to devastate prideful stinginess. Especially the various forms of glory stealing that we commit against God.

Here’s the answer. You did not choose to be born and almost certainly, you will have no choice over when you die. Your whole life is a product of divine activity. Even if you devote yourself with puritanical diligence to hard work, thrift, and enterprise, we find that the conviction and energy to live that way come from God.

As the Apostle Paul writes elsewhere, “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” — 1 Corinthians 15:10

The truth is that in a very real way, all the sins we commit are fundamentally acts of theft. And this is not a perspective restricted to Christianity. We find this kind of thing clearly stated in various novels.

In the Kite Runner, “There is only one sin, only one, and that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right of a husband, you rob his children of a father. When you lie you steal someone's right to truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. There is no more wretched act than stealing.”

And many years before that, Stephen King wrote the following:

“The father of sin was theft; every one of the Ten Commandments boiled down to “Thou shalt not steal.” Murder was the theft of a life, adultery was the theft of a wife, covetousness the secret, slinking theft that took place in the cave of the heart. Blasphemy was the theft of God’s name, swiped from the House of the Lord and sent out to walk the streets like a strutting whore.”

Communion:

So in the end, we find that sin is simply theft. And I think that’s remarkable when you consider the cross.

What is God’s answer to a world that has broken itself by taking what did not belong to it? All sins comes down to stealing from others, from stealing from God, from stealing from ourselves. What is God’s answer to all of this wrongful taking?

God’s cure for our wrongful taking, is a great merciful giving.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.”

It is no coincidence that Jesus is crucified between two thieves. For at the end, that is the state of humanity. And the only question is how we will respond to the great giving of God’s great son.

Will we be like the thief on his left — unrepentant all the way to the end.
Or will we see the great gift of God’s only begotten son and say to him — remember me, represent me, forgive me!

For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. — 1 Corinthians 11:23-26