Robbing God

“But you say, ‘How have we robbed you?’ In your tithes and contributions. You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you. Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house.” – Malachi 3:8-10

I can think of people in my life—Dave would be among them—who have the gift of generosity. Who just as easily give away money as keep it. But that is something I’ve historically struggled with. It’s ugly to admit, but I tend to feel entitled to what I earn. A while back, I wrote a piece to myself entitled, “Why does God own everything?” and listed four main reasons: because he created it (“The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein,” Psalm 24:1-2). Because he can take it away at any time (“The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away,” Job 1:21). Because we can’t take it with us after we die (“For we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world,” 1 Timothy 6:7). And because he enables me to earn what I do. It is only by his grace that I was born a woman in the late 1900’s and not the late 1800’s; that I had a supportive family and educational opportunities; and so on. Deuteronomy 8:17-18 says, “Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth.” 

 

God owns everything, and this should change how I live. It does not negate the need for financial wisdom and prudence, but it frees me from anxiety and the desire to control money as a primary means of security. It shoots down my pride. It should lead to greater contentment, freedom from the need to compare what I have with others, and an even greater ability to materially enjoy what I do have. And it should lead me to give willingly, because what I have is not mine but God’s. He means it when he says we rob him when we keep for ourselves what should be accounted as his.

 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Earthly goods are given to be used, not to be collected… the disciple must receive his portion from God every day. If he stores it up as a permanent possession, he spoils not only the gift, but himself as well, for he sets his heart on his accumulated wealth, and makes it a barrier between himself and God. Where our treasure is, there is our heart, our security, our consolation, and our God.” My old pastor put it more succinctly: “Money is like manure: if you spread it around, it helps things grow. If you hoard it all in one big pile, it stinks.” Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of these not-so-self-evident truths.

Confession

“O my God, I am ashamed and blush to life my face to you, my God, for our iniquities have risen higher than our heads... what shall we say after this?... shall we break your commandments again?... Behold, we are before you in our guilt.” – Ezra 9:6, 10, 14-15

Ruth Haley Barton writes, “Our culture promotes a profound sense of denial about the presence of sin in our lives and the ways our sins and negative patterns wound others.” Perhaps that is why I am struck by Ezra’s genuine grief and open confession. When was the last time you told someone you felt ashamed about something? The tone of this part of the book seems far more personal than anything we have read thus far. 

There are three general kinds of confession: personal (between God and us), interpersonal (with a trusted friend or the person we have offended), and corporate (as a community or congregation). We see all three kinds here in Ezra 9-10: the personal confession of all who had taken foreign wives (10:14), interpersonal confession of Shecaniah to Ezra (10:2), and confession as an assembled congregation (9:10, 10:1, 10:9). 

For some reason, interpersonal confession seems hardest to do. It’s much easier to confess in private or in the anonymity of a large group, but much harder to look someone in the eye and admit your wrong. For one thing, most of us have seen few examples of this done well: it is rare to grow up with parents who model confession to each other or their kids, for others to personally apologize for their wrongs, for friends to be vulnerably and deeply committed to accountability. If anything, sheltering in place has given me plenty of chances to model confession to my kids: “I’m sorry I hurt you with my tone of voice.” “I’m sorry I turned my frustration about your brother onto you.” “I want you to know I said sorry to your Daddy after we fought.”

For another thing, interpersonal confession can reveal whether or not we are really confessing at all. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “Why should we not find it easier to go to a brother than to the holy God? But if we do, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution... Our brother breaks the circle of self-deception. A man who confesses his sins in the presence of a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the presence of God in the reality of the other person.” Whenever I feel the urge to brush off confessing my sin to someone, I at least try to examine that impulse. Am I really sorry, or am I just trying to make myself feel better and move on? 

“Confession,” writes Barton, “is good for the soul… because it opens us to the experience of being forgiven and the freedom that comes on the other side.” Confession leads not to shame but to release, because we have this promise: “If we confess our sins, he [God] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

Repentance Vs. Regret

“When the people of Israel cried out to the Lord on account of the Midianites, the Lord sent a prophet to the people of Israel. And he said to them, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I led you up from Egypt and brought you out of the house of slavery.” – Judges 6:7

Judges has a cycle of rebellion, retribution, repentance, and rescue, which is repeated six times throughout the course of the book. The fact that God sends an unnamed prophet here to speak to the Israelites suggests that there is something about their cry for help that may be regret, but falls short of true repentance. What is the difference between the two? Regret, or worldly sorrow (2 Corinthians 7), is sad over the consequences of sin rather than the sin itself. Once the consequences go away, the behavior returns. Repentance is sad at how the sin grieves God and results in the loss of a relationship with him. Repentance opens the door to grace and restoration, the ability to move on past the sin. 

Regret is about ourselves; repentance is about God. The prophet’s brief sermon is entirely God-centered: he wants them to see who God is and what He has done; he wants to drive home what their disobedience means to that God, rather than just what their disobedience means to them.  

How can we discern whether we respond to sin with regret or repentance? We can go to God’s word, just as the prophet quotes God to his people. We can observe patterns of sin in our lives. As one commentator wrote, “If you are continually falling into the same spiritual pit and your falls are not decreasing in number or intensity, you may be responding to sin in regret rather than repentance. In other words, you may regret the troubles your sin causes but be unwilling to reject the idol underlying the sin, which is still attractive to you.”

We can examine our patterns of confession. It is telling that we so often find it easier to confess alone or within a congregation than to one or two other people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it well:

“Why is it that it is often easier for us to confess our sins to God than to a brother? God is holy and sinless, He is a just judge of evil and the enemy of all disobedience. But a brother is sinful as we are. He knows from his own experience the dark night of secret sin. Why should we not find it easier to go to a brother than to the holy God? But if we do, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution... Who can give us the certainty that, in the confession and the forgiveness of our sins, we are not dealing with ourselves but with the living God? God gives us this certainty through our brother. Our brother breaks the circle of self-deception. A man who confesses his sins in the presence of a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the presence of God in the reality of the other person.”

Wealth In Poverty

“One pretends to be rich, yet has nothing; another pretends to be poor, yet has great wealth.” – Proverbs 13:7

I kind of laughed when I came across this in our reading, because it seems so Bay Area. It’s like that scene from “Always Be My Maybe,” when Marcus says, “I thought this was a high-end restaurant. Why am I the only one wearing a tux?” and Sasha replies, “Oh, sorry, I should have told you. Rich people are done with fancy clothes. Now it’s all $4,000 T-shirts that look like they were stolen off the homeless.”

There is some debate regarding the translation of this verse; some suggest it reads closer to “one makes himself rich, yet has nothing; another makes himself poor, yet has great wealth.” Regardless, the point is that true poverty, and true wealth, does not always meet the eye. We ought to be wary of judging anyone based on how wealthy they appear. We ought to be wary of judging our own conditions based on how propitious or inauspicious they may seem. Jesus says the poor in spirit will have the kingdom of heaven, and the meek the earth: nothing is what it seems, or perhaps we need to learn how to look anew.

This is part of the hope Christmas offers us: the most wonderful thing in the history of the world happened in an insignificant stable in an insignificant village.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it well in a letter he wrote his fiancé, Maria von Wedemeyer, from prison on December 13, 1943:

“Be brave for my sake, dearest Maria, even if this letter is your only token of my love this Christmas-tide. We shall both experience a few dark hours—why should we disguise that from each other? We shall ponder the incomprehensibility of our lot and be assailed by the question of why, over and above the darkness already enshrouding humanity, we should be subjected to the bitter anguish of a separation whose purpose we fail to understand… And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.” 

Mary Sings A Prayer

“My soul magnifies the Lord.” – Luke 1:46

What does it take to know scripture so well that its words are the ones that you think and speak during the most critical moments of your life? 

Mary’s song in Luke 1 is very similar to Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel chapter 2: too similar to escape notice, yet not an exact replica. Both are about God exalting the lowly and bringing down the proud, about the poor versus the rich and the hungry versus the full. Both rejoice in God’s holiness and have the same movement from personal to corporate deliverance. But the phrases are never exactly the same. “My heart rejoices… in your deliverance,” prays Hannah. “My spirit rejoices in God my Savior,” sings Mary. “The bows of the mighty are broken,” prays Hannah. “He has brought down the mighty,” sings Mary. “My heart exults in the Lord,” prays Hannah. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” sings Mary.

It’s almost as if Mary has taken Hannah’s words and internalized them so deeply that they can rise back out of her, transformed now by Mary’s own experience. And Mary was, well, a nobody. She was a poor peasant girl from a small town nobody cared about. She was no Jewish scholar. When she goes with Joseph later to present Jesus at the temple, they bring two birds, meaning they couldn’t even afford one lamb. She calls herself someone “of humble estate.” Yet at this significant moment in her life, words rise out of her that Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls, “the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung.”

What does it take for scripture to rise out of us like that? The picture I get is a steepening, a saturation, a deep kind of working-through. The way tea leaves steep in water: received, unfurling, releasing, until every part of the water is changed, the new aroma rising up into the air. This is no momentary encounter. Think of the things that rise unbidden in you: lyrics of an oft-played song, stanzas of a well-loved poem, words spoken by someone loved but now gone. Who knows if Hannah was a person like that to Mary, a mentor perhaps, who gave her hope through her own trials? Are there people in the scriptures who have been that to you? How do you saturate yourself with scripture?

Two Masters

“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life.” – Matthew 6:24-25

I’ve been thinking about this particular “therefore.” In the original text, of course, there is no separation between verses 24 and 25, but because we often start reading the more-popular section on anxiety starting with verse 25, we often miss the link: that anxiety is related to trying to serve two masters. 

That’s hardly a popular concept in a place where we like to think we can “have it all.” Hasn’t that belief seeped in some way into how we all think? But Jesus is uncomfortably black-and-white, either-or, about this. He speaks in absolute terms: “no one,” “cannot,” love, devotion, hatred and contempt. “Money” here is Greek mamonas, meaning “riches, possessions,” akin to a Hebrew word signifying “to be firm, steadfast” (from which we get our word “Amen”), and thus meaning also “that which is to be trusted.”

Jesus is saying, when it comes down to it, your heart can only trust and serve one or the other: God, or the currency of this world. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “God and the world, God and its goods are incompatible, because the world and its goods make a bid for our hearts, and only when they have won them do they become what they really are. That is how they thrive, and that is why they are incompatible with allegiance to God.” The currency of this world is a master; it owns us, and we serve it, whether we deliberately choose to or not. In fact, Jesus’ point here is not that we should serve God, but rather that we cannot serve both God and the world. If we think we can, we are already turning our love for God into hatred. We have already made the choice.

Therefore—for this reason—do not be anxious about your life. Anxiety is both a road to, and a symptom of, serving worldly currency. One could read the subsequent section as a contrast between the two masters, one the way of anxiety, that focuses on the trappings of life, the other the way of faith, that seeks first the God who gives true life and will provide all that we need. The question is, which master are we serving?

Forgiveness

“For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” – Matthew 6:14-15

“But does it teach that I am forgiven only because I have forgiven? No, the teaching is, and we have to take this teaching seriously, that if I do not forgive, I am not forgiven. I explain it like this: a man who has seen himself as a guilty, vile sinner before God knows his only hope of heaven is that God has forgiven him freely. The man who truly sees and knows and believes that, is one who cannot refuse to forgive another. So the man who does not forgive another does not know forgiveness himself.” – Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, p12

This verse has always bothered me, because it makes God’s forgiveness sound conditional. But, like Lloyd-Jones likes to say, “If you find yourself arguing with the Sermon on the Mount at any point, it means either that there is something wrong with you or else that your interpretation of the Sermon is wrong. I find that very valuable.” There’s something to that. The parts that grate on me the most are probably the parts worth pressing in to.

This verse bothered me because it seems like Jesus is saying, “if you do it for others, then I’ll do it for you,” like a bargain. But I think he’s actually saying, “if you do it for others, then you’ll know that you understand what I did for you,” like a fact, a statement of truth. 

I think too often, I don’t really receive God’s forgiveness as much as I bestow forgiveness on myself. It’s a kind of self-absolution, to avoid feeling guilty, so I can make myself feel better rather than truly change. I don’t see the depth or true nature of my sin, and I don’t see the cost of the forgiveness I receive. 

Reminds me of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship about costly grace: “Instead of following Christ, let the Christian enjoy the consolations of his grace! That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves… Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has… It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him… Such grace... is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life… Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His Son… and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us.”

Somehow, I think forgiving others should come easily to me, but in fact it should not. It cost Jesus his life. It should cost me something. It should cost me my life; it is the way of life as I follow Jesus. Just like receiving forgiveness from God can be a process—as I see and understand more about my own sin, as I learn and practice confession, as I open myself to receiving grace and forgiveness—forgiving others is a process. This is a good place to start, a kind of litmus test: if I cannot forgive someone else, how have I failed to receive God’s forgiveness for myself?

N.T. Wright writes that forgiveness is not a moral rule with attached sanctions: it is a way of life, God’s way of life, God’s way to life—“and if you close your heart to forgiveness, why, then you close your heart to forgiveness.. If you lock up the piano because you don’t want to play to somebody else, how can God play to you?... Not to forgive is to shut down a faculty in the innermost person, which happens to be the same faculty that can receive God’s forgiveness.”