Archives for November 2021

Bigger Than Anything, Part 1

November 29, 2021 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

We have some odd ideas about God.

I hear students say, “We won our soccer game. Isn’t God good!”

Well, yes he is. But he was good to the team that lost, too.

“I passed my test. Praise God!”

But he would be worthy of praise just as certainly if you hadn’t passed.

The Bible’s story is very different from this sort of self-referential, circumstance-based thinking. God is good all the time. And he’s great all the time. He’s bigger than anything.

The shepherd boy goes up against a giant, and he kills him with a sling (1Sa 17.48-51). God’s greater than giants.
The Assyrian army surrounds and besieges Jerusalem, and the Angel of the Lord kills 185,000 Assyrian soldiers as they sleep in their tents (Is 37.36). God’s bigger than emperors and their armies.
Nahum says that God’s way is in the whirlwind and storm (Na 1.3). Have you ever seen a tornado? I’ve seen a town shortly after it was obliterated by one. Who sent that storm? God did. He’s bigger than the greatest natural forces we can ever imagine.

Let me go a step further.

He’s even bigger than sin! He doesn’t sin, and He doesn’t like us to sin, but it doesn’t frustrate Him or mess up His plans. He even uses it to accomplish His purposes.

Watch how it happens. I’d like to lay out the biblical story—what some call its “metanarrative”—in a couple of posts. It’s not a story in which we’re the heroes, or even the main characters. But it changes our lives and our fortunes.

The Promise (Ge 3)

The story I got in Sunday school was simple:

God makes a beautiful world, Adam ruins it, and God has to figure out a way to rescue him and still be just.

Simple enough for a child. But not accurate. That’s not really how the story goes—or perhaps more correctly, that’s not the point of the story.

This is more like it:

God hasn’t made this difficult, but Adam and Eve sin anyway. And God knows, and He confronts them. He pronounces judgment on each of them, and then He turns to the serpent, and in the midst of judgment, He speaks grace to Adam and Eve (Ge 3.15).
There will be a “seed.” And that “seed” will crush the serpent’s head. Out of unexpected failure, and shock, and fear, comes Hope.
Adam and Eve clearly don’t understand. She has a son and names him Cain, “getting,” because she’s gotten what God promised, a seed (Ge 4.1). Boy, is she ever wrong.
But God is doing what He wants. This is not Plan B; there is no Plan B. This is what He intended all along.

The People (Ge 12)

God finds a pagan man, an idol worshiper (Jos 24.2), and makes a completely unreasonable demand: Leave your home and your family, and go somewhere else. Where? I’m not telling you. Just go (Ge 12.1).
And Abram believes, and he goes. But he’s not exactly perfect; he’s afraid of a king, so he lies and tells him that his wife is his sister (Ge 12.13). And only direct intervention from God preserves the purity of the woman Abram’s supposed to protect. That’s a pretty serious failure.
Then Abram tries to help God keep his promise by having a child with his wife’s servant (Ge 16.3). That’s disappointing.
But by the time it’s over, Abram (now Abraham) and Sarah have a son, and everybody’s laughing (Gen 21.6). And that son has a son named Israel, who’s a cheater (Ge 25.26); and that son has 12 sons, 10 of whom sell their spoiled little brother into slavery (Ge 37.28); but they become the 12 tribes of Israel, and God has taken the first big step toward keeping His promise to crush the serpent’s head.

Next time, the story continues.

Part 2

Photo by Philip Graves on Unsplash

On Thanksgiving

November 25, 2021 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Here’s my annual Thanksgiving post.

Even in tumultuous times, we have much to be thankful for.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

How It Ends, Part 5: Living in the Now—Diligent Occupation

November 22, 2021 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Part 1: Taking the Long View | Part 2: Anticipating the Then | Part 3: Living in the Now—Confident Expectation | Part 4: Living in the Now—Patient Endurance

God has shown us a glimpse or two of how this life transitions to the eternal. The details are sketchy, but the overall picture is clear: we have perfect fellowship with the infinitely, eternally, unchangeably good God, and we serve him meaningfully and perfectly, having shed our personal flaws and having entered an unbroken cosmos. In the meantime, the Scripture tells us, we endure the difficulties of the present broken world because we are eagerly anticipating what is to come.

But we’re not just hanging on, waiting for the good stuff. And we’re not just passive, waiting for God to do what he’s promised.

There’s good stuff now. Lots of it. And there’s work to be done—joyously, effectively, redemptively.

Jesus himself told us how our energy should be directed during these days of anticipation.

Shortly before his death, he told a story about a nobleman who “went to a distant country to get royal power for himself and then return” (Lk 19.12). He gathered his servants, gave them resources, and said, “Do business with these until I come back” (Lk 19.13).

Our more familiar KJV renders that statement, “Occupy till I come.” The less formal NIV says, “Put this money to work until I come back.”

And the story ends with two servants being rewarded, on his return, for their diligence, and one being condemned for being more concerned with security than productivity.

Did Jesus intend for this story to guide our time as we wait for his return?

You think?

Jesus set the example himself. As a boy of twelve—too young to be a rabbi, at a time too early for the death his Father had planned for him—he wasn’t playing the 1^st-century equivalent of video games. He was about his Father’s business. When the family was in Jerusalem—as it likely was at least three times a year, for the pilgrimage feasts—he headed for his Father’s house. And he was surprised that his parents didn’t think to look for him there first.

The Father’s business.

The Father has invested in all of his people, in different ways. We’re all good at something—some of us at many things—and we can do those things for him, and his work, and his people. There’s great joy in doing something well; God has kindly set up the world so that our greatest joy is in doing well those things for which we are gifted—and thereby accomplishing his work, showing all who see us the glories of the invisible God.

I started life on a little family farm. There’s great satisfaction in working hard all day and then seeing the visible results of your labor—the plowing, the planting, the irrigating, the weeding, the piles of harvested corn, the shucked ears hanging to dry, the ground corn meal, the well-fed cattle, the milk, the butter, the cheese, the beef. Every day there’s a new opportunity for the joy of accomplishment and the visible and tasty fruits of your labor.

This week is Thanksgiving in the USA—the meal that takes hours to prepare and more hours to clean up after, but that lasts, seemingly, just 15 minutes. Yet we all know it’s worth it—not just for the 15 minutes of turkey and gravy and mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, but for the shared experience and fellowship.

How much more is our lifetime of preparation for the eternal feast worth it? Even in the preparation there’s joy of visible accomplishment—changed lives, examples of mercy and grace—and joy of fellowship, working together toward a goal that’s bigger than all of us.

When The Day arrives, his servants shall serve him (Re 22.3).

Better get some practice.

²⁰The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.”
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!
²¹The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen (Re 22.20-21).

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

How It Ends, Part 4: Living in the Now—Patient Endurance

November 18, 2021 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Taking the Long View | Part 2: Anticipating the Then | Part 3: Living in the Now—Confident Expectation

We live now in the confident expectation of Christ’s certain return.

But in spite of that bright light at the end of the tunnel, we do indeed live in a tunnel, and roses don’t grow in tunnels. The Bible has more to say about how we live as we anticipate The Light.

After lambasting those of his day who hold all the social power and oppress those who don’t (Jam 5.1-6), James turns to the unempowered—which in those days included the Christians—and says,

⁷Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. ⁸Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh (Jam 5.7-8).

Be patient, he says. This is the word used to describe Abraham’s waiting—for years—for a son through Sarah (He 6.15). It’s the word used to describe the Lord’s waiting for us to come to repentance (2P 3.9). It’s the first word listed in the virtues of love (1Co 13.4).

You know people like this. You’re all torqued about something, and in a frenzy, and there’s that old guy who’s just sitting calmly, at peace, in stark contrast to your gesticulations, your full-bore linear panic. And when the panic has passed and the chaos has settled, it becomes obvious that the old guy had the sensible response—usually because this isn’t his first rodeo. It’s those with long experience who are in a position to “keep calm and carry on”—to focus on executing the fundamentals when it looks like the other team is just going to run up the score. To be the tortoise rather than the hare.

The illustration James chooses for this characteristic is the farmer. He prepares the soil, and then plants the seed, and then prays for rain.

And then waits.

Most of us, being continental Americans, are used to four seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter. In much of the world, however, particularly the tropics, there are just two seasons: dry and rainy. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in equatorial countries (Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania) where the temperature—and the day length—hardly changes at all. What changes is the precipitation. In the dry season, we’ll go weeks with no rain. In the rainy season, we hardly ever miss a day of rain. If we’re doing work in the bush villages, we have to plan to avoid the rainy season, because the dirt roads will be completely impassable with mud.

Israel’s not tropical, but it does have a Mediterranean climate, where summers are warm and dry and winters are mild and wet. The first, or “early,” rains of the rainy season normally arrive right after the Feast of Booths (Sukkoth) in the fall, allowing the farmers to prepare the soil for the spring planting. The “latter” rains show up after planting, around Passover in the spring, and precipitate (pun absolutely intended) the growth of the crops.

If you’re a farmer, you can’t make it rain; you just follow the seasonal pattern, do your job, and hope this year’s precipitation is normal.

James tells us to think like the farmer.

We actually have a better deal. The farmer doesn’t know for sure that the rain will come as it usually does; droughts do happen. But we know that the Lord is surely returning, though we can’t predict the timing.

And yes, it takes longer than a few months. So far it’s taken close to 2000 years, and for all we know, it could take 100,000 more. (Yes, it could be today; but I’ve long ago lost patience [heh, heh] with the hyperbolic date-setting exploiters.)

And so we wait.

But not idly.

How It Ends, Part 3: Living in the Now—Confident Expectation

November 15, 2021 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Taking the Long View | Part 2: Anticipating the Then

If we’re living with the end in mind—an eternity living in intimate fellowship with God, and serving him perfectly—then how do we live now? What are our priorities?

Like all the most important questions, the Bible answers this one clearly. I’d like to offer three passages where the New Testament addresses the answer.

Anticipate with Confidence

In his last recorded words to his protégé Titus, whom he left on the island of Crete to oversee the churches there (Ti 1.5), Paul gives him some imperatives designed to last him for life:

¹¹For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, ¹²Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; ¹³Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; ¹⁴Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works (Ti 2.11-15).

Some of this he has said often elsewhere: in light of God’s grace to us (Ti 2.11), we should live seriously and righteously (Ti 2.12). No surprises there.

But then he adds a descriptor, a participle, that applies specifically to what we’ve been discussing; he says we are to “look for” Jesus’ return, the event that distinguishes the present age from the next, the event to which life as we know it points. This verb describes Simeon and Anna, and indeed all the Jews of their day, living under the bondage of Rome and the hated Roman puppet Herod the Great, as they anticipated and longed for the day when they would be liberated once more (Lk 2.25, 38). It describes Joseph of Arimathea, who as a member of the Sanhedrin, the Supreme Court of Israel, had not consented to the council’s condemnation of Jesus and then risked his career by asking Pilate for custodianship of the body of the crucified “blasphemer” (Mk 15.43; Lk 23.51)—a body that in the eyes of the council should be thrown out in the trash with the bodies of the other two miscreants. Joseph’s most noteworthy characteristic, in the eyes of the two Evangelists, is that he “was waiting for the kingdom of God.”

That’s our verb. That’s how we’re supposed to be thinking and living—“looking for” Jesus’ return. Or, as Paul calls it here, “that blessed hope.” I’ve noted before that biblical hope is different from how we use the word today. To us, hope is something we wish for. Maybe it’s likely, maybe it’s not; as is evident from the size of the jackpots, millions of people buy lottery tickets in the forlorn hope that one day they’ll hit the big one. Some wag has observed that a public lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. They hope, many of them fervently, even religiously. But if their dreams come true, they’ll be more surprised than anyone else.

That’s not biblical hope. Hope is the anticipation of a certain future event. It’s the president-elect waiting for Inauguration Day; it’s the senior who’s just passed all his final exams; it’s the engaged couple focused intently on the coming June Saturday.

This is not wishing; it’s explosive, confident anticipation. It’s taking the future to the bank.

There’s a lot we don’t know about the future. It may hold financial setbacks, or job loss, or terminal disease, or sudden, violent death. We don’t know what life will be like for our children and grandchildren, should the Lord tarry. Even as we study prophecy, we don’t know—for sure—when Jesus will return, or when it will be in relation to the Tribulation, or what the Millennium will be like, or which ZIP Code of the New Jerusalem we’ll occupy, or what we’ll do with our time—or the absence of it.

So many unanswered questions.

But this we do know.

Jesus is coming back. For us. And for justice. And for eternal day.

Anticipate, with confidence.

Next time, more ways to live as we anticipate.

Part 4: Living in the Now—Patient Endurance | Part 5: Living in the Now—Diligent Occupation

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

How It Ends, Part 2: Anticipating the Then

November 11, 2021 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Taking the Long View

I noted last time that there’s quite a bit of biblical material about the millennium. Assuming that the millennial passages should be taken with a reasonable amount of ordinary hermeneutic, this period will be characterized by

Natural peace, such as the lion lying down with the lamb (Is 11.6), after the manner of “Peace in the Valley”
Social peace, with nations beating their swords into plowshares (Is 2.4)
Spiritual peace, with the nations full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea (Is 11.9)
Political peace, as justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream (Am 5.24)

Our knowledge of the eternal state, however, is much less extensive. Most of it is confined to the last two chapters of the Bible, Revelation 21-22. The environment portrayed there seems to have two outstanding characteristics:

Perfect fellowship with God

God and the Lamb light the whole city (Re 21.23)—and likely the whole world, given that “the nations will walk by its light” (Re 21.24). Recall that at the Transfiguration, Jesus’ garments shone whiter than any launderer could bleach them (Mk 9.3); that Paul was blinded by Jesus’ heavenly glory (Ac 9.8-9, 18); and that when Jesus’ closest friend, John, saw him glorified, he fell at his feet (Re 1.17).

But there, all the barriers—sin, distance, visibility—will be removed. You and I are going to enjoy the open, intimate, personal presence of the Godhead.

Perfect service for God

There we will be in a position to worship God perfectly; we’re told that “his servants will worship him” (Re 22.3), in a time when we have bodies like Christ’s resurrected body (Php 3.21), and we will be like him in other ways as well (1Jn 3.2).

We worship him today, both in private and in public, but our worship is dented by our sinfulness, by distraction, by limitations of imagination and creativity, and by all sorts of other factors. Yet even in this broken state worship is highly satisfying, both to us and to God.

I recall attending church a few years ago in Arad, Israel, with a small Messianic Jewish congregation. They met in a house on Shabbat. As I entered, a young lady just inside the door asked, “What language?” When I answered, “English,” she twisted a knob on a small black box and handed it to me with a set of headphones. I entered the living room and sat down with 30 or 40 other people seated close together.

The preacher began speaking—in Hebrew—but I heard a live translation in English. As I looked around the room, I noticed that most had on headphones, but a handful had microphones as well, and they were speaking softly as the sermon continued. I learned afterward that translations were available in German, French, Spanish, Arabic, and a North African tribal language as well as English.

I couldn’t help thinking that this was a delightful foretaste of glory divine, of the day when every kingdom, tongue, tribe, and nation will be gathered around the throne, singing and shouting the praise of the Lion of Judah, the Lamb who was slain (Re 7.9ff).

Even here, worship can be delightful.

But there, there, all those limitations will be done away. We will worship him purely and completely, and we will serve him perfectly and successfully as well.

What will that service look like? Will there be white-collar and blue-collar jobs? Will there be physical kinds of service as well as spiritual? Will God send us shooting off through the regenerated universe on missions of importance to the accomplishing of his will?

All good questions; thanks for asking them. But by God’s choice—and his grace—we don’t know the answers. All we know is that we will serve him—and serve him perfectly.

So that means—to put it in absurdly simple terms—that everything’s going to turn out just fine.

And that presents us with a question: What do we do in the meantime? How do we think? How do we make decisions? How do we feel?

How do we live?

How It Ends, Part 1: Taking the Long View

November 8, 2021 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

It’s human nature to focus on the Now.

Sometimes that looks like shallowness: the magazines in the checkout line at the grocery store, the obsession with celebrities, many of whom are famous for nothing more than being famous.

Sometimes it looks like self-centeredness: hoarding, the manic grasping for whatever’s right in front of you, from Tickle Me Elmo to toilet paper, before somebody else gets it.

Sometimes it looks like fear, or even despair, over the state of the world, the suffering of so many, wave after wave of insoluble problems.

There’s a difference between stewardship—doing your best to approach life’s problems sensibly and successfully—and nearsightedness. From driving a car to inhabiting the C suite in a multinational corporation, we know that it’s unwise to obsess over the immediate or to downplay the long-term view.

It’s wise to proceed with the end in mind.

For the Christian, that means staying focused on the certain divine victory.

There are many who scoff at such things. It’s pie in the sky. It’s how the empowered and privileged manipulate the masses into not revolting and casting off exploitation.

I’m not for the empowered and privileged manipulating the masses into not revolting and casting off exploitation; the prophets talk a lot about that, and Jesus speaks to it as well. But I would argue that thinking eschatologically is not in fact pie in the sky, and it’s not properly used to manipulate the unempowered.

It’s not only a worthwhile occasional exercise; it’s the only way of life that makes any sense.

I’ve written here before on the difficulty of developing an eschatological system, because the prophetic genre is inherently and intentionally clouded; God intends that the prediction not be fully understood until it is fulfilled. I speculate that one reason he might do that is so that the outcome—and the accuracy of the prediction—would have maximum impact on the audience. If you’ve been trying unsuccessfully to figure out a puzzle for centuries, then the resolution is going to hit you like a ton of bricks.

That’s essentially what educators call discovery learning, and in my experience it’s the most impactful kind. When a student learns something for himself, he considers it his own personal property, and he’ll remember and use it for a long time—often for the rest of his life.

But even though interpreting the Bible’s eschatological material is difficult, and even though we’re unlikely to figure it all out ahead of time, and even though we have to come to our conclusions humbly, it’s still worth studying the material—first, because it’s Bible, and going to the metaphorical gym in your study of Scripture is a means of grace, building spiritual muscle in you; and second, because in this area of theology, as in all others, God has made the important stuff, the stuff necessary for now, clear enough. There are some things of which we can be certain.

I’d like to spend a few posts investigating how it all ends. There are significant arguments, as we would expect, over the path we follow to get there, and when that will happen, but the main truths of how it ends are pretty clear. And thus it’s equally clear how we should live now in light of where we’re headed.

I’ll note that while there’s quite a bit of biblical material on what we call the millennium, that material suffers from the same clarity problem that other prophecy does. Bible students can’t agree on whether the millennium is real or symbolic; whether it lasts a thousand years or something else; whether it’s in heaven or on earth; or even whether Christ is visibly ruling or not.

I’ll note that I have an opinion on all this—I’m premillennial, and I have what I think are good reasons for holding that position—but if it turns out that God has some other approach in mind, I’m not going to be overly surprised, and I’m not going to go all Peter at Caesarea Philippi (Mt 16.22-23) and try to change his mind.

So my concern in this series isn’t the millennium; I’ll let the millennium take care of the things of itself. I want to look at the very end, after everybody’s eschatological system has been either confirmed or, more likely, corrected. What then?

We have very little biblical material on that—what theologians call the eternal state, and what most people refer to, accurately or not, as “heaven.”

Next time we’ll see what we can wisely discern from that little bit of material.

Part 2: Anticipating the Then | Part 3: Living in the Now—Confident Expectation | Part 4: Living in the Now—Patient Endurance | Part 5: Living in the Now—Diligent Occupation

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Integrity Matters, Part 2: Case Study

November 4, 2021 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

Part 1: Two Commandments

In Acts 5, we read of Ananias and Sapphira, a couple in the church at Jerusalem, who sell a piece of land and donate some of the proceeds to the church.

The Motive: Personal Recognition (Ac 4.32-5.2)

Hidden under the surface of this simple and apparently commendable act, however, are two key facts:

They do this immediately after many other church members, including a highly esteemed man named Barnabas, have done something similar (Ac 4.32-37).
They lie by saying that the money they’ve donated is the entire proceeds of the sale (Ac 5.2, 8).

It’s pretty clear what’s going on here.

Everybody’s making sacrificial donations to the church. Ananias and Sapphira don’t want to appear selfish, and they want a piece of the action; they want the praise of their peers, but they don’t want to make the sacrifice Barnabas and others had made. And thus they’re willing to lie to get it.

Nearly all sin is based in pride and self-centeredness: you want something for yourself more than you want God to be glorified. And this in spite of the fact that God has already given us “all spiritual blessings” (Ep 1.3) and promises much more to come (Lk 6.38).

What would you do for recognition? What would you do to have fellow believers think well of you? If you’d do something God forbids, then you’ve made yourself into an idol that you worship. Can you think of anything more ridiculous?

You know, the physicists tell us that you and I don’t have nearly enough mass to be the center of the universe.

The Sin: Lying to God (Ac 5.3-4)

It’s obvious that Ananias and Sapphira lied to the church; but at bottom, as Peter tells them, they lied to God (Ac 5.4b)—who, by the way, is omniscient.

How hopeless is that?!

Sin, you see, makes you stupid.

Like the bank robber who wrote the holdup note on the back of one of his personalized checks.

They didn’t have to do any of this; as Peter tells them (Ac 5.4a), they were free to do what they wanted with their property and with the money they got from selling it. Did they really think God wouldn’t know what they had done?

That’s just stupid.

The Penalty: Death (Ac 5.5-10)

Ananias lies, and then he dies.

Does this penalty seem harsh?

I’ll confess that it seems harsh to me.

But this is a direct act of God—Peter didn’t call for it—and we know that God is just.

Now, in this country we don’t have the death penalty for lying or stealing. I suppose there are circumstances in which your lying or stealing might get you killed—stealing copper wire from an electrical power substation is pretty risky—but you’re not likely to be executed for lying.

But God is just, and in the end of time all the scales of justice will be balanced, and all evil will be accounted for. Don’t put him to the test.

It doesn’t stop with Ananias. His wife Sapphira doubles down on the lie, and she dies too.

Ananias, who is supposed to be a tender shepherd for his wife, leads her into sin instead of out of it. And her conspiracy just compounds the crime.

The Outcome: Fear (Ac 5.11)

And now the body, this body so eager to care for one another, this body so generous with their belongings, this body surrounded by the grace and power of God, is afraid.

That’s what sin does—even to innocent bystanders.

It corrupts and disturbs and poisons everything it touches; it turns a delightful situation into a fearful one.

Now, this isn’t how God wants us to live. “Fear not,” Jesus said repeatedly (Mt 10.28; Lk 5.10; 8.50; 12.7, 32; passim). Perfect love, John says, casts out fear (1Jn 4.18). We sons and daughters of God should live as adults, not little children; we should be motivated by love, not by fear.

Sin keeps us from doing that. Living a lie keeps us from doing that.

Integrity matters, for so many reasons more than just reputation.

Photo by Sean Foster on Unsplash

Integrity Matters, Part 1: Two Commandments

November 1, 2021 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

Everybody knows about the Ten Commandments. Not everybody knows what they are, and nobody obeys them perfectly, but the term is pervasive as an expression for Doing Good.

It’s been often observed that the commandments come on two tablets—not just literally (Ex 31.18), but logically as well. Commandments 1-4 address our relationship with God, answering to the Great Commandment (“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” Mt 22.36-38), while commandments 5-10 address our relationship with other humans, answering to the Second Commandment (“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” Mt 22.39). And within that second table, many have noticed that the last 4 seem to be related:

¹⁴You shall not commit adultery.
¹⁵You shall not steal.
¹⁶You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
¹⁷You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor (Ex 20.14-17).

Adultery and coveting (especially coveting your neighbor’s wife) seem of a piece, bookending the prohibitions on stealing and lying, or “bearing false witness.”

I’d like to spend a post or two on these last-mentioned two as connected. Stealing, I’d suggest, is really just a form of lying—which is why the two so often travel together.

Stealing, as we all know, is taking something that doesn’t belong to you. We know instinctively that that’s wrong, but it’s worth our time to think systematically through the reasons why.

Like all the other sins listed in the Second Table, stealing is failing to love your neighbor, since you’re depriving him of something that he has earned:

⁸Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. ⁹The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” ¹⁰Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law (Ro 13.8-10).

But when you do that, you’re engaging in a whole list of lies. You’re saying that
- Your neighbor is not in fact in the image of God, deserving your respect;
- What you’ve taken really and rightly belongs, or should belong, to you;
- God, your abundantly generous heavenly Father, hasn’t given you everything you need;
- You need more—and God doesn’t care enough about that need to give you what you need in a legitimate way;
- If you’re a believer, you’re saying that you haven’t taken off the cloak of ungodliness and put on the cloak of righteousness (Ep 4.17-25). You’re saying that God hasn’t fundamentally changed you from your unbelieving days. As a believer, you’re living as though you’re still by nature a child of wrath (Ep 2.3). That’s like being a square circle—it doesn’t make any sense at all.

So when you steal, you’re lying, in multiple and obvious ways. It’s no surprise, then, that Paul mentions both together:

²⁵So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. …²⁸Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy (Ep 4.25-28).

Note his requirement that thieves work “honestly” with their hands, in contrast with the lying way they had “worked” before.

When you steal, you’re not telling the truth, and you’re not living the truth. And there’s nothing good down that road. Since you don’t like it when other people do that to you, how can you possibly excuse it in yourself?

In the next post I’d like to look at an incident of lying and stealing in the Bible.

Part 2: Case Study

Photo by Sean Foster on Unsplash