Tithing
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome, and today we are talking about Malachi, or at least about a theme that Malachi talks a lot about. We’re actually going to be talking about tithing.
There’s a huge problem in the book of Nehemiah, which we will run through the narrative of. Ending a sentence with a preposition is my specialty.
In chapter 13 of Nehemiah, Nehemiah has taken a leave of absence and when he gets back he finds out that a number of things have not been tended to, and we’re going to look at just one in particular. This is starting in 13:10 –
And I perceived that the portions of the Levites had not been given them: for the Levites and the singers, that did the work, were fled every one to his field. Then contended I with the rulers and said, Why is the house of God forsaken? And I gathered them together, and set them in their place.
Then brought all Judah the tithe of the corn and the new wine and the oil unto the treasuries. And I made treasurers over the treasuries, Shelemiah the priest, and Zadok the scribe, and of the Levites, Pedaiah, and next to them was Hanan the son of Zaccur, the son of Mattaniah, for they were counted faithful, and their office was to distribute unto their brethren. Remember me, O my God, concerning this, and wipe not out my good deeds that I have done for the house of my God and for the offices thereof.
Crucial to the success of the restoration covenant was having a functioning temple and functioning pastors, men who taught the word of God. Strange thing about pastors – they have to be paid.
Really? I mean it seems like it’s something they should do out of the goodness of their hearts. I mean if their heart’s really in it they should consent to be at least underpaid, don’t you think?
Yes. I mean they don’t need to be paid as well as everybody else. They’re pastors. Their lot in life is to not have much, right?
Exactly, tempted by avarice. The Bible says they’re not supposed to be greedy of filthy lucre, so let’s make sure of that by not paying them very much.
That seems pretty foolproof to me. No logical issues or moral problems I can see with it.
Okay, let’s be clear that was all sarcasm. Please do not be confused, dear listeners.
Here are two examples out of my own past. My pastor when I was a kid, his wife told the story of how one morning she served bacon to her children, and the oldest was probably four or five and looked at it and said, “What’s that?”
We all know a young man who’s the grandson of a pastor who’s now gone to be with the Lord, and every time the subject came up in my class when he was there, I’d turn to him and say, “Does this sound familiar?” and he said, “Oh yeah, yeah. It’s when church members and even deacons turn to the pastor and say, ‘You know, you should be able to get along without a lot of money. God will take care of you. The rest of us have to work for our living.’”
There’s the story of the little kid who when asked, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” said, “I want to be a pastor.”
In my original article I have a quote from a gentleman named Mike Holmes, who I do not know otherwise. The article was published in 2013 and the title is, “What Would Happen if the Church Tithed?” The quote I salvaged was this, and this was in 2013: “Christians are giving only at 2.5% per capita, while during the Great Depression they gave at 3.3%.”
Yeah, you can point that out. During the Great Depression you might at least think people had a reason. Of course they were making a lot less money, so 10% would be a lot less money as far as that goes, but you know what? During the Great Depression pastors still had to eat, and pastors still have to eat.
One of the odd spectacles of our generation is those relatively few pastors who do make thousands and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. They have mansions and they have jet planes. Their receiving of money seems to attract more money. But most faithful pastors struggle to get along and to leave enough support for their widows after they’re gone. This is a real issue.
There’s a passage in Deuteronomy 8 which I’ve written about, and it speaks of God prospering us, giving us money, giving us wealth, to establish his covenant with us. At first glance that sounds really weird. “You need money to establish the covenant? Isn’t it all grace and the blood of Christ?”
Yes and no, because who’s going to go tell people about grace and the blood of Christ if you don’t pay them? Where are God’s people going to get together to worship? They probably need at least chairs to sit on. They may need a few bucks for that. Most of us in this pampered 21st century want a real building, central air conditioning, and central heating. That’s hardly necessary, but we’ve gotten used to it.
Then there’s publishing and printing Bibles and Christian literature, Sunday School materials, hymnbooks, having a computer system and speakers. There are all kinds of things that we think we need, and many of them we kind of do if we’re going to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth.
And it is a valid point, that you don’t want people to become pastors because of the money. You don’t want them to do it out of a love of filthy lucre, but the tithe as a mechanism short-circuits that. If you’re being paid the average of what 10 families make in your congregation, you’re not going to be the one who’s like, “Hmm, how come the butter is so rich on your bread?”
The interesting thing is that in Israel there were 12 tribes that were tithing to one, so if Israel was faithful, if Israel was ever faithful, the average Levite would probably be making a little bit more than average. At least there was a built-in safety net there.
There’s nothing in scripture that suggests that God expects pastors to be poor. On the other hand, Paul says many times that he’s willing to be poor, that he can abase and he can abound, that God will supply all his needs and pastors need to trust God, and yet we need to take care of our pastors.
I also think it’s important that we remember Paul was traveling to multiple different churches to establish new ones. He wasn’t someone from the community or even someone from outside the community who was established there and expected to be there week-in and week-out, day-in and day-out, caring for the needs of people.
For Paul’s situation – and that’s not to say that no pastor should follow Paul’s example – for those particular people it makes more sense to pay them for the labor that they’re doing day-in and day-out, just as Paul received pay from some of his longer-distance disciples for his missionary work.
But it does make more sense for Paul to be willing in his role as an apostle, as essentially an itinerant minister, to be willing to do that because it was about bringing the gospel to people who had never had it before. If you went to a place and said, “By the way, before I give you salvation I want you to pay me for the work of bringing you salvation,” that’s not the best foot to start off on, I think.
Particularly in the area of Corinth and the areas thereabout he was very adamant that he would not take pay from any of those churches because there were people who were saying exactly that about him, “He’s in it for the money,” and he wanted to put any occasion for that very far away, but he still took, as it were, checks from other congregations, as you said, from people who were far off.
So whereas we can talk about the pastor’s attitude, none of us is a pastor and that’s really not where I think we should be coming from. We need to start where we are as members of congregations who are ministered to by our pastors and what the Bible says we need to do. What they need to do they probably know. Most of them do it faithfully. Every now and then you run into a couch potato. I just heard the story of somebody who for eight years had been plagiarizing sermons off the internet, but that’s rare generally. I know in our circles most of our pastors work very, very hard, put in a lot of study, as well as doing counseling, Bible studies, confirmation classes, and all sorts of things, so God has provided a way to pay them.
Having said that, now we back up and people will say, “But wait. Tithing? That’s so…”
“…Old Testament. It’s a law. It’s not something that is required for salvation, because salvation is by grace and tithing would be a work.” Did I nail it?
There’s a lot of things that aren’t required for salvation that are still necessary.
Yeah. The question is not how we get saved. The question is what we are saved unto. Are we saved to be members of a body that supports itself and that needs to, well, eat. If you’ve had a cardiac arrest and someone brings you back to life and says, “You need food,” you don’t say, “No, I don’t. I came back to life for free.” Wait until you see your hospital bill. But having come back to life, you need to be eating, and somebody needs to make the meal, and in our world, even in the hospital world, somebody’s going to get paid.
That’s a matter of confusion. No, you don’t have to tithe to come to Christ. I remember talking to some Mormon girls at the door, and they had been coached really, really well. They propped all the old Mormon cliches and were trying to sound very evangelical, to the point where I finally just said, “Look, what do you have to do to be saved?”
“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Repent of your sins. Go to church. Tithe…” and they went on.
Now that’s a different gospel. That’s not tithing as a fruit of your faith. That’s tithing to earn forgiveness, and we’re not talking about that. Anybody who’s listening should have figured this one out by now, so we’re moving on.
Are there grounds in the New Testament for tithing? The first question I think is where does tithing start in the Bible? It starts with Abraham. It starts before God’s covenant with Abraham in chapter 15 and then the covenant of circumcision in 17.
Oh yes. For those who may not know the Bible, Abraham was way before Moses, so we’re before the Mosaic law and Mosaic covenant, but we’re even before the Abrahamic covenant. What we have is only the gospel promise.
God has called Abram out of Ur of the Chaldees and said, “In thy seed all nations will be blessed.” Paul in Galatians 3 calls that a preaching of the gospel, so we have the preaching of the gospel and Abram has responded in faith. Then there’s this whole thing where he takes on some Mesopotamian kings who’ve come into Canaan and raided the place, and when he’s done and coming back from the slaughter he meets this strange guy named Melchizedek, of whom we know very little, but we are told this in Genesis 14 –
And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine, and he was the priest of the most high God. And he blessed him and said, Blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth, and blessed be the most high God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand. And he gave him tithes of all.
And the king of Sodom said unto Abram, Give me the persons and take the goods to thyself. And Abram said to the king of Sodom, I have lifted up mine hand unto the LORD, the most high God, the possessor of heaven and earth, that I will not take from a thread even to a shoelatchet, and that I will not take any thing that is thine, lest thou shouldest say, I have made Abram rich, save only that which the young men have eaten, and the portion of the men which went with me, Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre. Let them take their portion.
There’s tithing. “He gave him tithes of all.” If you just read that you wouldn’t even be sure who was giving tithes to whom. “He blessed him.” Again it would be unclear until you read the whole passage in context.
The writer of Hebrews comes back and comments on the whole thing and makes it really clear that whoever Melchizedek was – and he says it means king of righteousness; it’s a title, not a name, so we don’t even know the guy’s name – he was king of Salem (peace, shalom), probably the original Jerusalem. So a prince of peace, a ruler of Jerusalem. Some people have even thought he was Jesus, but there’s language in Hebrews that suggests he’s not, although there are quarrels about that.
Whoever he was, he’s greater than Abraham on two counts: Melchizedek blesses Abram, and Abraham pays tithes to Melchizedek. What does Melchizedek do for Abram? He blesses him and he brings him bread and wine, which is to say as the priest of the Most High God he presents a – the indefinite article is important here – a communion meal, because to eat with God’s priest is to eat with God.
Now, this is not the eucharist. This is not the holy communion we know as Christians, but it’s certainly a foreshadowing of it because it’s the same elements. It’s bread and wine and it’s brought by a priest, and Abraham and his men eat with the priest, thus fellowshipping with God’s priest and so with God. It is to this man, who brings the bread and wine and who blesses him, that Abraham pays tithes, and here is this word tithe out of nowhere. It means 10%.
As we read through scripture we see it’s 10% of the increase, not 10% of your capital goods. God is not out to decapitalize his people, but where God blesses us then out of that increase, beginning here, he tells us he wants 10%. Abraham has just gotten money. He had just raided kings, and although he gave most of it back, apparently he gave 10% of his accumulated winnings to Melchizedek.
The next account is in Genesis 28. Here Jacob – who is Abram’s grandson, so we’re still under the Abrahamic covenant, but we haven’t got to Moses yet – is on his way to Syria to find a wife, and as he leaves the Promised Land he sleeps at a place that he’ll called Bethel. He sees a ladder to heaven, and angels going up and down, and then God speaks to him. When Jacob wakes, he’s afraid. He names the place Bethel, the house of God, and he promises that when he comes back he will give God 1/10 of all that he’s gained.
At that point he’s got nothing, a point he makes later. Although he’s heir to a great fortune, he actually says, “I just have my staff,” and apparently a bottle of oil for anointing the stone, and that’s about it.
Again there’s no positive commandment that we know about beforehand, and yet both of these men believed that this was something they ought to do, that they ought to tithe, to be taxed upon their increase, and both faithfully did. Jacob eventually when he comes back honors Bethel and makes it a place where God can be worshiped, and eventually the ark is there for a little while, and later on the tabernacle. So this is the pre-Mosaic history of the tithe that we know about. We don’t know a whole lot else.
There are things that the patriarchs knew, that they had been told, that are not recorded in scripture. For instance, Noah knew what clean and unclean animals were. There’s no record of how he knew that or when God told anybody, but obviously God had. So someplace along the line these men understood that this is what God wanted.
How do we know they didn’t just make it up? “This sounds like a good idea!” I once had a pastor tell me that since there’s no positive command in Genesis to sacrifice a lamb, Abel made up the whole sacrificing a lamb thing and God thought it was a good idea. No, that’s not the way the Bible works.
No, it’s called will worship, and Paul condemns it rather soundly in Colossians, so this is not will worship. This is not, “I’m thinking of a number. The number is…10.” When we do get to the Mosaic law, it’s very clear that 10% is the normal tithe, even to the point that when you’re tithing animals you stand there with a stick and tap them one by one as they go by, and you take every tenth animal.
Here’s a trick question I put on tests for my kids. “If you have 22 new sheep, how many do you tithe?” When it’s a multiple choice question it’s like, “a) 2, b) 3, c) 2.2, d) however the Spirit leads you.” The answer is you count the first 10 and pick one, you count the next 10 and pick another, and then you’re done. “But wait, here are these extra sheep! Isn’t God good? He lets you keep stuff.” So throughout the rest of scripture, a tithe is 10% of the increase.
Since we’re now reaching the end of the Old Testament, this is not the time to go back to the Mosaic law and look at all the uses of the tithe and distinctions people have made. Sometimes the tithe was used for celebrating feasts. Every third year, either as a second tithe or as a specified use of the normal tithe, it went to the poor. Those tell us things about how the Mosaic law fleshed out the tithe and showed us what it was all about and how it could be used and such, but that’s not the point because that’s wrapped up in the Levitical law.
Would it be sufficient perhaps to say the tithe is a form of first fruits offering, that it’s a token amount to say, “All of this is really God’s”?
That is a very important thing to say and thank you for saying it because I probably would have forgotten. I kind of take it for granted, and therefore often forget to say it. Yes, absolutely. As Americans we say, “God wants 10%?!” No, God wants 100%.
Yes, he’s letting you manage the other 90% for him. He wants 10% of that total to go to his church, to those who bless in his name and who present you with communion. This is why the tithe does not normally go to Christian schools or para-church organizations or other things. Those are fine things for the church itself to support, and they’re fine things for you to support with offerings above and beyond the tithe, because God does demand tithes and offerings. But the basic 10% needs to go to your pastor and your own church’s work because it has immediate needs, and God has judged that 10% should just about cover it.
You mentioned earlier that if you have 10 families and they’re tithing, then you can support a pastor. You can’t support a building on top of that very well, but if you’ve only got 10 families you can probably meet in someone’s house, as the early church often did.
It’s also interesting that under the Mosaic law when judges were apportioned, the lowest grouping was 10 families, so I think there’s an argument that at 10 families a church can become self-supporting. Less than that and you’ve got a mission work and it needs to grow. If after 20 years you still have a mission work and it’s not growing, people need to be evangelists or you probably need to defund it or just let them sink or swim on their own.
The thing that I left out of my summary, which I think is very important, is that Christ is our tithe, that he is spoken of as the first fruits, he as the first to rise. When God raised him from the dead, he became the first fruits of them that’s left, meaning all of those who trust in Christ are fully God’s, that he is the first to receive gifts on our behalf.
That is excellent, and if we undo that – wait, did we say this wasn’t a salvation issue? Everything is a salvation issue. Everything points to Jesus. Thank you for making that explicit on this one. I had not thought about that in those terms before, although I’ve heard people kind of talk around it but not so bluntly as that. I think that’s a very, very pertinent observation here.
To say, “God doesn’t need my 10%,” well, do you need Jesus? He is representative of the whole and he claims all that we are, and if we can’t give the 10% he demands we’re basically saying we don’t like God’s covenantal arrangement of life or of salvation, and that can be a very dangerous thing.
When we come to Hebrews, the writer starts to mention Melchizedek and says, “I’ve got a lot of stuff to say about him, but you’re kind of dull and not ready to hear it all,” and he goes off on a tangent for a while.
But in chapter 7 he comes back and says, “All right, here we go,” and he does tell us what he wants us to know, and here’s just a little bit of it that’s relevant. His point here is not to prove the continuation of the tithe, but it sort of drops out in the process, starting in 4:7 –
Now consider how great this man was, unto whom even the patriarch Abraham gave the tenth of the spoils [translating the word tithe for us]. And verily they that are of the sons of Levi, who receive the office of the priesthood, have a commandment to take tithes of the people according to the law, that is, of their brethren, though they come out of the loins of Abraham. But he whose descent is not counted from them [Melchizedek] received tithes of Abraham, and blessed him that had the promises.
And without all contradiction the less is blessed of the better. And here [on earth, in Israel] men that die receive tithes, but there he receiveth them of whom it is witnessed that he liveth. And as I may so say, Levi also, who receiveth tithes, paid tithes in Abraham. For he was yet in the loins of his father when Melchizedek met him.
If therefore perfection were by the Levitical priesthood (for under it the people received the law),what further need was there that another priest should rise after the order of Melchizedek, and not be called after the order of Aaron? For the priesthood being changed, there is made of necessity a change also of the law. For he of whom these things are spoken pertaineth to another tribe, of which no man gave attendance at the altar. For it is evident that our Lord sprang out of Juda; of which tribe Moses spake nothing concerning priesthood.
And it is yet far more evident, for that after the similitude of Melchizedek there ariseth another priest, who is made not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life. For he testifieth [Psalm 1:10], Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.
So Abraham, the father of all who believed, paid tithes to Melchizedek, who was greater than the father of all who believe, greater than the Abrahamic covenant, in that sense greater than the Old Testament version of the gospel administration.
Jesus picks up where Melchizedek left off. He is a priest after the order of Melchizedek. If our father Abraham paid tithes to the lesser Melchizedek, does it not follow that we should pay tithes to the true and greater Melchizedek? And if not, why not? And why don’t we want to, except the two appeals – “But that’s legalistic.” No, it’s called obedience. “If you love me, keep my commandments.” Or “But I can’t afford it.”
My roommate in college, when he ran into tithing for the first time, really struggled with it. He actually called Dr. Rushdoony and went to talk to him and said to Rushdoony, “You don’t understand. I’m a poor student. I can’t afford to tithe.” Rushdoony said, “It sounds to me like you can’t afford not to tithe.” Sometimes the way to kill the flesh is to demand of it what it can’t do, so that we’re thrown back on grace. We’re thrown back on faith.
Can I say from a practical perspective that 10% -- you know how if you’re on vacation for a long time and there are no demands on your time, suddenly you find yourself wondering where it’s all going? I found that money is the same way. If suddenly you think, “Oh my goodness, 10% is a significant portion,” it’s like, “Yeah, now you get to figure out how to manage the rest of it so that it’s enough,” and you’ll find that it is enough.
I’ve also found that weirdly enough when I am actively tithing, the other 90% covers more. I don’t understand how that works. But when I’m not, I also realize, “Oh wow, that just got used up really quick and I don’t know why.”
God is subtle and sneaky and he controls the universe in ways we don’t get. I think a lot of people have discovered that. When we are faithful, the money just somehow seems to go further or more easily or there are less demands on it or it shows up in the mail or something. When we’re not, it doesn’t seem to matter how much we have. It’s never quite enough because God keeps his end of things.
He’s promised that we will have enough to eat and to drink and to keep ourselves clothed, and ultimately that’s enough, and yet he goes far beyond that so often. He usually lets us have houses, which is kind of nice, and even with air conditioning.
Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse, for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation. Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.
And I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, and he shall not destroy the fruits of your ground, neither shall your vine cast her fruit before the time in the field, saith the LORD of hosts. And all nations shall call you blessed, for ye shall be a delightsome land, saith the LORD of hosts.
Tithes and offerings – God expects us to generously support the work of the church. The parallel book in the New Testament is 2 Corinthians, where Paul spends a lot of time talking about the need to give and how God loves a cheerful giver. So you want to be led by the Spirit? Let’s look at it this way. If the law with all of its limitations and imperfections only demanded 10%, surely the Spirit will lead you to give…less? Probably not.
Demands for the work of the gospel are great, and it’s not an accident that as we come to the end of Old Testament, both in the prophetic books and in the historical books, tithing reasserts itself. God promises a blessing, and if the work of the kingdom is to be forwarded in our generation, the money has got to come from someplace. Sometimes we are just a little too entitled. Even those of us who think of ourselves as poor, sometimes are just a little too entitled thinking, “We deserve all this. All our friends have all this, why shouldn’t we?”
God does not ask us to give up all the good things of life. There’s a series of sermons you could do out of Ecclesiastes on that little thing, and yet he does want us to give generously, particularly to those things he lays on our heart where we see opportunities, where we’re involved.
Paul says, speaking of one group of saints, “They gave not as we hoped, but first they gave of their own selves.” So personal involvement, prayers, thoughtful wise intentional giving, this is part of what it means for the gospel to advance. It is so not gnostic that it’s a bit amazing.
The alternative to financing God’s kingdom is – well, anyone look at their income tax bill lately?
Samuel said that when the king starts asking for more than 10% he’s a tyrant. We passed that a long time ago. To step backward into freedom and responsibility is to pick up tithing again, yes, in the face of the government confiscatory taxes, and rebuild in terms of the Christian faith. That means spending money on churches, missionary activity, Christian schools and orphanages, pro-life centers, Christian books, and you name it. There is lots to do before Jesus comes back.
Why do you think the topic of tithing comes in so heavily at the end of the Old Testament, as we’re closing out both our series and our look at the Old Testament?
This is a guess, because I had just thought about it a little before you asked the question, then something new sparked in my head as you asked.
This is a time when Israel is under the heel of a foreign power. The Persian kings initially were very nice to Israel and actually funded the temple-building and a number of other things. Israel wasn’t always responsible with the money they got, but it was there for a while. But as we go on into the time between the testaments, there’s nobody making God’s people tithe. Nehemiah is a civil governor. He’s not the pastor, and yet he’s enforcing the tithe.
Yes, he is, and he has his priorities right and he sees the need here and he pushes it. But as we go beyond that it’s going to become more and more up to God’s people to be self-governed and to tithe on their own if they want to have any kind of godly local self-government. If they want to have pastors and teachers and synagogues, they’re going to have to fund this. The Persians, and certainly the Greeks and the Romans, aren’t going to do it. As we’re stretching out of the economy where the Davidic kings took care of everything, and then the Gentile kings for a little while, I think we’re being shown this is how it’s got to be.
In that sense it is a message for the New Testament church. God’s people in the restoration covenant are foreshadowing of the church. No political support, no political presence, scattered throughout the world, meeting on the Sabbath day, receiving sermons, reading the Bible, chanting psalms, praying, witnessing to their Gentile neighbors, trying to bring Gentiles into the flock, and waiting for Messiah. You can add to that, with no financial support, the only way this is going to work is if they tithe. With the New Testament church it’s almost identical.
What Israel was being taught in the restoration is an operator’s manual for the New Testament church from the beginning until now. We still don’t have the civil government supporting us, and I’m not sure I want them to, because there are always strings with that.
The things that they support don’t tend to turn out very well. Does it fit also with the concept of the Old Testament church growing in maturity, to where it becomes these mundane details? We start off with the flood and the Red Sea and fireworks and special effects, and then very gradually we come to the restoration and it’s, “And this is how you pay your bills on time.”
You know, when you’re in kindergarten you don’t pay bills. Dad and Mommy just make food, and ice cream and pony rides materialize out of nowhere. Isn’t it great? Then somewhere around 19-21 it’s like, “Wait, you mean I have to pay for this? I don’t even have a job.”
“You should have been thinking ahead.” Sometimes young people are a little slow to pick up on that, and often the church is a little slow. “Where are the miracles?” You don’t need no miracles. You need to make use of the means that God has given you. They are sufficient.
In this respect – with all due respect to our Charismatic friends – sometimes the Charismatic movement has been kind of a step back toward immaturity. “We want the signs and wonders.” Well, yes, we do, as a matter of fact. It’s not that Reformed Presbyterians don’t want those things. Sometimes you want to go lick that lollipop or that ice cream cone or go sliding down the water slide, but that’s not what life is made of anymore. There are regular duties and responsibilities, predictable things that we have to do. And as you say, paying the bills for the kingdom of God is one of them.
It's mundane and it’s unexciting and sometimes it requires you to sit up a couple hours later and do some math to make sure you know how this is going to work, but this is part of faithful living in God’s kingdom.
I had some thoughts earlier and I neglected to make notes so I could mention them when there was a lull in the conversation.
You should have known, there’s never a lull. We’re how many episodes in? There’s never a lull.
That’s a very good point. I haven’t learned. I think the only thing I would add is that I think at least one large part of the innate instinct to eschew tithing does come from the over-emphasis we see from people such as prosperity teachers or even from hometown preachers who simply put too much emphasis on it because the budget didn’t balance the way they wanted it to that year.
And it’s a question of how you teach it, not how much you teach it as well, right?
Yes, for certain. I’m sure you could do a sermon series on tithing and not come across as a moneygrubber or a legalist, but it doesn’t change the fact that this is a good thing. It’s one of the ways that God has instituted to take care of the church, which includes not just the pastor but also all acts of mercy ministry that the church engages in, the care of widows and orphans, which James calls true religion, and activism in some sense, and things like that.
Those are all proper ministry avenues for the church to engage in, and most of them you can’t do without money. There are some things you can squeeze by with some elbow grease and old 2x4s that are in someone’s garage, but for the most part you need money. It’s not a crude calling to engage in funding the church in this way. It’s a simple sign of faithfulness, I think, like we said.
There may even be seasons where it’s not possible for a particular family to engage in tithing, but it should be the goal to get back to it as soon as possible.
A practical example there – we had a lady in our church who was dying of cancer, and she died over a long period of time. She really fought it because she had a ministry smuggling Bibles into locked countries and she really wanted to get back there and was just kind of wrestling with God over it. So she was doing every treatment she could, not to hang onto life for its own sake but because she wanted to minister, and it consumed their income.
They were wise. They drew limits and said, “We’re not going to spend so much money that…” but it came to the point where people were giving her money to support her, and they turned and said, “So we should still be tithing, right?” Our church said, “You know what?”
“There’s no increase here. You don’t need to be tithing. God knows what’s going on here and it’s alright.”
The way you talked about that, Bryan, it kind of sounded like this is the bride of Christ practicing self-care.
Actually though, that’s not too inaccurate. There’s a very real sense in which the Spirit works through these practical means. There is the office of deacon for a reason, which is to assist with the practical needs and concerns of its church members, beyond just the “strictly spiritual” needs like the gospel, weekly sermons, and the Lord’s Supper. We’re still flesh and blood creatures. We need food, and sometimes the only way you get that is from the deacon board helping you out.
Last year we lost power during a summer thunderstorm. Actually, a lot of the city lost power, but we lost all the food in our fridge and we were very much not super-solvent at the time. It would have been a hit to replace the food that was in there, so we approached the deacon board at our church. I think it took four days because that’s when their next deacon meeting was, but they said, “Here’s a gift card to Aldi. You can go and replace all your food.” Aldi is super-inexpensive and we get most of our food there anyway, so it was like we were replacing the things that were already in there. That’s just one of the ways that God provides for his people.
Like you said, sometimes you tighten the belt a bit more in order to be able to tithe, and things work out in a different way than you would have expected, that don’t make sense. They don’t make naturalistic sense. In a sense, the deacon board is a naturalistic sense-making thing, but in another way it’s not. It’s a spiritual thing that is happening.
Mine is kind of two-parted. I’m going to recommend your local library. Today I went to return something at my library. Also you should check out what your library actually lets you check out, because besides books our library has the most interesting additional things you can check out. I checked out a baking cookware tray that was honeycomb-shaped with little bee imprints. It’s for cakes. I tried making scones in it and it didn’t work very well as far as keeping the shape, but it’s just fun. You should go look and see what kind of things your local library lets you check out.
Today when I was returning that, I also found that they had a whole shelf for new cookbooks. Being the baker and mixologist of our house, I found one on European baking, two books on cocktails, and one on pasta-making that’s thicker than any of the other ones. That will be my reading for the next two weeks, to just kind of absorb all this super-interesting information.
I guess I’ll make it a 3-point thing. You should explore things that you’re passionate about and learn about them, because God has made a world that is vibrant and full of interesting things, enough for the 6 or 7 billion people that live on it to find something that interests them. That’s really cool.
One of the families that I’m connected to, I thought he was retired, but he goes around and sells bacterial treatments for private ponds on dairy farms, to get rid of harmful bacteria and things that come from cow dung, and he makes a good living doing that. I never would have guessed that this was a career or a job that existed, but it does because that’s just how complex and interesting the world is.
Awesome. I’m going to recommend a different podcast. I guess it’s probably available as a podcast. I have obtained it on YouTube. It’s a series from Jordan Peterson and a bunch of friends, talking through line-by-line the book of Exodus. It’s a huge panel discussion. Dennis Prager is on it, Jonathan Pageau, Os Guinness, and some others that I had not heard of before. It’s very cool to listen to. It’s just full of good stuff.
Dennis Prager, whenever he talks about religion I’m like, “Dude, no, stop,” but it’s really cool to see the back and forth between him and the others, who are coming from a variety of backgrounds and faiths. I love to watch all of these very intelligent people submitting themselves to the Word of God for the sake of understanding it, because really when you approach a text, if you’re going to understand it you have to take it on its own terms.
C.S. Lewis talks about that in one of his works, something about criticism. He talks about how you have to take a work of literature on its own terms. So whether or not any of these individuals submit in faith to Jesus Christ as the subject of the book of Exodus, they are all submitting to the book of Exodus in some fashion and there’s just lots of fruit coming out. I’m enjoying it very much.
Excellent. Now if we could just get someone on that panel who actually understood Exodus it would be nice, not to say that they don’t have some understanding. Especially I would think Os Guinness would know a lot.
I’m going to recommend an old BBC series called Sherlock Holmes, starring Jeremy Brett.
I just picked up the fact that Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective named its Sherlock main character Basel, as a reference. I never knew that. That’s amazing.
It’s done in period. Jeremy Brett plays a pretty much thoroughly unlikeable Sherlock Holmes, but a man you have to respect, which is how Holmes ought to be played, pretty much. And of course Doctor Watson is likeable, as Doctor Watson is always likeable, but it’s done straight, it’s done well, it’s done by people who appreciate the original stories and copy from them almost verbatim. If you’ve never seen it and you want an older original take on Sherlock Holmes short stories, this is it. It’s fantastic. So there we go.
Great. Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number, dear listener, you can visit our website, anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion or you can become a patron at patreon.com/haltingtowardzion. I will remind us all once again that “toward” without an “s” at the end is the American spelling, so that’s what we’re using.
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